I’ll share my thoughts about the Summer of Love Reunion Concert in Monterey this weekend as soon as I recover from the effects of the Jesus Weed. In the mean time, have a look at some of the sights.

Many more pictures soon!

Occasionally thedude finds beauty in things that are not exploding or spewing flames! This weekend’s trip to Bass Lake found us sipping cool beers on the deck at Ducey’s while enjoying this splendid view.

I had so much fun on Wednesday at the Fire Festival, that I went back for more on Saturday. I just had to see the incredible Dance, Dance, Immolation again, where one misstep on the digital dance floor can cost contestants dearly, as seen below. What fun!!

If you’d like to see more of my pictures from the Fire Arts Festival, just click here!

We made a promise to ourselves that we’d never miss another Fire Festival at the Crucible. The sights and sounds are just so cool, er, hot. So flaming-hot-stainless-pneumatic-alien-stilt-walker strange. So smack-you-in-the-face with a white-hot-stove-pipe cool. A billion BTU’s of climate-changing fun. You jus’ hafta see it to believe it.

More pictures coming soon.

Hey Dude,

Have a look – it looks super cool! – it’s dye-sub printed directly on a sound-absorbent panel.
Thanks for allowing us to use the pic!!

Best regards from Copenhagen -

Sten Jauer,
Art Director

LAND DESIGNLAB APS | VESTERGADE 12A 3 | DK-1456 COPENHAGEN | DENMARK

Thanks, Sten! I think it looks great too. :)

I finally found a way to get my wife more involved with thedude.com. Sure, she’s already the number one subject on this site, but I always wanted her to contribute a little more than just her beautiful smile. Now she can!

See the little image in the upper-right? That’s her most recently uploaded iPhone image. Kelly put this image here – all by herself. How? Well, I created a private e-mail address on my server which, when e-mailed, strips out the attached image – resizes, sharpens and compresses it, then creates a thumbnail with a link to the full-size image. A little modification to the blog’s main page template, and the uploaded image and text appear “automagically” on this page. The script even uses the message body as a caption for the image. Cool! Instant publishing from a cell phone!

Now Kelly can upload an image with an optional caption to the blog at any time. She loves that fact that she can participate in the publishing process without any input or oversight from thedude.

I plan to emulate my pal Jason and use all of the uploaded phone-cam images to create some sort of collage page or something, (reload page for random phone images.) but that’ll have to wait for now. I’m very happy just to have this working.

By the way, it was fairly easy to implement all of this on my server using procmail, ripmime and ImageMagick. If you’re interested in such things, have a look at my procmail recipe.

Many thanks to our hosts Hi-Suk and San Ju for a wonderful day at their gorgeous country home in Guinda, Califirnia. (Don’t feel too bad – we never heard of Guinda, either.) July 4th was the hottest day of the year so far – at least 110 degrees. Ugh! Luckily, the couple have a gigantic pool for the children and pets and plenty of ice-cold margaritas for the rest of us. Yum!

View the rest of the day’s images here.

In a perfect stroke of luck/magic, I have a new coworker, who is also the Director of a very cool wine and food event called Pinot Days. Nice – another wine and food lover in our midst. One who routinely throws parties for 4,000 friends. I’m impressed!

This is the first event I ever shot entirely with my D40x. I still have a lot to learn about this camera, but as of today, here are some of my observations.

Pros:

• The camera body is very small and light. (All of my lenses look and feel huge on the D40x. Almost all of them weigh more than the body!)
• The shutter is smooth and quiet. It makes you want to keep shooting.
• The camera feels fast.
• Images look almost as good as those form the D2X.

Cons:

• My best lenses will not focus automatically. I’m learning to manually focus my 14mm lens. This leads to a lot of squinting and too many out-of-focus shots.
• The camera is too small. Controls feel a little cramped and are definitely harder to use than those on the D2X. And eyeglass wearers may find that there is no way to use this camera without smudging their right right lens – probably related to the next con…
• Minimal eye-relief. If I wear my clip-ons over my prescription glasses, the LED information in the viewfinder sometimes disappears. To compensate, I have to press the camera hard to my eyeglasses and move the camera around to find the display. This does not help the manual focus problem at all because the little green dot you must use to focus manually is in the extreme lower-left corner of the display.
• One of the reasons the camera feels fast is because it’s saving smaller images in JPEG format vs. the RAW I’m used to shooting. There is no support for this camera ’s RAW images in PhotoShop CS – a significant problem.

More as I get better acquainted with the D40x.