Scabies

The doctor just recently informed us that my 3 year old daughter probably has scabies. It is soooo nasty! I feel horrible, my daughter comes towards me with her arms extended looking for love, wanting nothing else than the comfort of a father’s hug, and all I can think is “eeewww gross!”

I want her to “love” me more than my ex (her mama) so I usually let her do whatever she wants. You don’t want to brush your teeth? Fine, whatever they’re just baby teeth anyways. You don’t want to bathe? Fine whatever, I t’s not like I bathe very often either. But now it’s different. There is absolutely no way I’m going to let her go to bed without taking a shower first. Get those nasty bugs off her. But oh my goodness. As soon as she realized that I was going to give her a bath, and that I wasn’t joking, she starting screaming like I was about to kill her. She was screaming for half an hour like she was getting tortured by the Taliban. I was seriously worried that my neighbors where going to call the police. It sounded like a horror movie inside my bathroom.

Oh my goodness! That’s all I can say is “Oh my goodness!”

I’ve created a monster.

Photoshoot

Here are a few pictures from yesterdays photoshoot!

No Tengo Ropa!!!

album

Graphistudio is having a promotion for photographers where they offer an album for 30% off and a second studio sample album for free. Today is the deadline and I went ahead and took advantage of it. I decided to print my November 21st wedding for the first album and the second one is going to be my July 4th wedding. Here are a few pages from the first album… not too bad I think.

couple at windansea beach (san diego)

this pictures is from Monday’s photo shoot, I tried using the pocket wizards again, this time with a 420ex instead of the 580ex and they worked without a hiccup. I got really lucky with the weather, we had the perfect amount of cloud cover. Just enough to add a little dramatic effect.

Sunday’s Photoshoot

The latest official photoshoot of my daughter Camila, she was quite eager to let me take her picture but not very willing to follow directions, including the part about not eating chocolate during the shoot. Hence the gunk on her face.

Windows 7 sucks…

I recently obtained a copy of Windows 7. I did this so I would be able to use Adobe Premiere and AfterEffects CS5. They only run on 64 bit operating systems so my 32 bit copy of Windows XP was apparently not going to cut it anymore. Looking back I should have just gotten an old copy of a 64bit version of Windows XP.

I used Windows 7 for one week before I just gave up and went back to Windows XP. One would imagine that when a manufacturer upgrades one of their products that it would be to add new features and increase reliabilty, but apparently that’s not how Microsoft operates. Anyways, enough of my whining, let’s get down to specifics.

-it takes a million extra steps to create a restore point

-won’t recognize my canon 20D

-constantly deactivates one of my video cards which means I’m regularly uninstalling it and having to restart the system to reinstall the driver

-won’t let me select and open more than 15 files at a time! According to Microsoft this was done on purpose and there is no way around it. Which means that when I have to edit a wedding, consisting of several hundred images, sometimes up to a thousand, I have to edit them in batches of 15 ! ! ! !

-it doesn’t include and won’t even run Outlook Express, and it’s replacement, Live Mail, makes it a million times harder to sync all of my computers for anything other than a hotmail account. I don’t use web based e-mail accounts for work so now I’m stuck having to check and reply to emails from a single computer. I was going to go into the details of why this is so but it was too long of an explanation.

-won’t let me grant network access to entire hard drives, I keep my images on separate hard drives so this was an issue, I got around it though by transferring everything into a new folder within the harddrive. This was a pain though because it meant that I had to change the path of all of my shortcuts and photoshop actions since all of my files were now in a new location.

-speaking of networks, I keep back ups of everything on a separate computer within my network. The folder where I keep all of my jpegs contains 155 image files and 85 folders containing many more images. Some containing several thousand. When windows 7 opens up this file it will very slowly begin to create thumbnails for each folder and file, about half way down though it just gives up. And although I could care less about the thumbnails, the problem is that anything without a thumbnail gets denied network access by windows 7. So I am forced to do all of the back up related actions on the non-Windows 7 based computers in my network.

I’m sure there is more for me to complain about but it’s been a while since I used that wretched system and the bitter memories are no longer as fresh.

photo shoot in balboa park

Pictures from a recent portrait session. Not too bad I think. It was my first time using the miniTT1 and flexTT5 radio transmitters, so I had some problems since I didn’t yet realize the extent of the interference problems caused by the 580EX flashes. They did manage to work a few times though, as is evident in the first and last images.

hacked

As if I didn’t have enough to worry about already, I just discovered that my website (sbaphotography.com) got hacked by spammers. It looks like it’s been like this for a little over a week. The only reason I even noticed was because I just happened to update my wedding portfolio today, and in the process, I did a quick Google search for my site and discovered that it had been completely dropped by not only Google but by all the search engines. Apparently spammers managed to access my htaccess file and made it so that all of the search engines got redirected to a viral site every time they crawled my site. I fixed the file but now I’m worried that they might have altered something else or that they might try it again, or even attempt something worse. Who knows how long it will take now for the search engines to start indexing me again.

Camila Sofia's first photoshoot

Camila is doing much better. She was at Mary Birch Hospital for a total of 2 months... I think, or was it 3? Usually I'd check my pictures to see what day this or that happened but my hard drive had a total melt down whilst at the hospital, and now I'm missing most of the pictures I took from March to August. Anyways, here are some updated snapshots of the little whippersnapper (taken September 28th, 2008). Sept 28th!?!?! Wow, I can't believe how time flies. I really should start getting ready for another photo shoot.

Camila Sofia

For those of you who haven't met her, this is my daughter Camila Sofia. She was born on June 3rd 2008 with a few complications. The first picture was taken when she was 4 days old and the second at 17 days. The edema is gone now and she is breathing room air on her own. The arterial line is gone and so are most of the IVs. The only thing we're waiting for now is for her to eat entirely on her own. Once that happens, they'll take out the last IV line and we'll probably be able to take her home.

my little dude (or dudette)

check out my little dude. supposedly 14 weeks and 2 days old in this picture... i think he (she) kinda looks like a monkey a little bit, oh well, you win some you lose some :)

cable

well, the cable guy came by tonight. Apparently they just now found out that I have been getting free cable for the last three and a half years. LOL! It took them long enough.

Mama Rat (a.k.a. Bonita Bonita)

it's so sad. My mama rat is in her last dying days and I think it might be better if I put her down before I leave to go to Mexico. So so sad. She used to be such a vivacious little thing, now she's just a bag of skin and bones who can barely pick herself up when she falls (which is often).

DT's

Damn, i think I'm having withdrawals. I ran out the door today at around 1:45AM to get a beer before the 2AM curfew and wouldn't you know it, my car battery was dead. Who would have thunk that that little door light would drain a car battery in less than 2 days. I looked around frantically for someone to give me a jump start but to no avail. I could feel my chest starting to tighten up and the cold air was making it more difficult to breath. I thought crap what do I do? What do I do?! Of course! I can probably get a spark if I roll my car down the hill and get the alternator moving. So that's what I did, I pushed the car back a few feet, jumped in and let it roll down the hill. The little Kia was accelerating quickly but still it wouldn't start. Come on come on! Start damn you. 20 mph and still NOTHING! The car slowed down as it reached the end of the slope. I turned the key one last time. Nothing. Not a peep. I looked around. I was on the road about a quarter mile away from my apartment and there was no way I'd be able to get that car up the hill. Looked at the clock. 2:02AM and still no beer. No choice now but to push the car into a safe spot and wait until the morrow, and as I struggled to pushed it into a parking spot it occurred to me, THE CAR WAS STILL IN NEUTRAL!!! Damn it, how was the alternator going to turn if the car wasn't even in gear?!?! Oh well, nothing I can do now except rummage through my medicine cabinet for some scope and a few ounces of rubbing alcohol which might together get me through the night.

Yosemite in November

Alright so here's some of the stuff from Yosemite (November 24th, 2006), I can't post them all up, way too many for that, here's a couple though...








All right I think that's enough, I also have a panoramic image on my home page which I probably won't leave up for long, so don't be surprised if you look and it's no longer there (www.sbaphotography.com)