Well, it’s been a pretty good weekend, finishing off a nice 10-day (or so) stint in Hamilton. As usual, I was crazy busy. I shot a million-dollar house for a friend’s mom in King City. The house was beautiful, inspired by Spanish architecture, with lots of stucco, terra cotta tiles, and arches galore. The lot was huge, with rolling lawns, a winding driveway, and studded with mature trees. The interior is a bit dated, but carefully decorated with quality pieces. I wish I could afford to buy this place and turn it into a photography playground! The photos will go on the MLS listing for the house. Hopefully they attract some potential buyers for the home.

The only time I was available to shoot these was from about noon until 2pm on Saturday, so I had to deal with some pretty difficult light. In the end, I took a few bracketed exposures of the high contrast scenes and layered and masked them in Photoshop. Not quite HDR, because I wanted them to look natural, but essentially the same purpose.

I’ll be heading back to Montreal tomorrow afternoon on a train. I’m looking forward to the change of pace. I’ll be up in Montreal for 10 days, staying for the jazz festival next weekend. It should be a good time. I’ve been in Montreal for jazz festival weekend before and it’s nuts… they shut off about half of downtown to traffic, and there are outdoor stages set up everywhere. With the hot weather approaching, I predict a trifecta of cool music, cold beer, and good times.

I’ve been having a lot of trouble with my server lately. That means my website and email will go down unexpectedly. The problem is that it tends to die on Friday nights, leaving me without email until I can get an on-call technician in Montreal to go into the datacentre and reboot it. I have a bad feeling that the hardware is starting to die, and I’ll have to replace it. Ugh.

Nerdiness was in full force in the last couple of days. I’ve been tremendously busy, but I decided that I needed to replace the case my computer is in. It’s an Acer HX45 midtower that I’ve had for ages. Here’s a review from 2000 of that case. I think that’s about when I got it. It’s been through about six upgrades since then, and has had a lot of stickers affixed. I will miss the dA stickers and Upright Citizens Brigade stickers that adorned it. However, I was hearing the cooling fans inside working overtime, and nearly burned my hand on the hard drives when I had to reach in there one day. The old case just wasn’t doing the job anymore, coping with the heat of the newer, faster CPU and hard drives. With the hot weather these days, I was worried I’d burn out a CPU or worse yet, a hard drive.

The new case is sweet. I got a Thermaltake Armor Jr. It’s possibly the lamest name for a product ever, but I really like the design.

I could do without the glowing blue fan and the clear plastic side panel, but I guess I can live with a bit of pimping out, especially if it comes with really good airflow. Now I can work without worrying too much about my computer exploding into flames.

The second item on my geeky to-do list was to buy an Xbox 360. Don’t ask me why. I don’t actually have time to play, but for some reason I felt compelled. I even bought a game on Ebay so that I would practically be forced to buy the console. Anyway, I ended up buying the console at EB Games. So, I’m the owner of a shiny new Xbox 360. I’ll tell you how it is once I get a minute to play with it.

I spent this weekend at a “cottage” in the Kawarthas. I say “cottage” in quotes because it is really more of a gargantuan house with room for 16 people, a couple of hot tubs, two barbecues, a huge deck, a guest house, a large stretch of waterfront, a dock, a motorboat, waterskis, an inflateable tube thing for pulling behind the boat, and all kinds of other fun stuff.

Because of the strict rules of disclosure surrounding stag weekends, here are a list of activities that I can tell you about.

• Boating
• Waterskiing
• Drinking beer and assorted spirits
• Guitar Hero II
• Sunburning
• Eating
• Talking

The rest is classified. Here is the only unclassified photograph from the weekend.

The records will be unsealed in 50 years.

So I had my appointment with the sports medicine specialist today. Before I got there, I went to the hospital to pick up my MRI scans on CD. The disk is pretty cool. It runs an application that lets you step through all the “slices” of the MRI like a movie. There’s no doubt about it. My ACL is wrecked, and I’ve got a torn miniscus too. I think you can see the damage in this picture.

It’s a slice, side view. You can see where the two leg bones connect at the knee. The bones are the light grey phallic looking things from the top and bottom. The famous Thom calf muscle is darker grey, bottom right. The knee cap (patella) is the rectangle sort of in the top left. You should be able to see the ligament as a dark line connecting the two leg bones. Mine has given up and let go. Well, not so much “given up” as much as “wrenched from its moorings with a rather vile popping sound.”

Here’s another scan. This one is a cross section. I think it’s cool to see those veins and bones and muscles. It reminds me of osso bucco (Italian braised veal shank recipe). Yum.

Of course, the doctor was too cool to need these scans. He didn’t even look. He could tell that the ligament was missing by wiggling and prodding my knee for a while, explaining that he should be able to feel it stopping the motion of the knee. Since it wasn’t there, the knee is extremely unstable, prevented from twisting only by the skin around it. He said I have three options. I can stop doing physical activities (not an option), I can wear a brace (”Run, Forrest, run!”), or I can have a surgery. It seems like surgery is my best option. The surgery involves taking a piece of ligament from the hamstring or patella and grafting it into place as a replacement ACL. Alternatively, the surgeon can use a bit of “previously enjoyed” ligament from a cadaver. In that case, I’ll have a zombie knee. If I start craving braaaaaiiiinnnnnssss I’ll be ticked.

My next step is to see the surgeon. I have an appointment on July 10.

My friend Mike’s sister asked me to shoot her wedding. Mike is one of my oldest friends. We go way back to grade 7, which is much longer ago than I care to calculate at this moment. There was no question that I should agree to do it. Shooting weddings really isn’t my thing, but I suppose a wedding once every few years won’t kill me. It turned out to be a pretty nice affair. It all went down yesterday and last night. The reception after the simple City Hall ceremony was a traditional Chinese banquet, replete with twelve mouth-watering courses. I took about 500 photos, trying mostly for a reportage style. I’ve pared them down to my favorite 26.

If anyone in particular (ahem Diny) is wondering why anyone would bother to get a separate flash instead of using the one built into his DSLR, check out the photos from the reception. For the most part, they were taken with my ancient Vivitar 283, which I bounced off the ceiling to create a fairly natural-looking light. I manually adjusted the power of the flash so I could shoot at ISO 400, 1/125 (flash sync) and more often than not, f2.0. Whenever I switched to the longer lens, I had to shoot at f2.8. The room got quite dark at night, with the overhead lights dimmed down to candlelight levels, so I wanted to shoot as wide open as possible, maintaining the intimacy of the mood, while not being disruptive to the people I was shooting. Nothing kills a mood like a full-blast direct flash. I’m sure that with the flash pointing at the ceiling about 18 feet up, hardly anyone noticed when I took their picture. That was important to me. Weddings are about emotion and critical moments. Shooting inconspicuously is a key part of the recipe for capturing moments as they are. You can’t do that with a built-in flash

By the way, I just installed some scripts that change the way the photos are presented in my blog. I’m up to something with this little experiment… I’ll fill you in on it later.