Tag Archives: Chinese New Year

Photo-A-Day

Two Blogs Collide

Two Blogs Collide
Photo-A-Day #1401

Today started with a very exciting morning of scoring 12 tickets to the Thursday June 25th show for Jimmy Buffett’s Summerzcool Tour. Even Buffett has gone Web 2.0. He’s on Twitter but his tweets are protected, that is no way to be social on a social network. But one thing that is being handled really well is the FaceBook account because every one of the shows in the Summerzcool tour has an event page. Our group is a large one and we shot for Thursday to guarantee (or hopefully guarantee) getting tickets. We got so many. I hope we can find homes for all of them. My best set of tickets were in the 4th section under the covering at the Comcast Center.

After that we packed up and went off to Bryant University. At the university there was a Chinese New Year Celebration. Since I am trying to learn Chinese in 15 Minutes A Day I thought a cultural immersion adventure would be great. I was right, it was pretty fun as there were dancers, martial arts students and singers.

We arrived to a fully packed gym with hundreds of seats. On stage awards were being given out for various reasons including many for service to the Chinese community. The United States Postal Service was also there for an unveiling of the Year of the Ox stamp. I was able to buy three sheets of stamps and I got a free Year of the Ox pin.

Unveiling the Year of the Ox Stamp

I also got some materials from a Chinese Christian Church that I can translate sometime.

The different acts that performed were very talented. There were some dancers like the ones above. The Dance was called Pretty Girls (Sichuan Opera) and was performed by Art Troupe of the High School Affiliated with the Renmin University of China. I edited the photo two ways here is the one with more saturated colors.

More color

Eva absolutely loved the dancers. She was rapt with attention and she also was very friendly. She was waving to everyone, dancing and trying to say hello to all the other kids. I have a bunch of photos from the day under the tag Chinese New Year Celebration.

You might notice that I got some nice shots of people performing. I was glad I brought my Xshot with me because I used my Xshot to take photos above the crowd. I also used the custom timer on my camera to take 10 photos in 5 second bursts and then kept the ones I liked.

Conferences, Photo-A-Day

Further Reason I now Shoot Raw

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Further Reason I now Shoot Raw
Photo-A-Day #1389

I have been really trying to be better about not shooting with the auto settings. I have the camera on manual now and I mess around with the settings till I get the light the way I like it (trying to get is as close to true as possible). Once I do that I try shooting a few things in the same light to get a shoot that I like. I also have the camera shooting both RAW and JPEG at the same time. The photo below is the JPEG version.

The JPEG

The Photo-A-Day photo is the raw version and it is not a particularly good photo or interesting but what I like about it is that it shows me what I’ve been missing while just shooting JPEG all these years.

While I take control of my camera and attempt to become a better photographer on my own, I know I need help. One thing that I am doing is reading the Nikon D80 Digital Field Guide. I am also reading many photography blogs and I’ll be attending Digital Days in April in Boston. Digital Days is a two day conference where I will learn many techniques on digital photography and on day two there is a photo shoot with live models. I need to work on my portraits and have never had a model to photograph before. This should be interesting. Also watch this blog because there will be some passes to the event

Another conference that I will be attending is Affiliate Summit East in New York City. I just firmed up my details on that one and will be attending that on August 9-11. I’m pretty jazzed up about that and cannot wait to meet Missy Ward and Shawn Collins the founders of Affiliate Summit.

And yet another conference is on my horizon and that is IZEAFest 2009. As you know I am an IZEA insider and my crew is the “I’m Not A Famous Blogger” Crew. I’ll be at IZEAFest along with Allison and Eva. If you act right now you can save $50 on admission to IZEAFest 2009. You are not going to want to miss this at all.

Happy Chinese New Year. Oh and If you have any kids this year they may turn out to be our future leaders because this is the Year of the OX and many leaders were born in the Year of the Ox, like Barack Obama. I subscribed to the White House blog today. Who knows I might become informed enough to actually talk a little politics. A very little.