My Faves of 2012

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Well, 2012 wasn't as productive as I would have liked as far as getting out and taking pictures. However, I did get some nice ones from a few different places and I also tried some new things in 2012. So, since I didn't post a top 10 last year, I thought I would this year. But, I don't like to call them my "Top 10" per se, since that's hard for me to figure out. Not that they all could be "top tens".  I feel quite the opposite actually.  I like to think of them as my "Favorite 10" instead.  I know, it's really all semantics. So, here they are in no particular order:

(Also, if you want to check a really good top 10, check out Dave Wilson's here.  Blows mine away!)

1929 Duesenberg Model J Bohman & Schwartz Front

Here's another shot I took at Dick's Classic Garage.  It is a 1929 Duesenberg Model J Bohman & Schwartz.  It is a little different from other "Dueseys" because of the headlights.  This one has smaller headlights, but overall it's still a classy looking ride.  I really liked the front of it so I tried to capture it on an angle and make it dramatic, or at least a little different.  I hope it worked. (Click the photo for a larger view)



Garden of the Gods #2
The National Natural Landmark known as "Garden of the Gods" is a must see on any visit you may make to Colorado.  It's full of beautiful sandstone outcroppings and there are plenty of hiking paths and roads to see everything the park has to offer.  Located in Manitou Springs just outside of Colorado Springs, its a wonderful place to see nature at its best!

Th shot below shows what you can do with HDR...  The light was terrible.  I was shooting into the sun and the sky was very hazy at the time.  But, with 7 brackets, a little processing with Photomatix and some tweaking with Nik's Color Efex and Viveza, I was able to bring out some of the detail from the haze and the shadows to present something a little more interesting than just the original snapshot.  Do you think it was worth it?  I would love to hear your thoughts if this looks good, if it looks over done, or if it looks OK.  Either way, I can take it! ;-)



Peyton Manning (Oakland v Denver, Sept. 30th, 2012)
Here he is! Peyton Manning!  He's one of the big reasons we went to Denver.  He's a great quarterback and ever since he's had problems with his neck in recent years, we never really knew if we'd get a chance to see him play.  So, when the opportunity arose, we jumped on it.  We were even able to score some pretty decent seats... 6th row in one of the end zones!  Nice place to see a game and to take a few shots.  This one here is one of the better ones I was able to get.

According to things I've read about getting football shots, if you get a face and the ball in the shot, then it should be good.  Well most of the shots I got didn't have either.  I realized it's not easy to shoot football games, especially from the seats.  However, this is one of the few shots that had both a face and the ball in it.  It's not the greatest shot in the world because I would've preferred to see Peyton's number 18 as well, but overall it's not too bad.  Here, Peyton's throwing the ball to the running back, Lance Ball, number 35, for a touchdown.

The game was an awesome one!  Denver won 37 - 6!

Shooting Security on the Aransas Pass Ferry

Last weekend we went to visit friends down in Aransas Pass, TX.  They have a boat down there that they invited us to stay on.  Unfortunately the weather didn't cooperate enough for us to be able to go out on it.  t was just too windy.  However, that's not to say we didn't get to ride on a boat at all.  We took the ferry from Aransas Pass to Port Aransas.  It was a short ride, but it was windy as well.  The funny thing was, as we started out across the channel, we decided to get out of the car and go to the front of the ferry to watch the dolphins.  There was a small pod of them swimming about.  Pretty cool!  However, the further out into the water we got, the bigger the waves became.  They started lapping over the front of the ferry.  I and my camera got a little wet on the first one, so I turned around to head back to the car.  As soon as I did a bigger wave crashed over the front and soaked my back.  Luckily the camera didn't get very wet as my back blocked most of the water.  But, my wife Eileen and her friend Sandy decided to stay and they got completely soaked!  It was hilarious!  Sandy says we got "baptized".  I should've tried to get a shot of them at that point, but alas, I wanted to make sure the camera was OK and get out of anymore possible soakings.  So, while in the car, the security guy came around to check everything and I thought that would be an opportunity to shoot SOMETHING.  I got more of the camera in focus than the security guy, but I still think the shot is kind of interesting.  Do you?

Siamese Twins

Hey, I didn't name it! ;-)  It may be politically incorrect, but who cares, right?  Anyway, this is one of the many different rock formations at the Garden of the Gods.  This one is kind of off the beaten path, but I think it is one of the more interesting formations to see there.  Also, just behind it lies Pike's Peak way off in the distance.  I should've tried to find an angle with both of them in the shot, but I'm happy with this one.

University of Michigan Band At Jerry's World

This it a shot I took a few minutes before Michigan-Alabama game at Cowboys Stadium as the University of Michigan Marching Band was on the field.  I took this with my new fisheye lens as you can see.  It's pretty fun to play with!  It's nice to get a whole panorama interior shot of a sports stadium without having to take 7-8 separate shots and try to blend them together.  I did notice that there is a little bit of purple fringing around some of the lights so I guess I'll need to be conscious of that in the future. 

Door Ringing at the University of Texas

Below is a picture of Alex Suarez's son that I took during one of Alex's photowalks at the University of Texas.

Cloud Shadows on Mountain Chute

This is an HDR that I converted to a monochrome.  I tried to "Ansel Adams" it up a little even though I think he did mostly black and whites.  Something about shooting mountains and clouds that just calls for either.

Hyper-drive

Wouldn't it be cool to be able to click a button in your car and move into "hyper-drive" or "warp-drive" to get to work if you were running late? I'm not usually late for work, but there are times when I would like to leave a few minutes later than usual, but yet get to work on time.  That was sort of the inspiration for this shot. 

Downtown Austin and Paddle Boat

I spent a few minutes on the 1st St bridge getting a shot or two of the Austin skyline and the lake.  Here it is...  Luckily, I think this one turned out nicely after a night of letting it cook.

Misc. Bleatish thoughts since I haven't posted in a while...

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--Last weekend I took Jemma to a swim meet with Surenna and afterwards we all wanted to go to McDonalds for lunch. Things seemed to start auspiciously but went downhill from there. We walked in and there were no customers at the counter, so we began to order. Just then, an old lady came rushing up to the counter, like she needed catsup or forgot her change. She then proceeded to make an order! The old bat had just cut in front of us!

Later the kids were wondering why old people are so rude. I told them that the lady was a jerk, but probably was always so. I speculated that when she was young, she excused herself any blame for cutting because she was a kid and nobody expects fine manners from them. Later as a working adult or parent, she rationalized that she was too busy to wait. Now she figures that as an old person, people should make allowances for her.

Once we got up to order, the cashier indicated that they had no burgers! Jemma complained about us leaving, since she was having nuggets anyway. But really, should Surenna and I have just stared at Jemma while she ate? We went to another nearby McDonalds and we all had what we wanted. It was easy to get around since we happened to be within a couple of miles of where I work and so I know all the roads around there.

--I watched the gentlemen's Wimbledon today and the ladies’ yesterday. There was a lot of great tennis, though the men's match was more interesting. In the women's, the play was dominated by Serena Williams' serve. Winning with a powerful serve is perfectly legitimate but not at all interesting to watch. The set which Radwanska won was by far the best one. On the men's side, Andy Murray was not favored to win since Roger Federer is just simply the better player right now. Nonetheless, he took the first set and really gave Federer a tough match.

As an aside, the girls had definite and diverse opinions about the men. Jemma thought Federer was the most handsome and the other two really liked Andy Murray. They are both good-looking men; I think Murray has a kind of roughish charm, while Federer looks more debonair. Jemma didn't like Andy Murray's prominent Adams apple and loved Roger's flowing hair.

Barefoot Half Marathon

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This is no kind of record for me, I've done this distance barefoot several times this year, although all have been since early fall.

I had originally wanted to run with shoes because I have a goal of doing at least one long run (15 miles or more) before the end of the year and my feet can't take much beyond 13. The problem lately is that if I run with shoes I am too tired to go further than that, so 13 seems to be the limit for now.

It was a nice day, sunny and low 40's and there are only so many days left before we are hit with the kind of cold and snow that will keep even my shoes on. So I will make barefoot runs while I can.

It was just cold enough, or really just warm enough depending on how you look at it, so that in sunny parts it was perfectly comfortable. In shady areas I felt a chill and my feet were cold. One might think that my feet would be numb all the time when running in 40 degree weather. Not so! Even at about 30 degrees, the feet are numb for a little while but then thaw out in a mile or two. A lot depends on if the ground is wet. In any case, numb feet are fine comfort-wise but I worry about damaging myself and not noticing until too late. A small sharp stone or peice of glass can stick to the bottom of your foot and slowly drill its way in with every footfall.

I started the run at about noon and yet the sun was low in the sky. The trees along the bikepath were casting shadows at right angles to the path and even though the pavement is asphault, the lit areas were almost white in the sun so there was a large contrast between the shadows and lit areas. As I ran down the path, I imagined that I was traveling along an endless barcode. The tree trunks cast shadows of various thicknesses and the spacing was random yet homogeneous in that there were few areas of total blackness or of light. I amused myself thinking about what messages could be encoded by the alternating bands of light and dark. We assume that the bands on packages mean something, even if we don't know what it is. We similarly asssume that the natural barcode means nothing, though at the very least it tells us a lot about the population density and age distribution of the trees in the wood.

Things took a poor turn soon into the run. I had been looking forward to getting out of the woods and onto roads since there would be more sunshine out in the open. Indeed there was, but also broken glass. My vision has gotten worse over the years, in the sense that I can't focus up-close anymore, but I can see small pebbles and glass peices well enough to avoid stepping on them. A sharp pain at around mile 3 told me that my senses failed. I stopped for a bit and found a shard of amber glass, not much bigger than a largish grain of sand embedded in the ball of one foot. I easily dug it out with a fingernail and was dismayed to see a bright drop of blood welling out of the wound. Great! Only ten miles to go! By about the half-way mark, sharp pains in both feet indicated further wounds, though there was no more glass to pick-out.

Not every step rewarded me with sharp pain, it was more like a couple of steps per minute of running. Maybe it was from when a small grain of grit got into the wound. In all, not a bad run. I made just under 8:00 per mile.

Fisking Marcotte is Like Shooting Fish in a Barrel

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But here goes anyway:

National Review Writer Doubts the Power of the Bushmaster AR-15
By Amanda Marcotte

If you, like many red-blooded Americans, plan on joining the gun shopping spree that mass shootings usually inspire,

It is not the mass shooting that inspires gun shopping, it is the fear that the predictible hysteria will lead to a ban. So, it is prudent to buy while you still can.

The fact that he successfully killed 27 women and children with only one target escaping with an injury certainly suggests that the gun does what it was designed to do: kill a whole bunch of people in a short period of time.

There is a lot of history behind the development of the .223 Remington. To sum it up, the earlier cartridge types were more powerful than they needed to be. The 30.06 could be fatal at ranges of up to 800 yards while most soldiers lack the skill to make a hit beyond 200 yards. Further, it is better in a battlefield situation to wound (badly) than to kill outright. The logic is that a wounded soldier needs assistance while a dead one can wait for attention, so you remove more of the enemy by wounding them than by killing. Further advantages are that smaller lighter ammunition allows for more rounds to be carried and the lighter recoil helps with accuracy. Many states do not allow big game hunting with .223 Win because it is not deemed powerful enough. We err on the side of overkill for hunting because it is inhumane to inflict a wound which will kill, but only slowly.

But before you rush to give Bushmaster your hard-earned dollars, let me present a second opinion on the gun's manhood-bolstering capabilities from Robert VerBruggen, courtesy of the (sic) National Review Online, who argues that Lanza's weapon is too weak to bother banning:

VerBruggen's logic is not exactly difficult to follow: Gun control people claim that they are not after hunting weapons, but want to ban "powerful" "assault weapons". Hunting rifles are much more powerful than so-called assault weapons. So if you want to make a limit on how powerful civilian weapons can be, you will end up banning all large game rifles.

Playing Against Type

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1. From the picture above and from years of watching the show, it seemed like Jack Klugman was older--not by a lot, but older. In fact, Tony Randall was two years older.

2. Yes, I realize that the characters played are not like the actors. But still, can you imagine the show working if the roles were reversed? In fact, Klugman was a lifetime smoker while Randall did not smoke. Yet the slovenly guy who ate what he wanted and smoked, lived 6 years longer.

3. Divorce: On the show, both were famously divorced--which is how they came to be living together. Yet both actors were never divorced and their initial marriages lasted over 50 years. (Klugman did legally seperate from his wife of 21 years, but they never divorced).

The Noble Pig

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Noble Pig
Menu
After classes ended, I decided to finally treat myself to the much talked about sandwiches at the Noble Pig.  Noble Pig makes everything in-house, from the bread to the pickles and to the house-smoked meats.  They really take ownership of the quality of the sandwiches!

When I researched their menu, I knew that I had to try the duck pastrami to satisfy my duck addiction.

Duck Pastrami Sandwich with potato salad, chips, and housemade pickled veggies
Smoked Duck Pastrami Sandwich with Russian dressing and rye pickles
The duck pastrami tasted very earthy and the rye pickles gave the sandwich a nice crunch and tang.
The Noble Pig with spicy ham, pulled pork, bacon and provolone cheese
The Noble Pig sandwich was packed with porcine goodness and ended up surpassing the tastiness of the duck pastrami in my humble opinion.  But that's a bit unfair; this sandwich has 3 kinds of pork in it!  
I'm really curious about the delicious looking breakfast menu.  I might just have to fight some traffic in the morning to try it out!

Ryu of Japan on Mom's Birthday

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Mom and I celebrated her birthday at Ryu of Japan after reading an awesome review by Boots in the Oven.  My parents' favorite cuisine is Japanese.  Dad can't get enough of sashimi and sukiyaki while mom can't do without hamachi kama.
We decided to skip ordering dinner entrees altogether in favor of several courses of appetizers.
We began with a small dish of monkfish liver, which unsurprisingly has a texture similar to foie gras but on the drier side.  It was quite delicious but I kept wishing I could pair each bite with a carb like rice or baguette!
Ankimo (monkfish liver)
The Ryu Special was basically a trio of sashimi (tuna, salmon, and yellowtail) rolled up in cucumber.  This was light and summery, delicious but hard to keep intact.

Ryu's Special - salmon, yellowtail, and tuna sashimi wrapped in cucumber with shiso and roe
Agedashi tofu is as standard as udon at Japanese restaurants but Ryu's is heavenly.  The broth that the fried pieces of tofu was soaking in really made this dish sing.

Agedashi Tofu
I was a bit underwhelmed by the ginger eggplant.  It was good, but a little bland even with the lovely curling bonito shavings.

Nasu No Shogayaki - ginger eggplant with bonito shavings
Mom and I always reminisce about the whole grilled squid served at the cafeteria in the Japanese department store, Shirokiya, in Honolulu.  I grew up scarfing down Shirokiya's smokey ikayaki.  We were super excited to see ikayaki on Ryu's menu, but this version just can't compare to Shirokiya's.  It's a bit tough and although it's grilled, Ryu's ika doesn't have that intense smokiness present in Shirokiya's version.

Ikayaki - grilled squid
No Japanese meal is complete without hamachi kama for my mom.  This was simply prepared with a sprinkle of salt and grilled.  This dish never falters.

Hamachi Kama - yellowtail collar
The next few dishes were fillers for the meal.  The trio of sashimi were fresh, the spider roll was a bit heavy on the eel sauce but otherwise quite satisfying, and the hotate hokkai was my one regret.  Instead of whole scallops, we got scallop bits that were indiscernible among the bigger chunks of chopped krab and smothered in spicy mayo.  It was a wreck.

Salmon, Tuna, and Yellowtail Sashimi
Spider Roll
Hotate Hokkai - broiled scallops with roe and mayo
But rather than leave you with a bad impression, the overall meal was delicious and affordable.  I've complained about how I can't seem to find a traditional Japanese restaurant that doesn't break the bank in Austin, and Ryu has given me a reason to stop whining.
Happy Birthday, Mom!

Sustainable Food Center Farmers' Market Republic Square Park and Bola Pizza

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I've been in Austin for around seven years, and I finally made my way to the Sustainable Food Center Farmers' Market in downtown two weeks ago.  I can't believe I've been denying myself this weekend pleasure for so long!  
Just look at the gorgeous veggies!











The reason why the idea of finally visiting SFC Farmers' Market in downtown dawned on me was because I wanted to get a taste of Bola Pizza, which I read about on Austin Chronicle's 2011 Restaurant Poll.

Bola Pizza
Bola Pizza offers freshly made pizza hot from their mobile wood-fired oven 9 AM - 1 PM Saturdays at SFC Farmers' Market downtown and Wednesdays at the Triangle 4 PM - 8 PM.
I chose The Godfather from the vegetarian-friendly menu because I can't seem to ween myself away from meat ingredients on my pizza.  I behaved like an annoying fly, fluttering about my pizza, capturing each step of the pizza-making process.  
Making our Godfather Pizza
The Sauce
The Mozzarella
The Hot Fennel Sausage
The Caramelized Onions
In the Mobile Wood-fired Oven
In the box with the smell wafting out and drinking it all in with a peach ginger lemonade from another vendor
The Godfather
The result?  Beautiful!  The pizza dough is the best I've tasted in Austin!  It's slightly chewy, with a tint of sourdough-like tartness.  Each bite of caramelized onions and hot fennel sausage was a balanced explosion of sweet and spicy juices.  I'm glad I got to try Bola before leaving Austin!

Ray's Hell Burger

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Pin It

I arrived in DC during the peak of summer, which happened to be the time of year when I seek out good burgers.  I remember reading about Obama taking to Medvedev to Ray's Hell Burger earlier in 2010.  I didn't get excited about the place until I read their menu, which is packed with luxurious toppings like roasted bone marrow with persillade!!!!  How can you not get excited by that?
Decisions, Decisions!
Ray's Hell Burger Team
Strawberry Shake
Au Poivre Patty with Gouda and Cognac and Sherry Sauteed Mushrooms
Unfortunately, by the time I arrived at Ray's for an early bird dinner, they had already run out of bone marrow for the day.  Utterly downtrodden by that, I comforted myself with an awesome complimentary topping - cognac and sherry sauteed mushrooms - and paid extra for gouda. 
The burger was hearty, flavorful, and juicy, but it's truly humongous.  I couldn't finish all of it, and burgers just don't taste right reheated.  I recommend sharing with a buddy at Ray's to avoid wasting the delicious and pricey burger.