Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5.6, 1/125 sec, ISO800 “Crazy Kitten” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！How’s it going?
So, my wife and kids are in Japan for a month and I am at home with the two kittens and the dog. Which means that I get plenty of “attention”.
We’ve had cats for about 18 years now, but it’s been a while since we had kittens. I don’t remember if our previous kittens were as naughty as these two are – they will knock everything off of any surface they can reach (or jump onto) and generally wreak havoc around the house. Yesterday, one of them even fell into the new aquarium! 😠
But when they get sleepy they are very cute. For instance, the photo above is their normal way of sleeping. Crazy, huh? These two sisters are really funny! So, I guess all the trouble is worth it. 🐱 Maybe.
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/3.2, 1/950 sec, ISO400 “Old Glory” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！Hi, how’s it going?
Today it’s Independence Day here in the States, and I spent it at home relaxing, watching a lot of baseball, and doing a lot of research for the new aquarium. I have a rough plan for how I want to decorate it, and the mockup is below:
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5, 1/125 sec, ISO2500 “The Plan” Cedar Park, 2016
I want to keep the tank kind of simple, with a black and white color scheme, with the black being some flat shale rocks, one standing, and two flat, and the white being the substrate (gravel). Then, I’d like to have at least two type of plants, maybe three. After the success of growing plants in the small aquarium, I realize that they can grow fast! So, I am going to start with just a few and see how it goes. The mockup only shows the starter plants, but I’d like to have it pretty lush in the back of the tank, and keep the front and left side of the tank open.
As for fish, I will keep this a barb tank, and add a Siamese algae eater or two. And then I should have enough room to get a few more barbs. I saw some green barbs at the pet store today, so I might go for those. The last thing will by my Malaysian trumpet snails. I hope they thrive!
Anyways, I hope you had a nice day, and we’ll see you tomorrow!
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/3.2, 1/125 sec, ISO4000 “Old and New” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！Hi, how are you?
Today I noticed a small crack in the side of our 10-gallon aquarium. It’s funny because it just popped up out of nowhere! (I’m pretty sure nothing hit into the glass) Anyways, I was worried that the crack may grow and I’d have a huge mess on my hands, so I went out and bought a new 20-gallon aquarium kit.
I’ve wanted a larger aquarium for a while now and the 20-gallon kit was on sale. It includes the essentials such as cover, lighting, filter, thermometer, and heater. I also decided to go with a very light-colored substrate that I always found attractive. It will be a nice change from the river-gravel we’ve been using in our 10-gallon tank.
In the photo below, you can see some of the steps I went through to get the new tank up and running. The trickiest part was moving the new aquarium into the old one’s spot. Basically what I did was to transfer about 70% of the water out of the 10-gallon tank into the 20-gallon tank. Then I could safely move the smaller tank to the bench. Then, I transferred the water back into the old tank, using a 1-gallon jug. Finally, I could move the new tank to the table, added the new white substrate, then filled the tank up with clean, treated tap water and added some of the decorations from the old tank (after cleaning them). You can see the present condition in the photo at the top of this post.
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/5.6, 1/125 sec, ISO1250 “Transferring” Cedar Park, 2016
I checked the condition of the crack in the old tank, and it seems like it isn’t growing, which is good news. That means I have some time to let the water in the new tank get ready, and also plan out how I want to decorate the new tank. I’m doing some research now (which is fun!) but I’m pretty sure I’d like to use more live plants. They look so nice and it’s cool to watch them grow. And with double the space, we can get more fish! 🐠
And don’t forget about my precious Malaysian Trumpet Snails! In fact, I added one to the new tank already and he’s cruising around. 🐌 I hope he survives and helps prep the tank by conditioning the water. Speaking of water conditioning, I cut a small piece of the biological filter and added it to the new biological filter to kick-start it a bit.
One thing I have not done in the past is to test the water’s chemical levels but with this new tank I think I will begin doing that and taking more steps to keep it nice. Our current tank is looking a bit ragged! So, just more things to research and learn, which is fun. 😄
Well, I think I will call it a night. I’ve been up since 3am (for an airport drop-off) and it is already 12:30am. I’ll have to post-date this blog entry since it is so late. 😴
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/4, 1/125 sec, ISO1250 “Homework Kitty” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！Hi, how’s it going?
Tomorrow my wife and kids are leaving for a summer vacation trip, so today was spent preparing and packing. In the photo above, you can see our son Koa working on his Japanese homework, and our kitten Yuzu is keeping him company, as cats do. 🐱 I took the photo using standard Fujfilm Provia film simulation, then I edited the JPEG in Nik Silver Efex Pro 2, which is a great way to convert to black and white and find just the right look.
Starting tomorrow I will be a summer bachelor for a while but I still have two cats and a dog to keep me company so I shouldn’t be too lonely. I’ll also have some tasks to do around the house and I predict that I will be spending a lot of time at work too, trying to get ahead on projects while I have the chance to put in a few extra hours.
This will be maybe the 4th time I’ve been a summer bachelor so I am pretty used to it and know what to expect… but this year will be different in a not so good way – Mariko did not cook a big pot of curry for me to live off of! What am I gonna do? 😧 🍛
This evening after dinner, we went to an arcade called Pinballz to play some games. This arcade is really cool because they have dozens of pinball machines, from very old classics to some relatively new ones. It was so nostalgic to see all these machines from my childhood memories! Isn’t it cool when you can awaken those memories that haven’t seen the light of day for many years? The human brain is amazing… memories that have been buried for so long can somehow reappear!
Pinballz also has old video games as well, many of them I haven’t played for 30 years or so, including Zaxxon and Wizard of Wor. I had a lot of fun playing those games with my brother back at the mall in our hometown. A wonderful period of my life, the ’80s!
Besides all the fun games, Pinballz Lakeline also serves food and beer. Mariko and I shared a nice draft brew while we played pinball with the kids. I was so much fun… I’m looking forward to visiting again in the future.
Today’s photo is of my son showing off his skills. For the post-processing of this indoor shot, I first used Perfect Exposure, which is a free plugin for Lightroom. It can quickly fix poorly exposed photos, like the ones I took in the dark arcade, which has lots of different types of lighting. Next, I adjusted the vibrance and saturation in Lightroom, added a little bit of grain, and voila! All done.
As you can see from today’s photo, we had sushi! It’s my son’s 15th birthday today, so we went to his favorite restaurant to dine on delicious Japanese food. Our friend prepared this amazing selection of sushi, which included some beef! It was all so yummy, I could have eaten all night.
I’m so happy that our kids are relatively open-minded about food. My wife and I love to try so many different kinds of cuisines, so Bay and Koa are used to giving new foods a try. Of course they have certain foods that they really don’t like, for instance Bay cannot stand mushrooms, and Koa doesn’t like sushi rice (although he likes the fish). I am pretty sure that in time, they will grow to enjoy these foods as well! 😄
The photo below is from the box of uni (sea urchin) that we enjoyed. It was from Japan and was super delicious! I wish I could eat it every day. 🍣
Tonight’s photos were taken at a relatively high ISO of 6400, but the Fujifilm X-Trans II sensor handles it amazingly well. I don’t mind shooting at 6400 at all with my X100T, in fact, I have the Auto ISO range from 200-6400 which is something I would use only in extreme situations on my dslr. I think it is fantastic that cameras keep getting better at high-ISO. It’s the area where I think we can benefit the most.
I used the Fujifilm standard Provia film simulation for both of these photos, and in Lightroom I adjusted the white balance a tiny bit, deepened the blacks, brought back some shadows, and bumped up the vibrance a little. I then added a slight vignette and a some of grain, which is pretty much my standard look these days.
I hope you had a great Thursday. We’ve almost made it to the weekend!
Photo info: FUJIFILM X100T, 23mm, f/8, 1/1250 sec, ISO400 “Texas Sunset” Cedar Park, 2016
こんばんは！How’s it going?
This evening I happened to glance outside our window and see some light streaming above a cloud, so I grabbed my camera, ran upstairs and snapped this photo. I used the circular polarizer because I was shooting through a window, but I don’t know if it helped at all. I suppose it could have reduced any reflection, but I wonder if the angle was correct.
At any rate, I got a nice capture and decided to see what I can do in Lightroom. Normally I will import the jpeg and then apply a nice “S-shaped” tone curve, adjust vibrance and saturation, apply some grain and save for upload. But tonight I decided to spend a bit more time to do some more editing.
A fun thing I did was to paint in some selections using the Wacom tablet. First, I painted in some clarity and sharpening around edges of the center clouds to add detail. Secondly, I made a new brush to darken some areas using negative exposure. You can see in the top-right corner, and center-top that I darkened the sky a bit to add more variation. The tablet is so fun to use with Lightroom – I highly recommend getting one!
To add a bit more color, I adjusted the vibrance and saturation, but also added a few linear gradients. There’s one coming up from the bottom added some more warmth with a pale orange color and white-balance shift. Then up in the sky, I added one in the upper-right to add a touch of purple via white balance shift, and in the upper-left, some blue. It’s really fun to add color gradients or white balance edits this way. I did it quite a bit in another photo of mine several months ago.
I think the final image of the cloud is a bit exaggerated, but I like it. I think it could have been even better if there was a jet streaking across the sky leaving a contrail behind, or even a few birds flying in the sky. Just one more element to add more interest.
Anyways, for comparison, here’s the original image:
If you use Lightroom and are curious, I’ve saved all my adjustments to a preset and shared it, along with the original JPEG below. I use Lightroom 5, but the preset probably works with other versions as well. Enjoy!
In other happenings, I was reading about the terrorist attack in Istanbul. How awful… so much violence in the world. 😔 Whenever I turn on the news, there are so many negative things being reported… floods, airplane crashes, hate crimes, etc… I almost would rather hide away from all that. But what can you do but focus on being positive? Teach your kids to be open-minded, respectful, and compassionate, especially when they are young. I guess that is a start.
Anyways, I hope you had some moments of joy today. Even the little things! 😄
