Scattered Thoughts . . .

I 'm still trying to figure out how to paint with watercolors.  I'm making some progress but I am still needing more practice. Although I am learning and making some headway after the few paintings I did in the past week or two, I am slowly changing my painting supplies too which also causes a need for adjusting technique.  For instance, I purchased a different brand of warercolor paper, different brushes, and a few other supplies.  Each of these changes requires some practice to get used to the new characteristics of the new supplies.  I seem to be learning fairly quickly though. Here is my latest painting from yesterday... I need to start with having a specific plan for each of these paintings.  That is definitely a problem that is making things a bit difficult.  I'm sort of winging each painting with not much of a plan in mind.  Also, I really should be working on just one part of these paintings at a time.  Once I get a handle on each part, then I should attempt a compl

S heila and I ventured up to the University of Vermont Medical Center earlier in the past week to deal with some spots and growths on my skin.  This appointment had been delayed many months because we were more focused on more severe health problems. The primary concern with my skin was a growth on my right temple (photo at right).  This had been growing steadily for about a year and then it started growing more quickly throughout this past summer.  It had quickly grown to a concerning size when it comes to cancer so I was definitely looking forward to having this growth taken care of one way or another.   I have a history of skin cancer including a fairly large basal cell carcinoma.  I also have had all sorts of stuff removed from the surface of my skin over the years.  The one basal cell carcinoma I had removed in surgery was a large growth that went deeply into the flesh so that was actually a "surgery" requiring about 27 stitches to close-up the area after removing the ca

I recently started getting back into sketching and that has been going well.  I've never really stopped sketching throughout my entire life so I wouldn't expect to have any problems with refining my sketching abilities again.  Painting, however, is something I haven't done much of in many decades.  Watercolor painting is actually something I've never been comfortable with even when I was an active artist in school as well as college.  In college, every art-related class I took was sketching, engineering drawing and architectural renderings in graphite only and then blueprinted.  Back then, we didn't have all large format color printers using today's printer technology.  We only had large format blueprinting available.  Consequently, it made no sense to render any original drawings/sketches in color. Lukey and Kenzie were staying with us for the long holiday weekend last weekend and they also did some sketching but I noticed that they were very reluctant to use t

I 've been spending quite a bit of time trying to emulate Super 8 video footage fairly accurately and I have now come quite close. The two biggest factors in trying to get this emulation believable turned out to be, first, making sure I shoot in a rather flat color profile and, second, learning more about the hundreds of video effects I have with my video editing software.  "Learning" about these video effects means knowing what each is supposed to do and learning how to effectively use each effect.  This alone was a time consuming process. I chose to make things a bit easier for myself by switching cameras from my Fuji X30 that I used in earlier tests to a camera that is capable of shooting video in "Cine-like D".  The older Fuji X30 doesn't have a flatter profile.  It has nice contrasty images, which is great for images straight-out-of-the-camera but not so great for video footage when you want to do some editing.  The "Cine-like D" profile on my

S ince my last two video experiments created by using only still images captured in a fast burst mode on the camera were successful and actually came out better than I expected, I decided that perhaps I should try to come up with a way to effectively mimic old Super 8 home movies too.   For this new experiment, I chose a short clip of our grandson, Lukey, playing tabletop shuffleboard at Agave Taco & Tequila Casa. ________________________________________________________ I should start with a disclaimer...  This particular video clip was perhaps the most challenging clip I could have chosen for this experiment.  I did this purposely just to see what I could do.  This video clip was a high contrast clip with deep blacks and dark shadows.  Additionally, it was a highly compressed video which minimizes any leeway in editing the file.  In the future, if I want to mimic old 8mm/Super 8 home movies, I'll use a more appropriate clip captured using more appropriate camera settings. ____

I 've written a few times about a long-discontinued classic Fuji compact camera that I finally found a few months ago after a years-long search but I thought I'd write about it again.  This little camera is a really outstanding compact camera but I'm always looking for ways to improve whatever gear I use.  In this case, getting a slightly wider view would be nice for those occasional times when you need a slightly wider view.   I've had a few different wide angle converter lenses on hand for many years...  perhaps decades, actually!  I dug them out to give each of them a try.  I think the smallest one I own has worked best.  Below, you can see this converter lens sitting next to the Fuji X30 camera. In this photo below, the wide angle converter lens is mounted on the front of the Fuji X30...   Below, you can see the difference between the views when using the camera without the converter lens (inside the red box) and when using the camera with the converter lens (the w

I am about due for another visit with my primary care doctor.  I saw her last month for my ongoing breathing problems that started with an ambulance ride to the hospital back in January.  My breathing was still terrible in August so she started me on a new drug and I'll be checking in with her again next week to follow-up on the effectiveness of this new drug.  When I saw her about three weeks ago, I was telling her that the worst of my horrendous gastro-intestinal problems seemed to have been traded for the breathing problems.  I was still occasionally experiencing the debilitating gastro problems about once or twice a week but the severity had lessened and the frequency had significantly lessened.  However, my breathing had become unmanageable and, if you can't breathe, you can't do anything.  I haven't been able to do much this calendar year as a result.  Far too often, I feel like a fish out of water gasping for air. On the rare day when I feel halfway decent, I at

I n mid-August, we went to another one of Kenzie's figure skating lessons and practice sessions.  I really enjoy going to these sessions because, when the rink is empty such as it is during these sessions, I have access to the ice from one of the team benches rather than from behind hockey-puck-marred glass in the stands.  When I'm on one of the team benches, I have no marred glass in my way...  no safety nets in my way...  I can even open the door in the boards to get down low to the ice rather than shooting down on Kenzie.  Shooting photos at ice events is far more difficult because of all of these aforementioned obstacles when needing to sit in the stands.   I always shoot a lot of photos during these practice sessions so, as usual, I came home from this practice session with far more photos than I need.  I sometimes shoot video during these sessions and I did on this day too but, for some reason (really multiple reasons), I'm never really happy with the video files.  

B ack about a month ago, I wrote about our two year old grandson getting a new bicycle from Gee and Papa for his birthday.  Liza and Ace spent the morning with us before we all headed to a local park.  After eating some breakfast, we went for a walk while Ace rode along on his new bike.  I shot a lot of photos during this relatively short outing and I shared about two dozen photos here in another blog entry.   I decided to revisit all of those original photos that I captured that day to see if it would be worthwhile trying to put the photos together as individual frames of a video.  I actually got this idea for a video while looking at images of one of Kenzie's figure skating sessions.  As I was scrolling through these images, I noticed that when I scrolled through the photos quickly, it was just like watching an old home movie.  "Hmmmm....  I wonder if I can put these photo together as a video?" I opened up my video editing software to see if I could figure out how to li

B ack in January, my primary care doctor referred me to the University of Vermont for some skin cancer on the side of my head.  At the time, I had all sorts of other significant medical problems including, but not limited to, an upcoming bone marrow biopsy so the skin cancer was pretty much forgotten or, at least, put on the back burner.  I had much more immediate problems including ongoing anaphylaxis and significant breathing problems so the skin cancer referral seemed insignificant at the time.   In the past month or two, we noticed that this growth of skin cancer has grown significantly so it was immediately put on the front burner again. Last week during my last medical appointment, when my primary care doctor found that I had not yet seen a doctor for the skin cancer she immediately looked to see what happened with her referral way back in January.  She noticed that the referral was indeed put into the online portal but it just sat there.  The specialist's office at UVM never