In search of inspiration

I've been playing around with an old image I took of a water tower. It looked so cool when I found it, and I got a few pics that I swore would be a snap to use in an image, but every time I approach them, I seem to hit a deadend. Today has been no exception. I have a start of something here (the tangle of two of the pics) but it's stalled. I need to find a good pic to harmonize with it. So far, nothing. grrr

A rose is a rose

I've been tinkering with a new image for the last day or two. It's one of the pics I took the other day of a late growing rosebud that I found in the yard. I snipped it and took it inside and tried a few macro shots, and liked this one. I've found a decent background for it, but I haven't found anyway to give it some punch. Right now, it's just a simple rosebud. There's nothing wrong with that, I suppose. Still, it just looks unfinished, so I keep plugging away. I'll scan through my files, and hopefully something will inspire me.

Meanwhile, I realized today that Thanksgiving is next week. That came out of nowhere! I'm still in Halloween mode. Strangely though, I managed to start my Christmas shopping last weekend. I decided to get a PS3 for Chris and me. I didn't know if the stock would be picked out after Thanksgiving. I'd originally thought I'd get a Wii, but the stores seem to be incapable of getting them in stock, so maybe a lot of folks will opt for the PS3 and Xbox instead. Anyway, the PS3 more or less covers the gifts at home, and that's most of what I need to get.

If a blog entry is posted in the woods

My title means, I'm wondering if anyone will ever read any of my blog entries. The traffic to my site has been pretty anemic lately. I guess some of my audience drifted away after a while. When you consider that I didn't post new images on the site for two years, I can't blame them for going away.

Meanwhile, I'll keep writing and keep posting new pics and images. My head cold is finally starting to shake off, so I felt good enough to step outside with my camera again. I found a few interesting subjects (posting three shots here). It should give me some fodder for images to work on during the week. The yard is really looking sloppy. I have to do some raking next weekend. By then I'll feel more up to it. I've gotta start exercising again too. It's been a few weeks since I did anything physically demanding. Luckily I haven't had much of an appetite while I've been sick, so I haven't gained any weight. But I know when I climb on the elliptical machine again, It's going to be a little harder to push myself.

Still in the woods

I'm still in the Wood Sprite mode, I think. Last night I started a new image, and it's turning out to be another figure in the woods kind of thing. Yesterday I took a pic of some plants that are growing in my goldfish pond outside, and I was playing a little with one of them. I found a pic I took years ago of a buddha statue. I was never able to find a suitable image to use it in, and just on a whim I put it inside the tangle of the plants. It has some potential, I think, but I need to play around with it a little more.

Back in the backyard again

I was supposed to be raking leaves today, but the head cold that I've been fighting with for the past week seemed to flare up this morning, so I stayed inside for most of the day. I did venture out around 4:30PM with my camera, because goddammit I promised myself I would take pictures! So I went into my backyard tool shed, thinking that maybe I'd be inspired by an interesting yard tool, but instead I found a dead mouse sitting in the middle of the floor. I won't pretend that I felt bad when I found him, because these critters have been chewing up anything that isn't metal or glass that I keep stored in there. Between the mouse turds, the hundreds of acorn shells, and the shredded bags and straps, I felt no sorrow. So anyway, I thought I'd take a few shots of him before I tossed his carcass away. Meanwhile, Simon was waiting patiently outside the shed. He might have caught a wiff of the dead mouse.

One problem I seem to be having lately, besides getting out and about with the camera, is the sun. I suppose if I went out earlier I would have had more luck, but today there wasn't very good light, so the mouse shots, and a few leaf shots I took, came out pretty noisy. I played with the settings but it wasn't helping. On a positive note, I took a few good shots of the bottom of my outdoor fireplace. The pattern of the ash was nice, and I think the pics will be useful to enhance some image later. So all the shots will be filed for now.

Warming up

Now that the web site's been revitalized, my next step has to be to start picking up the camera more often. So today I took a quick break from lunch to go in my backyard and take a few snapshots of the Fall decay. The weather is finally toeing the seasonal line, so the temperature dropped, and so have a bunch of the leaves. Plants are starting to whither, and all the bright greens are turning dull and brown. I felt like I may have been forcing myself to find a decent subject to take a picture of, but as soon as I started walking around the backyard, I found a few worthwhile things. I took about a dozen pictures. Here are a few of the shots I liked. They may be lackluster images, but there's some Photoshop-able material here. I can think of a few ways these would work as background or texture images.

So the trick now is to get away from the house and start finding new shooting grounds. I used to take short drives around the town, and could find interesting things to shoot. But those photosafari trips required some time, and good weather. And both may be in short supply in the coming months.

Welcome to my re-redesigned web site

and no, I didn't stutter.

This blog is the latest attempt I'm taking to redesign "Pixel Sandwich", which was the web site I created in June 2000 using Frontpage and a pitiful amount of HTML training. The site came out reasonably well, or at least it didn't have any technical problems. But it wasn't very elegant.

About a week ago, I purposely destroyed that cheesy and clunky web site, and opted for a free Doteasy template web site. It came out looking better, but after a few days I noticed that the web-creator was changing all the URLs for all the pages and images into random strings of letters and numbers. Not good, says I. Plus some basic functionality was missing in the template, such as a decent gallery page option. So I had to decide. Do I go back to the less elegant (but more technically sound) Frontpage web site, or come up with another option.

Hence, my web site is now a blog. Google (for all their evil omnipresence) offers free blog service, free (and abundant) storage space for files, a gallery slideshow option for the sidebar (as you can see to your right) via Picasa, and a domain name redirect which I will be taking advantage of soon. So I think this latest site will be OK for a while.

If you've new to Pixel Sandwich, please take a look at my Gallery and let me know what you think. If you've been to my previous site and came back to find this new site, please let me know what you think too. There are some new images at the end of the gallery slideshow, so you can fast forward to them.