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July 25, 2004

Well, this is what I’ve been doing today. The image above is a composite of cat heads. Pure and simple. Wonderful catheads courtesy of my little cat Spike. You can see pensive Spike, Thoughtful Spike, Happy Spike, Mischevious Spike, and Growly Spike. Spike of a Thousand Faces. Spike the Cat. Heeeeyyyy, Spike. Spike enjoys all her appearances on the AllThingsMike Website, especially the “Nine Lives of A Lazy Bastet” page.

Today I went to the flickers, and saw “The Bourne Supremacy”, I’ll give it at least an 8 of 10 on the Mikometer. I enjoyed the first film, and liked this one too. I feel Jason Bourne (the amnesiac agent) is the James Bond of the 21st Century. (“Mission Impossible” wants to be the James Bond of the 21st Century, but “Bourne” is “Better.” Next I had an itch to take some pictures. So I went to Redondo Beach and Hermosa. Snapped some photos on the Redondo Pier, but Hermosa was so crowded all the parking lots were full. So I came back home, drank far too much beer. (Corona and lime) ( It tasted real good) and uploaded a bunch of photos into a new folder on the Webshots site. It’s called Potpourii, and has some shots like this.

Here I am drinking coffee, which I don’t do anymore, in 1998, prior to the Office Christmas Party, which was held on the Queen Mary in Long Beach that year. I’ve got photos of me, photos of Spike, photos of the Queen Mary, photos of me hanging around with beautiful women in Las Vegas (oops, sorry, I didn’t put those photos online) I just hit the photo button when I came to part on a DV tape which I thought would make a nice photo for my webshots site. I have to get over to webshots now and add the captions, which I still haven’t done, and I think I’ve edited this blog entry a couple of times now because I wasn’t pleased with the “presentation”.

This is a burning building in Baker, California,on the way back from Vegas in 2001. I love to find weird photo opportunities. Trouble is, of course, that photo opportunities don’t always present themselves when I have my camera at the ready. I saw the fire off the side of the road , got off the 15 and went exploring. There are also some photos I put in the Potpourii folder with images of one of the clouds of smoke billowing from the San Gabriel Mountians last week which I used as a background for the poem “Beauteous Destruction.”

I also put some photos in the Potpourii folder taken off California coastline at Portuguese Bend in the Palos Verdes Peninsula. I took a lot of stills from the various videotapes I have lying around the house. These were all DV, or digital video, dating back to prehistoric DV times of 1998. (I know on earlier posts, If you click the pictures you would see the full size views, and for some reason that isn’t happening no matter how much I edit this entry, so I’m going to stop messing around)  If you go over to the Webshots Gallery, you will see the full size versions of these, and a great many of my photos. (Not all of them, all the digital ones I’ve uploaded there since I got the camera.) I must have over 1300 photos there by now. And they “only” let me have 3000. (I say that now because I can see that I’m going to fill up the space relatively quickly at the rate I post photography.) I can’t believe I’ve posted so many. The ones uploaded today are truly a Potpourii of images from all over the country, including Nantucket, as pictured above. (EDIT: 7/25: The Nantucket photos were not in the Potpourii folder, since I already used up the 100 spaces in that folder, so I created a “Nantucket” folder for those photos. I used to have a Nantucket folder on Webshots but deleted it when I only had the regular free service. Now it’s back up with the “old” photos and the “new ones” I captured off the videotape last night! ) That’s about it. Oh, yeah, almost forgot that I changed the music today. Now I’m playing some more eclectic sounds, and they can be “turned off” if you want to, although the song only lasts 2 and a half minutes. It is called Erghen Diado and the singing goup is the Bulgarian State Radio and Television Female Vocal Choir. I have a link below the player on the left to their website.

EDIT: 7/25: In answer to the comment from Sam Stevens (To Serve Man). My “first” digital videocam was a JVC GR-DVF10U, purchased in 1998. All the images shown on this entry and the ones in the Potpourii folder sized at 640×480 were taken on this older camera. As mentioned, it is a videocamera, and did not even have a digital output (firewire) because it wasn’t invented yet! I take the tapes from that camera (I’m looking at them right now on the shelf, there’s about 40 hour long DV videotapes with footage taken from 1998 to the present) and put them in the new Sony DCR-PC105 I bought in March of this year. (It’s already discontinued, I see from the Sony site.) Then I capture them from the DV to the memory stick.  I mention the older camera because the shots above were taken with it, and are still video captures from the DV tapes. The newer shots are taken with the Sony and still photos are saved in 1152×864 to a memory stick. (256MB, saves roughly 250 photos at that resolution.) The still camera is only 1 Megapixel, but I had to weigh the quality of the video images with the stills. I looked for about two months before finally settling on the Sony, mainly because the still photos are so clear. I never use the autofocus feature. I set the focus to infinity, and then manually focus on the ring. I don’t just take “snapshots” either, but attempt to frame the shot so it is artistically pleasing to the eye. I use a wide angle lens attachment for a lot of the shots, as well. Now that I’ve added more EDITs to this post, I’ll go whole hog and add another photo.

This was taken through the window of a gift shop on the Redondo Beach Pier yesterday. I must have repositioned myself about six times before I was satisfied with the lack of reflection in the shot. This one isn’t online in the Webshots Gallery either.