Listen, did you see an Eko?

Posted on October 3, 2009 by Tom Harold

I went to a guitar show on Saturday. These things are soooo much fun! Really, if you want to experience weirdness and the panoply of humanity and geekiness, a guitar show is a great way to do this. (Also, if you want to pick up a single guy – lots of them there. Seriously, I know women like music as well, but how many of them want to wax nostalgiac about the quality and sound of an original ’63 Strat versus the ‘unholy’ Relic Series reiusse ’63s? It’s largely a group of excited, if lonely, men.)

Anyway, lots of good fun and ogling to be had at a guitar show. There are all different kinds of folks milling about (with some fantastic hair styles, I might add), but this one woman stood out to me. She was sitting quietly off to the side with this instrument looking as if she might just be waiting for an opportunity to speak. I must have walked by her half a dozen times if not more, and I just sort of got curious. I kind of expected her to start playing it or something, and it was such an odd-looking instrument, not one that I remember having seen before.

Finally I just went over and asked her what it was. She smiled and said, “Oh, honey, I don’t know. I’m just holding it for my son while he goes to sell something.” She invited me to look at the tag, and it said that it was a 1967 Eko bass. She was such a sweet little thing that I just said a few more words, and then I asked if I could take a picture of it, and she obliged. She looks like she should be playing it, doesn’t she? I was kind of bummed that she didn’t burst into “Surrey with the Fringe on Top” or maybe “Foggy Mountain Breakdown?”

At Speed

Posted on October 2, 2009 by Tom Harold

So I’ve been trying to shoot something, ANYthing early in the morning on my way to work in case I have another one of those days where shooting slips my mind, and I wake up the next day, realize that I missed a day, sit bolt upright, raise my hands to the sides of my face, and go, “NOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!”

Or something like that.

My preventive measure against the forgetting of the shooting is to just take some kind of random picture in the morning. Then I at least have one in the can so to speak. It’s my safety shot, my backup, and it has worked on a couple of occasions when I just didn’t get to do anything else toward the end of the day. One thing I’ve noticed about it, though, is that sometimes they can be pretty ordinary shots, or if not exactly ordinary, at least repetitive. I’m guessing you don’t want to see pictures of my office parking lot every morning (although we did get it resealed this summer, and wasn’t that quite exciting??).

So I was on my way to work wanting to shoot something that was somehow a different version of the same thing, and I thought, “I wonder what would happen if I shot this stuff with a reaaaaally slow shutter speed. Would it all be blurry? Can I hold it still? How would that come out?” So I started messing around, and the above is what you get, an effect I’ve seen in motorcycle and car ads on various occasions, and one that’s kind of cool. Looks like you’re really tearing down the road, now doesn’t it? I’m going to goof with this some more, see what I can do. I need to find that balance between fast enough shutter to stop the action of the central focus figure and slow enough to let the background go all crazy/blurry.

Anyway, good times with the shutter speed experiments.

Easy Does It

Posted on October 1, 2009 by Tom Harold

It was my photo club meeting night again. We saw pics of a guy’s trip to Alaska. He shot about 5,000 pictures in two weeks, which some people gasped at, but which sounded right on target to me. When you go somewhere new you’re going to see a lot of new things to shoot. Good thing we don’t have to buy film these days. Wonder what processing and printing would be on 5,000 photos?

As I was leaving the hall I decided to double back toward some of the work studios and see if anyone was doing some welding I could watch. Never made it there. On the way I passed the glass blowing room, and they were at work. A friend of mine just happens to do this stuff, and I ran into him by chance a few weeks ago there. Saw him again and stopped to say hello. I ended up hanging out there for another 90 minutes taking pictures and watching people. Man, I’m telling you, I totally want to do some of this! It looks like so much fun! That and welding. I’d love to take a welding class. I want to BUILD STUFF I tell you!!!! BUILD! MAKE! CREATE! AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Man. Yeah. Whew! Building things, making things…so cool.

Oh, right – anyway, I was watching them and feeling all cool that the instructor let me come in the room near the big, fiery, kill-you-instantly-they-are-so-hot oven/furnace things, and I’m shooting all this stuff and having a good time and thinking, “I am right where I want to be right now. I don’t want to be anywhere else. These people are making art, and I want sit here and watch them and grab that thing there, and that other thing over there, and those gloves and that pair of tongs and get some of that glass and roll it in that stuff and…” Really, I was just kind of thrilled to be there. I totally forgot about everything else going on in my life.

The photo above is one of the students working on a little vase. She had tried a couple of different pieces that night and had goofed on a couple, but this one was looking good. Here she’s getting a little help shaping the opening just right. You can look at her and just tell that this glass-blowing stuff is not for people who aren’t prepared to put their patience to the test. It’s not easy, and you also have to move fast. It can get stuck lopsided if you don’t keep moving it, and then you pretty much have to start over, or you can put a bend or a pinch in the wrong place and then…you pretty much have to start over. Tough stuff, man, and she was getting the final touches on it here. This one worked out for her.

Finally I had to admit that it was getting near time for the carriage to turn back into a pumpkin, and I got up and gathered up my things. “I gotta hit the road,” I told my friend, Eric. He says, “Hang on. I’ll make you a paperweight.”

What? You think I’m gonna leave after that? Next blog entry: paperweight. I promise. Lots of pictures.

Bridge to Paradise

Posted on September 30, 2009 by Tom Harold

I love closeup detail shots like this one. If I had the proper lens I could *really* do some cool stuff…but I don’t. Maybe I should find a way to afford one. Hmmm…not sure how to do that. A new one kind of like what I want costs about $800. The one I *really* want costs something like $1500. Yeah, somehow I always get interested in things which bring high prices of entry. Bah!

Anyway, for those curious, this is a closeup of a mid-80s Fender Telecaster. The black thing with the dots is the pickup, the sorta rusty things that the strings go over is called the bridge, hence my clever little blog title. I do love the Teles. Wish I had an older one with some vintage cool to it. Wait? What’s that? You say there’s a vintage guitar show coming up this weekend? Hmmm…what can I sell?

Lens or guitar…lens or guitar…

Nightlights

Posted on September 29, 2009 by Tom Harold

I was walking home after meeting some friends and decided to fool around with the camera a bit. Since it was dark out I figured I’d see what I could make happen with some slow shutter speeds. Since the shutter is open for so long, moving objects will appear blurred or smeared as they move across the camera’s field of vision. I like car lights done this way, so I gave it a try. This was handheld (no tripod and plenty of chances I’d breathe and shake the camera), and many of them came out surprisingly well. I could do better with a more intersting surrounding or better cars or whatever, but the effect itself is pretty cool.

Agh! The Light!

Posted on September 28, 2009 by Tom Harold

The morning after the big zombie shoot, and I am whipped! We did lots of action sequences yesterday, and while I wasn’t doing hand-to-hand combat with three zombies at once – oh, well, I was sort of doing that. Okay, so everything is sore today. This is what my day looked like all day – just too bright! I wanted to crawl into bed and just sleep it off. Gah.

I stressed out about that shoot, and I’m not even sure I did a fantastic job or anything, yet the idea of doing it again is already appealing. THAT was fun!

Zombieeeeees!

Posted on September 27, 2009 by Tom Harold

Soooo many fun pictures from today! This was the last big shoot for “8 Wheels of Death.” This was the shoot where I was performing all of my lines. Big fun, and we were attacked many times by numerous bloody not-dead people. It was huge B-grade fantasticness: corn syrup, rubber limbs, cauliflower (ugh that stunk!), and a pink Hello Kitty Super Soaker full of 5-year-old Pabst Blue Ribbon. YES! Can’t wait to see what it looks like all put together!

I can’t put all of that up, however, as my rule is one picture, kind of forcing me to learn how to edit things down and figure out what to keep and what to get rid of. Here’s one I particularly like. We were rehearsing a shot where Baldy was getting his head stomped into mush by the sheriff. Nice makeup, right? There was a throwdown right before this where the sheriff gave him a fun little flip onto the floor.

Oh, crap! I forgot! There’s a teaser trailer that they just released on this! Ahhh! I’ve been meaning to put it up here for days now, and it totally slipped my mind! The teaser was done right after the car shoot, so none of the stuff from today went into it, but there’s some cool roller girl action, and the car makes an appearance or three (you can see the inside of it when Lola attacks Chad, plus the dash when the dice are swinging from the rear view mirror). So here’s the teaser for you as well:

Weiner Dogs!

Posted on September 26, 2009 by Tom Harold

K9 Units.

Better today? Hope so. I went on a benefit walk to fight congenital blindness this morning, and some folks brought out their pups. There were several dachshunds out and about, and these two were getting to know each other. The black short hair was pretty keen on making friends, and the long hair just sort of stood there and feigned mild interest. I think the long hair was a bit older and putting up with the curious young’un.

Anyway, better than yesterday’s random cop cars? Yep.

Morning Cops

Posted on September 25, 2009 by Tom Harold

This is where my new plan has paid off – sort of. A few days back I had a confluence of busy day plus being tired and woke up the next morning realizing I’d forgotten my One Pic for the previous day. There’s no way to fix that, you know? If you miss a day, then it becomes “A Picture Almost Every Day for a Year” instead of “One Pic a Day for a Year.” Not quite the same ring to it. In an attempt to keep that from happening again I’ve started a habit of taking random photos early in the morning on the way to work or whatever. That way if I forget the rest of the day or am so exhausted that I fall asleep when I get home and totally forget to do anything until past midnight, I still have a valid image for that day.

What this means is that I’ll always have an image. What this also means is that sometimes it will just be a random-looking shot of a K9 unit sitting at a stop light. Not the most exciting thing, but at least I’m not going to lose out, eh? These crappy ones will just make the good ones seem a heck of a lot better – I hope!

Rain

Posted on September 24, 2009 by Tom Harold

Today I was pretty exhausted, and by the end of it all the one thing I’d taken a picture of was the view outside a restaurant where I had dinner. Hmmm…you’d think I was living well to be eating out so much. I kind of would like to take some more pictures out in the rain, but the whole getting the camera wet thing obviously is a deterrent to that activity. I just like how the light looked here.