I took a look out of my windows and it was crazy outside. The storm was heading straight south, I face north. I decided to take some photos and make a few movies.

I set up my nice camera to take long exposures of the sky… and with my other camera I filmed a movie.

The first clip I posted was of me filming once it started to rain. I zoomed in to see if I could get a better view of the rain coming down. To my surprise a giant bolt of lightning hit the roof about 50 feet from where I was filming. It was crazy loud and totally freaked me out. It happens at about the 14 second mark.

The second is a movie made from the time lapse photos and stitched them together.

This was not the craziest storm I have seen since I have lived here, but it was the closest lightning strike I have seen in a while. Last year my sister was over and we were making her wedding invitations when my biz partner called me and told me there was a tornado headed towards the city. We got out of the office and looked out side and it was just waves of rain. The roof next door had whitecaps on it. My entire wall was covered with water. The windows and doors were pulsating with the wind. I thought they were going to blow inward. We ended up going to the bunker like basement of the building that is attached and waited for it to pass over. There were others down there as well. When it was over we called our mom and told her we were alive. That may have been the worst storm I have seen.

Well the other day Google released Picasa version 3 which has a pretty sweet feature, which allows you to dump a bunch of photos into a movie… I thought this was cool but played with it, and could not get it anywhere fast enough to where I wanted. Then Graywolf told me about the timelapse setting and I was "off to the races".

It took me a few attempts to get things right, and I still think a few parts are off… mainly the beginning and end… but it is a start.

I searched around the interweb and found pretty much free public use music at Mus Open. So I added that, adjusted the frames per second in Picassa, and exported it when it was a good length.

I have roughly 21,000 other digital photos spanning from 1998 to the present, and would like to do something with all of them… so if nothing else this is a start.

You can either watch it in the right hand column or directly on youtube by following this link, or on VIMEO (recommended) with this link.

Let me know what you think.

A bunch of my shit got damaged…

Then I had some talks about taxes.

I had to go to the dentist. This is my first visit since the mouth bling.

Then I watched the cubs lose. I hate sports, but the cubs have a new japanese baseball player who kicked ass. The brewers looked like a bunch of out of shape bitches on the field, yet they still won. Hahahahaha. Pull up your pants fatty. And this is coming from a guy who could gain a bit from running around the bases.

I talked to Rae a bit via bb and that was good! I went on my deck and took a few fun pics. It was nice out. I still need to decide what grill I should buy. Same goes for the patio furniture.

As you can see on the fetus, I really used lots of contrast to make the image somewhat interesting. I am not sure what sort of weirdo would make this their desktop, but I am guessing some nut job out there, wants a fetus desktop wallpaper.

I guess there also has to be some other weirdo who will want Ben Franklin as their desktop?

This image I played with all the raw settings to get that "electric blue" look. hahaha. Very bad I know!

Like all my free desktop wallpapers, leave me a comment if you use these yourself, or see some other weirdo using them.

Here are 2 Kozik Toys that I own that I took photos of:

I think they will make some pretty fun backgrounds, especially if you hate your job or are a boozehound (c:

Anyone know the proper names of these characters?

Ps: if you use these for your computer desktop leave me a comment!

And one for you sorry SOBs with just one monitor: 1280×1024

I would say it is a very scary desktop… what do you think?

ps: if you use this leave me a comment.

1. I won an amazing camera from one of the companies I work with. It is a Nikon d80, digital slr camera. It is pretty much TITS

2. I am planning to sell a shit load of small items on ebay, including straight razors, pocket knives, antique fishing lures, and old lighters.

3. I recently purchased a light tent so I can take better looking pictures of these small items.

4. I collect weird toys.

So you add those all up, and take a few test shots, and you get a free desktop background for my sweet readers:

Added a 1280×1024 proper ratio desktop:

Let me know what you think, and if you have any requests of any objects that you know I own, let me know and it can be yours.

Enjoy!

I also dug up an old photo project of mine, from a few years back that a teacher archived on his site.

You will need quicktime to view this, but it is kind of cool. The original was like 140 megs and was projected into a dark a classroom and navigated by the students. The way this was made was to use a digital camera, hold it steady, rotate it and take some shots in a full circle, then use photo shop to stich them together…I spend about 8-10 hrs making the image flawless in photoshop, and the result is pretty cool I think. The idea is to have the viewer involved in a something that I experienced. Click here to try it out.

Let me know what you think about both of them.

I went down to the basement to grab a brisk ice tea out the fridge and decided to at least unpack my easel and paints… I set up the easel and put a canvas on there and it was calling my name. I globbed some black paint on it and just went to town.  It was a great release to just get something on it. The strokes were relaxing and smooth, but spastic if you would have been watching.  This was just the first part of it, and was just the background, but at least it has started….it  will take weeks to dry since it is so thick…not to mention the fact it is oil paint and in a basement…

The surface of it reminds me of woodwork or something similar… and I think it looks great now…we will see how it dries. In a way it should be nasty and dirty looking when it is complete, so I will let it do its own thing. Right now it has a beautiful deep liquidy feel to it, which does not have the exact feeling the finished piece will need. I am wondering how hard it will be to paint over, and if my finished piece will have the desired effect. Time will tell…

I used a larger brush than normal and I liked the speed at which it covered the surface. I also used more paint then normal and it went quickly. Cleanup up was pretty interesting. The brush had properties of human hair or similar and I used Murphy’s Soap  Oil to more or less shampoo the brush. I liked the way the brush absorbed the paint and the way that the bristles or hair held on to the paint regardless of how many times I would wash it. The final look of the brush was similar to the dog hair on an old friends dog, and the soap oil smell brought back memories of school and all the feelings that were going through me at that time…

I like how I refer to “normal” above, since there is no normal anymore due to the lack of doing anything related to painting… when I do my next one I will see how I do it and see if lots of paint and large brushes become the norm.  The one thing I did notice is that I think I need to go bigger. I think this was 18×24. I need to at least double that.

Not only is it extremely creative, but I think the artist did an amazing job on it. All I can say is wow!

What are your thoughts?