A moo-ving experience.

Being a cow wrangler isn't always as glamorous as it's made out to be.  The cows can be tempremental at times.  Especially the ones with tiaras.  Olympus xz-1.

While I love the cow with the wheels and gears I hope it's not a preview of my new bike....

Olympus xz-1.

Being serious for a second I really like the look of the widest angle setting on the Olympus xz-1 camera.  It's bright and contrast even though I was shooting at f3.5 in full sun.  The VF-2 made shooting in full sun, and shooting low angles a lot more comfortable.  Coulda done this with an iPhone but it probably would have crippled me......

 Another example of the nice color, exposure and wide angle rendering of the camera.

What budget deficit?  We've got the golden cow.  Wait.  Isn't there some Biblical tie in here?

So now I've come to the end of another long week and I'm tired and sore and behind on my schedule for writing.  That just means next week I'll have to write more.  Don Giannatti and I talked this week and decided to push the lighting workshop in San Diego back toward the end of September.  We were both getting calls from lots of friends and strangers who wanted to take the class but had conflicts with kids going back to school or end of the Summer family vacation plans.  Stay tuned for more info on that.

I'm a little bummed about all the BS that's going on in Washington, D.C. over the budget deficit.  I don't care what your party affiliation is or which leader you personally think is the great Satan but I'm starting to feel businesses that were on firm recovery footing pulling back a bit and re-adopting that nasty, "Wait and See" attitude.  And that's not good for any of us in the creative industry.  We're lower on the food chain and some of us were just starting to see food on the chain again when all this crap bubbled up.  

It's kind of wild when you own your own business or are otherwise self-employed.  If the economy implodes again there is no unemployment insurance for us.  The salary jockeys in most states are going to get their 100 weeks or 2,000 weeks or whatever of unemployment payments but when our last job is over and the market collapses we say hello to our personal bailout.....it's called our savings accounts.  And if you are a fellow photographer I hope you've been rebuilding yours lately because when these liberal and conservative numbskulls (who have NO skin in the game) start playing around with the world's largest and more rigorous economy you might need it.

Sometimes I feel like the neighbor who just watched the nuclear reactor manager next door give the keys to the facility to a bunch of teenage boys on high fructose sugar and Red Bull.  Consequences be damned.  Well, at least we have the cows to keep us company.......