American in Spain

In October and November, it’s very typical here to get strong winds coming from the south blowing warm African air over the Iberian peninsula. The Spaniards call it viento sur (south wind), and there is a mythology similar to that of full moons where the wind from the south makes odd people just a little more crazy. I have a love/hate relationship with viento sur.
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When I took that glorious evening walk last week, my photographic attentions were drawn particularly to the street lights that had just come on, and how their artificial light contrasted with the natural light still in the sky. So I set aside the photographs of street lights for this separate post. The whole experience of that night has taught me that I need to do more night photography, actually lugging my tripod out with me into the cool evening air. The play of street lights against buildings and sidewalks and the rest of the urban landscape is a particular itch that I hope to scratch at the earliest opportunity.
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Este post es bilingüe para mis fans locales… Mirad después del inglés.

I’m doing this post in Spanish, too, for my local fans. So bear with me.

On Saturday, when I awoke from my nap, the missus instructed me to make a paté sandwich for my daughter’s afternoon snack, and go down to the town park where she was playing with her Spanish grandfather. I’m still not entirely sure what make me grab my camera on the way out the door, but I think I was expecting to get some cute grandfather-granddaughter playground shots. When I got to the park, they were playing on the swings, but soon there were too many kids at the playground, so we left and went for a walk…and what a beautiful walk it was! The tide was high, the sunset was beautiful and there was the tiniest sliver of a moon. I was so lucky that I’d taken my camera!
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For more months than I’d like to admit, my DSLR’s CCD sensor has been dirty. There were just a few specks of dust, but I had to digitally retouch almost every single photo to remove the digital noise they caused. A couple weeks ago, I decided enough was enough, so I took my lens cloth that came with my sunglasses, flipped up the mirror (the R in DSLR) and wiped off the sensor. Of course this didn’t work at all. Every time I tried to wipe it, I added more debris than I wiped clean. I had to break down and order a sensor cleaning kit, which consists of some Q-tip-looking things the size of the sensor and some sensor cleaning liquid, which smells like it may be entirely made up of rubbing alcohol. I’m guessing that cleaning off the sensor is just something DSLR owners have to do every couple years, like replacing the tires on a car.
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This morning when I was walking Nora back from the town’s Friday market, a man was wandering around asking people if they knew when the race was coming through. What race? The human race? As I went about my daily errands, I gradually learned, through eavesdropping on people, that the Vuelta a España would be passing through town. This is huge!! It’s one of the biggest international cycling races, sort of Spain’s version of the Tour de France (vuelta = tour or lap). Then I remembered that I had heard that they were finishing one stage in the nearby town of Noja. Apparently the parties thrown at the end of each stage are absolutely amazing, and worth going to even if you don’t care about the sport at all, so if you’re a heavy partier looking for cheap holidays abroad… I learned that they were leaving Noja at 1:45 PM and that they were expected to go through Laredo at 2:10 PM, which would put them smack in Colindres at around 2:05 PM.
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I realized that it was about time to revisit my temporal compositing Photoshop project, placing Nora on the couch with younger versions of herself. It’s no surprise that she has changed much less in her second year than in her first. What follows are three Noras, one at 6 months, one at 18 months, and another at 30 months. To take the 6-month-old’s picture, I had to prop her up and run to press the shutter before she fell over. The 18-month-old could sit there just fine, but the 30-month-old could actually be told to keep her legs straight and put her hands on her knees to conserve horizontal space.
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This past June, I traveled to Ireland to play golf with some friends. I briefly mentioned, in a post about playing Ballybunion Old, that my good friends, Jacob and Jeff, took a walk one evening (while I was in bed shivering with a fever) on the Cashen Course at Ballybunion. I said that I’d post the photos Jacob took, but I never got around to it. Yesterday was Jacob’s birthday, so I thought today would be a good day to post these gorgeous photos he took. For photogenic terrain, you really can’t beat golden hour on an Irish links course.
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This morning I was reading an interesting Lifehacker post about self control, when I came across a very cute embedded image, which was full-freakin-screen on my iPhone, of a little blond girl eating broccoli. She reminded me a lot of Nora. My next thought was, “Wait a minute! We’ve got some broccoli in the fridge!” At that point there was no turning back [insert ironic quip about self control here]; I had to take some broccoli publicity portraits of Nora.
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Strawberry season is about to draw to a close in Spain. Although I’ve consumed several kilos this year, I’m sad to see them go. The thing that most annoys me about strawberries is how long they last after I buy them. In my experience, if I don’t eat them within 48 hours, they all turn to mush and they get all fluffy with mold. This is especially a problem since I normally can’t stop myself from buying a whole 2 kilogram box of them. So I decided to turn my frustration around and use the rapid growth of mold on my strawberries as the subject of a timelapse video.
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Just this year, as far as I’m aware, a new sort of digital photography art form has emerged, called cinemagraphy. It’s so new that there’s still no Wikipedia page for it! The general idea is that you create a photograph with some bit of it that is not exactly still. It’s published in the infamous “animated gif” format that plagued “world wide web” pages back in the 1990′s. The trick is to get the file size down below a megabyte so that it can be downloaded more or less as instantaneously as a regular jpeg photograph. As I have discovered, this is not easy.
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