On Saturday I had lunch plans with Dee.
This is Dee with the jindo she is fostering, Dori. Dori is a boy, and while the name may sound like a girl's name, it's actually a Korean name so it all makes sense.
As I was running about an hour early (when does that ever happen on a weekend?), I grabbed my camera and played around. I went to the beach, but it was about 11 am so the light could not have been flatter.
This is either interesting or utter shit, I can't really tell. I'm leaning towards utter shit, but maybe I'm wrong. It's taken through the orange slats at the Santa Monica Mall parking lot. I could spare you my utter shit, and only post the good ones, but what fun would that be?
Incidentally, the SM Mall parking lot is total genius-slash-big brother. This is what they have on every floor if you can't remember where you parked your car. I took a picture, because if I had told you, you wouldn't have believed me. Of course, I don't remember my car's license plate, so I'm not sure that this would be helpful. Eh hem. I should have tried looking for "Pixie the Prius." Of course, I might be blogging from a mental asylum as a result, but what a blog post, right?
The other cool thing is that they have red/green lights along the ceilings indicating whether each space is available or not. In case you're wondering, red is for not available, green is for available - once you get the hang of it, it's easy. If you're color-blind, I guess you're SOL. Or you do it the old fashioned way and actually look at the spaces as you drive by them to find the available ones.
Someone was flying a spectacular kite on the beach. Unfortunately I wasn't able to capture its dragon face, but the wings were really amazing:
I was trying to do something that I had too much light for: I wanted to use a slow shutter speed to capture motion. At first, I tried standing still, and letting the moving subject go by. Blech. It's harder than it looks to get just the right amount of blur. Also, I didn't have my tripod, or the filter to reduce light coming through the lens, so...
Next, I tried a slow shutter speed while following the subject. The aim is to get a (more or less) sharp subject and a blurred background. The idea was good, if unoriginal, but again too much light and no tripod. Here's the best I was able to do, which is hardly worth writing about (and yet, here we are!):
The lesson here is, practice practice practice. Also, I think it would have worked better if I'd been photographing moving subjects directly in front of me.
While crossing the bridge over Pacific Coast Highway, I took this one:
After lunch, Dee, Dori and I went to a cute little park off Wilshire Boulevard, and sat by the pond to watch the ducks.
Well.
You have never seen such duck drama. First of all, there were maybe three girl ducks and about a dozen boy ducks. Good odds for the girls, but you know that spells trouble. There was a lot of chasing around, flapping of wings, splashing of water, generally a great commotion. All was revealed when we noticed that one of the boy ducks was trying to get it on with other boy ducks. Not that there's anything wrong with that, some of my best friends are boy ducks who like to get it on with other boy ducks; the problem here was that the other boy ducks were having none of it and would squawk with dismay when Mr. Horny Pants would hop on their backs. Finally, another boy duck, probably the pond principal, had to intervene to stop the nonsense. I did not capture the action as I was too disturbed by the duck-on-duck violence. No means no, dude.
And so ends episode 235 of On Golden Pond. Please join us next time when Mr. Horny Pants is revealed to actually be his own evil twin.
