September, 2009

Having awoke at an absurdly premature hour, I drove around at about sunrise on Tuesday August 25th looking for something to photograph, I knew not what. I was in the East Bottoms industrial area right near the Bayer plant when I saw this, pulled a u-turn and parked on the side of the road to get this picture. Incidentally, I unwittingly put the car into a miniature swamp of sorts, and while getting the tripod and camera apparatus prepared, had to contend with being eaten alive by the opportunistic mosquitos dwelling therein looking for a tasty breakfast. So I didn't exactly hang around twiddling my thumbs for this like I wished I could have.

Entryway to the Scarritt Building at sunrise in late August, 8th and Walnut, downtown KCMO.  

 A photo taken five days after the photo in yesterday's post but also from Sheffield Cemetery. I had wanted to do some more playing with the Canon 70-200 L rental lens that was due to be turned back in the next day. My photography has come to a halt for the time being at least due to some illness, so I'm kind of dredging up a few older shots until I'm doing good enough to run out for more. 

The danged Ford Aerostar way in the background kind of ruins the look I was aiming for here, but it's not the first time my plans have been thwarted and likely not the last either. 

The day of my dad's wedding rehearsal I checked out a rental 70-200 L Canon lens - this being one of my beginning shots walking around downtown for about an hour to see what it could do, and oddly seeing another set of wedding photos being taken on site. Given a friend of mine was also having a wedding the same weekend, marriage must really be in style this season. 

On another note, I'd like to complain. I now curse the day I so dopily decided to install Mac OS 10.6 Snow Leopard onto this "production computer" with the OS just having been released days prior and no point update having been released to the public as of yet. What was before a wonderfully productive and fluid photography workflow has now degenerated into a mess of programs that crash due to slight incompatibilities, despite that long, long, exhaustive list of Snow- Leopard-compatible-and-functioning programs. Slightly faster preview renderings in Lightroom and quicker source image HDR file merging don't make any difference if all of Photoshop repeatedly crashes as soon as you click Save. But nevermind - I knew this was a risk I was taking so I guess I have only myself to blame here, despite all the reports to the contrary I had heard claiming everything was coming up roses in terms of compatibility. There are times even Firefox crashes when I try to upload pictures to this site and to Flickr.

They're busy arranging 10.6.1 at Apple right now and I really hope it comes sooner rather than later. 

End Rant.