When I become President of this Great Nation I'm going to issue an executive order outlawing the use of wallpaper. I hate that stuff. Putting it up or stripping it off, it doesn't matter to me. One task is as onerous as the other.
Remodeling on our ol' house continues as we're finally getting floors down to replace those ruined by the Great Water Heater Flood of '09. Surprisingly, the walls have to be repainted as well and that, of course, creates the opportunity for change. I'm all for change, particularly when someone else has to make it happen and I get to come home and it's done. Unfortunately, it's not completely going to work that way. We're repainting the bathroom, a bedroom, moving my library and painting another half of a bedroom. I'm excited about what the finished product is going to look like, but this is one process I don't enjoy.
Hagy's Photography is continuing to expand and I expect to purchase our first set of studio lights at lunch time today. We're booking into 2009 and are doing well with that. Right now we have a backlog of photos to process between a wedding and engagement shoot and that stack is getting deeper even as we try to cut it down.
The reading and writing, much to my dislike, is taking a backseat to remodeling and photography. We've got a January deadline for getting The Sixth Sword on the shelf, thanks to Uncle Sam calling my coauthor to duty in southern Iraq. It'll be a push to meet that. The writing is done, except for a few tweaks, but the proofing and polishing will take a little time. These next couple of months are filled with holidays and an anniversary and other pressing engagements, so it will have to get squeezed in the cracks somehow.
Fortunately, I was able to spend some time in the Great Outdoors before all of this broke loose and I'm still able to post images from last Friday's trip. I spent a lot of my early photography career trying to make motion blurs. When I started, I didn't even know what you called them or how to do them, but I wanted to. When I finally learned enough to purchase that priceless ND400 filter I was able to start making the images I wanted. Once I learned the trick to it, I then ran around to every moving body of water I could find and started shooting ripples and rapids just to see what they would look like without any attempt at composing anything artistic. It left me with only one real wall-hanger of a shot from those days and it can still be found on Outdoor Photographer's web site.
The photo you see above is a bit of a throwback to those days. I shot it because I liked the background of the solid rock of the base of the cliff against the foreground of the rocks in the river. When I first saw it on the big screen, it didn't make me overjoyed with wonder until I saw the tail streaming toward me. I kept the photo because of it. When you're standing there, all you can see is the barest hint of a ripple arcing out toward you. There are no rocks jutting up from the bottom to create any white water along that arc. Needless to say, I was pleasantly surprised at finding that "tail" so prominently displayed in this long exposure photograph. I held on to it for that reason alone.
It just goes to show that you never know what you may see when you frame the world with a camera.
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