White Mamba

It wasn't my doing. I was dubbed. There's the Black Mamba, and now there is me. White Mamba. Okay, okay, okay, let's put this in perspective. Three games of two-on-two. Me and my early twenties brother, against our late fifties Pop and our mid thirties bro. Hey, that's the way the free throws fell when we shot for teams. Although Pops can still compete, he started out tired, and our older bro has been training for marathons, not for leaping, cutting, picking, in your face two-on-two basketball. He's got all the stamina in the world, but he felt like he had no quick, no hops (not to mention no shot). Me? I had my way. Driving, shooting, rise up over the screen and put it in the cup from twenty. That's the way it goes. I don't touch a ball for months, and then the first game back, I got a sweet shot like no other. If I play again within the week, look out, bricks be fallin' from the sky. That's just the way it is.

After three games of two-on-two, same teams each game, it was 3-0. White Mamba. Pops bailed, and the three of us played three games of twenty-one. Would you believe I ended the night 6-0? White Mamba. Cutting, driving, corner threes, reverse left-handed layups. Fall away jumpers. Even a few Magic over the Celts baby hooks. White Mamba. I haven't done much of anything athletics-wise since Vegas, so by endgame, my legs were like jelly. Doesn't get better than this.

Another bro is coming tonight. Gonna play again. Watch your head. Bricks be fallin' from the sky.

Edit:
Second night recap: White Brickamba

Conversations with a two-year-old: Teasing Mom

[Earlier in the day, Jadon had been playing with the dog, Rizzo. Jadon came inside crying after he got bumped on his head as they played together.]

[Later in the day, on the back porch, eating lunch]

Jadon: It cold.

Karleigh: Yeah, It's cold from the wind. I have goosebumps. You have goosebumps too.

Jadon: I have bump.

Karleigh: Where's your bump?

Jadon: Forehead. I got hurt.

Karleigh: How did you get hurt?

Jadon: Rizzo. Tail. Bum piece wood.

Karleigh: [laughing] Rizzo's tail is not a piece of wood.

Jadon: Tail hurt. Piece wood on bum.

[Two minutes later...]

Jadon: [points to his bum] "I have bum." [He laughs] "I tease mom."

I love my Lotto Primatos

About two years ago my cleats died after a long, action packed life. One of the cleats broke off during an intense game of ultimate (frisbee). I lost the cleat on the same play I lost my lunch, having sprinted the length of the field twice, on back to back plays, at the end of a long point. But you don't want to hear about that (and neither do I since I was scored on to boot). I was bummed, but it was the best thing that could have happened to my feet. The old cleats had probably been best retired much sooner, but I tend to wear things into the ground, even when I shouldn't necessarily do so, such as with athletic footwear. The old cleats were Adidas brand, and I had a high opinion of them, so expected I might replace them with the same.

I lived in a small town with few store options. Nothing I could find was suitable. So I turned to the internet and three different stores that rock when it comes to shipping and returns:

shoebuy.com
shoes.com

zappos.com

If I was looking for cleats today, I'd add another store to my shopping list, one owned by Amazon.com:

endless.com

Free shipping, free returns

What's great about these stores is that I was able to buy a half dozen shoes, try them on, then return what I didn't select without paying shipping, not even return shipping. Sweet deal.

What I tried

In looking to buy, I researched a great deal, as I tend to do, but can now only remember two of the boots I tried but did not end up choosing:

• Adidas Predator (I forget which iteration of this model) - These were stiff, kinda plasticky feeling, and the toe didn't fit right. A soccer cleat should fit to the toe, and this left too much space in it's pointy end.

• Adidas Copa Mundial - Nice fit and feel, but just couldn't justify the $100 tag. In the end, the Lottos I bought had a similar feel, but at a better price. In fact, I think I liked the Lotto's sole/cleats much better.
  

What I bought
Lotto Primato. I love, love, (love) these cleats. Instantly comfortable fit. Light weight. Clean, classic styling. And I almost never slipped on dry or damp ground. They just bite into the turf. In about thirty games, and three times as many practices and scrimmages, I've gone down to the ground due to slipping only two or three times while wearing my Lottos. They work equally well on grass or artificial turf (the new stuff that looks like grass with rubber bits that fly in the air when you cut hard).

About Fit
A soccer cleat is designed to fit to the toe. The shoe conforms to your foot, and you shouldn't have any excess room at the tip. Because of this, as you wear them they leave the foot looking much smaller than you may be used to them looking. With my Lottos I came to realize how much excess room there was in my old cleats. With my old boots, my toes tended to drag too frequently, but with a proper fitting cleat I felt much quicker just by reducing this unnecessary toe room. These fit true to size. I bought a size ten, which is the size I usually wear.

Lotto Primatos come in black or white.

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Movie Review: Bella

I'm a tough critic when it comes to media. If I'm going to spend time and money, I want the material to be well crafted and to have a worthwhile message. I'm even cool with something light, and silly, if it fits my sense of humor and doesn't leave me feeling scummy. But not much out there gets past my quality filter and into my "wanna own it" list. I like a lot of movies okay, but many don't appeal to me beyond a first, or maybe even a second viewing, as its flaws just don't end up seeming worth my time.

Having said all this, I think that Bellais just about perfect.

Beautifully filmed, written, and acted, with an inspiring message to boot. There are a few bits that were flawed. I noticed two minor visual technical weaknesses, which were a touch distracting for me during those scenes, but nothing terrible, and they seemed more due to the film's lower budget as an independent film than any inability of the filmmakers. The storytelling and acting were so strong that they more than overcame these two minor visual weaknesses. Atthe end of the film there is a passage of time that didn't seem very well conveyed, and thus left me a bit confused for a few moments until I realized that it wasn't the next day, but a few years down the road.

I should say I sat down to watch the movie with no previous knowledge of the film other than what the cover had to say. Coming to it with no great expectation allowed the film's simplicity and nuanced performances to do what they were intended to do. That is, tell a good story, without pomp, but with dignity, warmth, and an eye and ear for what is beautiful about life. That is, what is beautiful about real life, rather than movie life.

I considered embedding a trailer, but the trailer was pretty weak. Better than this is the interview with star and co-producer Eduardo Verastegui at Amazon.com. The interview is on the left hand side, just under the movie images on the left.

“A Perfect Film, An Artisitc Masterpiece”
Tony Bennet, Grammy & Emmy Award Winning Singer/Songwriter

Warm, sweet and funny.
Roger Ebert, rogerebert.com

“The Best movie of the Year. Everyone should see this film.”
Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life

“A sweet, life-affirming picture”
Gary Goldstein, Los Angeles Times

“A bear-hugging embrace of sweetness and light”
Stephen Holden, The New York Times

Versategui is a natural on the big screen, a compelling presence.
Ruthe Stein, San Fransico Chronicle

Powerful and moving… a true inspiration.
CNN, Ana Maria Montero

Bella

New Edition

Meet our second! Ethan Alexander, born May 30, and weighing in at 7 lbs 5 oz at 21 in. long. I know, I know, he's cute, right? Notsofast. This is the 26th of 28 photos taken of him over his first two days on earth. And the only cute one of the bunch :) Hey, it's true. I just don't think newborns are especially cute looking until about two to three weeks into life. My suspicion is most people secretly feel the same, but wouldn't ever admit to it. It's okay. We still love him.

Dust Furniture

This is too cool. My wife found Dust Furniture on etsy, and when she showed me, my whole insides smiled. I felt a twinge of envy, as the woodworker in me oggled over their work. Give them a look and see if you don't come away smiling inside and out.

Dust Furniture website
Dust furniture on etsy

Your pain, gone.

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition

I can't say enough good things about this book. It's not perfect, and it isn't a cure all, but the application of its precepts does wonders on a great many types of pain. Now, if you're bleeding, or have a purple lump the size of a melon, or some other clearly identifiable injury, that's a different story. But otherwise, this book stands a great chance of getting rid of your pain by getting to the source of it. With well over 200 positive reviews on Amazon.com, I got past my initial skepticism, and bought the book. I've never made a better purchase.


The Gist of Trigger Point Therapy

A trigger point is a small, persistent contraction within a muscle, commonly called a knot. Often times these knots, or trigger points, cause pain, sometimes disabling pain, at the point of the trigger point, or more commonly, at points away from the trigger point. Consider a headache. It can be caused by trigger points, or knots, in the neck. So, to get rid of the pain, the point of pain is identified, which leads to a search of probable locations of the culpable trigger point. One trigger point may be the cause, or multiple trigger points may be contributing. Then self-applied massage is applied to the trigger point, each session lasting for about twelve short strokes. Five or six such sessions a day and soon enough the trigger point will release and the pain will be relieved. Sometimes one session will be enough to do the trick, sometimes it can take a few days or weeks. That's it. Simple. From headaches, to a frozen shoulder, to an inexplicably painful toe, all of these and more can often be relieved with self-applied trigger point therapy. It's inexpensive, and easy to do, and so may often be the best first thing to try to rid yourself of most any pain you might have.

The book goes in more depth on what I've said here, and provides diagrams aplenty, so within a short time you can be seeking out your own possible trigger points and finally ridding yourself of some unnecessary pain.

Knee Pain, Be Gone

During a season/semester of ultimate (frisbee) I developed knee pain early on in the season. I didn't have the pain to start the season, and didn't have it after the first couple days of tryouts and practice. But the pain came on by the end of the first week.

It wasn't getting worse over the course of the season, but stayed about the same. I did curtail my efforts at practice, in an effort to heal, but for me it was an odd pain being that it didn't seem to get better with rest, and giving an all-out effort in games didn't seem to make it worse. Throughout the season the pain was sometimes more, sometimes less, but the increase or decrease wasn't obviously connected to more or less activity. Strange.

I chalked the pain up to having spent about six months prior to the season doing little more than sitting in a chair for about 6-8 hours a day, with little to no exercise, and then suddenly practicing and playing hard once the season began. Ultimate (frisbee) requires lots of running.

Yet, this didn't explain the actual source of the pain, but just described the circumstances in which the pain developed. Although, these circumstances of prolonged inactivity followed by intense activity later helped me understand exactly what had been happening with my knees, once I got a hold of The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook.

At mid-season I bought two books, The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook, and Treat Your Own Knees: Simple Exercises to Build Strength, Flexibility, Responsiveness and Endurance. This second book wasn't the answer for me, but the exercises in it would have helped prior to the season, and might have been useful in conjunction with trigger point therapy, but I never did much with the book once I found that my pain was really due to the trigger points. I also tried knee straps like the one shown in the photo at left, which seemed to provide some relief, but in the end they weren't the answer for me, and I ditched them by season's end once the trigger point therapy proved to be helpful at easing my pain.

So, like I've been telling ya, it was trigger points, or more commonly called "knots" in the muscle, that caused my pain. While sitting for hours on end for several months, my muscles lost their luster, so to speak, and when I started running hard, they didn't react kindly, and these knots, or trigger points developed in the muscles that supported and operated my knees. A common attribute of trigger point pain is that the pain is often (but not always) experienced in a location other than where the trigger points are. So, a headache can be caused by trigger points in the neck, and my own knee pain was caused by trigger points along the front and sides of my thighs.

Conclusion

I've got two other stories about pain I relieved with trigger point therapy. One for so-called plantar fasciitis, or foot pain, the other being a pain in my neck. As this is running long already, I'll share them in future posts.

Until then, you may want to consider getting the book, and I expect you'll be glad you did, if not for your current hope to cure pain, then for other pain you're sure to experience due to trigger points.
-------
Here's a list of tools that are suggested for treatment of some of the trigger points, although many can be treated effectively with supported fingers or sometimes even a knee or elbow:

A lacrosse ball
A tennis ball
Knobble
Backnobber
TheraCane

The Trigger Point Therapy Workbook: Your Self-Treatment Guide for Pain Relief, Second Edition

Goooooaaal! Renewed.

So, it's been about two and half months since I last posted. My goal of weekly posting, which I almost did for a while there, got set on hold as I set aside not only blogging, but my photography as well. The time that had gone to these activities was swallowed up by my recent efforts at illustration. The thing is, I had to learn how to illustrate. And also to learn the software that I use to finalize those illustrations. So, amidst learning the software, studying other illustrator's work, and working through the tedious process of picking up drawing when I've never done much of it before, all kind of took up lots and lots and lots of my time of late.

And then I went and decided I needed to increase the complexity of my illustrations, which required my developing my own technique so as to emulate to some degree the texturing technique of one of my current favorite illustrators. The thing is, he's hush-hush about his process of adding texture to his work, a process which is unique amongst illustrators insofar as I have seen (and I've been seeing a lot lately), and so I had to go out and figure out a means of emulating what he's doing. I've fairly well got it figured, somewhat, I think, albeit my development of the technique as well as how it relates to my own style is a work in progress that I'm polishing up and likely will continue to evolve for... well, indefinitely if it's to hold my interest for long.

More about all this later. But now, I want to talk about your pain. Coming in the next post. Off to write it now...

Senior Portaits: Part Two

A couple weeks ago I stumbled across a couple John Michael Cooper videos about one of his shoot's and his post-production for that shoot. It was a new idea for me, and one I wanted to try asap. Take a look if you'd like to see him walk through his shoot. Or, you can continue on and get the ten peso version (I don't have a cameraman just yet) of my own first effort at this lighting technique.

The photo above (click it to see it larger) is the big idea we went out with when we headed to shoot Haleigh's senior portraits. I knew we'd shoot something more conventional afterwards (see previous post), and would probably even shoot again the next day (just for fun), but I wanted to shoot this idea whether or not she decided to use it. She was excited about it too.

And she had a great location in mind. Several old concrete and steel buildings, or what was left of their tumbled remains, largely hidden from view in a narrow span of trees tucked between one city and the next. After we arrived I wanted to stop and shoot everywhere along our way as we walked to the place we ultimately decided to shoot. The place isn't great because it's pretty. Because it's ugly. But cool ugly.

Here's the quick rundown of the shot. Camera set two stops under the ambient during a cloudless mid-afternoon (in the photo above you can see that it was actually bright and sunny outside). Lit using only one strobe. Twenty frames, put together in post with Photoshop. If you're a quick study, the picture, and the previous three sentences are all you need to know to go and try it out yourself. If you're still not quite sure, read on.

Composition
Once we picked a specific location, I spent a few minutes composing the scene precisely. Which was different than my usual perpetual exploration of the composition throughout a shoot, as I explore the interaction of the subject and his or her surroundings, getting different angles and looking for something that works. But this particular shot required sticking the camera on a tripod and sticking with the one composition.

Pose
Next we decided on a pose. Important to get this right too, since we were essentially taking one shot. In a way this is restricting, but also refreshing to be able to make the choice, and be done with it, and focus on other things besides choosing different poses throughout a shoot.

Light the Face
Then we took several different shots of Haleigh as I held a speedlight to light her face. I was in frame, but that would be taken care of easily in post. Dang it if she couldn't sit still! She did maintain the same general pose, but she's so animated that she kept leaning forward and back up again as we tried getting several different expressions to choose from for the final image. I was concerned that her movement would make it a pain to blend her face into the final image, but it was cake, largely thanks to the darkness of much of the image, which made it easy to hide slight shifts in her overall posture.

Light the Scene
After that, she maintained her pose as I went throughout the scene and popped the strobe wherever I felt like would be a good place. Note in the photo above that I was actually in frame as I did this, but I'd be easily removed in post because I only used the flashlit portion of each frame. We took about 35 shots (some redundant it turns out), but didn't like all of them and ended up with nineteen or twenty frames that went into the final composite. As we shot, I came back and checked the camera screen after I took several shots, then shot some more.

Composite
In post, I selected the images to put into the scene, and with layers in Photoshop combined the flash lit portions of each image all into one composite image. Some of the flash pops were too bright, so I didn't layer them all in at 100% opacity. I also darkened the sky some, to help keep the high contrast of that area from being a distraction. Although I went for a low-key image, this technique could very well be used to create an image full of light.

Some notes
You can do this any time of day. Noon, sunny, whatever. Just manually set the camera under one or two stops, then an unmodified speedlight is more than powerful enough at close range to overpower the sunlight. You'll need something to wirelessly trigger your strobes (click here to learn more about speedlights, how to trigger them, and to learn a great deal more than you bargained for).

We shot again the next day, without any strobes. I think I may talk briefly about that in another post.

John Michael Cooper's site

His how-to videos

Senior Portraits: Part One

Haleigh wasn't interested in what is typical for senior portraits in the area she lives (often cheesy). So I presented her some photo ideas that weren't the norm, and we went and played with a few of them. In the end, she did choose to have her guitar in some of them so as to appease mom with a symbol of her talents without cheesily holding a paintbrush.

These photos here are actually not one of the original ideas I presented to Haleigh. But, after the first part of the shoot, which was more involved, I quickly scouted out this location to make a lighter and cleaner portrait from the more dramatic and moody image we shot first, thinking these would be more to the taste of Haleigh's mom (in my next post I'll cover the first part of our shoot, which I think turned out pretty cool). The series of photos in this post were shot pretty quickly, only a handful really, and we stopped when we had something that worked since she had an appointment to keep.

For both series of photos we were at an old abandoned building, what was left of it, and the wall-less second level is raised up on concrete slabs and covered in dirt and soot. Nature was reclaiming the place, and I used the upraised level of the building to get a shot of tree, sky and mountain in the background, so as to avoid the grungier post-earthquake-rubble-fifty-years-later look that surrounded us.

Being mid-afternoon without any clouds, I tamed the hard light by bringing the ambient down with my exposure settings, and filling from the opposite direction with flash. Because I was using flash, my shutter speed maxed out at 250 (the max sync speed of my camera), so I took the exposure down the rest of the way by closing down my aperture. The trick was to stop down far enough to prevent blowing out of the mountain behind, while still being able to have enough strobe power to get through my smaller aperture. To offset the sunlight coming down from camera right, I stuck three speedlights in a silver umbrella, each at half power, coming in from camera left. (I ended up at about f/11 at 1/250 sec.) Since the strobes were close to Haleigh, they were a close match to the intensity of the sunlight.

I could also have gone a bit faster with my shutter speed, which would have the flash taking no effect on the edge of the frame where Haleigh was not standing, but that's a trick I have yet to try and it wasn't on my mind at the time.

I used three light stands, one for each light. The tri-legs of the lightsands were closed up, and they were all clustered together and held by my lovely assistant, as they fired into the umbrella. If I had one, I'd have used a TriFlash bracket, just to un-clumsy the set-up.


Time for a confession. The original images were darker than these, but I pushed up the exposure in post. The slight darkness was a mistake on my part, but fortunately a small one which shooting in raw helped to be amendable. My error was in not shooting either my hand or the subject or a stand-in up close, which would have allowed me to get an accurate meter reading for the light that reflected off only her skin. Instead, I mistakenly metered from far back, thus metering for the whole scene. My histogram gave me a good read, but the mild nagging unease about whether or not the exposure on her face was bright enough didn't get through to the part of my brain that should have told me to go meter up close on her face and use that histogram to tell me how to adjust my camera and/or lights. Later, when I got the images on the computer screen, I saw I had a good exposure for the background (having taken the mid-afternoon light down to an early evening level of light), but her face was a touch underlit from what I wanted. I had adequately balanced the strength of the ambient light with the strength of my strobes, but what I really needed was to either have the strobes be a touch brighter, or to have the whole scene brighter (by opening up my aperture to allow more light in from both sources, or by increasing the ISO). A wider aperture or higher ISO would have threatened to blow out the lightest parts of the mountain, which I'd prefer to avoid. So, increasing my strobes to full power, or adding another light would have been my preferred first option at bringing up the light on her face.

In the end, with the top photo, we got something fun and that showed a bit of Haleigh's personality, while being a bit different than what she normally thought of as a senior photo. In the next post I'll talk about the first photo we made just prior to this series. It's a bigger idea that was even further from typical, and I think looks pretty cool.

Slideshow