I'm hot-blooded, check it and see...

Photo Challenge: For Carolina

Hello Everyone,

A while back, I challenged my good friend (and photographer) Carolina Yocom to a photo challenge during a Google+ Hangout. The challenge was something like this: Make a photo of yourself staring dead-on into the camera. The reason? She's very good at making self portraits of herself in beautifully lit poses, but never dead-on from the front. She fought with her photo, but her final portrait was excellent. You can see her photo on her blog.

In exchange, her challenge to me was this: Make a dramatic portrait of myself, but.... don't use off-camera flash. She knew what my weakness was! I light almost everything I shoot. I've spent the past year strengthening my "off-camera flash mixed with ambient light" skills, so being limited to what I could use without using off-camera was a challenge.

I fought with it for weeks...designing and redesigning the concept in my head. Tonight, I managed to capture this:

It's amazing how much you can get sick of seeing your own face while editing (for all 30 seconds that I touched this photo)... How do you feel about self-portraits?

Anyway, Caro, I hope you think I did okay. XOXO.


PS- For the photo nerds that always love to know settings for photos.... I don't know how I shot this... but I'm guessing: 1/2" @ f/8 @ ISO200. Light source is a single shop-light from the shed... probably a 100watt bulb. I dunno... I was busy.

My "State of the Video Games" address

I'll be the first to admit that I was a HUGE gamer back-in-the-day:

• I would play video games between classes
• I required that any girl I dated understand that I needed video game time
• Bonus points were awarded if she were into video games too
• Double points if she was better at the games than I was
• PC, Dreamcast, SNES, N64... they were all awesome

Then, for some reason I quit playing as often.... then I quit playing them entirely. I'm not sure if it was because I started co-creating offspring or if my wallet was more sensitive to my gaming habits. In either case, I realized recently that I hadn't played much of anything in a long time.

Caitlyn and I bought a PS2 a few years back with the intention of getting DDR and two pads so we could shake our asses together, but I had a hard time finding the dance pads. No one seemed to have them. So since we only had one pad it made for some slow gameplay. Then, the Kinect came out for XBox 360. No controllers needed, but it DID require an XBox. (damnit)

At my new Day Job, my fellow Newb, Myko, said that he had an extra XBox 360 laying around that he'd give to me. I'm all about the barter system and he mentioned that he would need some family portraits coming up soon. That sounds like a win-win to me! I owned the console for a week before I actually got a game for it: LA Noire. It's an excellent game brought to you by Rockstar Games (GTA, etc).

I'm also interested in getting a hold of Street Fighter when I get a moment.

Myko gave/lent me Soul Caliber 4 (I own SC3 on PS2) and Fable2 but I haven't cranked them up yet.

So anyway, to my point: I started looking through other games that I wanted to get into as well. I've been a HUGE fan of the Hitman Series, so that's definitely on my list. Hitman: Absolution doesn't come out until November, but it looks amazing.

I came across one game in the XBox market place that kinda left me floored. I really don't know if it's the most amazing game I've ever seen or if it's a complete waste of effing time. It's called Lollipop Chainsaw:

In any case, it looks like I'll start slowly making my way through each of these....Maybe not the Lollipop One... that might be a rental. lol

Have any thoughts on what games I should try out? Leave them in a comment below.