Vu Bui Blog

Josh and I decided to go do some dusk and night photography tonight, and we learned a good lesson or two in preparation. We were actually quite lucky to not have to learn the hard way… ending up dead in a ditch by either a car or monster or crazed chainsaw wielding undead serial killer.

Notes for next time:

When doing night photography in the cold, bring a jacket. A sweater may also work.
When doing night photography along a road, bring and wear reflective clothing. A flashlight may also help you more safely return to your car, and be able to see where you parked.
When doing night photography along a little 2 way highway with no shoulder where you need to walk a half mile back to your car after dark, be prepared to accept that you may not be the smartest person you know.
It was a lot of fun though, and I’m glad we went. Unfortunately I think I had more fun with just going out there than I did actually taking photos. For some reason I had a lack of motivation and enthusiasm for taking pictures on that little stretch of road. I think it’s because I made a bad choice of a subject, which is my fault. I didn’t come up with much of anything good, but I kinda liked these:

After we safely returned to our trucks and began our merry way back home, I stopped along Santiago Canyon to take some pics of a scene that caught my eye. While I was shooting the moon came out from behind the clouds, and I shot a bunch of pics of some nice scenes using the moon. Unfortunately it was right before the moon because once again entirely obscured by clouds I realized that though I had set the camera to manual focus, I had forgotten to set the focus to infinity, so all the shots I had done were out of focus, I think it was focusing at 2 meters or something. I quickly fixed that and shot some more, but I couldn’t get anything as good as what I thought I’d had while shooting out of focus. I have to say that it was quite enjoyable standing there at the edge of the shoulder of Santiago Canyon Road waiting for the moon to come back out while I shot the profiles of various hills and then some car lights passing by. I guess I’m really back in the mood to do some photo, it was damn cold out there and I still hung out at that spot for 30 minutes waiting for the moon before I gave up and took off to go home. On the way home I stopped again to take a few shots of the “city lights”, but I didn’t particularly care for any of those shots.

These are between 8 and 15 second exposures:

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I look back at this month and see that I wrote quite a bit compared to the rest of this year. That’s good, it sucks when this site dies… though I guess I don’t know why it’s so great when it’s working. This will probably be the last entry for this month, since tomorrow is Halloween and I probably won’t have time to write tomorrow night. Hopefully next month goes as well as this month did for the site.

Yesterday, when I walked out of work, I was treated to the only good thing I’ve seen come of these raging SoCal fires as of yet… a post-apocaliptic-esque color scheme painted all over everything in sight. It was weird and cool… so I set off driving home and hoped to find something decent to shoot to record the event. I ended up taking only 5 pics, of which I liked only one, but it was still an interesting drive home. Here’s the shot:

It’s ok, but I was hoping for something better. The colors have not been altered, I only adjusted the contrast a little bit. It was trippy driving down Santiago Canyon, because everything was red but the headlights, which all seemed to radiate a crystal clear blue light… very strange and contrasty to the red surroundings. Seeing the red sun reflected off cars as they passed was also a bit disarming… all in all it was a very memorable experience.

So… this morning when I woke up and saw that even outside of my apartment things were turning red, Lan and I decided to go back to Santiago Canyon and shoot some more pics, this time earlier in the morning so the sun would be lower and easier to frame behind some decent foregrounds. Unfortunately it wasn’t nearly as red and there wasn’t nearly as much smoke or effect today, but I took more pics (should have done that yesterday) and maybe a few came out ok… so here are the best in my opinion (again, only contrast has been adjusted:

Maybe tomorrow when I get out of work there will be more interesting shots to be had… guess we’ll see. It’s sad that so much nature had to be destroyed because of some assholes, but since it happened anyway, I’m glad I at least got to make the best of the opportunity that was presented to me.

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Lan and Bonny backpacked up in San Jacinto this weekend, and Josh and Jarr went up to White Mountain to take part in a study on effects of elevation on stuff… while I worked. I had decided yesterday that I would go hiking today, just a day hike up at San Jacinto… unfortunately because of the fires I guess they aren’t issuing any new permits up there. Damn fires. They make for great pics but not much else they effect comes out for the better.

The Halloween stuff is coming out quite nicely… last night Tony, Kevin and I made the coffin and the scarecrow stand. Now we just need to do some tombstones and we’ll be set. Hopefully it will be pretty fun so that next year we can try to do it even better. I’ve never done anything fun for Halloween, so the future of Halloween for me may hinge on how well this first attempt goes…

Conversing with Josh about photo.net and photocritique.net etc… has gotten me fired up about photography even more so than Josh’s F-1 purchase. Strange, but I think it has to do with the resurfacing of old feelings… the last time I was into photo.net and photocritique.net I was only thinking about photo all day long… so I guess it shouldn’t be surprising that visiting these sites would bring back a bit of that old itchy trigger (shutter) finger. Now if I only had a camera I’d be set…

Riding didn’t go as well as planned. First of all, I forgot that my bike had problems. Something wrong with the rear bearings or something… every once in a while (often) it locks up and won’t allow the wheel to spin free of the chainring… so I have to pedal. Haven’t figured out what it is yet, but it is bad enough that I couldn’t do the 3 b’s ride, because I ended up hurting myself when the thing caught at a bad moment and I slid through some loose dirt and had to step off… right onto my bad knee. Ouch. So, we rode back home. And when I say we I mean Jarr and I, because Josh bailed on us to get his hair cut… or so he says…

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I’m going to plan a trip for Thanksgiving weekend. Not sure where or what yet… probably not a biking trip, so I’m guessing it will be backpacking, but I’ll leave that open until I know who is going and what gear I’ll have by then. So… anyone open to a backpacking trip (probably) for Thanksgiving weekend? Probably leaving on Wednesday evening and coming back Sunday afternoon. I wanted to make a cool past/future trip page but I like Josh’s design and don’t want to steal/copy it, so I need to design something else… so it may never happen. I just like the fact that he used pics, and if I were to use pics, I’d have to also use tables to keep it clean on the page, and then it would look like Josh’s design. Unless…

2 hours later…

Ok, I think this will work. It’ll look a lot better when there are more trips, but hey, gotta start somewhere. Actually, I might go back and scan photos from old trips and add them. The only 2 things I might need to work on are the little nav links at the top of the page and the fact that the images are the links to the detailed pages. Lan didn’t even see the nav links, and Jarr didn’t realize that you click on the images to see more details. I’ll have to change that.

Just got home from seeing Kill Bill again. Damn is that a good movie. The only downside is that now I really want a custom made samurai sword. QT is just an awesome writer/director. Makes me proud that I shot this years ago…

Liz with Sword

Now I can continue to shoot this type of shot in the future and not feel as though I am just copying or ripping someone else off. Whew… good save. First, though… I need a new samurai sword… um… might as well be a custom one. Gotta fly to Okinawa soon!