Salk SongTowers

It’s been a while in the making, but my new audiophile-quality sound system will finally be finished* with the arrival this coming Thursday of my Salk SongTower speakers. Over the last few months I have auditioned a number of speakers from manufacturers including Golden Ear, Dynaudio, Pyramid, PSB and Vandersteen, but for that combination of sound quality, build quality and appearance and, of course, value for money, the Salks won out.
Now, you may be thinking, “How come I have never heard of Salk before?” and you would not be the first. Salk is a pretty small company (Jim Salk himself answers the phone and answers email queries) in Michigan that I would describe as almost cult-like: there are no retailers or distributors involved, one purchases direct from the manufacturer. This throws up two main points. First, since you’re not dealing with middle-men you’re not paying the 50-100% mark-up that would push your speaker price through the roof at retail. That’s great. What isn’t, at first look, quite so great, is that you can’t just drop in to your local audiophile Hi-Fi store and try some of these speakers out. This is where the cult element comes in. Salk customers are a very happy bunch. So happy are they, that many of them open their homes to complete strangers to come and listen to their speakers! This is what happened in my case, in a roundabout way – my friend Tom visited a stranger’s home in the Bay area (I was in Hawai’i at the time or would have joined him) and was impressed enough to place his own order. I then had the luxury of listening to and inspecting Tom’s Salks before placing my own order. Pretty sweet!

The other advantage of Salk over those other brands is that every pair is hand made to order. Bespoke speakers for under $2K, now that ain’t bad. Take a look at Salk’s web site for some examples of standard and not-so-standard finishes to see what I mean. http://www.salksound.com/songtower%20images.htm
Our speakers will be finished in straight walnut so that they go with our walnut Noguchi table. How thoroughly delicious!!

*By “finished” I mean “have the correct number of components” – I am not sure any home audio system is ever truly finished…

New music

I recently discovered The Black Keys. I know, I know: where have I been? Well, I’m making up for lost time and now have three of their albums, two of which (The Big Come Up and Attack & Release) I have on 180g vinyl and the third (Brothers) on CD only – Brothers was my introduction to the band and an album I purchased before I had acquired my new turntable. Their newest offering, El Camino, comes out next week and, needless to say, I pre-ordered it some time ago and greatly look forward to receiving it (in vinyl, naturally) next week.

Any recommendations for other music I may have missed will be most welcome!

Greek mythology

I was at a colleague’s ‘daddy shower’ the other week. The organizer handed out sheets of paper with spaces for us to write an unusual baby name for each letter of the alphabet. Any you got that others didn’t scored a point (like Boggle.)
After a minute of frantically writing names I volunteered (volun-told?) to read off my list first. The person next to me (one of our grad students) read his list after a few others had read theirs.

For the letter ‘S’ he had written the name ‘Sysiphus’, which, of course, nobody else had. I leaned across and said, “With a name like Sysiphus in your list, perhaps *you* should have got the ball rolling.”
Blank look.
Ah well.

Still here…

Well, it’s been a while (just over a year, in fact) since my last post. I had kind of forgotten about my other life, to be honest, since taking a position at UC Merced as the program representative for The Center of Excellence for the Study of Health Disparities in Rural and Ethnic Underserved Populations (or Center of Excellence on Health Disparities for short…)

I was brought back to the world of the blog after seeing my last post (Holy batwings, Batman!) linked from a friend’s facebook page. My first reaction upon seeing the thumbnail photo, “Wow, I have a photo just like that! In fact… that looks like MY photo! Whoa! Somebody used my photo in a blog posting. Oh. It was me.” Or something like that.

Anyway, a lot has happened since I last wrote here. I now have a ‘real’ job but I am still plugging away part time at the photography and design gig. My wife also signed a book deal so I am drawing the illustrations and taking photographs for that project – depicting soft matter science in photographic and illustration form is not as easy as it might sound…

And I am still contributing to istockphoto.com and watching as the most unlikely images are downloaded again and again. Not that I’m complaining – it’s all good! But it is a little strange to think that my most popular image files are the most mundane of things – light fixtures, bathroom faucets, etc. The picture above right has proven to be my most popular image (based on number of downloads) and has now been purchased 300 times. Sure, it’s quite a nice photograph. Of a light fixture. But I just can’t help wondering who downloads these photographs and why.

Holy batwings, Batman!

Now, this blog was never intended as a competitor to the likes of failblog.org or epicfail.com, but once in a while one happens upon something so ridiculous that a snap of the camera phone is not enough and the offending article must be shared with the world. This is one such event.

On a recent shopping-hell excursion to my local Costco (is there any other kind of excursion to Costco?) I came across this product intended as a scary Halloween decoration. Unfortunately it was designed by someone who, it seems, had never seen a bat, a picture of a bat, or even Batman and, as such, the end result is more comedic than horrific.

Par Fore Pink tourney

Friday was the Par Fore Pink charity golf tournament in support of breast cancer awareness at the Pheasant Run golf course in Chowchilla which, for those who do not have an in-depth knowledge of California’s San Joaquin Valley, lies part-way between Merced and Fresno on Highway 99. Like that helps.

Anyway, the day got off to a great start – I arrived nice and early so I could concentrate on photographing tee sponsorship boards before the golfers took to the course. I was issued with my little electric golf cart and off I went.

The sky was very clear and, though it was only 9:30am when I began photographing the tee sponsorships you could tell it was going to be a pretty toasty day. Which wasn’t only potentially problematic from a sunburn/heat stroke perspective, but from a lighting perspective also. As any photographer will tell you, harsh, bright mid-day light can play havoc with balanced light metering, particularly when there are some very dark shadows from trees to contend with. Fortunately, Pheasant Run being a relatively new golf course the trees along the fairways have a long way to go before they are fully grown and so most of my subjects were bathed in very bright sunshine. Of course, when the subject was an immovable sponsorship sign the position of the sun was everything…

As the day wore on I managed to photograph all of the participating golf teams and all of the (willing) sponsors that had refreshment stands at some of the holes. The folks from Allure (clients of mine) in fact had a massage chair and sangria at their stand which, coupled with the personnel providing the spa treatments and sangria being young good-looking girls, made the Allure tee a popular place to stop. And return to. And generally hold up other players (few that they were) who were more keen on the golf than the booze and back-rubs…

And so the day came to an end and, just before the trophies came out there was the final of the putting challenge- a knockout putting match where the last man (or woman, as it turned out) standing would win a Caribbean cruise. Off I went to photograph some of the competitors, aware that the heel of my shoe had become slightly detached during the long, hot day. Forgetting my predicament for a moment and crouching to get a shot of one cruise-hopeful I heard the dreaded sound of upper/sole separation as my shoe finally gave up the ghost. And there I was: at the putting range with one shoe that made me look as if I were the most bizarre of all Telemark skiers. Blech!

…and the prize goes to…

Day Spa designs coming together

So the Allure Day Spa and Salon project is moving along very nicely – the web site overall design has been agreed based upon elements drawn from a few different ideas (screen shot below) and, once the site map has been drawn up, menu items confirmed, I can begin making the final site and commence inserting content.

I’m hoping to do a ‘Meet the team’ type page with portrait shots (by moi) of each of the staff members and renters. The overall feel of the web site is intended to reflect the vibe of the business itself, which can be summed up in one word: ‘Welcome’. The temporary place holder is already online and I hope to have the new site up and running very soon.

Also for your viewing pleasure, the die-cut logo is now in place above the opening hours in the front window of the salon, replacing the previous name but keeping the original opening hours format.

Next up should be the main large business sign and you know how excited I am to see that baby go up! More to follow…

Photographing a baby

I spent much of yesterday afternoon photographing our friends’ two-month-old baby up in Modesto. As much as it is always a challenge to photograph children, it’s even more of a challenge to photograph a baby (and just the baby) when the model can’t support the weight of his own head. This limits one’s options significantly, although with some clever parent manipulation (we actually had the dad covered in a black felt drop cloth holding baby from behind the cover) and some experimental ‘baby lying on back on reflector disc’ ideas we managed to get some pretty interesting shots. OK, mostly just shots of a baby lying on front or back, but you know, the dude’s only two months old…

And some close-up detail of those blue eyes:

Waiting for UPS

I’m sure this has never happened to you, but I find myself waiting in for UPS to deliver a parcel today. Fortunately I work from home, so this isn’t quite the tedious chore it could be, but I do have things that I would rather be doing, some of which involve actually leaving the house, if you can imagine such a thing.

It seems to me that wherever I live, whether it is Southern California, Northern Florida, or North-Central California, my address is always the last possible stop on a UPS delivery truck’s route.

When I lived in Southern California this was, sadly, not just some crazed conspiracy theory: I actually did live at one of the last possible places on the UPS delivery route. My apartment was in fact very close to the UPS depot in Goleta, CA, but it was on the north side of a main road at a point where, in order to get into my street, one would need to drive 300 yards past my street down the main road to do a U-turn then, after dropping the parcel off at my home, you’d need to drive 150 yards in the opposite direction on the main road to U-turn once more to end up driving the direction you were before heading to my apartment! In fact my address was probably the only address within a five mile radius of the UPS depot where a U-turn was necessary if approaching from the direction of the depot. The street to my apartment was, however, at the end of the off-ramp for trucks returning to the depot at the end of the day, hence I was pretty much the last stop on the route.

Boy, it’s boring waiting for the UPS truck. How am I going to pass the time apart from writing in excessive detail about the U-turns of Hollister Avenue, Goleta CA?

Incidentally, the parcel I am waiting for today is my new cell phone. No, it’s not an iPhone, I think the iPhone is cool but it is excessively expensive to run and, let’s face it, I sit at a computer almost all day so why do I need mobile internet? No, the phone I am waiting for is the Sony Ericsson C905a. It is a phone that is certainly well-suited to my needs in that it comes with a camera.

Now, I know that all phones come with cameras these days, but by comparison with the c905a you could say that the others come with a ‘phone camera’, whereas this beauty comes with a ‘camera camera’. Let’s put it this way: it’s the only cell phone I first heard of by reading a review on it in Popular Photography. Boasting an 8.1MP sensor and Xenon flash (a real flash as opposed to camera phone light) it seems like the phone element of this camera phone is somewhat secondary.

Test shots a-plenty this weekend, I’m sure, with notes and photos to follow.

Have a great weekend.

Par Fore Pink

Yesterday I spoke with the organizer of a breast cancer awareness charity golf tournament about being the official event photographer. The tournament, called “Par Fore Pink”, takes place at the Pheasant Run golf course in Chowchilla (sounds like a small furry animal, I know) on Friday, September 25th from 11.30am.

I will be photographing all day and into the early evening (the event is expected to go on until about 8.00pm) and, in return, I will be given some publicity by way of a tee sponsorship (my ad below will appear on a 18″x24″ board at a tee: hopefully a cool tee like #9 or #18, not some loser tee like #7. I have no idea what I’m talking about.)

Of course, being a pasty-white British person my prime concern was that being out on a golf course all day is not the best UV-avoidance strategy known to mankind. There’s also the strong possibility that, even with oodles of memory cards, I could run out of memory card space and need to download to a laptop. “Not a problem,” came the reply: I will be given a golf cart for the day so I won’t be lugging all of my gear around; I will have access to a private, air conditioned, lockable room for downloading and; there will be numerous food and drinks stands scattered all about the golf course to keep me fed and watered. Sounds like a plan. More to follow…