If I don’t get to go to the AIAA conference to present my paper, I am going to be SERIOUSLY UPSET. That’s all I have to say about that for the moment.
I already mentioned Saturday’s baseball game, so I guess I’ll give the rest of the weekend summary. Friday night a bunch of us finally checked out a new dinner theater in the area. They’ve taken out every other row of seats and put in tables and given the waiters room to walk past with food and drinks. We saw Mr. and Mrs. Smith, which was entertaining and amusing, but went to the 10:15 show so it was far past dinnertime. I ordered a coke float as dessert, and it was sadly lacking in ice cream. Oh well. We’ll have to check out the actual dinner food sometime. Before the movie, I went over to Seabrook to experiment with taking photos of the fireworks. It turned out pretty well, as you can see if you check my photoblog today. 
Yesterday was a day full of photography! I left my apartment at 5:45 a.m., returned at 11:00, left again at 1:30, and didn’t get home until past 10:00. I am tired today as a result. First, I drove way the hell over to Sugar Land to shoot the Tejas Triathlon (sprint distance — half mile swim, 13 mile bike, 5K run). The race started at 7:00, so I needed to get there by 6:30, which meant leaving at the afore-mentioned 5:45. I shot swimmers coming out of the water, and runners, and then some post-race party stuff and earned enough to buy the battery grip for my 20D. Yay!
Yesterday afternoon I took a casual photo class on studio lighting, how to set it up, and how to use it. It was being taught by a local photographer who also participates in the online Texas photo forum that I frequent, and it was pretty cheap, so I figured: why not? After my first attempt at portraits a few weeks ago, I could use the help. It was a pretty good class that lasted 8 hours (three longer than scheduled, at our request), but I had a few mixed feelings. First of all, it was a class, and since I tend to learn by doing, especially when it comes to photography, the first half of the class was all sort of “in one ear, out the other” for me. I didn’t really start to see what he was talking about until we actually set up some lights and had a model posing and starting taking photos.
If anything, I probably could have used an even more basic class, covering things like “this is a strobe, this is a hot lamp, this is how you use them” and I definitely could have used a more “this is how to pose people, this is what looks good, these are the things to watch out for” class. In the end, it was educational if a bit frustrating (and if it left me feeling pretty dumb), and it was worth the time. I even got a couple good shots that I’ll post over the next few days on the photoblog.
I guess the biggest thing for me personally is that I’m not sure if portrait/studio photography is something I’m interested in. I don’t really think it is, except on a limited basis. (Sports photography is my current pipe dream, and sports photography is, yeah, pretty much nothing like portrait photography.) I found myself losing interest in how to set up the lights, and thinking “enh, I’ll just wait until they set them up, and then I’ll have fun actually taking the shots!” I wanted to shoot, not set up. Personal preference, I guess.
