I Don't Get It

Spotted on the street yesterday:
The low pants have been out of style for at least three years.
The green hat was like part of a halloween costume.
His T-shirt is still around his neck, but otherwise off. Is it smart to advertise your abs when your re-pregged woman is right behind you?

Except for the shoes (which probably cost the same as a month's supply of baby food and diapers) this clown isn't wearing ANY of his clothes correctly. I would hate to find out that he works in a hospital, although that would be a stretch.
Fry cook?
Even that worries me.

(Sorry, but I'm getting cranky in my old age).





Here's something I knocked out last night:
(The picture, not the whisky). I'm saving it for a special occasion, like an emergency Civil War style amputation or maybe the start of the NBA regular season.



Last night was amazing.
Had to be the worst thunder storm since way before the drought started.
It was scary for awhile, but I loved every minute of it.
Just wish I could figure out how the water got into our garage.

Introspection (Looking Inside)

I've had this photo rattling around in my head for well over a year and tonight I finally decided to just give it a try, fully expecting to learn something but then have to do the whole thing over.
But it turned out just like I imagined, and was far easier to make than expected.
10-15 minutes was all it took, with a handful of lighting tests, three exposures to get one of me I could live with, then 4 or five of the skull to get it placed exactly where it belongs so I didn't have to screw around in PhotoShop for an hour.



I wish I had so many teeth!

It's been a LONG time since I posted anything on Flickr or changed my FaceBook profile picture, so that's why I got off my ass and finally just did it.

Halloween 2009

We had less kids than 2007 (65 vs 100+) but it was a successful night.
My new witch Selma did a great job!
One time she whipped open the door and barked "What!?!" at the punkasses, which left them speechless.
The magic words "Trick or Treat" totally left their brains.
After some "Uhhh....Mmmm..." action, witch Josie said "Well??? Are you going to say Trick or Treat, or don't you know what you're doing?"
We laughed our asses off!

Only one or 2 kids got TacoBell sauce instead of a handful of candy this year, which is an improvement.
Hey--if your costume blows or you don't say the 3 simple words, you get tricked instead of treated.
I didn't write the rules, I just enforce them.


When they come near our house, scary noises coming from a speaker behind the headstone attract them rather nicely unless they are with one of those parents who's small mind is locked into only ringing doorbells if the porchlight is on.
I mean, don't they think the spinning light on the mailbox (not to mention flames) mean we might be playing Halloween? Yet numerous morons walk right past our house every year.

When kids run up our driveway, the blast of a 500 watt shoplight through my garage window always freezes their asses in place.
That's when we sometimes hear such gems as "Is that real fire?" or "I better not touch that or I'll get burned".
Well...duh.

Then they see a biker zombie pushing his skeleton victim into the flames of hell.
Strobe on zombie and a red bulb + amber strobe + smoke machine in the black box of doom under the skeleton.
This is my new scene for this year, and it looked pretty cool in action.

If they are brave enough to make it onto our porch, the simple yet effective trick of hiding sheets of big bubble wrap under a rug gives the little weiners a final scare.


For the future: More automation so I can actually see the kids instead of spending all my time pushing buttons to activate everything. And if I could be in a scary costume wandering around our yard, there's no limit to the mayhem.

I'm designing a mechanical Jack'O'Lantern that's chewing on Elmo.

From bands past I have some experience building and using dry ice fog effects on the cheap, so there's some more ideas floating around.

But as long as one new thing gets added each year, I'm happy.
The leftover candy is good, too.

San Pedro Springs Park

Some of us in my photography club had a meet and shoot yesterday at the title location.
Those of us with flashes and umbrellas/softboxes were passing along our knowledge and techniques to the others, while shooting the breeze and meeting new folks and just plain having fun taking pictures.
Chrissy had to work, and Sylvia wasn't interested in modeling, so I spent the last hour of daylight shooting infrared with my F828 (The Toronto Special).

Should have shot this one 5 minutes sooner--the shadows were creeping upwards fast.

This photo is growing on me. At first I didn't like the shadows but now I think they enhance a mood.
Professional photographer and all-around fun guy Chris Pichado said of these:"Keith - your infrared shots never fail to amaze me. You've got such a wicked eye for great compositions already, throwing a curveball to what the nekkid eye can see just adds so dang much to it. :-) LOVE em!"
Chris's energy and talent helped push our little party into high gear, once he finally got there. I was a guest at a wedding he was shooting and got jealous of his skills at directing models as well as his excellent results.

For example, this photo of me is a Pichado:
Within seconds of seeing what my hand was doing he got Sylvia to shoot me from the left and Juan (the organizer of the event and owner of the gallery where I have shows) to do the same from the right.
Boom, done, next! And he managed to make it fun for me, which is amazing.

Speaking of Juan, he suggested we meet at La Tuna afterwards and within 30 minutes we had stopped allowing the staff to pick up our empties so he could take this pic for fun, using my flash.

We had a great time all day!

And I nailed down some wall space for my next gallery show.
The First Friday of December, 7-10+pm, 121 Blue Star #5.
Preview Thursday Night and Post-View Saturday not yet confirmed.
My theme will be "Christmas In San Antonio" so you've already seen some of the prints I'll be hanging.
This is my first showing since May '08, and I'm excited to be doing it again.

More from the shoot coming soon

Chalk It Up! 2009

This is the 4th year in a row that we've gone to Chalk It Up!, the downtown art fair put on by Art Pace.














Check my archives (October 2006/7/8) for more photos.

Death Visits Views Of Texas

It's probably going to slow down again around here for some time.
Blog Death is here, and he's demanding my attention.

First, there's Los Spurs.
Pre-Season has already started and I've made a personal commitment to become an even bigger (and more annoying) fan than ever before.
After many years of depending on just cable TV and the SA Express-News for my data and opinion, towards the end of last year I stumbled upon a wild internet forum that's been good for keeping the black and silver components of my blood circulating during the long hot summer.
From there I recently found 48 Minutes Of Hell, which isn't bad for a blog written by some college kid.
The regular season starts before Halloween, which brings us to part 2.

Unlike 2008, it looks like I'm not working on Halloween Night.
After a much-needed year off I'm eager to terrorize the street again, then give them all good candy.
As always, my goal is to get at least one person to admit in front of their group that they momentarily lost control of their bladder.
It's happened a few times before and never fails to make me proud of my work.
Especially when it happens to a parent.
Much work is needed because until very recently my calendar had something pencilled-in for the 31st, and suddenly it's too late.

What I'm saying is that I need to get my head in the game(s) and can't predict if this means more pics of what I'm doing or less photos overall because I'm super-busy.
And how will I compensate for the loss of Witch #1, who got free tickets to the Notre Dame game at the AlamoDome that night?



Above pic is of my new skull.
It's good to finally have a spare after they discontinued parts for the one I have.
Much more anatomically correct than my old skull, this one's a little smaller than lifesize but close enough.
The single new aquisition in '09 and I only bought it for photos, with no idea how it can be used in the show.
Much work to be done...

A Fertile Mind

Sprouting new ideas?

I love this little skull pot that I found at WalMart for $2, including a jade plant.
A leftover from Halloween, hidden in a corner of the garden dept in January.
The original idea was to grow thin turf that simulates hair, but my grass seed was old and didn't sprout at all.
Plan B kind of worked with some leftover banana pepper seeds.

I'm still going to do the grass someday.

Skull Candy

Just prior to feeding I asked Candy (our albino corn snake) to pose for me.

Two Notes For Next Time:
1) Make sure to set-up all the flash gear and backgrounds before taking the snake out of her tank!
One-handed set-up has been proven possible, but snakes have a tendency to wrap themselves around anything within reach, like light stands and cameras etc.
2) Don't ask a snake to stay where you put them when they're at a high body temp, like just before a feeding. I control her temperature and therefore activity level using dimmer-controlled lamps, and right before a feeding is the absolute worst time for taking pictures like this.
Like shooting hyper dogs or kids.

I had just taken her out of the tank when this photo popped into my head, so I accepted the challenge and went for it despite having only one free hand to place all the gear and make adjustments. Glad it worked.
I have a new respect for animal wranglers on photo and movie sets.

The reason for this shot was to have something new for Flickr and all my other outlets as well as for a new header on my BLISS band photoblog.

What's Inside My Head? (Now Featuring Martha Stewart)

Is the Holiday Whirlwind finished with us yet?


As things settled down to normal I found myself re-Photoshopping the San Fernando photo for prints, which are selling nicely right now thanks to a very special lady.
We secured next year's Christmas Cards at a great price, which is cool because the prints I add cost a bit more than WalMart charges for a 4x6".

I'm also putting my portfolio back together, filling the holes from sales and gifts over the last 8 months plus adding the new stuff. This requires packaging and framing supplies which were bought in bulk today so I'll be ready at all times.

Sunday night was the first real chance I had to play around with my most-needed Christmas present. It's a Westcott 32" Shoot-Through Umbrella, and I really like both the construction and results.
You have all seen photographers with umbrellas. The short version is that it turns a small light source such as a flash into a bigger and more-even light source, which can change everything about the quality of light on your subject.

That's my excuse for enjoying the construction of the following shots of a little stuffed toy and an empty Jagermeister bottle I picked up in a bar parking lot.
Did the first on Sunday night but woke up Monday with more ideas.
They might be useful for my band's web presence or not.
We'll see.





Continuing with the skull theme, I have been a longtime follower of Skull-A-Day where a guy showed the photo of each different piece of skull art he produced every single day over 1 year, in an amazing number of media.
I came in somewhere in the middle and enjoyed the hell out of it, but now that the project is over the site is more about his fan's "art" and the inevitable book deal bloggers get when they're clever and good.

There are some downloadable stencils at Skull-A-Day so on Monday night I cut myself a pair with an ExActo knife and tried them out on some old and scratched-up black background material.
The original sized result is on the left, my 65% version on the right, and it's stencil is angled up the middle featuring flat white Krylon over-spray.

This photo is all about photographic mistakes--we all make them, but do we find and fix them before it's too late?
It's a nice reflection of my new umbrella, which kinda ruins what I was going for.

**********Important Edit**********
Firstly, the correct answer to this post's title of "What's Inside My Head?" is:

A skull


Secondly, in a remarkable synchronicity of internet magic and luck, I present this screenshot of one of the above photos lurking inconspicuously in the corner of a webpage at the aforementioned Skull-A-Day website in fairly close proximity to Martha Stewart herself:

The Skull guy was on her show and it looks like they were making potato-skull ink stamps together.
Awesome.

As far as me and Martha hooking-up, it was due to her post moving far enough down his page so that it was next to the Blogger gadget that's in his Skull-A-Day code011010 plucking images from Flickr with the proper tag.
Short Version: A lucky catch on my part.

I knew my pic would show up on the site eventually due to the tag--I just got lucky to have stumbled upon it during the handful of hours when it was near Martha so I could document the special occasion.