fling93 loves fishies

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Friday Cat Blogging, Special Saturday Edition

Yes, Miette. I know. I've been lax with the kitty cat pictures that I promised for Blogs Sweeps Week. I know that this is trying your patience. I already explained the extenuating circumstances.

Yes, your worshipfulness. I know that excuses mean nothing to you. Yes, I know fully well that you can kill me with your brain. I am correcting the issue as we speak. Yes, I know you are displeased that I am reduced to blatantly ripping off Fafblog! for my material.

Nat and Cat

Yeah, I think I bit off more than I can chew this week. 15 units of classes at San Jose State plus I'm attending another class I'm considering adding (no, I'm not planning on taking 18 units, but I haven't figured out which class to drop yet so I'm still attending all of them), plus working part-time at my last job (well hey, it's a helluva much higher paid position than that of most of my classmates), and then spending a ridiculous amount of time on the silly 2005 Mix CD. And apparently, now I'm also on the photography staff of the Spartan Daily (although they've yet to run anything of mine yet).

So that's why no update so far.

Well, I promised the Top 6 of my favorite kitty photos, so you'll still get a Top 6. I just probably won't finish all 6 within Sweeps Week (“Oh, boo hoo!” you say). And as I have way too many favorite Natalie Portman photos, I'm not going to actually go through the trouble of ranking them. Instead, I'll just upload 6 of them in no particular order. I hope none of you mind (not like you got much choice in the matter).

So, in case you hadn't already noticed, here's a random photo of the hotness that is Natalie Portman. It's not a great quality scan, but I love the picture anyway. And of course, now that I'm obsessed with photography, I now can tell that this is a nice use of depth of field, having her dreamy eyes in sharp focus and the rest of her gradually getting out of focus.

Anyway, here's my number 5 favorite kitty cat photo (yeah, if you've already gone through my Flickr account, all of these will be familiar). Ready? One… two… three… Awwww!

That's all for now! Come back later! How much later? How should I know? That's why they invented RSS feeds.

Kicking off Blog Sweeps Week

Well, Blog Sweeps Week is upon me (banner courtesy of Ealasaid). Geez, actually it started yesterday, which doesn't bode well for me. I've never really tried to maximize my traffic, mostly using this thing as a place to put essays. I'm told that lists work pretty well, so I guess this week would be a good time for me to write up the post for my “My 2005 Mix CD” (especially since we're exchanging the CDs tomorrow) as well as “My Top Ten Films of 2005.” So stay tuned for those. And in case you were curious, here was my 2004 Mix CD and my Top Ten Films of 2004 and of 2003.

Aside from that, I know posting more frequently would help, and of course, kitty cats and sex are always money in the blog world (thus the banner). To tie this in with my first and my second obsessions, I think I'll also post my favorite photos my kitty cat, Miette, as well as my favorite photos of the hotness that is Natalie Portman (alas, none of which were taken by me). But to keep y'all coming back, I'm going to spread these out throughout the week. I would do a top 7, but because I'm a day late, I guess it'll be top 6.

So without further ado, here's my Number 6 favorite photograph of my adorable kitty cat, Miette. Click on the photo for a larger version. This was from a few years ago. Isn't she cute? She's soooo cute! Come back for more!

Speaking of cute, stay tuned later today for the Number 6 picture of Natalie Portman.

Gosh, grubbing for traffic feels so degrading.

Oh no! He's got a camera! Run away!

Yeah, I don't plan on turning this into a photo blog or anything, but since I already talked about my recent exploration of some more artistic endeavors and posted a musical example, I figured I ought to post a photographic one as well.

I guess everybody who starts off getting into photography inevitably takes these generic pictures of flowers. Oh no! Run away! Run away! Yeah, I don't think it's anything special or that I have any talent. It's just the culmination of what I've learned so far starting to come together, namely depth of field, the importance of holding the camera steady, shutter speed, ISO settings, and grain.

I had trouble getting a clean shot — everything was coming out blurry — and so I tried bumping up the ISO and shutter speed. It worked, but this introduced some grain into the shot. And I recall hearing an episode of the Tips from the Top Floor podcast that talked about how to introduce grain to add character to black and white shots, and so I figured a photo that already had grain might look better in black and white (especially since the flower was white anyway).

And so it did.

As always, you can see other pictures I've taken at my Flickr account. Warning! I don't always do a thorough job of filtering out the bad shots — sometimes I dump everything on the camera to Flickr so that I can go through and filter and tag them at my leisure from multiple computers. So there's a lot of junk in there.

And also, for anybody out there who has never met me, you can see what I look like. Yeah, I'm kinda goofy-looking. That's why I put them fishies on the blog instead.