Follow me to my new blogsite!

This is my last blog entry on this web address, though it is by no means my last blog entry. Thank you to everyone whose followed me here, or found my blog by a search term or even a random blog generator on WordPress and read on.

The time has gone to have my website, www.NotSoStillLife.com, host WordPress on its own. I’m using a new template source, one I can customize a lot (yet I’m still working on a lot at present), which will allow me to have my portfolios and blog entries all in one place. The photos can be displayed much larger as well.

Join me at: my first entry and my new blogsite. Hope to see you there!

~ Danielle

My Prehistoric Restaurant Experience

One great aspect of my trip to Orlando was a chance to meet two more runners, one of whom I’ve known online for a long time, Petra. She and I jokingly refer to each other as cousins, and online sisters and in one time she even sent me a card addressed to “My best friend I’ve never met”. Petra, and her husband, Scott, wanted to eat at Downtown Disney. We both thought it would be easy to meet, get on a bus Downtown Disney (a restaurant and shopping center) and meet. We decided to meet at T-Rex named for the Tyranosaurus Rex dinosaur. 

At 12:30 Petra called and we both thought we could get quickly there from our then current locations, I at the Shades of Green hotel, and she and Scott from Wide World of Sports where they were picking up their race packets. It turns out we all were given misinformation on which buses went where, all had to go back to Disney resorts and start over and arrived more or less at the place an hour later, very hungry. 

Both the outside and inside have many T-Rex dinosaurs, one large one roared at intermittent times. 

While underneath him (her?) there was a stagnant baby Rex. 

As many centuries are represented in prehistoric times, the restaurant has red areas (representing the arid times) and blue areas (representing the Ice Ages. 

I took so many pictures that soon Scott was asking if I always took so many photos or was it just the restaurant that was inspiring me. As I was starting to answer, Petra answered for me that as a photographer, yes, I am always taking photos. 

The decor was unbelievable intricate and beautiful. 

This undersea kingdom of lights was both beautiful and a bit frightening to behold. I was actually glad we were put in the Ice Age section where a small wooly mammoth by our table while jerky and noisy, wasn’t even a little scary. 

Finally I had Scott take a photo of my friend and I. Though I can’t make us look like prehistoric creatures, I can make our photo look like it might have been published in a newspaper printed long long ago, so here is a black and white version of Danielle and Petra, having met in person at last. 

Topical Tuesday (11)

When I write my blog entries, I almost always edit my photos first, often placing them on the entry in the order I want them, and then finally writing. With the old saying of a picture being worth a thousand words, sometimes I’m tempted to just publish them for a short amount of time, maybe an hour, before even writing anything, just letting the photos tell the story for me. It was really tempting to publish the photos on this entry without comments for quite a while.

As a teen, I really enjoyed writing, even winning a scholarship to attend the Center for Creative Youth, a summer program at Wesleyan University, an intensive program in which my concentration was creative writing. When I think back to the major essay I read at the audition process, a day in the life of a dog, I still cringe a bit, though somehow it worked.

I’ve sort of shied away from writing a bit since then, though working on my blogging 3xs a week goal, helps a lot.

As you may have noticed, I recently had some blog entries pre-written and posted as I’ve been in Florida to prepare for and run in the 17th annual Walt Disney World Marathon. In this Topical Tuesday I’ll be talking about some things that happened on the trip on the first few days, starting with my plane ride on American Airlines. (With the sole exception noted, all photos on this entry were taken with a friend’s Canon Elph camera, on loan to me while I try to decide on a compact camera suitable for runs and travel. I did miss my Leica on the trip very much).

Though I always take photos from my seat on my plane trips, I honestly think the photo above is one of the prettiest ones I’ve ever taken.

This next one was taken as we were flying over mountains in Colorado, a photo that would prove to be ironically funny later on after I landed in Florida and found out they were having one of the coldest January’s in recent memory

I don’t know what it is about airplane flying that gets to me, I’m just always in the mood to hear about the online food choices. Not that I always get them, I just find them a fun part of the journey. I know the prices are excessive (they have a captive audience the way movie theaters do), yet I absolutely had to find out how good (or not) a $3 cookie billed as gourmet was, so I ordered one and happily milk was still free.

To my delight (and somewhat to my surprise) the cookie was wonderful. In fact, the only way it could have been better has had they been able to serve it warm, which of course, would be a logistical nightmare in flight. The cookie was so good in fact that I also got one with milk on the return flight.

In addition to getting to run in a new state (that makes two out of the ten I need to complete to be a junior member of the 50 Staters Marathon running club), the visit gave me a chance to hang out with my mom and stepdad who live in a city that’s about an hour and a half away from Orlando. Knowing me as well as they do, the second night I was there they made sure to take me to Boston Lobster with an all you can eat buffet featuring sushi, crab legs, crab cakes, mussels, clams, oysters and whole lobsters. My mom took this photo of me:

and then I used my iPhone to take this one and post it immediately to Facebook with only the caption of “Dinner!”.

One of my main concerns about the trip, and one reason why my mom, stepdad and I were staying in Orlando days before the race, was how smoothly I could pick up my race packet and number. My mom thought the race expo was quite crowded, however, it was much less packed then I’ve seen others. Then again, about 75,000 people signed up for the half marathon and marathon events (with about 5000 of them signing up for both, the Goofy Challenge), and not everyone came out days early to beat the crowds. Here’s a shot looking down at the expo.

The hotel we stayed at is Shades of Green, for those in the military (including those who have retired) and their families. My stepdad is retired U.S. Navy with over two decades of active service. Shades of Green used to be called The Disney Inn, it’s still a Disney Resort, and there’s a Mickey Mouse in the lobby. Here’s another photo of me with Mickey from my mom (she’s camera shy, so she prefers taking photos of me).

It’s something of a tradition for me to take and later post a photo representative of where I slept the night before a big race. While the hotel room was nice, it was kind of nondescript, so for my pre-race hotel photo, I snapped a photo of the grotto the night before.

Brad Kava and Tony Lindsay

(This is my second entry for this week that is auto posted. While this is posting to my blog I’m running the marathon at Walt Disney World in Orlando Florida).

I had the opportunity to photograph my friend, Brad Kava, a former journalist at The San Jose Mercury News for over 20 years, who now teaches at DeAnza College and is a Dean in the Journalism Program at Cabrillo College, on his two hour talk radio show at 1080 AM KSCO in Santa Cruz.

Anyone who knows Brad has seen him with his adorable Standard Poodle Riley. A lot of my favorite shots include Riley actively trying to participate in the action.

Though Riley also was less into the show at other times (the sound operator joked that Brad’s show puts dogs to sleep).

I took more pictures of Brad than I thought I would. One of the reasons was he was just so animated. It’s funny he told me he thought having me take photos might make him self aware, yet after a few minutes of me taking photos he was really into his callers, too bad they couldn’t see his gestures.

One of the main reasons I wanted to photograph the show that day was Brad’s guest, Tony Lindsay who is the lead singer for Santana (as well as having a solo career). Tony was a great sport about being photographed, he didn’t even know I was coming and walks into the studio happy to be on the air and captured in photos.

Brad and Tony had great chemisty in studio. Their show flowed as they talked about Tony’s adventures as a singer from flying to shows, meeting great people, and once literally singing the menu of a restaurant onstage.

This shot was obviously posed, and I only had one quick opportunity to take it before the prop was shaken off.

Brad and Tony both invited me to Tony’s next show, which was at The Crow’s Nest in Santa Cruz. Brad was brought up as a special guest on harp, and now he has a photo of himself playing next to Tom Politzer.

Tony is a great vocalist, perhaps doing my favorite cover ever of “September”. I had a great time in studio and at the show.

Blue Moon Photography Mission

(This is blogged a bit out of order as the things on this post actually happened before the race that I blogged about on Friday. Additionally this is being autoposted for me, written while I was still in California. If you’re reading this on the day it’s posted, I’m in Florida training for the Walt Disney World Marathon (to be blogged later).

When I first got the Meetup Invitation to be at Ocean Beach (at the Sloat parking lot of the San Francisco Zoo), I chuckled to myself and wondered how anyone would get up that early considering it was planned for New Year’s Eve. As time passed I realized that even though I had the New Year’s Resolution run scheduled just a few hours later I could, if I went to bed very early on New Year’s Eve, get up and shoot this event and still make it home to San Jose to shower, change and get to the race with time to spare.

So when it was 8:00 p.m. I went to bed (though I was unable to get to sleep till 9:00 p.m., waking up only briefly to get a Happy New Year text a little after midnight, then sleeping until 2:00 a.m. when my friend Chris heeding my Facebook request for people to call me early to help me wake up called to say “It’s 2:00 a.m., do you know where your friends are?”. In all fairness Gaius called also, yet at 3:30 a.m. I was almost at my destination, not sleeping.

I wasn’t sure if it would be too dark to shoot our goal, the beautiful moon, a moon blue in name if not in color, over the water, preferably with its light on the water below.  At first I just used some very long exposures and high ISOs to create images like the one above (1250 ISO, f 2.8, 1 sec).

After shooting horizontal, vertical and tilts (the tilts were inspired by the posts I had to use as a make shift tripod), I started shooting details around me as if art paintings, including:

a fellow photographer’s camera:

the ocean through a rusty divider/crowd control device:

and a series of benches and posts of the type I used as my tripod substitute:

The moon was hidden beyond clouds for a lot of the time. Still as the day approached we got some flashes of light and some pretty blues and grays in the sky.

After a while I started wondering if perhaps I should leave at 5:00 a.m. since the moon wasn’t peeking through a lot. I really debated it and might have left, yet I decided I didn’t want to miss anything in case we got a dramatic image and I heard later that I missed out.

So that was the reason why I was on the beach when a loud bang rang out and some time later another. It turned out that someone decided to ring in the new year by firing a rifle (underwater for safety) twice. One of the photographers in my group had talked with him (though he was unable to talk him out of the idea) so he came back to the cliff area overlooking the beach where most of us had stayed. Soon when a ranger came by he was telling his story and then some unexpected action happened.

First many police arrived in several cars.

They interviewed potential witnesses (including some of us, I hadn’t seen the man or talked to him, though they took down my name and number anyhow), and started surveying the area with lights. At one point they had a light on a fellow photographer down on the beach and asked me to call him, which since not all of us had exchanged names was just me joining them in “hey photographer, come up here, the police want the beach cleared”.

I was having a discussion with myself that went something like, “We’ll they’re here, get some editorial shots now” mixed in with “Just get as close as you can without them taking your camera and memory card away”. I really don’t know if they were noticing what I was doing, I didn’t take that many shots of them, still I was surprised the officer in the below picture didn’t confiscate my camera or at least tell me to stop taking photos.

After I had a few good photos, I decided to ask if I would be able to leave at 6:00 a.m. as scheduled. I was told I would be. Then ten minutes later an officer told us they were temporarily closing the beach, yet we all had to go stand by the bathrooms (which happened to be locked the whole time) and wait. When I tried to explain that I needed to leave for a race I was told I would wait until they dismissed me. Though it seemed like hours, they did come back in about half and hour and tell us we could go back to taking photos, or leave.

Before I left I took a few more images, with the moon now ironically, casting a lot of light. While the moon was never blue, there were was a blue ring around it, and this last shot, straight out of camera, was one of my favorites. I’m glad I got up early and made the trek, the experience was definitely worth it.

Topical Tuesday (10)

Welcome to my first Topical Tuesday of 2010! By coincidence I wrote 9 for 2009 (which lets me start 2010 with #10), there will be many more for this year as I will try to do one for every week.  Above is a random generated Blog Post Collage of my posts on Facebook.  Ironically it pulled entries about running, movies, the dog, music, yet not one photography related post.

Since many things that happened this week will be other blog posts, this week’s Topical Tuesday will focus a lot on my one day trip through Berkeley with my friend Gaius.  I haven’t been to Berkeley since I first bought my M8 years ago. It was great to get photos of other things with the M8, someday when I buy an M9, I’ll have to bring it to the city as well.

Unlike my first trip to Berkeley (photos of which I’ll have to post in another blog), we were more trying to hang out then go on a long photo walk. So the photos are more things we happened to see than things we sought out for colors, textures, leading lines, etc.

One of my favorite parts of the day was visiting a chocolate counter, getting some samples of very dark chocolate and seeing this display of all the ingredients.

We didn’t stop for coffee in the city (though we probably should have), I did notice this sign for both its message and the probably intentional gritty condition of the sign.

This double stacked bus (I’m not sure what to call it), was in part to raise awareness on conservation. Gaius and I were joking that if it really was used as a bus the extra weight would actually make it a fuel waster.

One of my late father’s favorite photography subjects was flowers, particularly a single flower. When I saw this flower, I’m not even sure what type, I was just struck by its beauty, I had to take it in his memory.

Being a large city, I of course found an example of graffiti that was quite beautiful, at a local junior high.

Which leads to a cute scene at Gaius’s apartment. He has a cat named Catullus (which means little cub in Latin). He told me he knew he’d name a cat that before he even had took in this beautiful creature who was once a lonely stray. He has photos all around the apartment of a tiger at Catullus’s eye level, so he can imagine that he is the tiger. It took quite a few shots to take this (especially as I took it with my iPhone), yet it came out well.

Colleen’s mom is a big believer in practical gifts. One Christmas gift I got from her was a gift card to McDonald’s. Since I don’t eat a lot of fast food I actually had to look up on my iPhone where there was one, and found one not too far from my home. When I went there I found a taxi cab in the parking lot and while it’s likely only the driver took the cab there, had fun imagining someone taking a cab to McDonald’s to get the limousine feel.

Resolution Run – My first Anniversary of my first race

Friday January 1st, in addition to being the first day of the year and the new decade, was also a one year anniversary for me, that of my first race ever. This year I ran this race, the Resolution Run, co-sponsored by our running group’s sponsor, Athletic Performance, again. The race started and also ended with a lap on the Los Gatos High School track. 

When choosing what to wear for the race I paid homage to the two marathons I had run, wearing a in training shirt for my first marathon, the San Francisco Marathon, and the Tiffany necklace from my second, the Nike Women’s Marathon (also in San Francisco). 

One of of the things I love most about this five mile race is the beautiful scenery. Here is one of the first spots in which we run through a lush forest like area. 

Though I prefer running longer races to challenge myself more, I enjoy seeing all the athletes of all sizes, ages, abilities and types run these races. With paved or trail areas for most of the course, athletes wearing track shoes, sneakers, running shoes of all kinds, pushing strollers, even one on crutches, gave it there all for this race. 

We were not the only people out on this fine day, we were joined by dog walkers and cyclists as well. 

The course was changed a bit from last year. The last hill (the one I’ve jokingly referred to as the “Wow, why am I running this race?” hill when people ask me about the race), was substituted with one that was trail instead of paved, yet was less steep overall. Here’s the new last hill of the race. 

The course was just so beautiful all the way through. 

This is the top of the last hill, a scene we did not see last year, so glad they changed the route. 

I had a spectator take a photo of me near this great under bridge mural.  The race was a great overall success. We had many more people than last year (so much so that they even ran out of goodie bags). That aside, it was a wonderful day and great way to celebrate my anniversary. 

Wishing 2009 Goodbye, Things I Learned in 2009

This time of year is one of reflection, and often promises to make something new or different occur in the next year. Less than three months ago, I started blogging again after having taken a break due to some issues with my former blogging platform (the photo above was from one of my first entries) and have been doing it steadily. Along the way I’ve learned some photography things and so I’ll be using my blog entries from this year to help me outline Things I’ve Learned in 2009.

I learned I can start a blog simply with not a lot of ideas in which direction to go, and still be blogging a few months later. I’ve also learned that 3xs a week is good number of times for me to blog.

I’ve learned that weddings performed by a monk in a Buddhist Temple can be very similar in many ways to the Christian weddings I am more familiar with.

I’ve learned even when your plans get rearranged in a major way, for example, losing electricity for your entire party, you can still have a wonderful time.

I’ve learned some children get in planes and become almost instinctive co-pilots, and that by helping volunteer to photograph them in these planes, I can make help them preserve in an instant a memory for a lifetime.

I’ve learned I have some talented and funny amateur comedians as friends, and that it is joy to photograph them. Some images of Raf on stage, crack me up just looking at them, even weeks later.

I’ve learned some images are worth risking finding out what happens if you go beyond a No Tresspassing sign with a group of other camera carrying adventurers.

I’ve learned even if you have a seat facing the back of the stage area at the San Jose Holiday Parade, you can still get some great images if you’re ready for them.

Finally I’ve learned taking the wrong turn can sometimes lead to a great location you didn’t anticipate for a unique background for your photos.

And with that I’d like to acknowledge 2009, on its way out. So with that in mind, my last photo for the year is of a Beanie Baby (Ty named it Loosy, even if it’s supposed to sound phoenetically like Lucy, that’s a weird name) that was put in a box to preserve it. Somehow the goose ended up in a position that looks like it’s trying to salute, so I’ll have her salute 2009, and look forward to welcoming in the new year.

Topical Tuesday (9)

It’s amazing what we remember from childhood. I was telling Colleen that I thought we should go to a street nicknamed Candy Lane to check out the lights on Christmas Eve, and she instead persuasively argued we should visit a street nicknamed Christmas Tree Lane as it was closer to our location. She remembered visiting it for several years, and that her mom had told her that whenever anyone moved into a house on that street, Fulton Ave in Palo Alto, then even had to sign as part of their contract a statement that they would decorate their yard for Christmas and that the display would be over the top.

There were many beautiful houses on Fulton Lane. Though not every was decorated in a true over the top fashion, there were many interesting and unusual ideas from religious to whimsical. It was a hard subject for me to shoot, both as we were in a moving car (a special thank you to Colleen for driving slow even with an occassional honk of frustration from those behind us) and often there were pedestrians who seemed to be walking and stopping in front of just the house I wanted to photograph the most at the same speed as we were traveling. Still, I had fun and especially enjoyed the original Smurfs display and this house whose simple lights really transformed their house into a gothic ,almost mansion like setting.

Now on to the typical rest of the week through the iPhone lens.

Starting with Christmas displays in the daytime. I’m a huge fan of Christmas displays at night, and an even bigger fan of displays that also look great in the day time. As my running group often runs the same route up to (or past depending on the week and desired goal) Campbell Park, we often saw the same houses over the over again.

One house that caught my eye was decorated on all three visible sides. I wondered if they would keep it up past Christmas, and while I don’t know if it is still up, here it is the next day.

One of the best parts of the display was a little box saying how many days and hours it was till Christmas. As it was the next day at this point, I was able to see that it now reads “Ho ho ho” in the small boxes. I really like the oversize Christmas lights, I don’t think I saw them before this year.

I noticed this sign that while unfortunately it had been knocked to the ground, still conveyed a good message. On second thought, perhaps it is now more effective as people will notice the odd angle it is at and read it.

I remember in high school college my classmates saying they would never want a particular car as it was too boxy. On the ride home I noticed a car that seemed to embrace it’s outer cubeness to the point where the car was named The Cube. So while stopped at a red light, I took a quick photo to share.

Lastly this month is a special anniversary for me, as it marks the 12th year I’ve been in California. While I’ve loved this state from the moment I got here, a few things were especially memorable: the palm trees, all the one way streets (running in opposite directions parallely for many streets in downtown San Jose), and the restaurants. Seeing this sign this week really brought it all home for me. It is I representative of my first fast food meal here which was in a Green Burrito merged with a Carl’s Jr. I remember the first time I went to a Carl’s Jr. that was not so linked and wondering where all my favorite selections were until my friend, a California native after figuring it out and laughing a bit at my expense, explained that very few of them were housed at the same location. Oh well, I’ve since gone to Carl’s Jr. a few times, and The Green Burrito, not as many. I guess I like mom and pop restaurants over fast food regardless of what coast I’m living on.

Christmas Services through the years

For many reasons, Christmas is my favorite holidays of the year. One of those reasons is the beautiful pageantry of the Christmas (or now more commonly just prior to Christmas) worship services. Most of those I remember growing up involved candles, a lot of singing and often children acting out the story of the birth of Jesus in a manger. While I don’t unfortunately have any photos of those services from when I lived back East (most likely it didn’t even occur to me to try and take photos then), I have enjoyed capturing the services at Menlo Park Presbyterian several times now.

The photo above and just below are from the Christmas Eve service in 2004, and were shot with my film Leica M7. While I wish I had easy access to the negatives, they are in storage, however, the scanned images come across almost as well. The pictures make me miss the colors of film, yet it’s helpful now to see images as I’m shooting them in very low light situations, like all of those during these services.

This was the last year that Pastor Doug, with the candle below, was one of my pastors, before he took an assignment in Tennesee. This occassion was one of the first times I brought my Leica to church (though I’d shot in the church before with the camera I used more then, the Canon 10D. At the time I’d brought it both to test it out fully, as I had just bought it a month previously I was still learning how most effectively to use it, and to be somewhat stealthy. However, just prior to the service Pastor Doug saw me, I did have a very good seat about 6 rows back, and thanked me for taking photos for them, so I had to concentrate on making them especially good even though I had no idea what the service would entail (every year they change it).

Although I attended the Christmas services between 2005 and 2008, it wasn’t until last year’s services that I returned with camera in hand to take the photos. This time I had my new Leica M8 (which had debuted in 2007, I just took a little longer to adopt it into my camera bag), and had the pleasure of my friend Colleen’s company. We sat roughly in the middle (the best seats we could get for the service) and I shot more with the 90 mm then I had the previous year with film.

That year, having seen several services simliar in their lighting (though not all of their content), I really appreciated the subtle moods created by the lighting and effects.

The finale that year, with the children’s choir joining the adult singers and worship leaders onstage was my favorite of all of theirs. Since we were sitting in the middle I had to dodge standing proud parents in my frame, so the framing of this one isn’t perfect, yet it’s among my favorites for capturing the action and enthusiasm onstage.

This year when Colleen and I planned to return to the service we discussed in advance which one we should go to and decided to go to the earliest service, that at 5:00 p.m. and to get their very early to get good parking and a good seat. While we got an amazing parking spot, even though we were in the church an hour and a half early, all of the seats near the center of the church, in fact most of the seats in general were taken or being saved (in some cases someone was saving all of a row for their friends and family. At first we tried to sit in the middle, several rows back from where we had been last year. Since we had plenty of free time I decided to shoot some detail shots.

For this one I briefly went up on the main stage. The only person to ask for permission was a musician, and while he gave it he probably wasn’t the right person to ask. Still I took this and quickly went back to my seat before anyone could object.

Colleen who knows me very well knew I didn’t think I’d get the type of shots I wanted from our seat, so she asked if I wanted to sit in the balcony. I liked the idea and went to scout us seats and we finally sat there. While waiting for the service to start I asked the soundman who I was sitting right next to what cute things the service would have this year. He told me there would not be an elaborate candle lighting service, nor a children’s choir. There would however fog produced during the song “The Darkest Night of the Year”.

With our seats up high I certainly got a different perspective than I have in years past. In some ways perhaps a ground seat may have been better for capturing this, though I may have had many people in my frame as it was so crowded.