Birthday Lunch 2015

This year I wanted to do something different for my birthday. I wanted to relive the living under one roof, rent-a-house (Half Moon Bay) in Italy type thing. Well that didn’t quite work out so we decided on lunch instead. Luckily Rick’s friend, Francisco owns Flavors in HMB so off we went. Food was excellent, received some lovely gifts but my birthday was upstaged by Cait & Matt’s announcement. I hope to shoot engagement fotos soon.

Yes this is a composite so don’t look too closely.

Birthday 2015

This year for my birthday Sandy made reservations at the Bodega Bay Lodge. We could only stay 1 day but it was so relaxing. Their restaurant, the Duck Club was excellent. I had a superb lamb shank and Sandy had the sole in parchment paper, neither of which gave us diarrhea. The next morning we made a very slow drive down highway 1 through Point Reyes and Stinson Beach. What a wonderful way to spend a birthday.

Happy Valentines Day 2015

I have to give myself these projects in order to be a more rounded fotog. So last night I had Sandy fling some wine (backyard) in an attempt to create a heartshaped pattern in honor of V-Day. This is not original, I got the idea from Gavin Hoey via the Adorama channel on youtube. This is a 1 speedlite, 5 shot composite.

And no it wasn’t actually wine.

Later in the evening we had Arlene over for a Hamachi Kama dinner.

Glass Woes

Sylvia a family friend, asked me to photograph her glass art work. Thinking it would be a snap I quickly agreed. I found out the hard way that shooting glass is really difficult. Her work is beautiful so I wanted to do it justice. The wave sculpture below would not accept any side light as it would cast shadows in between the blue vertical stripes. In the end I used butterfly lighting.

I learned a lot and if there is a next time maybe it won’t take me 3 hrs. Sylvia generously gave me several sweet treats and a lovely glass platter as a reward. This is lit from below via an LED panel with a piece of diffusion plastic in between. Fill was then provided from above.

For the cityscape I setup side lighting to get a rim on the edges of the buildings to give it depth.

Grandma Maeda

While she passed away back in November we finally put Grandma Maeda to rest. She made it to 102, which is incredible these days. Sadly it was probably the last time we will all get together.

I did not feel right taking photos at the funeral, as it just feels too morbid. Afterwards we put Grandma next to Grandpa in a very informal ceremony.

Afterwards we converged at Christy’s place for food & drinks.

I did my best to shoot portraits of everyone but my G1X2 doesn’t have a viewfinder and the glare on the LCD was really strong. That coupled with the usually flawless ETTL flash system was not giving consistent results. Nothing is ever easy. That is Diamond Head in the background BTW.