American in Spain

Two nights ago, we were sitting in the living room, and Marga exclaimed, “Whoa! Check out the moon!” It was just peeking up over the tree-lined hillside to the east of our house. I ran to get my camera and snapped several pictures during the minute I had when the natural satellite was still behind the trees. Only one of them came out very good.

The following night, I decided that, if the weather was willing, I’d be ready to photographically ambush the moon as it rose over the trees.
(more…)

For a while now, I’ve had a photoshop project in mind to take historical photographs and add a three dimensional effect to them by providing camera movement. I’ve hinted at the idea before. Using historical photos of, say, dead people, is just a gimmick to show that there was no intention of the effect at the time the photo was taken. So far, I’ve only been able to find the time to make one attempt, but I’d like to do more. After googling “iconic photograph”, and searching for one with a clear foreground and background, I settled on this famous photograph of Bobby Fischer.
(more…)

We had a nice Christmas celebration. My Spanish family does a big Christmas celebration with aunts and uncles and cousins on odd numbered years, and the big get together on New Years Eve on even numbered years, so this year was a small Christmas celebration with just my wife’s parents, sister, and grandfather. As with most holidays, tradition rules, so the meals are pretty similar every year. Jumbo shrimp, stuffed eggs, paté, and gildas are the usual appetizers. We also had a fun time making a racket singing traditional Spanish Christmas carols.
(more…)

It’s that time of year again. Time to walk through the chilly air from bar to bar in Laredo, Spain, eating elaborate tapas, called pinchos, and imbibing fine wine. This is the third year, and it seems to be getting better every year. The Semana del Pincho is one Christmas tradition I could definitely get used to. Before we get to the mouthwatering photos, I’d like to quote myself from last year about why I like this event so much:
(more…)

Last weekend Nora got to see her second cousin, Chloe, again. Chloe is five months younger, and several kilos heavier, than Nora and has just begun walking. They were pretty cute together. Unlike Nora, Chloe is happy to be picked up by a relative stranger. I picked her up when I first saw her and she took an immediate liking to me after that, which is the exact opposite of what Nora would do.

I became a fan of Three Frames (sometimes NSFW) about a year ago. It’s an idea I’d never have thought of, to take just three frames from a movie and make an animated gif. The result can be quite comical. One side-effect is that, if the camera was moving at all, the resulting gif takes on a 3D effect. While it was not my intention when I was snapping photos like crazy of Nora and Chloe, when I later got them in my computer and was flipping between them, I just had to make a three-framed animated gif of three of the shots.
(more…)

Thanks to the little “One Year Ago” widget on my left sidebar, I was reminded about this photography/photoshoppery project I endeavored to embark on last year. Unfortunately, I seem to have dropped the ball in March for the “12 months” photo, so I’ve decided, retrospectively, that doing it every six months was a stupid idea and it’s really better to do it at 12 month intervals. Remind me next September, if you would…

Actually I was also reminded by the “Previous 12 months” smart album I have that keeps recent photos on my phone, which sorts, annoyingly, in chronological order, so I’m often aware of the photos I took a year ago, as I have to scroll by them a lot.
(more…)

Recently the iPad has been a source of inspiration for my photoshop creativity. Since it functions so well as a photoframe, it seemed only natural to use it as a frame for frame breaking. I also must admit to being astonished that I seem to be the first person to see its pristine reflective glass as a place to put an ice skater. It seems so natural to me. Here are my first two attempts at iPad photoshoppery.
(more…)

As soon as I learned that my friend and grocery store manager, Andrés, cultivates mushrooms, I knew immediately that we had to do a timelapse photography project with his next batch. The particular species he cultivates is Pleurotus ostreatus, the oyster mushroom. He buys preprepared bails of hay wrapped in plastic, to which nutrients, mushroom spores, and water have been added. Holes have been cut in the plastic on the top and sides of the bail. Before you can see any mushroom growth, the whole bail gets warm to the touch, as the nutrient consumption begins inside. When the little fungal sprigs started appearing in the holes, Andrés came to me, with a big grin on his face, and said, “Today’s the day!” So I returned that afternoon and set up the tripod, flash, and intervalometer pointing at the bails of hay in his grocery store’s warehouse right down the street from where I live. And then we waited…
(more…)

Recently I’ve been having a surprising amount of fun playing with some bubble solution that Nora was given by a local shopkeeper. Besides the obvious, the bubbles are my favorite of Nora’s toys. It took her a while to break out of her awe at looking at them enough to intentionally pop them, and she still hasn’t understood the process of blowing through the hoop to create them. But that’s fine; I’m content blowing them for her.

I have more ideas about photography of bubbles than I have time to implement them, but last night I finally got around to my first attempt. For some reason my off-camera flash wireless connection wasn’t working, so I decided to turn off the room lights, set a long exposure, and manually fire the flash. Of about twenty shots, these are the best three.
(more…)

It’s been just over a year since my last experiments with taking off-camera flash shots of my daughter. All yesterday she was reminding me, both in looks and behavior, of the title character of that 1993 Dennis the Menace movie, so I decided to take some photos of her during her playtime before bed. Recently, when my flash is on my camera, I can’t get her to look at anything besides the flash, so in all of my photos of her, she’s looking just above the camera. This problem is what gave me the idea to try my off-camera flash transmitter to see if I could capture her looking more at the camera or at least not looking almost into the camera.
(more…)