jims musings

Went and climbed Mount Olym­pus (not that one, but this one) a week ago. Took my daugh­ter, too.

On top of Mt Olympus.

While out in the back­yard last night, I was treated to this remark­able sun­set. Thought I’d share.

View from my back­yard last night

Yep, he’s get­ting out, after more than a month. Read more.

Dad is being moved to the Health­South phys­i­cal rehab cen­ter this after­noon. Also, his last IV line has been removed, leav­ing him quite un-Borg-like.

Dad is being moved to the Wood­land Park Reha­bil­i­ta­tion cen­ter this after­noon. Read about it here.

My Father is still in the hos­pi­tal after receiv­ing emer­gency sep­tu­ple bypass surgery. Read about it here.

Recently saw Cameron’s Avatar.
The story is quite sim­ple and is right­fully com­pared to Dances with Wolves, but that is not why you see this film.
In a sen­tence, Cameron has turned film-making upside down. There is no longer any lim­i­ta­tion to telling a story, none. With this one (very expen­sive) film, Mr. Cameron has:

1. Single-handedly brought 3D film into the main­stream. Start­ing now, non-3D movies will be passe, like black and white.
2. Nearly oblit­er­ated the need for sets or even actors. Sure, cost will con­tinue to drive the use of phys­i­cal sets and breath­ing peo­ple, but their days are num­bered. In a decade, a high school senior will have access to sim­i­lar capa­bil­ity on his home PC, what­ever that looks like.
3. Won him­self another pile of oscars.

Pre­dic­tion: This film sets a new stan­dard for ‘the view­ing expe­ri­ence’ which will not be sur­passed until direct sen­sory input is cre­ated… giv­ing an Avatar expe­ri­ence to each moviegoer.

Wind­ing down on a project that has con­sumed nearly an entire year, and I’m in the death-march phase. For those that don’t know, this is the fun part, where I work lots of hours to finally– finally!- get the pro­gram out the door and into the hands of my breath­less pub­lic.
For those inter­ested, we took some fam­ily pho­tos a few weeks ago while the leaves were turn­ing. I’ve posted those in the photo album. Look for the ‘Autumn 2009′ album in the Photo Album sec­tion.

I don’t get out nearly as often as I’d like, but yes­ter­day I was able to sneak down­town and take a few shots around sun­set.
It had been stormy all day, but the clouds were break­ing up around dusk and I was able to get some nice color in the sky. These shots were all taken hand­held with my Canon XSi at ISO 800. I used my 50mm f/1.4 lens, stopped down to f/2 or so. The first two pic­tures are actu­ally three pho­tos stitched together with PTGui. The last pic­ture is nine expo­sures. I ran a cou­ple of the images through Noise Ninja to remove low-light noise and grain.
Aside from a strong breeze, it was a great evening to shoot.

Salt Lake Tem­ple 1

Salt Lake Tem­ple 2

Salt Lake Tem­ple & Reflection

I know, these ought to be in the photo album. I’ll get them there, just as soon as I remem­ber the pass­word for doing so. (You betcha, I use pass­words.)
Any­way, I came across these pics recently and thought they looked pretty good in black and white.