The Failed Logic (Isaiah Foulks on bass, Brody Amaral, drums, Ben Carpenter, lead vocals and guitar, and Scott Little, guitar and backup vocals) plays at The Partisan, a club in downtown Merced, on Sunday night.
Jhonathan Thomas, Jesus Santana, Richard Simonia, and Joey Thomas play 2-on-2 basketball near dusk in Merced’s Applegate Park.
University of California-Merced has hosted a human rights film series the last 4 years. The film last week was Veiled Voices, and because the filmmaker, Brigid Maher was there, the discussion afterward was especially interesting and lively.
This week the film was Crude, and I made some photos there. Terrible lighting and I really dislike the little pop-up on-camera flash, so I set the ISO to 1600. I’m not exactly happy about the noise, but I prefer noise to flash
Cristian Ricci, literature professor at the University of California-Merced during the question and answer period after the documentary Crude.
This is about as fussy as I get when I cook or bake.
Before baking
After baking, but before devouring.
And where, do you ask, are the walnuts? There is a layer of finely chopped walnuts between the apples and the crust.
Delicious.
I’m happier with the second set of loaves from my first batch of brioche dough. I used smaller pans, so although the weight of the dough was the same as the first 2 loaves, the volume was better. I also let them bake longer (50 minutes as opposed to 30-40), which made them drier of course. But there’s so much fat in this dough (butter and eggs folks, and a lot of it), that it would take longer to ruin it than with other breads that don’t have the fat. In this case, a little drier is better.
The owner/instructor at the big Taekwondo dojo on Main Street wasn’t really making it easy for me to photograph a class for my daily assignment, so I went to Merced MMA, a mixed martial arts studio also on Main Street. After going one day and introducing myself, they told me to come back the next day so they would had a chance to talk with the management. In the end, they were much more cooperative!
I’ve always enjoyed making sports pictures, though mine are of the more standard action variety than anything truly unique or interestingly different. Getting the lacrosse picture was relatively easy, mostly because the player was running drills and not zooming all over the field, and it was outside, so I had plenty of light so I could both stop down and speed up. Merced MMA is in a former car dealership, so it’s all windows, but the class I wanted to photograph was at night, so natural light wasn’t a consideration, so I’m all the way open and relatively slow for action.
I’m also trying to use the 85mm (127.5mm) more, but long, clean lines of sight were hard to come by, and trying to shoot really tightly on sports action requires more skill than I currently have. So I used both lenses, which includes the 25.5-75mm zoom.
I baked my first brioche today.
Care for a schmear of butter with your loaf of eggs and butter? Why yes I do!
This is a very good recipe from Artisan Breads in 5 Minutes a Day. One batch makes 4 loaves! It’s very easy and quite incredible, especially since the flavor of whatever honey you use will dominate. I used what I had on hand, which was clover, but I’ll probably use a milder variety next time.
* I can’t take credit for the clever multi-lingual pun, it belongs to a friend who is fluent en Français, Madeline Moss. At least I have funny friends!
I’m halfway through the 30-day assignment, and I thought this would be a good time to review what I’ve done so far. I’m satisfied with my results so far, mostly in how well I am approaching people and my very conscious choice of a fairly wide variety of subjects.
But what I’m noticing about my photos is that they all look quite similar, similar because I’ve been using one lens, a very nice 17-50mm (25.5-75mm in 35mm terms), and at 17mm most of the time. I like the lens, it’s sharp, pretty fast (universally f2.8), focuses quickly, and it’s nice and wide. My favorite focal length of all time back when I was shooting film was 28mm, so this is mighty close. What makes all the photos look very similar is the depth of field.
Because I’m not getting super cozy with my subjects yet (with a notable exception on Day 8), I can’t really open my aperture way up and use selective focus to keep the background (or foreground) out of focus. So everything is fairly sharp, which can lead to a lot of clutter in the frame. That’s fine sometimes, but not all the time.
Enter the 85/1.8! Ta-da! My dad has given this lens to me, which is very generous of him, especially since this lens rocks. But I haven’t used it yet! I like wide angle lenses for the most part, I can do more funner stuff with them! But I want to use a more selective depth of field and I want to try using this great lens. It’s 127.5mm on the D200, so it’s very different than shooting with the much wider 25.5-75mm zoom, not a great lens for the small stores I’ve been working in lately, at least not the way I’ve been using the zoom, so I’ll be changing where I position myself and I’ll be looking for very different types of pictures when I’m using it as well. Here’s my first go at it, and these pictures feel different to me, which is a good start.
(For the purposes of the 30-day assignment, I’m only counting the pictures with people in them that I’ve approached. The first and the last photos fit the bill in this group.)
Matt Mateo has been an employee at Just for You, an adult-themed store in downtown Merced, for 4 years.
Downtown Merced in the evening.
Bishop’s on the Square is one of the few fine-dining restaurants in Merced.
Fernando’s Bisto in downtown Merced
Curt Nelson, local vocalist and choir director, and Rob Hypes, talk behind a theater in downtown Merced.
Can’t take credit for that witticism, that’s all Keith Simonsen, who was deeply and critically involved in POY as the assistant director, or something like that, for at least a couple of years when I was at MU. Great guy, great photographer. And super detail oriented, holy smokes. I think technology would make his former job easier. You should have seen the mountains of slide trays to house the tens of thousands of entries. I think there were a total of over 25,000 slides in the contest back then. He had to set up the room with a lot of wiring, 12 slide projectors, wall-mounted light tables, 3 judging stations, and so much more. It was crazy. I even got to operate the side judging stations a little, which was fun and exciting.
Anyway, I really enjoyed the countless hours I spent in the small auditorium in Gannett Hall where they judged POY (Actually I could probably estimate the number of hours, but it would scare me. My class attendance and homework usually plummeted during the first part of the Winter semester. Sorry J105 professor Bob Sullivan! Sorry GPA!). While I really miss being there for the judging – dark room, tens of thousands of good, great, and amazing photographs, lively and illuminating discussion among the experienced and learned judges, and side discussions with the students, big bowl of chocolate which you got sick of by the end of POY – I’ve enjoyed watching and listening live to the judging from the comfort of home. POYi is using Adobe Connect’s software and servers to live stream the judging, and you can chat with other people who are watching via Connect during the judging. I’m seeing some people I went to school with in the room, as well as some recent award winners chatting with everyone about the photos being judged, and people from all around the world participating in the discussions. Ain’t technology amazing?
POY isn’t the time suck it used to be for me, but it’s still so much fun to be a part of it, especially since I know what’s it’s like to actually be there.
Judging ends next week, check it out before then!
I think it’s time for me to start using the 85.
Della Salas goes over the Merced Antique Mall’s stall assignments with owner Rose Ann Bressler.
While Antique Mall owner Rose Ann Bressler looks on (middle), Micki Rucker (left), a long-time customer who now rents a stall at Merced Antique Mall, examines a pitcher that Mary Jo Campodonica (right) is going to sell in her own stall.
Antique Mall employee and seller Mary Jo Campodonica (right) shows owner Rose Ann Bressler a purse she’s pricing for sale in her booth while Micki Rucker, a long-time customer who rents a stall, looks on.