Feeding My Passion

My laptop can’t gracefully handle the large RAW files the D200 makes and I’m not willing to go back to JPEG as long as I have it, so yesterday I moved all my photos to a more powerful desktop computer. So I didn’t make a picture yesterday. So I’m sorry. So?

I’ll double up sometime this week.

Tonight I’m cooking stir-fried bok choy and shrimp and tofu pad thai for a dinner party. Last night my mother made the bases for chocolate ice cream and Barbara Tropp’s ginger ice cream, plus Tropp’s dark chocolate ice cream sauce. We’ll be eating well tonight! But first I must make photos!

Update 2/23

Epilogue: Ok, so after I got all of my photos posted here, I needed to prep for dinner since I was asked to cook for a weekly dinner thing my parents host. Because the prep took longer than I had expected, I missed my chance yesterday to make my daily picture. Now I’ve got catch up 2 days! I’m not worried that I won’t make the days up before 10 March (which is 30 days from my beginning on 8 February), I’m just a little disappointed in myself for letting it happen.

Forward!

Every non-rainy Saturday, there’s a big market at the Merced County Fairgrounds with vendors that sell everything from socks and bootlegged Spanish- and Hmong-language videos, to cherimoya, dried chilies, fresh exotic roots to aid digestion, and elote, roasted corn-on-the-cob you can dip in butter and sprinkle with chili powder and parmesan cheese.

A produce vendor cuts open and displays a melon for a potential customer.

Bonus:

My uncle Tad teaches the newest member of my family, Kylee, how to play the shell game.

Amanda Bowers helps package customers’ orders on her bakery’s first day open.

Let’s start with a photo I didn’t make. Here I am standing on the bank of the Merced River just east of Mid Pines. It was a glorious day!

Some red lichen on shale along a little hiking trail. Sorry for the rhyme, I don’t do it all the time.

Wild California poppies along a hiking trail above the Merced River.

Early afternoon in Ahwahnee dining room in the famous Ahwahnee Hotel in Yosemite National Park.

Nice view of Yosemite Valley.

Subcontractor Walt McLean installs ceiling tile while Amanda Bowers sweeps up before the health inspector arrives 2 days before opening her bakery, “Sweet Temptations,” in downtown Merced, Cal.

Nick Miller, an attacker on the UC Merced lacrosse team, practices scoring. The team has two more home games this season.

I swear I’ve been taking my daily photo for the 30-day assignment, I just haven’t had time to post them. Tomorrow, tomorrow, I’ll do it, tomorrow, you’re only a…ah, well, ok, well it’s already Sunday, so I’ll post them later today, after I get some sleep. I’ve made some pictures of a bakery downtown getting ready to open and then the same bakery on its first day of business a couple of days later, some of my trip to Yosemite, and then the surprising Merced flea and farmer’s market. Coming very soon! I swear!

I’m still wrestling a little with the D200 and Lightbox, due to my lack of experience with them, but I think it’s going better.

From L to R: Arnie Levey, Tim Wong, and Mike Abney sit in the back of Cigar Monkey in downtown Merced on Monday evening and smoke cigars.

My brother in law is letting me use his Nikon D200 body and Tamaron 17-50/2.8 most of the semester for this class. It is quite the beast compared to my little Nikon CoolPix 5400. And my dad has given me his Nikon 85/1.8 as well, a very fast and sharp piece of glass. So after reading some of the manual and a 3rd-party guidebook for it yesterday, I took it out for a test drive today, up into the foothills, stopping in the Spanish-named gold rush towns of Hornitos (population: 10) and Mariposa (translation: butterfly and a rather pejorative word for a homosexual man – the things you learn while working in restaurant kitchens!).

I’m shooting in Nikon’s version of RAW format, the first time I’ve shot RAW format of any type. The amount of detail it retains is awesome, especially if I underexpose by .7-1.0 stop, but I’m not happy yet with my processing. I have Photoshop 7 and my brother-in-law gave me Lightbox 2. I have a lot to learn about the camera and about processing its output, and the 30-day assignment is a good way to do both.

St. Catherine Catholic Church, built in 1862, occupies the highest point in Hornitos, and has a cemetery behind it.

Richard Ortiz, who mother opened the bar in 1948 and gave it to him just last year, serves Tuck and Tim Megher, who live in nearby Mariposa.

Downtown Mariposa, Cal.

Downtown Mariposa

As I mentioned in class, I was set to make pictures at a Taekwondo dojo last night, but when I got there last night, the owner didn’t want me to take photos. I didn’t figure out until later that it was because he felt there was more potential for me to take better pictures during his other, larger classes Monday-Thursday. I’ll have to remember to thank potential subjects for their interest in helping me get the best photographs I can, but to please let me see what I can do with any given situation. I’m already trying not to be an intrusion or waste their time.

So I went home fairly late last night without a photo. Bummer. It actually annoyed me not to get a daily picture. I wanted to get to the Saturday morning farmer’s market in downtown Merced, which is held every all year. The sign I keep driving by says it starts at 7a, but after jumping out of bed at 6:20a and driving downtown, there was nobody and nothing in the designated area at 7. Hmmm…

I needed to be somewhere by 8a, and I didn’t want to leave without getting something, especially since I missed my Friday photo. So I walked. I found the trio of Jehovah’s Witnesses a few blocks away before the farmer’s market started at 8a (guess I didn’t get the memo), and then took photos at the market as the vendors began to set up.

From left: Jose Esquibol, David Katen, and Jeremy Geiger wait early Saturday morning to hand out Jehovah’s Witness literature and talk to anyone who will listen.

Bill and Kathy Schaefer, who have a small farm east of Delhi, Cal., set up their stand to sell dried fruit, kiwis, oranges, and pecans before the farmer’s market opened at 8 a.m. on Saturday. They sell their produce at Merced’s farmer’s market all year around as long as it isn’t raining heavily.