I had a business trip to Oklahoma City last week. A coworker was driving and I had my Takashi 521 FX special effects camera along. As we passed vehicles I tried to capture their wheels to get the Lartigue distortion effect possible with the camera. I had a very low batting average what with the shutter delay and all.
I did get these wheels. Luckily they were red, after a little boosting from Picnick.com they were Ruby Red.
And the choice is up to you ’cause they come in two classes
The Graveyard Book is supposedly a children’s book. I hope that its okay with everybody if I read children’s books. I used to read them all the time to my son SuperPizzaBoy. Then when he was eleven or so he is was done with me reading to him. I still miss it.
The book starts with a man named Jack who has just killed three people in a home with a knife. He starts looking for the fourth, a toddler, but the toddler who has had elopement issues has gotten away again and leaves the house and heads for a long abandoned graveyard now turned nature preserve. Jack follows the toddler by following the smell of his pee soaked diaper.
The boy gets to the graveyard and is protected by a ghost. Another ghost convinces Jack that the kids isn’t there. The ghosts, which number in the thousands, most of whom are hundreds of years old decide after a fierce debate to extend the child “The protection of the graveyard.” They also give him the name “Nobody.” The rest of the book follows Nobody as he grows up and learns more about the graveyards and the ghostly life. My favorite parts are where he learns how to shimmer and manipulate human memories and other ghostly skills. That is how he can attend regular school and nobody really remember him at the end of the day.
Eventually though Nobody gets to the age where he has to leave the Graveyard and find out about that man Jack.
The book is wonderful and short. Get it at your library. I give it 3.5 stars out of 5 which is good. I’ll be reading more by Neil Gaiman.
SuperPizzaBoy attends a Teen Comedy Improv class at a city park here in Tulsa. Last year he was in the preTeen class and loved it and attended a summer camp where he was in a production. I used to hang out in the room while the class is going on just in case the instructors needed any help with Logan. Well, you their fine with him and he’s fine with them so this year I decided it’s time for dear old Dad to butt out and leave them alone. I kind of miss it though, watching the interaction between the eager kids and the patient but insistent adult leaders.
So what I do know is take my cameras and walk around the park and take pictures. This last week I took my cheapo Takashi 521 FX digital lomo camera. It can do lots of stuff. One of the thing it can do is take negative images. So Saturday was the day for negativity. The above is my favorite tree in the whole world. I swear it is alive.
Below is another tree. There was a soccer game going on also.
I love how shadows show up in negative on this softball backstop.
My favorite though is this cross at the front of the Church of St. Mary Catholic Church which adjoins the city park. I just love the coppery sky color. 
Here’s another view of the same cross with my Takashi set in Black and White. I just love that cross. I’ve never seen such a muscular cross.
And I can proudly say that all these pics are straight out of the camera.
Have you ever had a nice negative day?
I noticed all these cars parked in a row one evening downtown. Plus a bonus bus in the background.
My first confession is that I boosted the color about as much as Picnick.com would let me. (The pink sidewalk gives me away!) My second confession is that this isn’t the first time I’ve done that. Am I kicked out of Ruby Tuesday?
Well, its October and the weather here in Oklahoma is wonderful. Cool nights, warm dry days. Makes me want to get out of the house. So I decided you know, its time to plant another geocache.
I had the container. Sweetie never complains but I use lots better containers for geocaches than she gets for our household use.
And then some Walmart camo duct tape. I scored the last roll they had. Sorry!!
Voila, makes me want to dig up all my poor dead arts and crafts teachers and tell them See!! I actually can do something. Is that terrible? You don’t know 99% of what I think!!
So off we went to Turkey Mountain. Sweetie begged off because of severe allergies. Poor old SuperPizzaBoy had no choice. We first checked out a cache we set out years ago called “Boys Night Out – Firefly Swamp.” We set it out in July 2007. It has been found 94 times. We named it because it was on Sweeties book group night which is our monthly boys night out and it was very muddy due to rains, thus the swamp, and it was at night and the fireflies were out in force. Absolutely beautiful.
This cache is a hybrid. It is a geocache and also a letterbox. Letterboxing is a precursor to geocaching. Boxes are hidden but the descriptions are given by written directions rather than GPS coordinates. Also, letterboxers use stamps, to show that they were there, rather than a written log. So, its low tech but involves hiking and finding. I haven’t really gotten into it except for this one hybrid.
I took photos of some of the stamps people left. I think they are very cool.
The last two on the left are SPB and my stamps. I forget whose is whose. We bought them on sale at Hobby Lobby. One family found the cache on Easter Sunday last year.
I went through the pages of the regular log. Those are always interesting. I’ll translate for you. “TFTC” means “Thanks for the Cache,” “TNLN” means “Took nothing, left nothing.”
Here I show the last page. A cub scout group came through in September. When I take groups to find a cache I make everybody sign the cache!! They are entitled.
That done we went looking for a good spot to hide the cache we brought. SPB was running out of gas.
We had to do some climbing and found this trail.
And then I found a good spot, hid the container, and found the coordinates. So now I have to get a permit from the Tulsa RiverParks Authority and apply to Geocaching.com to post. It took about two weeks last time.
Some vandalism we found on the way out. I don’t know if JJ Shill is the lover or beloved but whoever left this is a loser.
SPB brightened up as we got close to the parking lot.
Not a bad time, all told. Then off to dinner at NaNa’s.
Our route, I just love technology, when it works.
I just finished a who dunnit by an author new to me, Benjamin Black, the pen name of John Banville. The book is set in Dublin, Ireland where Richard Jewell, aka “Diamond Dick” a rich powerful newspaperman is found with his head blown off by a shotgun. Crusty old detective Hackett calls in his friend Quirke a medical examiner to help solve the crime. Quirke, who is well named by the way, quickly gets personally involved with Jewell’s beautiful french wife, Francoise.
Detective Hackett and Quirke are crusty old guys with a few nicks and scrapes. The writing is superb and the plotting tight. This was a great find and I recommend it highly. Get it at your local library, I did, save some bucks.
I rate this book 3.5 stars out of 5. It’s a great book.
We have got all sorts of stuff going on in Tulsa these days. The city doesn’t know whether to lean to the right,
or lean to the left, or
Or just kind of shimmy in place.
So what’s happening? I know the wind blows here in Oklahoma, but not that much.
I have a cheap camera. The Takashi 521 digital lomo camera. It has all sorts of special effects built into a camera with a plastic lens. One thing this camera doesn’t have though is a shutter. That’s right no shutter. You press the button the sensor gets scanned is all. So that means that if I move the camera while pressing the button the things that the camera sees get distorted.
In a regular camera with a shutter you don’t get that. You get a blur. Blur can be fun, but not that much fun.
This distortion is called the Lartigue effect after Jacque Henri Lartigue, a french dude, who used a “focal plane shutter.” to invent the effect. Here is an example of his work:
Check out the link. He was cool! The main thing is that I love the term “focal plane shutter.” That is like one of the most wonderful pieces of jargon I have heard in a long time. I have no idea what it means. I’m going to use it a lot. I mean talk about authority. For instance, somebody talks about plumbing problems I’m going to shut them up by saying that until they get a Focal Plane Shutter installed they are going to continue to have the same problem.
Those of you who don’t have cheap camera will have to pay big bucks to get a focal plane shutter. That’s what you get for having fancy stuff like shutters on your camera. My shutterless piece of junk can get the same effect using the scan rate of the sensor. Aren’t you jealous? You should be.
