emo_snal, posts by tag: lj shootout - LiveJournal

   Okay the deadline for the first prompt of ljshootout is in something like ten hours, so here's my submission.

   The moderator had come up with the inexplicable prompt of "comeback" ... what a jerk! Or wait, that was me. Anyway, I do my best to come up with prompts without regard to thinking what I'll do with them (tis only fair), and then once I've decided on a prompt I'm left with "what am I supposed to do with THAT?"

   Was hoping maybe to get a good narrowly focused shot of an airplane nosed in at a terminal on my trip here but no go, so instead here's an Egyptian obilisk in front of the Blue Mosque which was build on top of the Byzantine palace in Istanbul...



And going back very to just shy of six months ago for the second picture, here is an aboriginal fisherman returning unphased from the froth following cyclone (hurricane) Ozwald:




   So far only one other person has submitted an entry for this first ljshootout prompt, I strongly encourage more to do so! /:

   Its very hard to edit pictures when the lower third of your screen just displays garbled columns of pixels. Not only that but: the laptop charger has a loose connection and only conducts power if laid out just right; power on the boat is frequently not working or power where one is plugged in will shut off and you'll have to move to somewhere else (presently we're only able to power a third of the boat at a time and they change it around depending on where it's most needed at a givin moment); the flash on my camera hasn't been working; my cell phone likes to randomly die for an hour at a time. So yeah, what technology we have barely works and all my electronics are barely going to survive this tour.

   I have a lot of pictures I'd like to put up but its too tedious to deal with most of them. Here, however, is my submission for ljshootout. This week we were to post a picture conveying a temperature, taken this week, and one conveying the opposite temperature, from sometime in the last six months.

(1) Clammy


Aberdeen, WA -- Taken on Monday, Sept 20th
AKA Aberdoom. Looking typically gloomy.
There are a LOT of broken docks here, a reminder of better days, when the town was big enough to be known as "the Hellhole of the Pacific" .. ah the good ole days...


(2) Warm


A warm evening in Roche Harbour, San Juan Island -- August 4th, 2010

ljshootout official portrait entries:

(1)



A jaunty sailor
11 Sept, 2009


(2)



My own dear mum, repairing some uh, nautical stuff.
29 August, 2009

   ljshootout topic this week has been portraits. Even though I don't really like taking portraits, I've built up a few over the years I rather like. The following are, as we say, my cutting room submissions for portrait -- the ones that I can't use because they're out of the time frame.


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   Topic this week is food.

   Below the cut, behold the very pinnacle of my awesome powers of chef-ery!

   I will share with you amazing secrets to my amazing recipe as well as delicious photographs of it being prepared AND on a plate in all its glory!!!


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   In unrelated news, tomorrow I'm going out to sea -- sailing on the tall ship Pilgrim for about 12 hours. (:

I wanted to use this picture for the architecture prompt. The plan was just to have the masts in the foreground to make it more interesting, but the masts turned out to dominate the picture I think.





And on a related note, if we move back even further, it's the house seen between the masts of the Pilgrim as seen over the bow of the Spirit of Dana Point!!



Other recently uploaded photos (including several more of the tallships.

   ljshootout topic this past week was Architecture. And this time we needed three pictures.


(1)



Bay Bridge, San Francisco, CA
25th July, 2009


(2)



House atop cliffs, Dana Point, CA
29tth August, 2009


(3)



Library, Saddleback Community College
31st August, 2009

For ljshootout.




Keyhole Wasp
26 August, 2009




Golden Umbrella Wasp (Polistes aurifer)
8th July, 2009


See also: my Cutting Room Submissions


There's also more of the Keyhole wasp I didn't post to this lj.

   This week's theme in ljshootout is "wildlife." It just so happens that I'm quite fond of wildlife. In particular, insects seem to just come to me.

   And so I present to you, insects landing on my hand, a continuing series

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(5)

Now this one warrants a few words. Yesterday I came across the (relatively) rare and beautiful Tarantula Hawk wasp:



These things hunt tarantulas, hence the name (for those of you from far and wide, I don't know if everyone knows what a tarantula is, but its a hairy spider the size of a plate).

The sting of a tarantula hawk has been described as having "an immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations." and the lovely Shmidt Sting Pain Index I blogged about recently rates it the second most painful insect sting in the world. So knowing this, I of course had to have it pose for the traditional photograph on my hand.

It was running along the ground at the time so I put my hand in front of her and she hopped aboard! Unfortunately she was still moving pretty fast so I only got one kind of blurry picture before she ran all the way up my arm and disappeared behind my neck before taking flight.



Tarantula Hawk
27 August, 2009

Not the best picture but it at least gives an idea of the wasp's size.


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(8)

One last bonus. This isn't technically wildlife I guess becaues it's obviously domesticated whatever the hell it is:



Unholy Beast Of Some Kind
27th August, 2009

Is it just me or is this thing totally creepy!? I think it's because it looks kind of human ... just enough to be totally in the uncanny valley. Also it looks sinister, like it's staring into your soul ... with contempt!

I thought I'd post some my very favourite of my monochrome pictures. These are all from ancient times (1999 & 2001), and the image quality isn't the best since they were originally scanned from prints, uploaded to yahoo photos (which actually wouldn't give me back anything but a very small version until they finally closed down a year or two ago) downloaded again, etc. So I think in all those transfers they suffered a bit.

Anyway:

(1)



Castle in Slovakia
May? 1999


(2)



Soviet Monument, Bratislava, Slovakia
May? 1999

(More pictures from Slovakia)


(3)



Power pylon, Mission Viejo, California
2001

This one I took for my photo class in high school, I think I got a D on it. Notwithstanding Mr Williams' lack of enthusiasm for it, it's one of my very favourite of my pictures. It has been the background on my computer ever since I've had a computer.