Kyle Logghe at The Crocodile, Seattle. Ilford XP2 400 pushed to 800 on a Canon EOS Elan II. The thumbnail is my other favorite pic of the year.

As I get older, I love the fall more and more. This year especially, as mushroom hunting is a new favorite pasttime of ours. 13 pounds of chanterelles, our biggest haul to date, meant we had to forego highly amusing gastric opportunities.

My first ever contribution to the 'photo assignment' are these lovely Icelandic Poppies on my front porch. [1/500, f8, MF, Canon A80, uncropped and unaltered for those interested.]

I busted out the film camera for the first time in a year and a half and I have some B&W prints to show for it! Kyle is always a good subject to shoot. I've shot verona before, but not with their new bass player and drummer. Here's another pic from the evening, taken on the digital. (thumbnail pic)

Available at the Hubble site are high-resolution photos for you to print out and hang in your home. My suggestion? Pick one or two and use the Photographica Photo Finishing service, I've had really great results with that. Enjoy!

Starting November 13th, I took a roadtrip across the nation - beginning in New Orleans, LA, and ending in Seattle, WA. I honed my skills at shooting my digital from moving vehicles - such as this shot of a breezy (experimental aircraft) shot from an autogyro (another experimental aircraft) in Lafayette, LA. On a road trip through Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, and up the Left Coast, one can see unusual things, such as a snowstorm in the Mojave.

Shooting from the car was the norm on this trip, like these pictures from West Texas of a tree and an oil well. This is a railside grain mill also in West Texas, which we left to drive through the middle of nowhere and observe a very memorable sunset in New Mexico. Occasionally, I'd get out of the car and get to shoot Elana and Bisous having fun on a beach in the redwoods, or an eerie moonrise. There are many beautiful shots of the redwood forests, but I picked these mossy trees and this tiny mushroom for an illustration of scale.

This was the first time I used my Canon A80 in such a challenging lighting situation. Some new friends are in a great local band named Verona. Kyle has a fantastic voice. I tried some interesting things.

Ah, my first post on photographica - quick intro, I'm the other force behind xlan.org. I used to take a lot of B&W, but now I find myself out of school and without a darkroom. And the 'professional' shop I took my first roll of B&W to in years completely hosed the roll (has that EVER happened to anyone else?).

So anyways, I decided to use photoshop as my darkroom on a picture of an orchid I took at the San Diego Zoo last summer. Here's the almost-untouched original version, as well as 1, 2, 3, 4 different versions I changed to mostly B&W just for kicks. I left the yellow parts yellow because they look incredibly bland when they are changed over to B&W.

I'd appreciate any and all comments! (poll below)

Geez, another useless diary entry. I should write some stuff here about how i'm soooo liberal and about how my parents suck and how everyone is less right than me. THEN it'd be an entertaining diary entry. Through this diary entry I could please Cory's strange personal desire to peer into the lives of strange people that hang out on k5. Oooh, read my diary please!

Wow. Now that amnesiak has joined, this site has 'arrived'.