*scottstuff*

I was in the COO’s office at work talking over phone system issues, and noticed that there were 3 peregrine falcons playing or fighting or something right outside the window. I’ve seen a couple here over the past few years, but never more then one at a time. Three is a personal record, and they were coming within 30 feet of the glass.

Among other things, it makes me wish I had a window office again. Presumably I’ll end up with one during the next move. Right, Mark?

I should have lugged my D60 into work today.

I’m back from vacation. Now for the fun part–recovering from the vacation. You take a week off, and you find yourself with two weeks worth of work waiting for you when you get back.

The trip itself went well. The kids had fun, and the ancient motorhome didn’t quite manage to self-destruct (although it tried–the oil pressure fell through the floor a half hour into the trip, and it took a couple hours to get it straightened out).

I’ll probably provide more details later, but for now, here are a few pictures. These are all 1152x768, formatted for my Powerbook’s display.

Wedding photography is a weird thing; it’s hard to get into, and hard to get out of. I’ve been shooting around one wedding per year since 2001. I’ve never advertised or tried to find weddings to shoot, but friends keep asking me for prices, so I keep doing it. One of these years, I’ll either give it up or try for 4-5 weddings per year, but for now one per year is quite enough stress, thank you.

I signed up this year’s wedding this afternoon. The bride is a friend of my sister’s, and one of her bridesmaids (from the wedding I shot in 2002). They’re getting married in July and were having a hard time finding a photographer. So I’m at it again.

In many ways, shooting weddings is the most stressful thing I’ve ever been paid to do. It’s amazingly nerve-wracking; during the ceremony, you’re basically just hanging on for dear life, trying not to miss anything important while balancing dozens of things in your head. Lighting, angle, framing, figuring up what’s coming up next and where you should be to shoot it, managing rolls of film/flash cards/buffer space, all while trying not to get in anyone’s way or make a spectacle of yourself. The posed pictures aren’t a lot better, because you’re always short on time and people always need to be somewhere else. So, you can’t find the bridesmaids when it’s time for their pictures, and you’re running 10 minutes late already, and the bride forgot that Aunt Mildred was going to be in town, so can we take a couple pictures with her, too?

The crazy thing is that I actually enjoy this. Something must be wrong with me.

Wow, a new personal record. Gabe’s birthday pictures are online and they’re under 24 hours old. Considering that some of the shots that I posted yesterday had been sitting around since July, I’m happy that these are off of my laptop hard drive already.

It looks like we’ve survived the weekend. Saturday’s pictures went okay; I haven’t had time to finish sorting them yet, but there are 170 “okay” pictures. I’ll probably take a second pass through those in a few minutes and pull out 30 or so good ones for printing.

Gabe’s birthday party left us exhausted, but it’s over, and he and his 19 closest friends had a good time. I think he now has a bigger dinosaur collection then any museum on the west coast, and the scary thing is that he recognizes and can name all of them. We gave him one on Friday, and it was labeled ”Corythosaurus.” Gabe took one look at it and insisted that it was a Lambeosaurus. I started to correct him when my wife pointed to the label where it said that the Corythosaurus is in the Lambeosaurinae family. It’s not quite the same as a Lambeosaurus, but it’s frighteningly good for a 4-year-old. (If you don’t know what any of this is, you clearly don’t have a dino-obsessed 4-year-old in the family).

Other then that, I spent most of my free time sorting and organizing pictures. My photo gallery has a ton of new pictures. They’re nearly all family snapshots, so don’t go looking for great art, but last year’s Christmas-card pictures are finally up, and the kids look cute. More importantly, there are now two additional DVDs worth of photos in my backup pile, and over 5GB of free disk space on my laptop.

Finally, I spent a bit more time working on svn.scottstuff.net. I have a set of scripts that’ll update the HTML project pages automatically whenever anything is checked in via Subversion, so all of the HTML pages stay up to date. I’m trying to add a CSS list-driven menu to all of the pages, but the CSS is killing me; for some reason, I can’t get everything to highlight right in Safari, or at all in Firefox. Oh, well. Once that’s done, I’ll retrofit it into everything that shares my blog’s CSS file. After that, I’ll probably re-do the CSS and change the color scheme to something more suitable to photography; the yellowish background throws color perception out of whack, and the Movable Type template that I’ve been using is starting to bug me; I’m sure I can do better now, so I’ll probably scrap the CSS and start over from scratch, aiming for a site-wide style instead of a MT-centric style stretched to cover other stuff. I might even be convinced to drop MT, if I could find anything that would work better for me.

It’s going to be a busy weekend this weekend. Gabe’s 4th birthday party is on Sunday at the Children’s Museum. Counting adults, I think we’re up around 50 people attending. On Saturday evening, we’re going to a party for two of my cousin’s kids. Saturday morning, we’re taking Easter pictures of the kids to mail out to family, so tonight I need to prepare for the pictures by picking up rental lights from Glazer’s, clearing out all of the old, unsorted pictures that are filling up my laptop’s hard drive and most of my flash cards, re-profile my monitor, and get ready to process a big batch of pictures. I also need to mow the yard, fix a couple bugs in the script that drives svn.scottstuff.net, and get ready for the Cisco 7940 that UPS is supposed to deliver on Monday.

Oh, yeah. And sleep. I need some of that.

I’ve posted a few sets of pictures at http://scottstuff.net/gallery. Right now, there aren’t a lot of pictures there, and they aren’t my best by any stretch, but at least they’re available. I’ll try to add more as time goes on. Of course, I’ve tried to do that for years, and never really found a workflow that works right for me. I’ve went for quick-and-easy this time instead of complex-and-flexible; maybe I’ll be able to stick with it for once.

I’ve had at least one complaint that there’s something wrong with the gallery when viewed in IE on XP, but I know that it’s worked for other people. Sigh. I love Windows.