Oakland, California.

Reading about the blockade, siege and ongoing massacre of Gaza and thinking about HAMAS, the IDF, how the worm turns and Henry Shoskes’s book about the Warsaw Ghetto uprising, No Traveler Returns.

South Hall at UC Berkeley.

It’s not far, just close by, through an open door, by and © monkeytime.

Going home, going home,
I’m a-going home.
Quiet-like, some still day,
I’m just going home.

It’s not far, just close by,
through an open door.
Work all done, care laid by,
going to fear no more.

Mother’s there expecting me,
Father’s waiting too.
Lots of folk gathered there,
all the friends I knew,
all the friends I knew

Morning star lights the way,
Restless dreams all done.
Shadows gone, break of day,
real life just begun.

There’s no break, there’s no end,
just a living on.
Wide awake, with a smile,
going on and on.

Going home, going home,
I’m just going home.
It’s not far just close by,
through an open door.
I’m just going home.

Athena and Golem Zeus: Today in Herstory, by and © Michael Zara.

A recent Strobist post involved how to shoot a person who’s not too keen on “having my picture taken,” and discussed the use of a shoot-through umbrella combined with on-axis fill flash. So, after dinner Saturday, we tried out some lighting ratios in a loose and, uh, eccentric atmosphere.

This is lit from about 45° camera left and high, using a Canon Speedlite 580EXII with a shoot-through umbrella. I added some fill on the right side using the 580EX on-camera (but off-axis to the right, camera vertical) with the Omnibounce, dropped 2 stops.

Tannhäuser Gate, by and © monkeytime. ]]> http://www.michaelzara.net/blog/archives/176/feed 0 http://www.michaelzara.net/blog/archives/168 http://www.michaelzara.net/blog/archives/168#comments Sun, 12 Oct 2008 20:08:22 +0000 Mike Zara http://www.michaelzara.net/blog/archives/168

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth, by and © monkeytime.

I seem to have decent luck shooting pelicans. Perhaps this makes me a crypto-Catholic. The pelican figures prominently in some branches of Catholic mythology as a model for Christ, piercing her side and feeding or resurrecting her young with blood from the wound. This lore of the pelican apparently predates Christianity.

Interestingly enough, the pelican also appears in Christian writing (and perhaps Jewish writing) as a metaphor for isolation and desolation. Psalms 102 says (verses 3-7, King James Version):

For my days are consumed like smoke, and my bones are burned as an hearth.

My heart is smitten, and withered like grass; so that I forget to eat my bread.

By reason of the voice of my groaning my bones cleave to my skin.

I am like a pelican of the wilderness: I am like an owl of the desert.

I watch, and am as a sparrow alone upon the house top.

It is not clear that the original writing actually referred to the sea-bird we know as the pelican, but most English translations seem to use the word pelican (notably, the New International Version does not). The Vulgate appears to use the Latin equivalent, and the Septuagint the Greek.

Get my good side!, by and © monkeytime

Over at Strobist, David Hobby cuts through the non-essential numbers (aperture, shutter speed, ISO) and focuses on the core of balancing ambient light and flash. 

Lloyd, above: I dropped the ambient two stops and shot on flash, ungelled. Nyahhhh!

Ranier from Maury (HDR), by and © monkeytime.

Last Thanksgiving, I visited the Seattle area, staying on Maury Island (Vashon Island) in the Puget Sound with friends whose house had the back-porch view of Mount Ranier seen in this image. I shot this at about 5:15 p.m. The foreground was in deep shadow, while the mountain was still in relatively bright sun.

I bracketed several exposures with the goal of combining them into an HDR image. In Lightroom, I applied the LR/Enfuse plug-in to the RAW files of two of the bracketed exposures, importing the resultant TIFF back into Lightroom. I then applied an exposure increase, fill light and a graduated filter to further increase exposure in the bottom 2/3 of the image.

I haven’t been a fan of HDR because so many of the HDR images I’ve seen on Flickr look cartoonish or surreal. An image of the Los Angeles River by cinemafia, however, was so natural looking that I’m coming around.

Longing, we say, because desire is full
of endless distances. I must have been the same to her.
But I remember so much, the way her hands dismantled bread,
the thing her father said that hurt her, what
she dreamed. There are moments when the body is as numinous
as words, days that are the good flesh continuing.
Such tenderness, those afternoons and evenings,
saying blackberry, blackberry, blackberry.

Robert Hass, “Meditations at Lagunitas”