Day 364 - Kids Theater

Thought of the day: Jasmine loves her Wednesday afternoon theater class. The kids act and improvise on the stage with the help of a professional. While Jasmine is busy in her class, Lila loves to dance around and around in a room annexed to the theater fitted with walls of mirrors. I like the special ambience of a theater, perhaps any theater. The elevated stage, dark interior, sparse and interesting lighting make it a challenging yet fascinating place to photograph. I can't help feeling that this place has a sense of gravity. And people and movements bring life to it. It's a simple place but I feel drawn to it in a mysterious way.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine and her friends doing an improv while a boy watched on.

Day 359 - Snow Leopard

Thought of the day: Having photography as a hobby can be time consuming and sometimes distracting but above all it is a blessing. No matter where I am, what I do, I can never be bored. Be it a familiar place or a foreign land, a fancy restaurant or a dingy pub, a modern structure or an old barn - no matter where I am, there’s always something interesting to observe and photograph. Always. When I was in Chicago two weeks ago, I was overwhelmed by the sensation of being in an extraordinary place and overjoyed by all the photo opportunities. When I was in the zoo today with my girls, I found many special creatures and special moments to record even though we were certainly no strangers to the zoo. Even in the rare occasions when I don't have a camera handy, my eyes and my mind are seeing and recording images all the time - the world is a special place and I am lucky to be a witness to the grandness of it all. 

Photo of the day:

Snow leopard - caged in and looking sad.  What was he observing from inside his cage?

Day 337 - Making Music

Thought of the day: I have missed a few excellent photo opportunities today. I missed a shot of two very dear dogs of my friend when I had coffee in her house this morning. They really snuggled up on me and made me feel all warm and fuzzy. I missed a shot of autumn light when I ran on a trail later in the morning. The light gave everything a soft, delicate and airy touch. In the afternoon, when I was at Jasmine's school to pick her up, I saw a woman and a dog waiting patiently outside for a child to show up. Inexplicably, I didn't have a camera with me again so I could only frame a picture in my mind but didn't actually take a shot. A photographer friend of mine once said that the shots he missed were the best ones and they lived in his mind forever. Perhaps that was not a bad thing - if he had actually taken those shots, they might not have turned out as he had expected and they might have been quickly forgotten. Instead, now he had a reservoir of beautiful and interesting images in his mind. Perhaps, those "missing" images made him the photographer that he was as much as the images he actually took made him. So, I do regret but do not feel bad about missing all those shots today. The important thing is to open my eyes and my mind to see and behold amazing images I encounter every day - at least I have done that today.

Photo of the day:

I finally got to take a few photos when it was already dark outside. Here Lila was "playing" piano for our house guests after dinner. She was not really playing a tune yet but her passion for forcing some interesting sounds out of these black and white keys were both cute and admirable.

Day 333 - Bikes

Thought of the day: The caliber of photographers on Google+ is simply amazing. Indeed, many of them are professionals doing that for a living. I am following a number of them and the photos showing up in my stream really made me pause before I dared to post anything of my own. My past experience on Facebook was the exact opposite - the quality of most of the photos there were so poor that I felt out of place to post anything with an artistic touch. Similar things may be happening to the non-photo posts as well - the posts on Google+ are often thought provoking and interesting while most posts on Facebook are none of that. It can become self-enforcing after a while - Google+ gets the great shots and profound thoughts while Facebook gets the average, mom-and-pop style shots and random posts. In an ideal world, people would move to one social network - Google+, of course:-), because it's open and less sinister - and use Circles to maintain separate public and private images. You can share your great shots and interesting thoughts with the public and your fuzzy shots and not-so-inspiring thoughts with family and friends as they are the ones who would welcome anything from you. Sadly, the real world doesn't work like that as it's easier not to struggle with something new and it's far less work to just share whatever comes into your mind with whoever is listening and most people would probably do just that. Unless Facebook messes up badly, I'm not seeing people migrate en-masse to Google+ in the near future.

Photo of the day:

Ready to leave - this is not an interesting photo for the public consumption, but this is one of the only photos I took today...

Day 329 - Energy Monitor

Thought of the day: I volunteered in the annual vision screening event in Jasmine's school today. All day long, kids lined up grade by grade and had their eyesight tested by volunteers. It was my first time doing this and it had been an eye opening experience for me. I got to observe the remarkable physical and behavioral differences between kids from different grades. It's amazing how much difference a single year of age difference can make at this early stage of life. An idea just popped into my head: I want to make a photo book for Jasmine's 10th birthday so she, and we, can see how she has changed from year to year. Our minds mostly live in the present moment and it's easy for us to forget how we or our loved ones once were. "Old" photos will help us recall memories buried deep inside us and help us see the whole person and how her present self came into being. Just like annual vision charts record the vision history, photos record the life history. It would be a pretty interesting and meaningful project to reconstruct a life using photos.


Photo of the day:

Jasmine's climbing gym employs an 100kW solar system to offset a quarter of the electricity usage in the building.  It has one of David's energy monitoring devices installed and the real-time energy information is prominently displayed on the wall near the entrance. The device has a detailed memory of 30 years so you can reconstruct your energy usage history over a long span of time. Hopefully, your usage will trend down over time as you learn more about energy efficiency, pay more attention to your footprint and take steps to reduce it. So, in a way, the device captures your history of becoming a green citizen.

Day 274 - Girls and Hay

Thought of the day: In the past few days, I visited a couple of farms and ranches in the countryside. I felt quite at home there watching chickens, pigs, goats, cows, horses and other animals roaming freely about. And the best part of it all was the light.  Inside the stables, on the people, on the buildings, in the sky, there's interesting light to be found pretty much anywhere and I really enjoyed taking pictures with it.

Photo of the day:

Two girls helping out in the ranch.  The light on their hair and the hay made this an irresistible picture for me to take.

Day 272 - Thunderstorm Cloud

Thought of the day: I got a point and shoot camera for Jasmine this morning - a Nikon Coolpix S8100.  It's very compact, easy to use and takes good quality photos and videos.  It doesn't take raw photos, give you a lot of exposure control or come with bells and whistles like in-camera HDR, panorama mode etc, but that's just perfect as the first camera for Jasmine. She has an outdoor photography camp next week and I can't wait to see what kind of images she is going to make with this camera.

Photo of the day:

Thunderstorm cloud reflecting on water.  The photo was taken in Erie where Jasmine had her horseback riding camp this week.  Luckily, her photo camp next week is going to be much closer to home.

Day 258 - Photo Sharing

Thought of the day: I have been playing with Google Plus for a couple of days now and I am really loving it. OK, first I have to admit that I'm a hopeless addict to Google products.  I am already relying on a bunch of them on a daily basis.  That's all for good reasons, though, as they are free, they are useful, and more importantly, they make sense to me.  I have two main issues with Facebook - the lack of control for privacy and the cluttering of messages on my wall.  I have long concluded that I have very little to gain on Facebook when it comes to getting valuable information and have a lot to lose when it comes to privacy. As a result, I have been using Facebook only sporadically. I hadn't deactivated my account yet because there were no other alternatives out there and I didn't want to lose all the contacts I had established over time. Not any more - with the launch of Google Plus, there is now a viable, and in fact far superior, alternative.  In addition to addressing the privacy and cluttering issues, Google Plus has many other edges over Facebook, at least from my perspective.  That includes, for example, my higher level of trust in Google for safekeeping my data and handling the growth of the social network, the seamless integration of Google Plus with other Google tools that I use daily.  My biggest concern for Google Plus is that many of the Facebook users may not feel the same discomfort with Facebook as I have and won't find a compelling need to switch over to a new service.  There's a chance that my online social network will be split into two - some of the more technically savvy and privacy minded folks will make the switch at the first chance they got while the rest will linger on Facebook. As a result, I may lose half of my online social network but it's still better than losing all if Google Plus had not come into being. My biggest hope is that the concept of Google Circles, which is a fundamental concept in Google Plus, will succeed and will permeate into other online services as well.  That might very well transform and dramatically expand our online universe and make it a better reflection of the real world.  After all, we don't live our lives as a singular personality. We are more complicated than that. We do different things, talk about different things, and may even behave quite differently in different circles.  It would be wrong to ignore or deny the subtlety of the real life.  In any case, even if Google Plus would not be able to unseat Facebook in the same way that Facebook had unseated MySpace, it would have already made big contributions to social networking by introducing the concept of Circles, in addition to demonstrating that our privacy and our sophisticated nature need to be, and can be, respected as much in our virtual life as in our real life.

Photo of the day:

Jasmine and her friend climbed up high on a tree - time to snap a photo and share it with grandma!  With instant upload and  tight integration with Mobile, Google Plus is going to make cell phone photo sharing even easier than before.

Day 223 - Bottles

Thought of the day: Today was a rest day.  Lila fully cooperated by sleeping way past lunch time.  The weather cooperated too as it was wet and rainy pretty much all day.  Looking out of the windows, I caught glimpses of what I'd like to photograph in the next few days: people under colorful umbrellas, preschool kids walking home on their own, green hills dotted with cute little houses, windows adorned with geraniums...the list is already long.  And of course, the trains, the ubiquitous trains that are so important in many people's lives and that will also be indispensable during our travels as well.  In fact, the first thing we bought after we landed in Zurich was a Swiss Pass for the duration of our trip.  And we intend to make good use of it!

Photo of the day:

Bottles at the window against an incoming train.

Day 218 - Smile

Thought of the day: Today I bought a new lens from Mike's Camera, our local camera store.  I was looking for a telephoto lens and it came down to basically two choices: 70-200mm f/2.8 or 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6.  I tried out the first lens at Mike's Camera's Denver Zoo event a little while back and really liked it.  It's a fast lens, great for portraits or landscapes, indoors or outdoors.  Unfortunately it's large and super-heavy - not something that I can take with me everywhere.  The 70-300mm lens is slower but it has some extra reach (200-300mm).  And most importantly, it's relatively small and light weight.  That's a deciding factor for me because, if the past tells me anything, I won't use a lens unless I can carry it with me all the time.  So why waste money on a great lens that would just sit at home when I can get a good lens that will be used often?  I think I have made the right choice and I look forward to using my new lens often in the next few weeks.

Photo of the day:

This Mike's Camera employee kindly let me try out a lens on him (it's a prime lens - not the zoom lens I bought). The poor guy must be shot at many times a day!  The picture is a little soft.  I like this other prime lens much better - see this picture.  I think there's a good reason that 85mm f/1.4 is selling for so much more than 85mm f/1.8!

Day 212 - Self

Thought of the day: The wet weather had definitely outlived its charm, if there was any to begin with.  Not a single person I talked to liked the rainy days of the past few weeks.  It's about time for the warm and sunny weather to come visit Boulder.

Photo of the day:

What else to take a picture of today?  I am tired of those rainy day pictures.

Day 210 - Misty Green

Thought of the day: Today I was trying to figure out whether I should get a new lens for the summer break.  I am getting a little tired of using only one lens, which happens to be the lens that came with the camera.  It has a good range and it does a decent job in a variety of situations but it doesn't do anything spectacularly well.  It's especially lacking in the handheld low light situation which I seem to run into a lot lately.  I would love to get a fast normal prime lens and a fast telephoto zoom lens.  But fast lens typically means big glass which typically means more money and more weight. So I have been hesitating before taking a plunge. When I was taking an inventory of what I already had at home today, I happily "uncovered" a Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 lens.  I couldn't believe that I had pretty much forgotten all about it.  I will surely miss the unparalleled object isolation effect of the 85mm f/1.4 lens (see my previous blog post about it), but I think this smaller and cheaper lens will serve me well, at least for a while. One thing I learned from this experience is that before I search far and away for something ideal, I should first take stock of what I already have and the chance is that I will find in my possession something close enough.  It may not be perfect, but it may serve me just as well - and nothing will end up to be perfect anyway especially after you can claim it your own.  This can be so true for worldly possessions, and also for other more abstract things in life as well.

Photo of the day:

Misty mountains and greenery in a rainy spring day, taken with my "new" lens.

Day 190 - Tackle

Thought of the day: Our neighborhood has now a photo club!  It's nice to be able to hop on the bike or walk to a photo club meeting in a neighbor's home.  In the meeting tonight, we showed some of our recent photos to each other and then spent the rest of the evening talking about some random things.  For those of us who do photography as a hobby, or maybe even as a profession, you know that it's a labor of love.  But unlike a "normal" group activity where you get constant feedback from each other,  it can be a lonesome pursuit.  You can be taking photos for years without knowing whether you are really making progress or not.  You can be sending albums to friends and family for years and getting little feedback other than an occasional "This is great!" which, unfortunately, doesn't tell you much or help you much.  I wonder if the feeling of loneliness is shared by individuals laboring in different areas of arts, for example, painting, writing, composing.  Other than the occasional recognitions you may receive when you are really good or get really lucky, you mostly labor in the dark driven by nothing more than the love of doing what you're doing.  In fact, it's probably true in any field that requires you to work on your own for a long stretch of time - astronomy, biology, basic science research, you name it.  The feeling of loneliness is pretty much inevitable and it may even be a necessity for us to develop into who we are.  However, we are primarily social beings and we need support from each other to break the monotony, and that's when something like a photo club comes into play.

Photo of the day:

Little kids tackling a soccer ball.  It's certainly more fun for kids to play with others than playing a ball on their own!

Day 189 - Tree and Bike

Thought of the day: Today I went out and shot some of my favorite flowering trees.  They didn't come out exactly the way I'd like, but at least it was a fun experience.  After all, what's a better way to spend a sunny day then spending it outdoors?

Photo of the day:

This is one of the flowering trees that I shot this morning along the Broadway bike path.

Day 185 - Smiling Boy

Thought of the day: Mike's Camera hosted an event in Denver Zoo today with Canon and Nikon.  They provided many different cameras and lenses for people to try out for free.  I spent a couple of hours there trying out different lenses.  The event was really fun as you got to try out some exotic and not-so-exotic lenses on animals and visitors. 

Photo of the day:

I knew that it was going to be my favorite photo of the day right after I shot it.  I used a mid-range telephoto prime lens for this picture - this lens was absolutely amazing and I don't think I will be able to get a photo like this with my current lens(es).  Time for an upgrade?

Day 176 - Photo Exhibition

Thought of the day: Tonight I attended an interesting talk by Scott Carlin about his night time photography.  He used a tripod for a long exposure and while the shutter was open, he walked around and "painted" selected surfaces and objects with a flash light so they would be illuminated in the image in a way that he envisioned.  The result was some pretty striking images that I had never seen before.  At the talk, I met a woman who took self-portraits with her built-in laptop camera and then manipulated them with various cartoon like effects.  She came up with some pretty surreal images - some of them might be a little disturbing but they were in general pretty unusual and interesting.  People can be so incredibly creative.  A million people can have a million different ways of perceiving the world and a million different ways of expressing themselves.  It's constantly manifested in photography, arts, technology, and daily living.  I think each one of us is blessed with a unique vision and voice that can be nurtured when we're young; and when we are older and more capable, as long as we have the courage and conviction to stick to them, we may leave a unique footprint on the earth and enrich the lives of many others.  Indeed, much in the same way that the diversity of genes is essential to the survival of species, our individuality is essential to our collective survival. 

Photo of the day:

Today I went to Mia's 39+ photo exhibit at CU's UMC Gallery.  Her 39+ blog inspired my blog.  Mia's photos have a sense of daily progression - every day's image relates to previous day's image either conceptually or visually.  I'm  more focused within the context of a day as I try to inject a daily thought  that can be connected to the  image one way or the other.  I think we both found a way that worked for us.

Day 168 - Lights

Thought of the day: The annual Conference on World Affairs is taking place at CU this week.  CWA started in 1948 and had attracted a wide variety of experts in different fields to talk freely about pretty much anything under the sun.  This morning I attended a discussion called "Artists and Scientists in Pursuit of Light" with two artist friends.  The panel included Danielle Feinberg who is a director of photography at Pixar and did the light-up of Wall-E.  She talked about the lighting for a few Pixar movies which made me want to watch them all over again as her talk gave me a new perspective in animations and a new appreciation for the making of them.  Another panelist was Jeff Lieberman who is the host of Time Warp on Discovery Channel.  His talk began with the origin of the universe and ended with the future of human consciousness.  So as you can imagine, his talk jumped all over the place from science to human emotions to mythology.  It was unusual and yet he made it all seem coherent.  I could tell that the audience was quite captivated by him and his topics as most of the followup questions were directed to him.  The third panelist was a physicist and science writer. He made some interesting observations on how science eventually brought many sci-fi dreams into reality.  And the fourth panelist was a storyteller.  Her sense of humor and keen observations of human nature added a nice touch to an otherwise quite serious discussion.  All in all, I found the whole session to be scintillating and mind-opening.  To say the least, any discussion that would make me go online afterwards and research for a dozen of new books to read is definitely not a waste of time.

Photo of the day:

Lights on Pearl St.  Danielle said that one of the joys of photography is to make the most mundane objects look special.  How true! Similarly, I think one of the joys of life is to make the most routine days feel special.  To make an object special, the key is in the light.  And to make a day special, the key is in the mind.  Stimulating thoughts can enlighten a day just like dancing lights can bring an object to life.

Day 164 - Wild Hair

Thought of the day: Today I took pictures inside a school building for a show.  Many of the pictures didn't come out well.  I always find it challenging to take pictures of a group of moving people inside a building.  Either the colors aren't quite right - which is no longer a big issue as I take raw photos, or the photos aren't quite sharp as I have to expose for too long to let in enough light.  There are things that can be done in such situations, but not without compromises.  Perhaps a better camera, lens and flash will also help, but that will force me to carry more weight which I am not looking forward to.  If I were a professional doing this for a living, I would probably put up with the extra burdens.  But right now, I am trying to keep the weight on my back as light as possible.  The consequence of my simple setup is that now I have a lot more confidence taking outdoor pictures, where there's an abundance of light to play with, than taking poorly-lit indoor pictures.

Photo of the day:

The wind made Lila's hair dance - yes, it was going to be another wild hair day!  This photo was taken outdoors where the light was abundant.

Day 150 - Fridge Door

Thought of the day: Today I took some videos for a family.  It was an interesting experience as I had not taken many videos before.  I learned a number of things for sure.  For example, I found out, to my surprise, that the real life could go through some subtle transformations when they were transported onto the screen.  The same scene or dialogue could appear more or less beautiful, more or less poignant, depending on how you record it.  By changing the lighting, the composition, and the surroundings, you could change the mood of the video.  Editing could make a difference too, by using different background music, cutting out different footage, and doing sequencing differently.  So taking videos is pretty similar to taking photos, in the sense that you can make the recording reflect your view of the reality.  Just like what a photographer can do with photos, a videographer can record beyond what the naked eyes can see.  He can cut through the surface and record the essence of reality as seen by the eyes of the heart and mind.  That definitely makes video taking interesting for me.

Photo of the day:

Friend's fridge door - random but precious snapshots of everyday life.

Day 139 - Car Light

Thought of the day: Doing this blog gives me a challenge, and pleasure, of finding and capturing the beauties of life every day.  On lucky days, a beautiful scene would just present itself at an opportune moment and I can just grab the camera and shoot.  On other days, I need to go out of the way to look for something interesting to shoot.  Today was one of those "other" days.  There were actually quite a few memorable moments throughout the day - horses on an idyllic pasture, a brightly dressed child on a misty, green meadow, stunning sunset silhouette of cottonwoods - but unfortunately I could only capture them with my eyes but not the camera for practical reasons.  So, when it was getting late and I still didn't have a single photo on my camera, I decided to go for a jog and shoot in the dark - a challenging task for me as the light was the biggest source of inspiration for my photos.  But luckily, even with the natural lights gone, we humans created enough artificial lights to keep ourselves safe and comfy at night that I was able to accomplish my task for the day.

Photo of the day:

Cars, street, and trees with blossoms of early Spring.