I’m featured in yet another Top 200 Photo.

photo #121 is:

I was just looking for a quick photo when I was trying to make sure to do one photo every day, but I wasn’t yet working on a 365 Project.

It’s time for yet another Top 200 Photo.

photo #122 is:

I created this photo to celebrate my 1000th photo uploaded to flickr. Now I have 7506 photos.

Otakon and video game characters in today’s Top 200 Photo!

photo #123 is:

I’ve mentioned my love of Final Fantasy before. And that was the main reason for photographing the girl on the left. I saw the moogle and had to photograph her. Later I found out she is a character from Final Fantasy X. Every time I see this photo I’m filled with regret that I chose to do it in landscape orientation to include her friend (From Elite Beat Agents) because the bottom half of the costume is very intricate. It was only my second time photographing at Otakon and I was very nervous to ask people to take their photos and then I tended to rush through it. I’ve gotten better with each Otakon, but I’m still working on getting over it completely.

An interesting self portrait in today Top 200 Photo.

photo #124 is:

One of my favorite things about photography is how it can allow us to see what is impossible to see with the naked eye. Nowadays I tend to do that by freezing action or doing macro photography. Back in the early 2000s I mostly did that with Photoshop. Sometimes I just played with painterly effects. But one of my favorite genres at the time involved exploring the dimension of time along with space. So I created a series of photographs like this one were I imagined that the camera could capture time as well as space. (I would later learn how to recreate this with flash and without any aid of Photoshop)

Wedding bells are ringing in today’s Top 200 Photo.

photo #125 is:

I saw this photo when I went to DC with Danielle’s parents to see the Cherry Blossoms. When we were waiting to cross the street back towards the mall I saw this awesome wedding limo. I’m sure they got some awesome photos for their wedding.

Dracula by Bram Stoker

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

this review originally appeared on Good Reads

Dracula is, like Frankenstein, a book that has influenced so much of our pop culture that we don’t even question that we know the facts of the book without having even read it. Before having read Dracula, I’d experienced Interview with a Vampire (book and movie), Discworld’s vampires, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, Blade, Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV Show, not movie), Vampire Hunter D OAV, From Dusk til Dawn, the Twilight Series (exposed to bits and pieces by the wife), and countless Hanna-Barberra or Saturday Morning cartoons that had vampire characters. In a lot of ways I knew about the original Dracula by what these other works of entertainment had done differently. For it seemed to be a game among authors and directors to take delight in having a scene in which one of the characters thinks he knows just how to kill or keep vampires away only to be chastised by the Vampire for believing such silly nonsense. So I set about reading Dracula, noting the differences from what we’ve come to know about Dracula.

The Map of Time: A Novel by Félix J. Palma

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

disclaimer: I won this book from Good Reads First Reads contest

This review originally appeared on the Good Reads website

Unsurprising for a novel about time travel, the contents of the book are not strictly chronological. Do not despair, this is not done for the purposes of obfuscation, in fact, the book is almost exactly like Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction in narrative structure. The book is told in three parts. Each of these parts is, as in Pulp Fiction, a story that stands on its own with a beginning, climax, and an end. But they all overlap with each other causing or being affected by the actions of the other story. And, the story as a whole also has a bit of an arc, again, like Pulp Fiction.

Fedora 15, which is almost out, will have Gnome 3.0 as its default desktop and since it’s such a radical departure from the Gnome 2.x series, I thought I’d have a post that reminds us of how it used to be and what Gnome evolved to become. So here’s a two screen desktop:

[caption id=“attachment_4512” align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Gnome 2.32 - entire desktop”] [/caption]

You probably need to click on the image so that it can be at a useful size.  Gnome 2.32 consisted of two panels, one at top and one at the bottom.  The one at the top housed menus that we’ll get to in a moment.  Next to that are launchers.  You could put launchers for all your most-used programs there.  Because of that, I almost never went to the menus to launch a program.  Over towards the right are panel applets.  I have some for mounting and for showing the load on my computer.  Then there’s the date/time where you can click on it and get a calendar.  This area also had icons for certain types of programs like instant messengers.  At the bottom you had the button to see the desktop, the list of open programs, the desktop switcher for the different virtual desktops, and the trash.   Also notice that the programs have minimize, maximize and close buttons.

note: This is a blog post about fine art nude photography.  While there is no pornography or erotic image on this page, you may not want to load it up at work.  Also, to see all my work with this model on flickr, you’ll have to sign in so they can verify that you’re old enough to see the photographs

I’d been wanting to photograph a model for a long time.  I’d read that photographers often get together and rent out studio space to do so, but I didn’t know how to find it.  I did a few google searches in 2006 and couldn’t find anything so I gave up.  I’d also wanted to do nude photography since that time.  I even bought a book about techniques.  It all floundered for five years.  Then I heard on This Week in Photo about meetup.com.  There I found a group doing Boudoir Photography.  I joined them.  They were going to do a workshop at The Carriage House in DC.  So I joined that group.  And The Carriage House arranged for professional model Devonny Sandrick to be available.  At $125 for time with a professional doing fine art nude and getting a liberal model release in return, it was a great deal I couldn’t pass up.

In this Photojojo photo time capsule, some 365 and some photos from my Delaware trip.