In the Mood for Blogging

I've really been in the mood for blogging lately. I think it is because I've been feeling fantastic since I finally cut the last string holding me to Tracie when we went down to the provincial registry to take her name off my car registration. Maybe it's just Christmas.

I had a really great boxing day yesterday. We went to London Drugs and got there right before they opened the doors and were able to get two 4gig compact flash cards and then we went to the Future Shop. I got a 8gig thumb drive and gps unit. I think I got a pretty good deal on both and the crowds weren't nearly as bad as I thought they would be. Then at about 10:30 or so I went to Lethbridge to see Heidi and her family. Heidi's whole family came down to her parent's house for a visit and Christmas dinner.

-Gary

I'm A Model

F07U8519

My good friend and assistant Christine did a practise series of photos of me today. They all turned out very well. I'm very pleased with them. We were able to go over the things that she did well and the things that needed a little improvement. There were only a few that would have needed to be deleted if they were for a real sitting, and almost all of them looked fantastic once they were cropped.

I may even print a few for my wall at home. I guess I'm sort of weird among photographers in that I generally really like having my picture taken. I think that these ones turned out particularly well. Now if I could just lose some weight.

-Gary

Students Loans

2007-03-31 Canadian Money

I finished paying off one of my student loans today. That leaves only one. It is very nice to be getting them paid.

I really wish it hadn't taken so long but I guess you do what you can. The other one is going to take a while to get through.

Things are going really well. I'm feeling fantastic and enjoying myself a lot. Heidi came to visit me for the weekend and we had a chance to exchange our gifts. We spent a lot of time visiting my family and we had a nice time. I'm glad that Heidi got a chance to meet Jackie and her boys.

-Gary

Heidi

Heidi came to visit again and I had a fantastic time. We went to see Twilight, which I liked quite a bit, it followed the book pretty well. I always like the book a little bit better. I think it is because it is easier to interpret books in a way that is meaningful than it is to interpret meaning into movies.

It starting snowing really hard at supper time and so Heidi decided it would be better to leave a little sooner rather than take a chance later in the evening.

I have to replace my tires tomorrow. The treads are really worn. I can't decide if I should buy winter tires or if I should just get all season and not worry about it until the time comes to get new, new tires.

-Gary

Why do Foreigners Love Michael Jackson So Much?

From the video info:

Here is a remake of the "Thriller" song that I've entirely recorded with my own voice, using 64 A'cappella tracks. There is therefore no instrument, synthetizer, beatbox, or even to sampler, but only the sound of my voice livened up with Reverb and slight Chorus on certain tracks. Regarding looping parts, I've simply used the "looping" technique. Moreover, in the whole piece (which contains several thousand notes), I transposed 8 notes, which were impossible for me to sing in high-pitched. Because of my tessiture, I also must have resigned myself to sing certain parts in head voice, more particularly on the track corresponding to Michael Jackson's solo vocal.

I've accomplished this non-commercial project at home, only with a mobile PC, microphone, headphones and webcam - in nearly 350 hours. It's just an artistic challenge, accomplished during my hours of free time, whose purpose is to make smile my close circle and net surfers. Nonetheless, I'll be happy to record in professional studio, original songs with this technique, if a label was interested to work with me on a SP or LP entirely based on this innovative concept of "Massively Multitracks A'cappella".

Jon asks...

"What sort of photo editing occurs for school photos? I never imagined that was part of the process."

I guess it sort of varies depending on what's wrong with the kid's face. We do a lot more editing than the big school photo companies.

We crop and straighten all the photos. We pop a few zits and fix stray hairs. People can pay for heavier zit popping. The biggest difference between us and the big guys is that we get rid of the glare from the flashes on glasses. Glare on glasses takes the most time of anything we do, and is fairly difficult. I'm getting pretty good at it and having a tablet/pen input device makes it a lot easier. The big companies specifically say on their order forms that they do not retouch glare on glasses. Another thing we do is colour balancing. We colour balance the photos from each photographer's setup for each day so that pictures of siblings will match even if they go to different schools or are photographed by different photographers.

The colour and light levels change dramatically based on where you are shooting. For example if you are in a school gym that is home of the "Red Devils" and there is a huge red logo behind you on the wall, some of the light from the flashes will bounce off of the logo onto the kid making them more red than usual. If the photographer beside you doesn't have the logo behind them, the pictures will have a different colour cast. Then if the younger sibling is goes to school at the home of the "Blue Devils" they will have a different colour cast as well. Shooting in a drama room looks different than shooting in the gym, art room, or cafeteria. Even though the pictures are mostly the same.

We try to control all the variables. It seems to be working for us.

-Gary

School Photo Printing Done

We finished printing the school photos today. Some of the ladies at work were discussing the last time we were done before December and it has been over 5 years at least.

The new printer coming late put us four weeks behind on the printing before we even started, so it was great that we were able to get it done. Next year, we are going to be sitting around waiting for the cheques to clear.

Apart from the speed of the printer itself, several other factors sped up printing and packaging.

For example

Photo editors don't have to split their time between editing and printing the photos. Now the editors only edit the photos, which lowers the switchover time between editing and printing.

The person operating the printer works independently of the editors. This means that anything that needs to be reprinted can just be reprinted. This reduces interruptions to the photo editors, and there is less waiting around for reprints.

The new printer is can have a much longer print queue. The machine can print unsupervised once the jobs are entered, allowing the operator to do other things while waiting for the queue to finish.

We don't laminate the photos anymore and cutting the prints to separate them has been mostly eliminated by the new printer. We will likely be able to eliminate all the cutting once we have more time to make templates and tweak the printer a little more.

There are a few more things that we could do to improve, but for the most part, many of the bottle necks have been removed.

KFC Police

I met a guy about 12 years ago that that raises fighting cocks. At the time, he had about 40!

He kept the big ones all together, it is safe to do that because although they naturally fight each other, if the pecking order is already established they don't fight. He said that if he separated one out and the put it back after a week or so the rest would have forgotten their friend and kill it fast.

He took out 2 little ones to show us a fight. They started fighting right away.
Trying to peck and scratch each other with their spurs. Luckily they were too little to harm each other. It was very interesting.

He let them all out and they all went looking for food. After little while later, one of the younger cocks started fighting with one of the hens. The owner whistled for his #1 fighter (mainly to draw attention that there was a fight going on) and it came over and broke the fight up and it let the hen know that it wasn’t allowed to fight by pecking her.

The hen got one last peck in after the fight was over. The guy laughed and said, "Just like a woman, she just had to get that last peck in."

That guy was very interesting. He knew the pecking order of his birds. He knew which rooster was the toughest. He told us that the #1 bird in the pecking order was actually the 3rd toughest rooster, #2 and #3 were both tougher, but because they were younger they could still remember when the #1 was stronger. I guess the top cock maintained his position through roughing up the younger birds and then continually intimidating them as they got bigger and older.

So it seems that chickens just don't like fighting if the pecking order is set in their minds.

-Gary

Heidi

Heidi

So instead of sleeping right now I am going through the photos on my computer. I have this one saved in the folder called, "BEST WEEKEND EVER".

Time Change

Medicine Hat, Alberta

With the removal of Daylight savings time, it gets dark a lot sooner than usual. About an hour actually. I really like having a little daylight left after work. I much prefer that to having a little more light in the morning.

Things are going well. I've finished going out to the schools and now we are focused on printing all the pictures as well as studio work.

I have about half the airmiles I need to get an xbox 360, but the good news is that Safeway has introduced a new card that gives you 50 bonus airmiles when you spend $40. Which is actually pretty easy. I spent $70 today. I guess I should pay attention to how much everything costs and spread my purchases out to maximize airmile potential.

Obama-McCain Dance Off

The Internet

Todos

I don't know if this is going to be a good thing or a bad thing, but I finally broke down and got an internet connection into my house. Actually, I'm posting this from my own home.

That sound you just heard... it was the sound of my Mom's heart breaking because now I probably won't need to come over an hang out for three or four hours every day to use their computer.

I'll have to think of something to do that involves humans at least a couple of times a week.

The photo to the right is supposed to represent the internet.

-Gary

Golf

Morning Stretch

My brother in law has once again returned to the world long drive championships of the world. I think he qualified at the world long drive championships of Canada. His groups starts to wack'em at 10:30am on Friday the 24th. Here is a link to the results page. They are posting the results live and so the page will refresh itself every two minutes. The auto refresh will be totally worth it if even one person is so interested that he can't wait until the very end to see the results.

Unfortunately (or fortunately depending on your economic situation) I have to/ get to work during the event and so the automatically refreshing website will be of no use to me.

Stupid retakes.

-Gary

Eclectic Sound

Eclectic Sound

People really love lists. I don't know what it is about them. Much More Music has a show called Listed. Basically it is the show that counts down the best of the best in Music and Entertainment. Something about this show really speaks to me. I really enjoy watching it whether it is counting down the 20 groups that rock our world or 20 biggest celebrity meltdowns.

Put anything in a list and people will be interested.

American Election

So, I've finally decided who should win the US election. It is John McClane because I liked the Die Hard movies.

Best Movie of the Year

Ghost Town staring Ricky Gervais is the best movie of the year. I laughed throughout the entire movie. I give it two thumbs up. It is fine holiday fun.

Happy Thanksgiving.

-Gary

Inspired by Jeff

wordle word cloud

I made a word cloud, it's from the last 4 or 5 months of this blog. The size of a word in the visualization is proportional to the number of times the word appears in the input text.

I guess you can draw conclusions about what is on my mind based on the size of the words in this image. But beware, not everything that is on my mind is in this image because I don't really post everything that I think here.

-Gary

September

We've hit our stride at the schools, two weeks in and we're going strong. I'm really enjoying it a lot even though it is a lot more tiring than the last two years. Luckily we are done photographing a the four local high schools. We only have a few more really big schools left.

I went to visit Heidi on the weekend, she's a really great girl. I really like her. She's nice, caring and very appreciative of the things I do for her. I always have a good time when we get to visit. It makes me sad that we live in different cities. I just want to spend all my time with her. I wish I had met her 11 years ago. It just takes too long to get to know someone properly, to develop a history with someone.

Over all things are going very well for me. The CPAP machine is just great. I have become accustomed to wearing it at night. I don't think I'll be sleeping without it unless I can lose a bunch of weight, which often helps reduce sleep apnea.

I've been uploading more photos istock over the last few months and have recently cracked 400 uploads. I hope to find people to act as models I would really like to get 30 or 40 uploaded a month. My spread sheet predicts that with 30 uploads a month I could be making as much as $1000 a month by May. It just seems so hard to come up with enough ideas and models to make 30 photos a month. I guess I could break it down a bit and do 3 themes a month with 10 photos from each theme. Even that is a little daunting.

-Gary

Haircut by Heidi

Haircut by Heidi

I've been wanting to grow my hair a little longer on top for a while now, but I don't think I would do a good job cutting only the sides by myself. Luckily Heidi saved the day by volunteering to trim the sides for me.

The though of just letting it all grow evenly just didn't appeal to me and neither did paying $15 to have it done at the mall.

Things are going really well. Heidi has been to visit a couple of times and I am looking forward to heading out to Lethbridge in a week to see her. I always have a lot of fun hanging out with her.

-Gary Milner

Guess What Bill, You're a Ten.

How could I not post this? It's one of the funniest things I've ever seen.