dan flies

Some communities have created thier own currency to help local buisness deal with the pressures of globalization.

St. Paul Pioneer Press | 02/12/2007 | Do you have change for a 10-Berliner bill?

Every few months the Como Park Zoo & Conservatory open up early for photographers and artists. This Sunday was one of those days. Usually the open coincides with a new exhibit, this is the opening of the winter flower show.

This was my first visit to the conservatory with my camera and I made a few rookie mistakes, but overall I was pretty happy with the results.

USDA Outlines a Plan To Cut Farm Subsidies

The entire Harvesting Cash series.

Reading this article I know that the ACLU need more lawyers more resources to defend the constitution and the citizens of the U.S. from the government. It is amazing what the Bush administration is trying to do.

Secrecy Is at Issue in Suits Opposing Spy Program

Best quote about the State of the Union: “There’s a sucker born every minute, but only a select few get to be president of the United States.” Story: Bush and Baby Einstein

Webb’s response for the Democratic Party is receiving a load of praise. It looks like the Dem’s have played the SOTU to perfection, they behaved nicely during the speech and only to kick in the door with the response.

Va.’s Webb Offers a Blunt Challenge to Bush – washingtonpost.com

This will be an interesting year!

I’ve decided to back to my web log’s roots. I going to start adding more of the news I first started blogging in 2004. Maybe its the return of the presidential politics, as you’ll see later, but there have been some request for me to add some of the old substance to the pure photo-blogging of the last several months.

Shushing the Baby Boomers

I think this article gets to a point I’ve made to a few of my friends in the X/Y-generation. Boomers are re-hashing the same debates and rifts that they felt during Vietnam, and we are suffering for it. Just as a crisis is looming for Social Security in the next 10 years and businesses will be turned on its head, politics will see a revolution when boomers are reaching retirement. Hopefully our generation can lead us in a new direction away from the partisian divides the has defined the lifetime of baby boomers.

Photos

Here are some photos from our 3rd annual sing-along and holiday party. Click on a any picture to to the all of the photos from the event on Flickr.

The Zone System

Zone system – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia: “This classic rule was stated in this way: “Expose for the shadows and develop for the highlights”.”

The classic rule has been restated for digital film: expose for highlights, post-process for shadow detail.

Any thougts?

I had a great time in Mexico for the Smith-Perkins Wedding. We had a great bunch of people. I knew most of Lisa’s side but I didn’t know any of Byron’s friends & family. We had a good time.
Four days wasn’t quite enough to fully relax, but it came close. The biggest decisions in a day were beach or pool first and margarita or cervesa.

I toot a lot of photos. I filled my 2 GB card twice (one doing RAW+JPEG and one all JPEG) and I filled the 1 GB card with JPEGs the same day as the all JPEG 2GB.

I shot with my 70-200mm lens for the ceremony and reception (3GB day) and Luke shot with the 17-40. So I’d like to see how the other photos turned out. I think some of mine look pretty good.

The first day I had a crappy success rate (maybe 5-6%) of the shots were presentable. 439 was the total for day one, with 28 into the “keepers”
folder, but there were a lot of duds. I shot 379 for day two with 30 keepers, but most of those were with the guys playing football and the rest of us hanging out at the beach. I was much happier with my photos because the were all much sharper than day one. A higher keeper rate, but a much better presentable rate.

Day three, aka wedding day, was going to be a lot of photos considering it was an ad hoc photo session with one wife of Byron’s friend acting as the “photographer.” When it was all done the 2GB card was filled with
818 photos (picture session and ceremony). I only had about a dozen photos with the incorrect White Balance setting, but it was fixed before any of the photos of the wedding party. I’ve been though about 700 with 100 keepers, but a lot good shot and a lot of continuous shots, so it was harder to choose.

For the reception I took another 300 shots, filling the 1 GB card but I deleted a bunch because I needed to make room to for the other shots I need to take during the “dance” portion.

Actually most of my picture taking was done with a Polaroid camera that Gigi (Lisa’s mom) brought for the guest book. I’ll have to get scans of those photo and share them as well.