A Nice Place to be Buried

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Nixon Library: We Did It Again

Went to the Nixon Library in Yorba Linda, CA.
Blatantly American, the museum featured no surprises politically. No Watergate here.
What my buddy said, "We've done it again," hit hard. He was referring to the picture above, which shows Nixon explaining an expansion of the Vietnam conflict.

Expansion, surge, two loaded words, that fit perfectly into the American lexicon of one-word pot shots at anything that kills or maims.

This picture backlit slide in one of the displays) has got to be the best in the museum.

Smart Cars Comin' to America

There are as many of these cars in Europe as there are SUVs in the U.S.

What are your thoughts about this car coming here?

If you want one they come out next year and you can reserve one if you pay $99 at www.smartusa.com

Such a deal.

Humans Beware!

Packs of monkeys just outside of Angkor Wat in Cambodia are a hoot to look at. But gawkers beware! You can attract, first one, then two, then dozens if you start handing out bananas.

When I got out of the car to look at all of the human-like creatures, it was a most novel experience. However, they were not friendly.

We ended up having to run away from the car when one got in and took some bananas that I had left there. At the same time a few others took residence up on the roof of the car, then the hood and then on the top of the trunk.

By the time the bananas were eaten and we had walked far away from the car, the monkeys finally left. Whew!

Digital Traveler's Pink Plane Find

A pink plane. Turn your little girl into a pilot. What fun!

Tiki Fun in Photoshop

before


after

Check out the before and after. Usually when you tweak
an image like this where the foreground is dark and the sky light,
you'll have to adjust the foreground so that there's more light.
The drawback is you'll lose the sky because the background
will white out.

To remedy this:

1. Click on a selection tool.
2. Enter a value for feathering in the top menu bar, say, 2.
3. Select the light part of the image. In this case it's the sky.
4. Click on Select>Inverse to switch to get the Tiki selected.
5. Adjust the Levels for the Tiki using Image>Adjustments>Levels.

That's it!

Gotta love this happy guy! He's in Honolulu.

Myanmar Girl

Better known as Burmese, this girl reveals the beauty of women and girls in Myanmar.

Unfortunately, I stumbled upon some exploitation issues that are very real for many girls in Myanmar.

I've written about Myanmar in other posts--

Asian Travel Heaven--Info about the Inle Lake Resort
Mandalay Puppets--The show not to be missed in Mandalay
Brown Tones in Myanmar--Great pic of thatched roof, A frame home on Inle Lake
Burma through Yellow Glass--Burmese landscape photo.

Working Together

Silk factory in Inlay Lake, Myanmar.

Inlay Lake is one of the destinations featured by the Myanmar government. Basically the government lets toursits only got to a few places--Rangoon, Began (where ruins of old temples are located) and Inlay Lake. The new upstart airline, makes a run daily to all three places.

Help Save Golf Cart Woman's Home

A Palm Springs homeless woman is struggling to keep her golf cart home. Homeless for 20 years, according to the Desert Sun, Ruby Caskey has made a golf cart her home for the past several.

The city has transitional housing available, according to the newspaper article about homeless issues published on May 16, but Caskey wants no part of it.

I talked to her for a while today and she seems happy living where she is. She had asked me to get people to write letters on her behalf, letters that let the city know that she should have the right to live in her golf cart.

She also let me know that a local church has her pay $100 a month for use of the shower facilities at the church site.

I told her I'd write a letter about her right to keep her home and tell others to do so also. I want this woman to be able to do as she wishes as her golf cart and its contents (everything from televisions to printers and found junk arranged as if the cart were an art piece in a museum) are a Palm Springs landmark.

If you think this woman should be left alone to live her life in a golf cart, email city manager, David Ready at david.ready@palmsprings-cs.gov

Other Photos:


Found art (old television) hung in home.


Front of golf cart.

Is This Art?

Is this art?

Red Dragonfly Haiku

Shot this dragonfly in a Tokyo park. Japanese folklore comes to mind as well as Haiku.

Bout time I wrote a poem. The last poem I wrote was Unautumn, a poem that tells of how the desert has no autumn.

The book "There's a Red Dragonfly on my Shoulder" is an English translation of 13 Haiku poems. Great for the classroom.

Haiku is a 17-syllable verse form consisting of three metrical units of 5, 7, and 5 syllables. Here's my example, about...well...a red dragonfly.

Red Dragonfly stops

wings spread aerodynamic

miracle of life.

Go ahead and write your own in the comment section

Psychedelic Palm Springs

Shot this a few years back at a mid-century modern store here. It's a light box.

Reminds me of an acid trip. Timothy Leary dropped the tiny tabsand lived to the ripe old age of 75 or 76. I think I'll live to that age without the trips, though.

Not to say that I hadn't tried the stuff before.

During an acid trip, the person who you trip with will float his hands in front of your face to see if you see "trails." My guess is that the picture above might be the "trails" you see in one of those acid trips.

So funny that rarely do people these days talk about drugs (except if you're in an NA meeting).

Well, those days certainly are a piece of history and gone forever.

People in Palm Springs most certainly took part in the drug culture. If you go to the Indian Canyons here, in the Welcome Center at the foot of the trail that runs thought the canyons, they have pictures of people from the 60s who went to the canyons to go to love-ins. A love-in was where people made love in public, not to mention smoke a little reef and drop a little acid.

Just a bit of history here as to find info like this on the Internet is difficult because no one wants to talk about nor remember it.

It was a truly unique time, and a time when many participated in these "naughty" activities.

Palm Springs was and still is a kind of "naughty" place.

Neon Tea

Tea Time? When one thinks of tea, one thinks old fashioned. Or British. Or Chinese and Japanese. I think this has to be the only neon sign in the world that advertises tea. Do you think so too?

I think the text is in Cambodian. Any linguists want to comment?

Wading in the Water

Summer's almost here. Wading in the water is certainly refreshing.

This is the Atlantic Ocean at Ft. Lauderdale Beach

Sunflower

Plant the seeds now, and you'll get this in Aug.

Boston Cream Pie

Gosh, photographing food is fun. This is my favorite dessert at Billy Reed's restaurant in Palm Springs.

How many calories do you think this creamy, delicious morsel has?

My Best Selling Photograph

Holiday Motel, Las Vegas

Cheers to the Old Bird(s)

On the Radio

in pink


o n t h e r a d i o w h o a o h o h

Surreal Color

Incredible color!

New Angle on the Photo Set

The first photo I've ever sold was of a European subway station. It was sold to our mayor (Palm Springs, CA) at a show inside a coffee shop. I have hundreds of subway photographs that I've shot from all over the world.
Right now I'm making a collage with them some of them, sorting them into groups by the levels you'd would actually travel underground to get to one subway line or another in order to create replication of a multi-level underground subway station.

For example, the first row of pictures are photos of the cafes, stores at ground level, the second are photographs of escalators and staircases, the third is the platform where people catch the cars. Then I repeat going down three more levels. This is an experimental work, so I've still got to refine it. I'm also coating it with shellac - I paste the first coat over a couple of pictures, then use spray glue and paste a couple more and apply another coat and repeat so there are multiple levels of coatings, which I am hoping will give it a 3-D look.

Tip: Experiment with your creative edge to produce new works of art from your photography. Save the work for future generations to see.

Palm Springs Photo Festival Has Successful Launch

On the grounds of the Korakia Hotel in Palm Springs, CA dozens of high-end art aficionados gathered to see the best of the best in photography.

Jeff Dunas, the festival's organizer and, at the opening anyway, performance artist, told stories about each one of his photographs. His animation clearly struck the souls of the viewers of his photos, each piece filled with mini-narratives about life as it happened at specific moments in time.

Jock Sturges was there, also, with a batch full of photographic nudes, shocking to some, mere art to others.

Juergen Nogai, a colleague of famed architectural photographer Julius Shulman, displayed both his photos and a couple of his books, one of which I bought. A picture of the cover is above.

Makin' the Local Paper

Here I am in this week's paper.

C L O W N

c l o w n

Now in each space, I'm going to put in a picture, but only a picture that contains mostly primary colors.

A Scrapbooking Moment

Ever wanted to start a digital scrapbook and didn't know where to start? Well, I'd start with my book, Digital Art Photography for Dummies (see ad on top).

Next I'd start with making a background for your scrapbook page. What better color to start with than a primary one. Maybe even more than one primary.

To make these colors in photoshop, double click on the background square in the tools palette. A color picker will come up. Don't pick a color, but, instead play around with these numbers to get a primary.

Start with (255, 255, 255) represents white, then move on to making these other colors--

• (0, 0, 0) represents black
• (255, 0, 0) represents red
• (0, 0, 255) represents blue
• (0, 255, 0) represents green
• (255, 255, 0) represents yellow
• (255, 0, 255) represents magenta
• (0, 255, 255) represents cyan

Now for the simpliest background

1. Open a new file in Photoshop
2. Set width and heigth to 8X10
3. Double click on the front (foreground) square of the tools palette
4. Type 0,0,0 in the second column of boxes (that will give you black).
5. Type in 255,0,0 which will give you red.
6. Use the paintbucket tool to mark parts of your design red.
7. Repeat 5 and 6 for other colors for other parts.

Climate Change Variables

I'm copying this from palmspringsdailyphoto.blogspot.com, my other blog, because of its high interest level.


Palm Springs, 2004

There used to be water that flowed down the San Jacinto Mountains this time of year. Could it be global warming causing the West's drought?

I'm not sure. As a guy who's had a couple of climatology courses under his belt (I've got a B.S. degree in meteorology from FSU), I know there have been longer and worse droughts than this before.

On the other hand, one might conclude that, with all the melting water at the poles, the ocean is cooling. Of course the dynamics are much more complex that that. In meteorology, they use equations, with each variable weighted according to how much scientists think it affects the climate.

What would you guess in percentage terms the weight (in percent) of the temperture of the water of the melted ice at the poles would affect the climate? Come on now, buddying daily photo scientists, take a swipe at this one!

Other variables: The West is very rainy when El Nino is present because of warmer ocean tempertures. Consider, too, that upwelling is a natural occourance on the West coast. Upwelling is caused by the earth's rotation. When the earth turns, the top layers of the ocean get dragged out to sea, letting the colder deeper water flow upward to the surface.

Elvis Returns

Come Hither

The hand that invites you to click above, to get your copy of Digital Art Photography for Dummies.

Cathedral City, CA

Today I take you to the city next door. Cathedral City is right next to Palm Springs. My house is closer to downtown Cathedral City than it is to downtown Palm Springs, even though I live in Palm Springs. This photo is a longer exposure at night of the fountain in downtown Cat City (we call it Cat City here). During the day in the summer, zillions of kids play in the fountain.