Surfin' with the Alien

Yes, I was one of the knuckleheads that stood in line for 3 hours of my life in order to get the midnight release of Halo 3. I was going to pick it up Tuesday morning but I figured it would be nice to wake Jake up with a fresh copy so we could play first thing in the morning. I ended up taking the day off and letting him take the day off from school so we could have some dad/son time without estrogen floatin' around the house. We beat the game on normal in a collective 8 hours. For those out there thinking that today's youth spends too much time inside, we also went to the park that evening and played football with my brother and then played frisbee football once the sun went down. Overall, we saw a lot of similarities between this one and the original Halo. The graphics rock. Our favorite level is STORM and nothing beats kickin' some alien ass while crankin' some System of a Down. Thanks Rob for the mix CD. Jake has a newfound appreciation for Motley Crue and Ratt.

For tonight's image, I did a fair amount of processing to come up with the one you are looking at now. This is the 4th version and the one I like the best. Rob thinks I should enter this one in some local contest. I have no idea how that works as I have never entered anything in any type of contest. I think it's time to push the envelope though. And yes, the title is a nod to Joe Satriani. I thought it was fitting for tonight's mix of text & visual. Let me know what you think.

Tower

I at least got up in time for the game today but the Chargers must have slept in. We are just not firing on all cylinders right now and it's starting to annoy me. We'll see what we can do next week here at home against KC. At least Denver lost today as well.

Enough about football. I'm continuing to post images from the Oceanside Harbor shoot. I tried a new processing technique on this image. It's more of an illustrated type look and I like the way it works on some landscape shots. I also tried it on the image I am going to post tomorrow and liked the way it came out. In the meantime, here's today's image. If anyone is still reading this, let me know what you think. I plan on implementing a way for my faithful readers to comment without having to e-mail me.

Oceanside

So I lied. I said I was going to post once a week, but this makes 2 days in a row. We went to Oceanside Harbor today to celebrate a 40th birthday party for my buddy Greg's wife Karla and her sister Marla. Luckily the weather turned out a lot nicer than expected. It seems a lot of people held off on going to the beach today which made it great for parking. The harbor is usually packed.

I was hoping to get to bed at a decent time tonight but I ended up spending a lot of time processing images from today's shoot. I think I have enough images from today to post every day this week so stay tuned. It's now 3:24a.m. and the Chargers game starts in about 6 and half hours so here's today's image. Hope you enjoy.

Where Does the Time Go

Sorry folks for the major delay in posting. I ended up taking a longer break than I expected. It was good though and I have come back totally refreshed. I am going to be taking on some new projects soon. My goal is to post an image a week for the next month. I would love to post more but I don't want to make promises I can't keep. I have a lot of respect for people that make the time to post every day to keep things interesting. For those who keep coming back, I appreciate the support.

I have made a decision to concentrate on expanding the portrait side of the business. I am putting weddings on the back burner for now. I am also starting a project soon that will portray different parts of San Marcos. I have a few projects in mind, but want to start off with this. The focus (pardon the pun) will be after the sun goes down. This is going to test the crap out of my processing skills as nighttime photography takes on a whole new dimension. The goal of these projects are to expand my capabilities, both in photography and post-processing, as well as giving myself something to strive for. I work a lot better under pressure.

In the meantime, I will still post photos of the kids so everyone can keep up to date. Here's an image of Jayden that I took the other night. Jess picked her up a cute little robe and she is just adorable in it. She is outgrowing her clothes quite quickly.