Dave Rodriguez, Web Designer

Favorite Photos of 2009, Part 1

2009-12-05T18:55:23Z

Since the year’s coming to an end, I thought I’d reflect again on what I’ve learned about photography in the year 2009, and share a few of my favorite shots with the stories behind them. This first set is photos I took from January to June.

In January, my Fuji point and shoot finally died, so I took a break and started saving my pennies for a DSLR. I wanted an Olympus E-520, because of the in-camera image stabilization. My biggest complain with the Fuji was that I had no control over shutter speed, which ruined a lot of photos over the years. Built-in IS would go one step further towards eliminating blurry photos without buying expensive IS lenses.

I ended up buying a Canon Rebel XSi. I have friends who already shoot Canon, so I figured the ability to borrow equipment would make up for the slightly higher cost. I think it was a good decision. The XSi is a solid camera except for the mode dial, which is way too easy to bump. Several times this year I lost a shot because I had somehow nudged the camera from Aperture Priority mode into Manual or the strange and useless A-DEP mode.

I got to travel quite a bit in early 2009. I went to Minneapolis and New York for work, saw my parents in Florida, and took a road trip to Toronto. Back at home, the town where I live flooded and my photos got hundreds of hits in 24 hours. I also became a Toledo Zoo member this year, so I took the chance to visit many other zoos on the cheap and practice with my telephoto.

Rhinoceros Hornbill, Toledo Zoo
The Toledo Zoo aviary is one of my favorite places to shoot. The aviary is an old, Depression-era brick building with huge windows and skylights. No matter how bad the weather is outside, there’s always beautiful light coming into some corner of the aviary. Most of my favorite bird shots are taken from the free-flight zones where birds fly all around the room and you can get right up on them with a telephoto. The hornbills have their own small cage along the wall, but because of the fence I had rarely tried to shoot them. I started with an underexposed and pretty mediocre shot, but when I started adjusting the contrast I found some really great detail on the bird’s face and head, with the ghost of the fence panels helping to break up the stark white background.
Webelos Medals
In June, my brother and I went out to my parents storage shed to look for old family pictures. While there I found a box of my old knickknacks, including these Cub Scout medals. Each one is some kind of merit badge. One evening after work I came home and there was great, long light coming in through the front windows, so I set a bunch of objects on the glass table in our living room and took pictures of them. I love how the light picks out every braid of the ribbons and every edge of the metal pins.
Westwood Theater, Sylvania Ave.
While my camera was broken, my friend John let me use his Canon 30D. We went out walking in North Toledo on a bitterly cold day in January and got some beautifully gritty shots. This was taken with John’s Canon 16-35 L lens, a very strange lens that I didn’t appreciate at first. My own style tends to close-up details and faraway things (i.e. zoo animals), whereas John shoots a lot of interiors. I’ve used it a couple of times since then, and I’d like to experiment more with extreme wide angle photography in 2010. On a side note, this is one of my most searched-for photos on Google. I imagine that has less to do with the Westwood’s aesthetic qualities, and more with its current incarnation as a 24-hour porno theater.
Cat’s Eyes
What can I say, it’s a cute picture of my cat. This is one of the first pictures I took with the Rebel XSi. I shot this very close with my 18-55mm kit lens, so the cat’s face and eyes look even bigger than they really are. Sometimes that’s an annoying affect (e.g. when it makes a person’s nose look enormous), but here it works.
Portrait of a Bear
Best photographic purchase this year: a Tamron 70-300mm telephoto lens. It’s a cheap lens, and not the greatest all-around performer, but under certain conditions you can wring some good images out of it. I use this lens all the time, and would probably go so far as to say that I over-use it. The Toledo Zoo has a great polar bear exhibit, and on days when it’s not totally mobbed by kids you can get right up to the glass and get some great close-ups.
Geese, Toledo Botanical Garden
Another local favorite this year was the Toledo Botanical Garden. As well as being great for flowers, there’s a big pond that attracts lots of ducks and geese, and in late summer every flower and bush is covered with bees, making for some great macro opportunities. I stopped by the garden one spring day after work and got some beautiful shots with the telephoto.
Wine Cork and Pins
This image was taken the same day as the Webelos Medals photo above. When I was in college, a roommate used to save wine corks and use them for all sorts of things around the house. I used this one as a pin cushion. The ridged surface under the cork is a cheap metal business card holder.
Chinese Alligator
This small alligator lives in the reptile house at the Toledo Zoo. I debated back and forth between posting this photo, and posting a later one that’s focused more tightly on his eyes. In the end I went with this one because I like the additional detail of his jaws and teeth, and because this earlier photo illustrates something I learned this year. Going through my zoo photos, I noticed that a lot of the animal close-ups looked flat. By trial and error I learned that just like a human portrait, an animal portrait looks best when the eyes are bright and expressive. I started experimenting with dodging and burning in lightroom to bring out more detail on the eyes. The alternate photo I mentioned before has a much brighter catchlight in the alligator’s eye.
Knowles Chapel, Rollins College
My dad works at Rollins College, a small liberal arts college north of Orlando. The campus is beautiful and well-landscaped, with buildings in the Spanish mission style, and Knowles Chapel is my favorite spot there. This is taken at the top of the stairs leading from the main church to the choir loft. There’s something mysterious and lovely about this room, with light coming in through the stained glass window and illuminating the single chair.
House Finch
In April this year I bought two bird feeders and put them in the gravel pit off my back patio. I bought the kind of birdseed meant to attract colorful songbirds, and for a few weeks in May we had some beautiful red and yellow finches around. After they left, we saw lots of sparrows and a few pigeons, but not much else for the rest of the summer. I’m hoping they come back next spring so I can get some more shots like this. Best viewed large.
Mantel Sculpture, Sir Henry Pellatt’s Bedroom, Casa Loma
In April, Michelle and I went to Toronto for a long weekend. We wandered around downtown, went to the Royal Ontario Museum, the CN Tower, the zoo (of course), and capped it off with a visit to Casa Loma, a hilltop mansion built by an eccentric industrialist named Sir Henry Pellatt. Although Pellatt lost most of his fortune in the Great Depression and only lived in the house for a few years, while there he decorated lavishly, including this carved marble mantelpiece.
Dundee Flood, March 2009
In March of this year, we had a lot of rain for several days in a row. The River Raisin, which runs through downtown Dundee, rose and rose, and finally flooded on the 12th. I saw roadblock signs up when I came home from work, so I drove down to take a look. The whole town had turned out to see the flooded park, with cameras and camcorders in tow. I got some good pictures, and over the next few days my Dundee Flood set got over 1200 views. My only regret is that I didn’t find a way to get over to the other side of town, where the flooding was worse, to get some even more dramatic pictures.

The first six months of 2009 were great and resulted in some good photos, but the last five months have been equally exciting as I continue to travel and get better with the camera. After Christmas I’ll post another collage of my favorite photos from the second half of the year.

I Got Scammed

2009-11-08T02:14:07Z

I should have known better. I should have seen the signs. Luckily, I’m only out $15.00.

The scammer in question is director Olatunde Osunsanmi, and the scam is his laughably bad new film, The Fourth Kind, which I’m happy to report was 98 minutes of pure incoherence. The Fourth Kind has been much hyped, and the little bit of the plot revealed in trailers (a psychologist investigates alien abductions in a remote Alaska town) seemed pretty interesting. Boy, was I ever wrong.

Warning: Here Be Spoilers. If you can’t stand the heat, get out of the kitchen.

As I said, I should have seen the warning signs. The Fourth Kind begins with Milla Jovovich (who is, along with Elias Koteas, this movie’s only saving grace) standing in the woods and explaining that what we’re about to see is a dramatization based on real events that happened in Nome, Alaska, in 2000. I hated (hated!) the Blair Witch, I’m not a believer by nature, and I have a hard time suspending disbelief for anything but a really good story.

To achieve the mockumentary affect, two movies were filmed: a “dramatization” starring Jovovich and Elias Koteas, and the ostensible “original footage” featuring a bunch of no-name actors shot with camcorders. At various points in the movie, the two are presented side-by-side in a split screen. Sadly this doesn’t lend the movie any credibility, it just looks cluttered and confusing. The original footage also has an annoying tendency to get blurry and swim in and out of focus whenever anything really interesting happens. Jovovich goes to pains to explain that most of the characters besides hers have been given aliases, because they are real people and they are really concerned about privacy.

Jovovich and her unnamed double play Abbey Tyler, a psychologist working in Nome, Alaska. Her husband was murdered in their bed while she was mysteriously paralyzed and unable to help him. Tyler can’t remember who killed him, only a disembodied arm stabbing him through the chest. She and her husband were working on some sort of government project, analyzing the residents of Nome who have all been reporting the same dream in which they wake up at 3:00 AM to find a creepy white owl staring at them.

Now that her husband is gone, Abbey is alone in a big house with her two kids, a precocious little asshole of a son and a daughter who went blind for some reason when her dad died. The son apparently blames his mom for everything - his father’s death, his sister’s blindness, the down economy, the cancellation of Arrested Development. In one scene he storms away from the dinner table, yelling, “You help everyone else! Why can’t you help yourself?!” These little outbursts have no impact on the plot, so forget I even mentioned them.

Abbey decides that there’s something to the owl dream, so she puts one of the townspeople under hypnosis and interrogates him. He admits that there is no owl, and that he saw something else and it came into his room. He then flips out and does a somersault over the couch, knocking over a table and smashing a lamp. Back at home, he decides that whatever he saw was so scary, the only way to escape it is to kill his entire family and himself. The police surround his house and Abbey is called out to negotiate, but she can’t stop him from doing the deed. Back at the police station, the sheriff accuses Abbey of killing people through hypnosis and threatens to arrest her. This is his standard response to anything Abbey does for the rest of the movie.

The next day, Abbey hypnotizes another patient, who also remembers something in his room. He helpfully says, “They’re not from here”, and that they smell like putrid cinnamon. Then he too freaks out and nearly chokes to death on his own vomit, Elvis-style. Meanwhile, Abbey’s receptionist has been transcribing a taped diary that Abbey records every night at bedtime. After she falls asleep, the tape records her screaming and some garbled talking in a metallic voice.

Abbey analyzes the tape and discovers that the garbled language is Sumerian, an ancient language of the Middle East. She does this with the help of a book on Sumerian that her late husband picked up somewhere and was reading immediately before his death. She calls up the author and he flies to Nome at his own expense to help her. I guess it’s not every day that you get to put a degree in Sumerian Studies to use.

Meanwhile, Abbey’s psychologist buddy Dr. Campos (this is an alias because he is a really real person) has showed up from Anchorage to help her. Abbey, Campos, and the Sumerian expert listen to the tape together, and he manages to pick out words like “traveler”, “heavens” and “destroy”. He then implies that because the Sumerians made a lot of weird-looking art and had their own versions of the book of Genesis and the Noah story, they were capable of space travel and were most likely aliens. Campos (played by the outstanding and totally-wasted-on-this-movie Elias Koteas) says that that doesn’t make any sense. Just as everyone else in the theater is agreeing with him, the three of them get an urgent call about Scott, the vomit-choker from the previous day.

Scott is in bed having a nervous breakdown when the gang arrives. He says he’s having more bad dreams, but he can’t remember, but he doesn’t want to be hypnotized, but he has to be, but he doesn’t want to because he’s afraid. They hypnotize him. In the only genuinely surprising moment in the movie, Scott levitates off his bed and begins talking in Sumerian. Then the shitty “original camera footage” gets all blurry and you can’t see what happens next. This is supposed to be “shocking” and “real”, but I would have preferred some good old special effects to this obvious budget shortcut.

After Scott’s floating episode, he exits stage-left and is never heard from again. Maybe he dies, it’s hardly important. The sheriff shows up and threatens to arrest Abbey again, but instead he puts her under house arrest and stations a police cruiser outside. In the middle of the night, the officer watching her house sees something and gets out to investigate. Just when something cool is about to happen, the “original footage cam” craps out and all you hear is the guy saying, “Oh my god sir! Do you see it! It’s floating above their house!” Seriously?

Inside the house, Abbey is freaking out. She says that a beam of light came through the ceiling and abducted her daughter. “Horsehit,” says the sheriff. (Bravo!) The cops take her son away, but he’s too busy verbally abusing her to be upset. In desperation, Abbey decides to hypnotize herself so she can “get to the source” of the aliens and get her daughter back. She, Campos, and the Sumerian expert set up a camera in her office and put her under. Finally, we get to see aliens!

...Except we don’t. We see the “alien’s eye view” moving into her house, down the hall, and into her bedroom. Then we see Milla Jovovich’s legs, some bedsheets, and it’s over. The “original footage” takes over and gets all staticky. Milla’s boring double does a backflip over the couch and starts talking in Sumerian. The subtitles reveal a long, rambling speech about how the aliens rule the heavens, and are never giving her daughter back, and finally the alien says, “I AM GOD”. Uh, okay.

At the end of the movie, Abbey is in the hospital. Her daughter is never found, her son is taken away and becomes “estranged” from her, Campos goes back to his practice in Anchorage, and the Sumerian expert gets tenure at a prestigious Canadian university. I have no idea why they decided to tell us this last bit, but it makes about as much sense as anything else in this train wreck of a movie. Milla Jovovich and the director come back and remind us that these are the facts, and what we choose to believe us up to us.

Oh, and it turns out her husband wasn’t murdered after all. He shot himself in the head, thus rendering yet another part of the plot insensible.

In conclusion, this movie was a total disappointment. The documentary plot device was transparent and badly executed. The characters were almost totally undeveloped, the scares were minimal.

Despite what I said earlier, I don’t blame the director. The guy is in the movie, and he seems nice enough. I blame the studio and the marketers, who hyped the hell out of a half-baked effort that should have been shitcanned long before it saw the front of a camera. They got my money this time, but next time I’ll be smarter.

Bonsai

2009-10-09T15:45:50Z

Bonsai at the Matthaei Botanical Gardens in Ann Arbor, taken with my new 50mm f/1.8 lens.

When I was in college, I owned a bonsai tree. I like trees, and I like miniature versions of things, so this seemed like a natural choice of hobby. My bonsai wasn’t a miniature spruce like the one here, or a tiny grove of birches like you see in the the best Japanese gardens, but some kind of dwarf shrub with fat glossy leaves. I bought it because it was easy to take care of.

Bonsai is supposed to be an exercise of patience and perseverance, as you train a sapling to look like an ancient, full-sized tree that fits on your windowsill. My tree came “pre-trained”, which means that somebody else had already spent a few years contorting it into an interesting curved shape. I had no plans to continue my bonsai tree’s training. I was supposed to bind and wire the branches to make the tree loop back on itself again and again, but that seemed like too much work. All I ever did was prune the upper leaves when the tree started to look like an unruly Chia-Pet.

I was in college at the time, and suddenly I had a living thing to worry about. When my parents came to get me for school breaks, the tree rode home in the car. After a while I decided it was easier to fly or take the train home, and it became harder to take the plant with me. One winter I left the tree at my parents’ house between New Year’s and Spring Break, which was in February for some reason. I left my brother instructions to water it every couple of days and keep feeding it Miracle-Gro, which I believed to be a substitute for actual plant-care skills.

I came home six weeks later and found the tree’s desiccated corpse sitting on the kitchen table. There was a single green leaf left on an upper branch, a lone holdout who hadn’t heard the declaration of surrender. My parents told me they’d found it in my brother’s room a few days before. He had forgotten all about it.

We tried hard to save the plant. We pruned back dead branches until the tree looked like a bundle of woody straws. We doused it with water and pierced the soil with enough Miracle-Gro to raise the dead, but finally the last green leaf shrivelled and fell, and the bonsai went in the trash.

I gve my brother a lot of crap about this over the years, but in a way it was a relief. Now at least I could go on trips again without having to worry about who was going to water my plant. My first taste of responsibility was a failure, but at least I didn’t have to give it a funeral.

Chauchilla Cemetery

2009-08-09T18:13:28Z

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 26, 2008.

Pati arrived back at the airport to collect us and we drove away to visit an ancient, Pre-inca cemetery. I was the last one in the van and so had to sit in the backward-facing seat. The bumpy road and lack of a stable horizon made my nausea return in full force. I leaned back, shut my eyes, and waited for us to arrive. After what seemed like an eternity bumping and sliding down roads made of compacted sand, we pulled up under a thatched shade overlooking a sandy plain that sloped down to a green valley lined with huarango, or South American carob trees.

At first glance I saw nothing but sand, rocks, and a few shallow depressions. Small wood-and-thatch sun shades dotted the plain, connected by rock-lined paths. My feet sank into the fine sand as we walked. Susi explained that this place was a cemetery for the local Nazca people, and that it had been extensively plundered by grave robbers, ancient and modern. Because of the dry conditions in Nazca (most years get less than 4 inches of rainfall) the graves were little more than shallow, stone-lined pits that were easily accessible to anybody who happened by. In the 1940s there was a severe drought in Nazca. The people applied to the government for help, and the government suggested that the Nazcans dig up the tombs and sell the grave goods to buy food. Many people did just that, taking the precious metals and fine textiles and leaving the mummies sticking out of the sand, exposed to the elements.

Looking across the plain, I saw now that each depression was in fact a disturbed grave. More touchingly, I saw that many of the bits of trash strewn across the sand were grave goods; pieces of pottery, cloth, cotton wrappings, and even small bleached human bones strewn about, destroying their archaeological value and displaying an appalling lack of respect for the people that lived and died here.

We made a slow loop around the cemetery, visiting all the thatched awnings. Underneath each one was a pit where archaeologists had gathered up some of the scattered mummies and their grave goods to show what an undisturbed burial might look like. Susi told us that the Nazca people believed their loved ones weren’t dead as long as they remembered them, so they regularly visited and cleaned the tombs until the Spanish came and put a stop to it.

More pictures of Chauchilla cemetery (warning: includes photos of human remains) »

The Nazca Lines

2009-08-09T17:33:53Z

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 26, 2008.

On the morning of May 26 I faced one of my greatest fears about the Peru trip. We left the hotel early and drove down rutted sidestreets to Nazca’s small airport, where we were to board a small plane for a flight over the Nazca lines. I was excited, but also afraid. I’m prone to motion sickness, and I dreaded the notion of getting sick on a tiny plane, but even worse was the thought of someone else getting sick.

Our first stop was a dingy concrete building across from the airport proper, where a dozen “airlines” competed for tourists. We passed shacks for “Aero Ica”, “Aero Condor”, and several others before stopping at “Aeroparacas”, where tickets were negotiated and purchased. We sat back down outside for a few minutes before our guide for the morning, Susi, announced that we would be flying right away. The butterflies in my stomach were busy waging war with flamethrowers and explosives as we bundled into the van and were driven back across the road and down to the airport entrance.

Nazca Tourist Airport is little more than a dusty field surrounded by a fence, and exists primarily to carry tourists on short trips over the lines, but it carries itself with the grandeur of a tiny JFK, complete with boarding passes, security checkpoints, and certificates stating that we have paid the mandatory airport tax. All these things were handled fairly informally - Susi told us the fancy new terminal with its carved wooden pillars, floor-to-ceiling windows, thatched roof had only been open for two weeks. A sign listed the things that could not be taken on our flight: explosives, batteries, aerosol cans, oxygen tanks, flammable materials, and paint. Who brings paint onboard a five-seater Cessna?

There were only four of us, and our guides, Pati and Susi, had taken the flight dozens of times and had no interest in going again, so our companion was a tiny, pretty Israeli girl named Anat. Our captain spoke limited English and his voice resembled that of Apu from the Simpsons. He handed us each a card detailing the figures we would see, each labelled in Spanish and Korean. The captain pointed out each one, prefixing it with the word “figure”: “figure whale”, “figure condor”, and so on. Because of his accent, “figure” sounded like “big old”. I cracked a smile each time he rattled one off: “beeg ole’ dog, beeg ole’ hammanbird.” This lesson out of the way, we strapped in, put on headphones, and took off.

At first I only felt exhilaration. The landscape was beautiful from above, even where there were no lines. The mountains extended to the horizon, purple-brown and massive like crumbling coffeecake. We wheeled around “beeg ole’ whale” and the captain banked sharply, first in one direction and then the other, so both sides of the plane could take pictures. He continued like this, flying figure-eights over each figure, and soon I began to break out in a cold sweat. I breathed deeply, focusing on the cold air coming from the vents, and fixing my gaze on the distant horizon. With each passing figure and each figure eight I felt worse. I glanced over at Anat and saw that she was looking down at her lap, her pale pretty face flushed and sweaty. Finally the captain announced that we were returning to the airport, and I breathed a sigh of relief.

Ten minutes later I staggered out of the plane and onto the tarmac. I asked Anat how she felt and she made the wavy-hand symbol for “so-so”, followed by the finger-in-the-throat gesture for nausea. “Me too,” I said, and wiped more cold sweat off my forehead. We headed back into the terminal and Anat disappeared into the bathroom. Everyone else seemed to be fine, all big smiles and high-fives. I hated them a little bit for that. I sat for a long time in a chair, waiting for our guide and trying to regain my bearings.

From Huacachina to Nazca, Peru

2009-07-12T23:26:48Z

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 25, 2008.

We drove on through the desolate outskirts of Ica and stopped at a roadside restaurant in Huacachina, the only natural oasis in the Peruvian desert. There, towering dunes ringed a small green lake, maybe a hundred yards across and ringed with palm trees. Huacachina was developed in the 1940s and was once a popular resort or balneario, but now it looked run-down and rough. I read later that tourists who wandered too far away from the promenade were liable to be robbed in broad daylight by desperate locals. The area immediately around the lake seemed safe enough and was overrun by young families and couples on honeymoon. Aside from the water, Huacachina was known as a place for “extreme sports”. High up on the dunes we saw groups of tourists sandboarding (sliding down the hills on small modified surfboards) and tearing up and down in dune buggies. Pati asked if we wanted to do any of these things, but no one was interested.

Inside the roadhouse we sat down at a long table to eat lunch. I had chicken soup, served with lime wedges and hot rocoto pepper sauce, and seco, a beef and carrot stew with a side rice and beans. The soup was simple and delicious; strong broth, tender chicken that fell off the bone at the touch of a spoon, a whole hard-boiled egg and spaghetti noodles. The seco was equally tasty, and the beans reminded me of the Mexican home cooking my grandmother used to make.

While we were eating, a tour bus full of of British and Americans arrived. A man with a guitar turned up out of nowhere and began wandering among the tables, playing for tips. He started with Andean music like “El Cóndor Pasa”, but soon moved into more familiar tunes like “La Bamba” and “Canción del Mariachi” (the last one with new Peruvian lyrics). There was a brief fracas when an American woman somehow locked herself in the bathroom. Eventually half a dozen people were involved, and someone shimmied up a ladder and over the stall door to set her free.

After lunch we went for a walk around the oasis. Kids posed for pictures next to a bare-breasted mermaid with brightly-painted nipples. She was the mythical creator of Huacachina. According to legend, a local princess came to a valley to cry for her dead lover, an Incan soldier. She cried so long and so hard that her tears filled the valley and formed an oasis, and for some reason she turned into a mermaid. Along the promenade, shops and stalls sold jewelry and various souvenirs: painted rocks, wooden carvings, alpaca garments, and weavings. Jiri bought a large wooden carving and Alena bartered for a mask. I looked at some necklaces for Michelle, but didn’t see anything I liked, and we got back into the van and drove on.

As we got closer to Nazca, we began to enter the foothills of the Andes. Late in the afternoon we went up and down our first set of switchbacks. The contrast was clear and stark between dry, crumbling hills the color of milky coffee and glittering with minerals, and the fertile green valleys below. Every bit of watered bottomland was fields, and houses were built on the scruffy margins between mountain and valley. Close to Nazca, we pulled off next to a metal tower in the middle of rocky plain. This was the mirador, a viewing platform that one could climb for the price of one sol and see the edge of the Nazca lines.

The lines are ancient, mysterious, and justifiably famous. Hundreds of thousands of straight lines, geometric shapes, and animal or anthropomorphic figures stretch from one end of the valley floor to the other, covering several hundred square kilometers. There are any number of crazy explanations for why the Nazca lines were built: they were landing strips for ancient spacecraft; they were signals to travellers from above; they were some kind of futuristic observatory that required flying machines to create and see. The sane explanation is that the lines were pathways to and from ceremonial centers and sources of water. Nazca lies smack in the middle of one of the driest parts of South America, and knowing where to find water on a daily basis would have been the difference between life and death. Many of the lines run perpendicular to the Río Ingenio, the main source of water in the region. The animal figures were probably meant to be walked as part of water-finding rituals, and may have also been the totems of local settlements.

The Nazca lines are famous largely due to the work of Maria Reiche, a German mathematician who began studying the lines in the 1930s. Twenty years earlier, pilots flying over southern Peru for the first time began to notice that the ditches criss-crossing the Pampa de Nazca formed patterns. Maria Reiche made it her job to map and clean the lines, often camping out in the featureless plain for days at a time. She thought that the lines were a giant astronomical calculator, used to mark the dates of solstices. Whether or not she was right, Reiche is beloved in Nazca. Her work put Nazca on the map, and now the town survives almost entirely on tourism.

From the mirador I could see three figures: “The Hands”, two outstretched palms connected to a headless barrel chest, “The Tree”, representing a trunk and deep root system, and part of “The Lizard”, a large figure that was obliterated by the construction of the Panamerican Highway. We marveled for a bit, getting our sol’s worth, and then climbed down and drove on into Nazca, a nondescript little city strung along the bottom of a river valley.

It was already dusk when we arrived at our stop for the night, Hotel Majoró. The hotel was a beautiful old estacionamiento or ranch, surrounded by a high stone wall with a heavy wooden gate. Inside were lush gardens, beautiful tiled courtyards, a pool, a pond with a fountain and a small island (which had its own trees and hammocks), bars, sitting areas, and any number of other amenities. It was stunning. My room was small but clean, with a marble-tiled bathroom and a deep tub. It was past dinnertime, but I wasn’t very hungry, so I went for a walk. Behind the main salon (another beautiful space with plush chairs, antique textiles and reproduction pottery in the ancient style), I found a garden full of exotic flowers and a path marked “Planetarium →” leading off into the dark.

As I was walking across the lawn, I heard the breathing of a large animal and glimpsed a dark shape on the tennis court in front of me. I froze, and as my eyes adjusted to the darkness I saw that it was a llama or alpaca. It stared at me, its eyes narrow and its ears flattened against its head in a posture of defense. I had never been so close to a llama outside of the zoo, and I didn’t know how it would react to me trying to pass. I watched it for a minute, then walked back the way I came. In the salon, Suzanne was watching a movie about Truman Capote. I watched it on and off for a bit and wrote in my journal. The movie ended, and I went back to my room, where I took a hot bath, read, and went to sleep.

A Long Weekend in Chicago

2009-07-12T17:03:32Z

Michelle and I needed a vacation, so we took a long weekend and went to Chicago. This time around we decided to skip the touristy stuff and relax, do a little shopping, and see as much free stuff as we could.

We spent a lot of time at Navy Pier (whence this photo), and dropped by the Art Institute for their free admission evening (Thursdays after 5 PM). We also spent a morning in Chicago’s small (but very nice) Chinatown. While there we had dim sum, bought some snacks and miscellaneous souvenirs, and I picked up some very good tea at Ten Ren.

The next day we went to the Lincoln Park Zoo, which is probably the best small zoo I’ve ever seen. It blew the Central Park Zoo away. All the exhibits were really well-designed to get you right up close to the animals. The aviary had a design I’ve never seen before, with a long, dark hallway full of mostly un-glassed-in exhibits. Apparently the birds stay out of the hallway because the darkness might be hiding predators. The ape and lion exhibits were also very nice, although the indoor big cat area was still the old-fashioned kind with bars. Between the screaming kids and the roaring fans (to keep the heat at a tolerable level) the poor cats must have been deaf or half-insane.

The one thing we did pay for was the Harry Potter exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry. Michelle’s a big fan of the books and the movies, and while I don’t know anything about them I thought it’d be fun to tag along. We took a taxi down to the museum, which is way out in BFE as compared to most Chicago attractions, and waited in line with about 50 kids and their parents while an overly-cheerful English woman asked trivia questions. Of course, the kids knew the answers to everything. Kids are like sponges for useless information. The exhibit was actually really cool. Even though I’ve only seen one of the movies (in Argentina, because it was the only movie at the theater in English), seeing all the props and sets was interesting. We paid extra for the audio tour, so we got to hear the producers and costume designers talk about where each piece came from, how it was made, etc. Michelle had a really good time, and I enjoyed it on a technical, “my god, this must have taken forever to accomplish” level.

All in all the weekend was a big success - no tall buildings (we’re still bitter from the Empire State Building debacle), no meals over $30, and plenty of relaxation. I can’t wait to go back.

More Chicago pictures »

Twitter Malaise

2009-06-08T03:21:12Z

It’s been eight months now, and I still don’t get Twitter. I don’t understand the etiquette of following people, I don’t know what a retweet is for, and I can’t understand why you use #hashtags when regular text is completely searchable. I don’t consider Twitter a social outlet; I’ve never been to a “Tweetup” (I hate the verb “tweet”), and I don’t use Twitter to have conversations.

I’d like to think that I use Twitter the way it was meant to be used: to answer the question, “What are you doing?” I post whatever comes to mind and don’t really expect an answer, or even anyone to read it.

Recently I’ve noticed a rather disturbing trend; more and more of my posts result in people I don’t know following me. The other day, I posted a complaint about my former web host, and immediately two people affiliated with web hosting companies followed me. Tonight I posted about how most of the photos on Flickr are crap, and three photographers (according to their Twitter profiles) added me. Then, for absolutely no reason, I was followed by a girl who describes herself as the “Official Spontent Party Chick”. No idea what that’s about.

So I wonder, is this normal? I’m pretty sure nothing I write on Twitter is of general interest, so I can’t fathom why people I’ve never met are subscribing to it.
Only two thoughts come to mind:

Someone is trying to market to me, or
Someone is trying to bullshit, trick, or spam me.

I have no way of knowing whether these people are shills, automated Twitter bots, or regular people with a lot of time on their hands. For awhile I was blocking them, but I’m starting to wonder if these shenanigans are standard on Twitter. Are they doing it wrong, or am I? Malaise…

Dolla Dolla Billz Y’All

2009-05-20T02:35:10Z

So I twittered earlier about the Dollar Redesign Project. I said that the project was cool, but all the designs posted so far were hideous. Within 20 minutes, the owner of the blog had tracked me down and rebutted that he’d love to see what I would do. Touché, internet.

I really do like the site and think the dollar needs a refresh, but I’m not going to post any redesigned dollars for the following reasons:

I don’t know thing one about designing currency.
I can’t point out good currency design, only bad.
All the designs on the Dollar Redesign site are either jokes, statements (I especially like the one where all the money looks like barcode labels), or inspired by the Euro, the Australian dollar, and other neon, sans-serif-loving monstrosities. I like clean lines and modern design in a lot of things, but money isn’t one of them. I also think that more color in money is not necessarily a good thing.
Anything designed on a bet is bound to be terrible.

A semi-related anecdote

Recently I had to take a logo designed for the U.S. market, in which a character was holding a stack of greenbacks, and convert it for use in Canada. I agonized over how to represent Canadian dollars, given that Canadian money has changed appearance many times over the years and didn’t seem to have a strong visual metaphor the way U.S. dollars do.

Money has a certain look in America: Bills are basically duotone - black and another color. There is a border around the edges and a rounded area in the middle that may or may not feature a portrait. You can play around with most of the elements and still not lose the basic connotation of money, as opposed to any old piece of paper.

I asked a Canadian co-worker whether (a) using U.S. money in the Canadian logo would be insulting, and (b) if he knew of a visual metaphor that would play in Canada. He said that (a) yes, it probably would, and (b) suggested maybe a handful of Loonies (Canadian dollar coins). Unfortunately, the logo was too small for the coins to show up clearly.In the end I modified the bills to look vaguely like the new Canadian $20 bill, which has a green bar on top and a white bottom, but I wasn’t completely happy with the result.

About a month later I went to Toronto on vacation, and walking down Yonge Street I happened to see an ad with a caricature of Canadian money. The ad used the familiar U.S. greenback shape, but the stack of dollars alternated green and red. This seemed like kind of a cop-out to me.

A final word of caution to U.S. dollar redesigners: Don’t end up like Canada. Push the dollar in new directions, but don’t throw away 100+ years of brand equity and force a lot of designers to reinvent the wheel like I tried to, or use an inappropriate metaphor the way the designer in Toronto did.

Do any non-Americans read this blog? I’d like to get some opinions and learn how “money” in the generic sense is represented in other countries.

HouseholdHandyman.biz

2009-05-16T03:14:17Z

Here’s the official, if somewhat belated announcement of a site that I launched in early April, HouseholdHandyman.biz.

Household Handyman Ltd. is a home repair and maintenance service located in Waterville, Ohio. The owner, Todd Lentz, has over 25 years experience in all aspects of home maintenance, from carpentry to painting to light electrical and plumbing. He specializes in work for the elderly, especially handicap improvements like bathroom grip rails and non-slip floor and stairway treads.

Todd takes great pride in his work and was an amazing client to work with. If you live in the south Toledo area and need a handyman, or you know an older relative or friend that does, I strongly suggest you give him a call.

Merillat Good Life in Times Square

2009-05-16T02:55:34Z

I got this photo today of a graphic I created on a billboard in Times Square, New York. This is a promotion we’re doing for Merillat (full details at http://www.merillatgoodlife.com).

I worked late last Friday night to create this high-res billboard version of a design by the very talented Jessica Englund. Shoutouts also go to designers Chad Berlean, Charles Ryder, and the whole Hanson team. It’s cool to see our hard work out in the world!

Messing Around with Macro

2009-05-10T18:07:03Z

Back in March I got a Tamron 70-300 lens to take pictures of zoo animals. I paid about $200 for it at my local Castle Photo (now sadly closed), which is still pretty cheap for such a long telephoto. The tradeoff, of course, is in optical quality. The lens is mushy at the extreme long end, giving it an effective range of about 70-270mm. Still, I’m pretty happy with the Tamron, and after learning its limitations I’ve been able to take some pretty good pictures.

The other neat feature about this lens is a 1:2 macro capability at the long end of the range (180-300mm). I hadn’t really played around with this much, but the weather has been absolute crap so yesterday I set up various small objects on the bathroom counter and got out the tripod to see what I could do. I still have a lot to learn about controlling depth-of-field in extreme closeups, but I got lucky a few times, as in the shot above.

I was also playing around with some rudimentary lighting, using a cheap LED headlamp to shine white and red lights on the dragon and other objects. I posted an example of that here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/daverodriguez/3516629677/.

All in all, a pretty successful day in, and hopefully the first of many macro shoots to come. Now all I need is a better tripod…

Why I Hate the Empire State Building

2009-05-03T03:03:09Z

I’ve been to a number of tall buildings, and I can say without a doubt, that the Empire State Building was the worst managed, with the longest wait for the least payoff. The only thing I’ve ever waited longer to get on than the Empire State Building was the Maverick at Cedar Point, and while the Maverick was a rip-roaring good time, the Empire State Building was a crowded hellhole with a mediocre view and one of those diagonal fences that makes it impossible to take good photos.

If you have never been to the Empire State Building, let me break it down for you so that you can skip it and not waste two hours of life.

1. You pull up to the Empire State Building in a cab and stride through the doors, full of hope and happy to be seeing an American icon.
2. You go up an escalator and into a lobby with high ceilings, nice carpeting, and lots of velvet rope. There is a very long line, but it moves very quickly. When you get to the first wall, a cheerful man hands you a brochure with ticket prices and all the extra add-ons you can ever hope to not buy. The man also offers to sell you an “Express Pass” for $45 per person, and you decline because you are an idiot.

3. After 10 or 15 more minutes, you round a corner and arrive at an airport-style security station. They make you take off your belt, empty your pockets, and run all your belongings through a scanner. This is annoying and humiliating as always.
4. After security, you walk down a hallway and around a divider and end up in another, even longer line to buy tickets. The ticket line winds back and forth across a room, then up and down the length of the room before depositing you at a ticket booth. It moves very, very slowly.
5. 20 minutes later, you buy tickets ($20 each, unless you were stupid enough to buy any of the add-ons except for the Express Pass). You walk down a hall into another line, which winds past the restrooms. At this point you have been in line about 40 minutes, so you sneak out of line for a pee and when you get back in, you find it has moved approximately 7 feet. This new and improved line moves down another lobby, into a side hallway, and then back into the same hallway, and then you come to a ticket booth.
6. Except it’s not a ticket booth, it’s a place where they take your picture in front of a green screen, so they can Photoshop in a picture of the New York skyline you’ll never be able to get from the actual observatory and sell it to you for 30 bucks.
7. After you get your picture taken, you stand in an unprecedented sixth line, but at the end of this one is the elevators. You see people coming down from the top, looking flushed and tired. You assume this is because it is windy outside.
8. At long last, you get to an elevator, which is very small and takes 55 seconds to get to the top of…
9. The eightieth floor. The observatory is on the 86th floor. That’s right, there are two elevators. After the first one, you turn left and get to stand in yet another line!
10. By this time the people around you are starting to slump against the walls and pillars and curse the building owners, the city of New York, and their mothers for ever bringing them into this shitty world. Meanwhile they’re stuck in a curving line that winds in and out of rooms, down what look to be service corridors, and past the gift shop, finally arriving at a second set of elevators.
11. It’s been an hour and fifteen minutes since you stepped onto the escalator on the first floor, and now you’re stepping into an elevator on the 80th. This last pointless elevator takes you up six floors to the indoor part of the observatory, which has no view whatsoever.
12. Because you would like to collect a souvenir of this monumental waste of an hour and a half, you push your way outside onto the outdoor observation deck. At that point you realize that there is still no view because (a) the walls outside the building are five feet high, except in the spots where they’re five and a half feet high, and (b) there are seven hundred people clogging every inch of fence. The slats of said fence are those annoying diamond-shaped things that make it impossible to balance a camera, so unless you are a robot with uncannily steady hands or are content to get shots that are seven-eighths night sky, your entire trip has been for nothing.
13. I should pause here to say that this is one of the better views I’ve seen, second only to the Vegas Strip at night. Manhattan looks cool from up high, but you won’t have any time to enjoy it because a family of foreigners from a country unfamiliar with deodorant is busy elbowing their way in front of you, and three Germans (why don’t you ever see just one German?) are yelling and joking loudly in your ear.
14. After about 10 minutes of this, you will have had enough. You go back inside and follow the sign marked “Exit”. This sign, of course, leads you into a line.
15. It takes you roughly as long to get to the first set of elevators as it has taken you to see the observation deck. You ride down six floors again, and then you stand in what you hope is the final line of the night, for the elevators back to the lobby. Your feet ache, small children are slumped on the floor, wives are leaning on husbands, and some annoying hippie teenagers are joking loudly in a foreign language acting like they hadn’t been haven’t just waited in line for an hour and forty-five minutes and everything is peachy. They’re either high, or they paid for the Express Pass.
16. You ride down the elevator, and it’s the longest 55 seconds of your life. All you want is to slump into a cab and drink something alcoholic so you forget about the goddamn Empire State Building.
17. As a final, cruel, M. Night Shyamalanesque twist, you walk out of the elevator smack into a line. Fortunately it takes you 10 seconds to realize that this is the line to buy your shitty greenscreen photo, and you can bypass it. This is exactly what you should do.

In conclusion: The Empire State Building is terrible. If you go there, you will regret it unless you buy the Express Pass, in which case you will only regret the fact that you can’t see anything from the observation deck because of pushy smelly people and angry Teutons.

Coming Attractions

2009-03-27T02:07:46Z

A little preview of an upcoming site, scheduled to Launch in early April:

Ica, Peru

2009-03-01T16:55:22Z

This post is based on a journal entry originally recorded on May 25, 2008.

Early in the afternoon our Peruvian Mystery Machine pulled up at El Catador Winery outside Ica. The further we got from the coast, the higher and drier the terrain became. Already we were driving through low foothills the color and texture of old, crumbly chocolate. Every river valley was plowed into fields and dotted with more of the reed-and-stick shacks we had seen along the coast. Ica itself was little more than a large village, a disorderly cluster of crumbling buildings baking in the semi-desert heat.

El Catador was down a side street in a neighborhood of trash heaps, rusted cars and stray dogs. Glicerio parked the van underneath a shelter made of huge logs and thatched with some kind of palm fronds or reeds. I have no idea where they got such massive beams, as I never saw a tree higher than fifteen feet until we got to Cuzco. From outside, the winery looked disappointing and flyblown, but as soon as we stepped through the door it was transformed. Inside was a restaurant with picnic tables under a shady awning made of the same log-and-reed construction as the parking shade outside. The walls were brick painted with restful shades of red and white, and all the trim was painted white in the colonial style.

A young man named Jesús met us and led us back outside for a tour of the winery. We went down a set of stairs and down an alley. Jesús was dressed for work, with a dirty T-shirt, jeans, and a pair of heavy gloves. The back of his T-shirt read:
“Si a Ica vino,
y no tomó vino,
A que mierda vino?”

Which means, “If you came to Ica, and you didn’t drink wine, what the hell did you come for?”

Jesus leads us to a large stone pit about two feet deep. This is where, every year, the harvested grapes are brought and stomped for their juice. This is apparently a big local thing, and it turns into a party. On the walls of the restaurant are pictures of local girls with stained feet and sashes reading, “Miss Pisco” or “Grape Princess 2005”, or something similar.

Most of the juice runs out through a pipe into a neighboring trough, but afterward the remaining grapes are collected and pressed into disks resembling large purple cheese wheels. The wheels are taken to a giant screw press made out of a hard local wood called huarango. The press removes all the remaining juice, which is filtered through baskets to remove the pulp and then allowed to ferment for fifteen days. After fermentation, some of the juice is poured off and kept for wine, and the rest is run through a system of hot and cold pipes to make the famous liquor called Pisco.

Pisco comes from the Quechua word pisqu, meaning little bird. Originally the grape juice was fermented in long jugs with pointed tops, which look vaguely like birds’ beaks. Jesus took us to an underground room where the fermented, heated and distilled pisco is poured off into barrels. There is apparently something of an art to this, as the beginning and end of every batch of pisco are poisonous methanol. It takes a skilled or brave worker to recognize when the pisco is drinkable. The “head” and “tail”, as the undrinkable portions are called, are poured into different barrels and saved to clean out the machinery.

We finished the tour by going back into the restaurant to try the different types of pisco and wine. Jesus gave us some of the “green” wine, aged only 15 days. This was sweet and mild, and only a little stronger than grape juice. Next we tried another type of sweetened wine, which was way too sugary for my taste. Next we had the Peruvian classic, Pisco Sour: pisco mixed with lime juice, sugar and beaten egg white. I found this a little sweet at first, but eventually grew to like it. We tried pure pisco, which I liked so much I bought a bottle of, and “pisco Bailey’s”, Pisco mixed with cream and fig paste (for texture). This was interesting, but I wouldn’t want to drink much more of it.

As the morning turned to afternoon, we hopped back into the van and drove on to Huacachina, an oasis in the desert between Ica and Nazca.