*Little Pink Weeble*'s photostream  

So...

I swore, as long as we were in our little apartment, NO. NEW. KITTIES. And, just like Bush lied about no new taxes, so I lied about the cats.

I don't know what got in to me, but I stumbled across this cat on craigslist, at a rescue in Hood River. I sort of fell in love with her, but dismissed it. Two nights later, she was still listed. I showed Patrick her photo. I emailed the rescue about her. They emailed me right back, and attached a video of her. I was SMITTEN. I applied. I was approved. The landlord said ok. So...

Patrick and I happened to be going to Hood River for a birthday getaway, and there she was...and she charmed us both and came home. :)

This cat is a CHAMPION FLOPPER! She's a sturdy tank of a cat - over 12 pounds - with stubby little legs, giant bulls-eye swirls on her side, half a tail, and only 19 toes. She's the perfect short hair cat - mostly tabby, with tortie and calico leanings (I love tricolor kitties!). And oh, the smile and the pink nose!!!

She lived under an RV near a state park for about 8 weeks before a cat rescue caught her, and spent the last two months in foster care. In a nod to our life with Dolly, she's blind in one eye. In a nod to all animals broken and in need, the poor thing had chewed off all her whiskers from anxiety.

Despite her rough start, she's just a little love-bug! She is as fluffy and soft as a bunny and doesn't really shed. She plays beautifully, with no claws, even when she's doing a bunny kick. You say her name and she throws herself to the floor for belly rubs! She is already in love with her cardboard scratching box and catnip, she is using the litter box without issue (it's a top-loader as she is awfully aggressive with her burying habits; she is quite brilliant and I am going to attempt full on toilet training with her), and she sleeps on the bed next to me when she isn't tearing around the house at 40mph, crashing through the blinds, and knocking over laundry baskets. It's like having a goofy, 12 pound, graceless, kitten! She is a great hunter, too, and is sure to attack anything you're trying to put on, like socks or pants, and is quite skilled at attacking your feet under blankets!

She'd been ok with dogs while living in the state park, so we think it's a matter of time before she is out and about the house all the time. She has met the dogs now several times, and still isn't 100% confident around them, but if I let them in the bedroom they sniff each other and then the dogs try to eat her food, and she flops on the floor and ignores them. This is GOOD PROGRESS in my book! No hissing, no batting, just moderate curiosity.

She's only been home with us for three weeks now and has developed such a wonderful personality and confidence. According to the foster mom, she didn't meow - but now she's a chatty-cathy who mews, yips, chatters, and demands attention and play time. We're totally in love with her - it's wonderful having a young, happy, playful, healthy, sweet kitty in the house! It's been a very long time. :)

Now, to toilet train her, and to wait for her whiskers to grow back! I also have to take some real portraits of her so you all can see her gorgeous markings and silly little tail!

Kate is SO damned adorable, naturally beautiful and sexy, incredibly funny and bright, and down to earth and an all around good human being. From our fun bridal shoot last summer in NH.

Yes, those are her work boots. What else would a NH bride wear on her wedding day?

This slide positively SINGS in person - and sadly the punch is really lost in scanning/ digital translation. But looking at this slide, in hand, is magical - and the excitement of picking up a roll of film is still a powerful motivator to continue to use film. This year I shot this tree not just with my Mamiya RB67, notable for its strong resemblance in appearance, size, and weight to a car battery, but I shot it with a pinhole...I still haven't had that roll processed.

The funniest part about the shots not just on my giant Mamiya and the lovely little wooden pinhole? I used to carry my Black Cat Exposure Guide (so very, very handy, and it has a gray card on the back!) everywhere, but I have a light meter app on my iPod touch - and I used that for the metering this year. The slides...they were all lovely. I just wish the scan were better!

This photo is an example of why, despite hating my slim-CPL, it will remain in my bag. Look at that sky! (Love.)

This was a muddier afternoon than you can see in the photo, and Ara, Crisse, and I were all sporting mud-butt from laying in the dirt at the Wooden Shoe Tulip farm and shooting up at the gorgeous cloud and skies.

I love spring in Oregon - and I think it's just around the corner - the daffodils are about 2-3" sprouted in my neighborhood already. Crocuses are coming up, too.

We had such a spectacular fall here (the prettiest I've seen yet living here) and winter has been so, so mild...it's giving me quite the case of spring fever! BRING ON THE FLOWERS!

This photo is from one of the last weekends I spent with my old Pentax, but that's not what the rant is about.

This weekend while my very sick dog was sleeping I was very, very wired and stressed. And while cleaning out my camera bag, looking for something, I was inspired to write.

So, who else has a love/hate relationship with their circular polarizer?

As you may know, one of the most important tools in your camera bag as a landscape photographer is a circular polarizer, aka the CPL. Blue skies bluer, clouds whiter, better contrast, enhance or eliminate reflections, and add a stop or so to your exposure. The easiest way to think about a CPL is to consider it a pair of expensive sunglasses for your lens.

There was a time in my photography when I lived in the 10-14mm range, at F16 or so, at exposures starting at a second and extending to a couple of minutes. I still visit that land – that magical landscape land of the rule of thirds and magic-hour lighting and clouds whipping by and still waters and silky waterfalls – and there’s nothing wrong with this branch of photography, in fact, when done right it can be stunningly beautiful. (Especially to someone who is not a photographer – you know – the post-card purchasers of the world. They ooh and ahh over very simple camera techniques, and if you post process the hell out of your image, they go further ga-ga. I digress.)

Working so much in portraiture in the last year or so has led me back into the 50mm 1.2 range, 85 1.8, and gasp, sometimes at ISO 1000, not 100. But there in my bag resides my landscape tools – my plastic cases containing expensive, brass wrapped, magical glass – my 77mm B+W CPL (+/- $100) and my 77mm B+W 6 stop ND filter (another $100). The CPL is a slim design, the ND, for those not in the know, resembles black glass – though the 6 stop is not as dark and intimidating as a 9 or 10 stop filter, which can only be compared to welding goggles.

When I found my angles growing wider and my exposures lengthening (sounds like a personal problem, no?) I needed a better CPL – something slim, something reliable, something without a terrible color-cast, something reputable – real, "expensive," glass. I went with the B+W, which all things considered (what with batteries for cameras being $80 what’s $100 for a quality filter?) is a bargain for what it does. At 10mm you don’t have to worry about vignetting from a beefier, cheaper CPL. I’ll argue right now that just about any long exposure is going to have some sort of cast to it, which is why we shoot RAW and post process our images, and why we do custom white balance settings. But to not lose the corners of the image, what a delight! (Because then we can rush into Photoshop and add a vignette, subtle or not, to our liking…) Somehow I was utterly convinced I needed this contraption, this slim, sexy, expensive CPL. What’s funny, though, is how much I have come to loath this slim, round item. Why?

Well, let me start by saying, I still need and want a CPL in my bag. This is not an anti-CPL commentary. This is merely a rant against this particular design. This CPL has been all over the country with me: to beaches, to canyons, to mountains, in snow, in rain, at sunsets, high noon, you name it. I’m fairly rough with my equipment – if you know me you know I’m not just disaster-prone, but a clutter hound, like Pigpen in the Peanuts cartoon, instead of a cloud of filth I am surrounded by constant chaos and clutter. Put me in a room with nothing – nothing at all – and come back an hour later and you’ll find me surrounded by piles of needless paperwork, tubes of chap-stick, empty seltzer cans, some craft supplies, several pens that don’t work, junk mail, several random cords that don’t plug into anything I own anymore, a few broken CD jewel cases, maybe a snack wrapper, ketchup on my shirt, and a twisted ankle. It’s just my life. So the fact that this CPL has held on relatively unscathed in the two years I’ve had it is pretty remarkable, and a sign of either dumb luck or excellent construction. I mean, this is the woman who ran over a Fuji S2 Pro with a Honda Civic. So, the fact that this little CPL merely makes a distinctive grinding noise from sand stuck in the rotation…well, that’s just a hiccup. But why is there sand caught in my CPL?

Because it’s an obnoxious piece of crap design. It’s next to impossible to get this damned thing on your camera lens. You cross thread it half the time, the other half you think you’ve got it on your camera, and the minute you start rotating it to compose your shot with the desired polarization, you realize you’ve rotated it the wrong damned direction (yes, there’s a “wrong damned direction” with this filter) because it promptly pops off the front of your lens and lands in the surf, where you have to chase it down before it’s sucked out with the tide, and hope that while you’re quickly fishing your $100 filter out of the ocean your tripod doesn’t get sucked in by the shifting sands. This little CPL is SO slim that half the time you think you’re screwing it onto your lens, you in fact are merely rotating the front element. In this respect, the grinding, sand-induced sound in my filter has been a blessing in disguise – if I don’t hear the sand grinding away in there, I know I have actually secured it to my lens correctly. So, if you have this filter, I suggest an ocean bath with lots of fine gritty sand. It will help.

This slim design has another fatal flaw – and the good news is that I have yet to die from blood poisoning from battling this flaw. As I mentioned earlier, I also have the B+W 6 stop ND. And, as you may know, occasionally we stack filters for desired effects or the correct exposure. So, sometimes you have to screw your CPL onto the front of your ND, which is screwed onto your lens. (At this point in photography, chances are you don’t have a UV on there, too, egad – but you can see why the slim design helps – when you have two filters stacked at 10mm, you run the risk of vignetting.) And as anyone who has ever screwed a CPL to another filter knows, sometimes the damned things want to mate for life. You finally have your CPL mounted to your ND, without the threads tangled, and you’re hiding under a hoodie or a jacket so you can see through your viewfinder or use your live-view to compose your shot, because the ND is so dark it’s impossible to compose through without making an effort, which is further complicated by the addition of the CPL, and now, hiding under your jacket like an old-timey large-format photographer from days of yore, you’re carefully rotating your CPL so as not to have it plop onto the ground in front of you (or off the cliff in front of you, or into the ocean surf in front of you, or into the rushing river in front of you, or into the tick-infested Devil’s Club in front of you, or into the poison oak in front of you…you know, the landscape hazards), and finally after being satisfied you have a shot you’re happy with, you trudge back to the safety of your car to chimp at your LCD. And when you’re finally packing your camera bag up like a good little do-bee, you realize between the temperature shifts and all your frantic rotating as the light changed before your eyes, somehow this slim little CPL has decided it loves your ND so, so much that it’s never gonna give it up, never gonna let it down. And now you have to separate them. I cannot COUNT the times I have gripped the CPL in one palm, and the ND in the other, and twisted, only to find a perfectly round, 77mm sized, gash in my flesh. I mean, it’s stigmata territory as your palms are bleeding, and in fact, it’s going to take a miracle to separate these two filters. I am pretty sure the landscape of my hands has been permanently altered by my slim CPL and its aggressive mating with other filters. Luckily, as an occasional off-trail hiker and photographer I have a pair of rubberized, insulated gloves, and usually if I sit my CPL on my defroster in my car at full blast heat, and then grip the CPL and the ND using my rubberized gloves, usually that will get them apart. But it’s no small feat – and in fact I know photographers who have had to have their filters cut apart at the camera shop. The hair on the back of my neck is rising just remembering the chilling sensation of that expensive B+W slicing into my flesh. This is a very expensive torture device, and mine has sand caught in it - good times!

Even more annoying than the bleeding hands and sand issues is the hilarious little joke of a lens cap that B+W so kindly includes with the filter. This lens cap is the mere suggestion of protection for your expensive filter. In fact, it may well be the single worst-designed piece of plastic on the planet, even in comparison to Jocelyn Wildenstein’s face or the interior of the new Ford Fiesta. This lens cap is the most useless, nasty little joke that B+W could play on you. It doesn’t lock into the CPL – it can’t because of the slim design – it merely hugs the front element, with a gentle, clammy-handshake quality. And if your lens has a hood? Forget it. The lens hood and the lens cap will not ever, ever play together. Ever. So, you cannot simply be a lazy photographer on the rush who throws their cap on their CPL and throws their camera in their bag and dashes off for the next destination, no. You have to sit down, remove your CPL (watch the flesh of your palms, mind you), and pack it away in the case, and then put your regular lens cap back on your lens. If, like me, your overpriced lens hood was wrecked in a yachting accident in southern California (you can’t make this stuff up), you can try, vainly, to use the lens cap jokingly provided with the slim CPL as you pack away your camera. What happens in reality is that you slip the cap on, and before you can even take your camera strap off from around your neck, the cap has popped off, mocking you. If you are careful and aware of its desire to live ANYWHERE but on the filter for which it was intended, you hold the cap onto the filter as you try to pack away your camera. And no sooner have you zipped your camera bag and put it on your back than the cap has popped off, and is now going to hide behind the Velcro compartments of your camera bag, you know, down at the bottom, wedged behind your batteries, your CF card wallet, your lens cleaning kit, that lens you hate and never use but keep in your bag anyway – it’s down there. Somewhere. While your $100 filter is vulnerable to whatever you have carelessly left in your bag on your hike – keys? A fancy rock you found? Flashlight? A film canister? The point is, this damned lens cap is so utterly useless, that when faced with a lens with a hood and this CPL I can’t unscrew without maiming myself, I remove my lens hood, I cover my CPL with a large microfiber cloth, and then I hold the cloth onto the front of the CPL with the lens hood, then I pack it all away. The lens cap pretty much lives in the plastic case for the filter, as it’s completely flawed in my opinion.

The sad part is that being thrifty, I won’t replace the CPL until it’s destroyed or has floated down stream in an incident (I once lost a $35 lens cap for a Nikon Fisheye in a river incident. Lesson learned.), so I am stuck with the thing for now. My next CPL will absolutely NOT be a B+W slim. I suggest you think long and hard about whether you purchase one yourself.

Anyone else hate their B+W? Anyone love it?