The Mugs For Jugs event benefiting the Susan G Komen Breast Cancer Cure Foundation And All You Can Eat 24 hr Diner was this past weekend at the Ship and Anchor Pub in Sandy Springs. Lots of live music, and we had a great crowd come out to support the whole deal. from what I hear, they raised over $1,500, so that’s a good thing.

I took some pics at this anti-cancer fund raiser, and I’ve got my thought on the whole gig after the jump. But for now, the pics:

You can see the larger versions by bouncing over to Flickr.

//standard satire disclaimer here//

If you didn’t come and support this great cause, all I can deduce is you hate breasts. My question is, why.

Is it that you hate your mother? Did she hit you over and over again with a breast-shaped branch because you wouldn’t stop crying unless she put on her limited edition DVD of The Postman Always Rings Twice, with Lana Turner?

Or maybe you’re gay. If you gay, fine. I have a brother that’s gay, and despite his willowy ways, and effeminate denial of the fact, we all love him. Even Grandma loves her queer grandson and his cover girlfriend. But being gay does NOT give you the right to hate on titties. You may not like them, but others do. A lot of others.

But maybe that’s not it. Maybe your mom, for whatever reason, loved you. Maybe, if you’re a guy, you like women, or you may even BE a woman. Maybe the reason you didn’t come isn’t that you hate breasts, but that you LIKE cancer. Is that it, you sick bastard? You like cancer.

You probably take vacations to the Tropic of Cancer each year. I’ll bet you smoke and layout in the sun without sunscreen so you can GET cancer. I’ll bet you like to have cancer over to your house on the weekends. Maybe let cancer watch your kids while you go on vacation. TO THE TROPIC OF CANCER, YOU CANCER LOVING BASTARD!!

Sorry. I’m better now.

Things have been stressful at work, and I haven’t been sleeping well. It’s not your fault.

Bottom line is, breast cancer == bad. If you don’t help fix it, then you’re an evil person. Way more evil than somebody who starts a fake fund raiser under the guise of helping vicims of a natural disaster so that they can rake in some quick cash. Yeah, that guy is better than you.

-kw

I was in the middle of writing the Nimes post when it got erased. I’ll rewrite it later, but here’s the pics for now.  Deal with it.

Ok, here’s the skinny on Nimes: Nice city, but terrible town. Arles was small and quaint. Winding streets, blind corners, and lots of places to get lost. I loved Arles. Nimes, on the other hand, grew up a bit more.

Nimes has a bigger coloseum than Arles, and the city is much more spread out. You can tell that it’s been like thes for several hundred years just by looking at where things are in Nimes. It’s quite a distance between historic monuments and buildings. Statues and temples are spread out over a pretty large area, so Ntahna and i walked a lot in Nimes.

While I really liked the things I saw in the city, I wasn’t impressed by the city as a whole. My main goal in traveling to places like these is to see the older architecture and infrastructure. Nimes is very much a modern city build around older sections.

I’ll certainly go back to Nimes, but only for one thing. I want to camp out in the coloseum. The way it’s setup, you could easily just not go out at closing time. I want to take a tripod, a couple of off camera flashes and do some long exposure night photography in the hallways of the coloseum. THAT would be amazing.

You can see still larger versions of these at Flickr as well.

The galleries below are having some issues with Internet Explorer 7. if you don’t see a the thumbnail images below, don’t worry. It’s not you, it’s me. Feel free to hop over to Flickr to see all of the Barcelona 2008 photos, or just browse through whatever else I’ve put up there.

Once the IE issue is tracked down, you’ll know it by 2 signs: 1) this message will be gone. 2) you’ll see a bunch of photo thumbmails on the page.

When I was in college I had this class (shut up Nathan), and in it we watched a lot of TV. Well, we were supposed to. At the moment watching TV became homework, I started playing in Photoshop. Two great things came out of this: 1) I became a designer, 2) by listening to the discussions in class, I got to hear from a teacher something that I had known for years. That there was a formula to television programming.

I was shocked. Shocked! To learn that TV does the same thing every book, story and 7,000 year old epic narrative poem has done. TV, it turns out, saves the best stuff for last. Those cheeky bastards make us wait to find out all of the sensational sordid details. These captains of the entertainment industry withhold the good stuff until we’ve plowed through the slag.

Well, I know you’re only here for the pics, so enjoy these.

There isn’t much to write about the Sagrada Familia cathedral that you can’t learn from a simple Google Search. Did you know that there are even photos of Sagrada on this magical Google search? It’s true. I’ve seen them.

This post is just part of the story arc.

Part 1 had some neat photos of a very triumphant, albeit full of itself, arch, and a shot of a woman in a red dress (whom I maintain I was not stalking). Part 3 has the really good stuff. Drunkenness, fights, Egyptian sand burial, wild parties, and the occasional Asian CS major. But this isn’t part 3.

This is Part 2. I’m just here wasting your time, and mine if we’re honest, with these lovely pictures of a building that is as much a testament to procrastination as it is to great art. Seriously Gaudi, how are you going to make it in this deadline driven, goal oriented business of design if you can’t finish one building within a reasonable time frame. I hope for your sake you’re billing by the hour. Though, knowing some of the clients I’ve had, the asked you to do this little project to make sure that you were really qualified and that you didn’t just BS your whole portfolio.

If that’s the case G, I suggest you start padding the materials costs and maybe hire on a few friends to help you with the final development. That’ll teach them.

Well, if you’re still reading this far into it, I guess I owe you some sort of something. So, I’ll leave you with an observation.

The coffee you get in Europe is really good. A latte here is a cafe con leche in Spain. The look the same. They smell pretty much the same, but the taste is very very different. I might convince myself that a mediocre meal is better than it is simply because of the company I’m with or the place I’m having it at, or even the price I’m paying for it. But coffee is coffee. I don’t have any glorious self generated ideas about coffee around the world. I drink it so that the gods of caffeination  won’t punish me with a head ache.

Now, the coffee I get at work isn’t bad. It might be better if the girl making it didn’t pour every ounce of hatred, malice and rat poison she has for me into each and every pot, but that’s just wild speculation on my part. I can’t prove any of that. The tasting better part I mean. I can prove the poisoning.

Any way, the coffee that I get pretty much anywhere in Europe, even France, is by far much better that what I can get at most local places here in the U.S. Starbucks makes a really good cup, but, aside from that, the place down on Howell Mill that serves the fair trade fresh roasted Colombian isn’t much different or better than what I get at Panera Bread. Sorry hippies, your BS marketing only carries me so far.

The coffee really is better Europe. It’s stronger, but in a good way. We tend to measure strong coffee by how much like road tar it can taste. All I can say is give up on that, the Turks have it in the bag. I really like the coffee I get over there, and I suspect that even if you get the same beans that they use, you’d never be able to reproduce the taste. It’s like a good whiskey. You can use the same process in Mississippi as they do in Kentucky, but the bottom line is, Kentucky water is iron free and rich in lime, and the Mississippi water isn’t.

Same with coffee in the EU vs the US. Different water, different metals, different equipment. All of those variables affect the flavor of the coffee. It’s the same reason Grandma’s skillet makes better cornbread than the one you picked up at Ikea ever will.

And that’s why I drink tea.

I could open up lightroom and find out how many sub folders I have for the city of Barcelona, but that would take time. Time better spent NOT finding out. It’s the ability to make these tough calls that grants me the title of Kevin Welch. Now, about Barcelona.

It was hot in the city of the Catalans. Hot the way the little trey of apple stuff in the microwave dinner is hot when you pull it out of the microwave for dinner. That is to say, the city was molten and sticky, and… apple flavored.

Here’s the pics. The post continues after the jump.

// WARNING: THIS POST CONTAINS REFERENCES TO, AND A DISTURBING LOOK INTO, THE MIND OF SOMEONE YOU MAY KNOW OR WORK WITH. NOT SUITABLE FOR PEOPLE WHO  THINK KEVIN IS NORMAL WARNING //

The flight over was uneventful for the majority of the passengers, but in my mind the world was reeling. They sat me next to a tosser from the norther midwest. Sorry I can’t narrow it down much. I know that most of the people from the norther midwest are tossers.  It was here that the trouble began.

You see, I have a problem with trans oceanic flights at night. I hate them. In the day time, you can see for miles all around. And over land at night, you can see the specs of cities below you. But at night, over the ocean, there’s nothing. You’re stuck in a tin tube of white noise that happens to be surrounded by inky black void. I have a hard time reminding (or is it convincing?) myself that the world still exists. That there is water down there, and that some where in the distance there is land. It’s cold and dry in this feeble jet, and if I happen to fall asleep, this last cloister, this tiny island of steel and humanity and vodka will slip away from my sight as well, and, in sliding from sight and sound and mind, it may just slide out of existence.

I keep telling people I’m crazy, but the only person listening is me, and he’s as nuts as I am.

So I’m stuck next to tosser Tim (I think that name works) whose mother happens to use the same detergent and fabric softener as this girl I know uses. Not only has the world ceased to exist outside, but now there’s a guy clinging to sanity on a transatlantic flight having weird dreams that this chick (detergent smell, remember) is sitting next to him trying to sell shots of wildly overpriced airline bourbon that smells like rotting wood and shit.

I hate trans atlantic flights at night.

Arriving at the airport in Spain, I am greeted by some guy who, for reasons unknown, is wearing the remains of a moled ferret on his face. He insists it’s a beard. I think it just looks pitiful. The ferret didn’t even have enough fur left to cover his upper lip or all of the right side of his face. But I digress.

I got to spend the next five hours wandering the city. Lost in the Gothic district, All I knew was was that the ocean was south, and that that Nathan’s place wasn’t. It didn’t matter though. I wasn’t here to relax in my room while a liveried votary fetched my bottle of ’47 Bordeaux. I was here to get dirty. I was here to get lost. I was here, to get drunk.

I got dirty, and I got lost, and as Nathan, and the jerk who cut me off in the crown room, will attest, I got a little drunk.

They take their beer seriously in Europe. None of the beer by the pitcher bs. They do it by the liter, and it’s on tap at your table. Not only that, they have a score board so you can see which table is drinking the most. Salud!

I expected a late night on my first day there. I figured we’d grab dinner around 9-ish, and then maybe hang out so I could recover from my flight. Instead, we went to a club at 2 in the mornig for a ninja tunes set featuring Bonobo. He started his set at 3:30 am. We stumbled home around sun rise.

Nathan headed to class the following afternoon. I got lost again. This time, I stumbled onto a movie shoot. Actually, I tripped over some camera track. It was while I was trying to puzzle out the reason for track to by laying in the middle of the street that I discovered a camera dolly, 2 grips and a director. I also got to watch a couple of rehersals and 2 takes of the scene they were shooting. The lady in red was chasing after some guy. I don’t know what she wanted, but I think it had something to do with late rent.

I’m a little tired, so I’m not going to go into the UGA Connection, or the Wen Wen situation, or the sonar night. I’ll save some of those for the other two Barcelona posts titled, respectively, Barcelona 2 of 3, and Barcelona 3 of 3.

later, beautiful. stay brilliant

We had an hour or so to hang out in this little french coastal town. We come down the hill that you see in the first shot and we’re standing at this wall overlooking the harbor. I already had my camera out but Nathan looks at me and says, “seriously, just take a lot of pictures here, don’t give all that BS about composition and framing and light and shit. Just get a lot of this, ok?”

Telling me to not compose the shot is like asking a sleepy drunk to drink his beer, and then NOT fall asleep in awkward and some times dangerous places.

Am I right?

I am, take my word for it. Now, The photos from Carbere, France. The hippie looking jerk w/ the backpack and official “I Hate Razors” t-shirt is Nathan.

NOTES: Photos number 4 and 5 (top row, last two on the right) really show off the ND Gradient filter. Photo 5 especially. I had to pull the blue saturation down in post so as to make this shot work/look real. My favorite photo in this set is is the cyan-heavy railroad crossing signal that I shot from the hip as we were walking back to the train station.

Side note on the town, 8+ euro for a coke and a coffee. French bastards.

I’ve been back in the states a week now, and people (kirby, josh, mom, etc) are starting to get on me about posting pics. Perhaps starting is the wrong word. Some of these people were on me about it before I even left Spain.

Well the images are finally sorted into their proper categories, and even though I haven’t had time to do the post production on the raw files that I really like, I have managed to do a ray JPEG conversion of the images as they were shot. So, here’s the first set. I shot these in Arles, France. The reason I’m putting these up first is because Arles comes before Barcelona alphabetically. Enjoy, and I promise to put more up soon. Really.

NOTES: Shot number 9 (row 2, pos 4) was done almost entirely in camera by setting the white balance to incandescent and lowering the ISO. I had to bring the exposure back up a bit in post, but not much. Favorites here are numbers 6, 9, 10, 13 and 24.

Arles was a great town, but paying 24 euro for a bowl of (quite delicious) soup was not cool at all. french bastards.  Love the city, but next time, I’ll go a la carte.

In preparation for my trip to Spain, I’ve been getting things ready. Files are prepped at work, I’ve given the girl at the desk a number to call in the likely event that things break, and my blog is getting some much needed attention.

Part of that attention is getting my twitter and flickr feeds set up to post here. I plan on posting some shots at the end of the day. Not all of them mind you. I’ll shoot around 5+ gigs a day (I’m taking 18 GB of memory, and a 40 gig HDD for storage. I believe that’s called being loaded for bear), and I want to post at least 10 to 15 shots once i get back in the evenings. This assumes that the following flow chart:

Assuming all goes well, the posts will look something like this:

Isn’t that nice? I think so. I’d like some feed back though.

From the depressing and devoid of life streets in Branson, MO, to the cool beauty of Flagstaff, AZ, I was able (forced, actually) to interact with a lot of people on a throwaway basis. I was stuck in the back of loading docks and auditoriums having to hold my tongue as the myriad of comments and jabs build up inside of me.

I loathe inefficiency, and I spent a lot of time dealing with it. It came to a head in Orlando. Seven people in the whole airport, and a que line 6 layers deep with only 1 person in it. I couldn’t deal with it. So, I made the process more efficient. I edited the que.

And pissed off one very organized ticket agent. I was unaware of the amount of power these persons had over my life.

We stared at one another for a long second. Me behind the Wait Here line. He behind his desk. As the moment ticked by, I began to think, maybe something was amiss. I smiled.

He just glared.

Finally, he gave a tight-lipped ‘next’ signal for me to approach the counter. The ticketing and baggage process went quickly, and as he started to hand me my ticket, he froze. And smiled. The ticket withdrew a moment, and smug satisfaction crossed his face.

k-chink k-chink k-chink

Three bright red SCREENING REQUIRED stamps were emblazoned on my boarding pass. The sound of a snapping latex glove and booming voice ordering me to spread ‘em. filled my ears. Approaching the security check in, I was only moments away from a violating, de-humanizing experience with TSA Bob.

I took two important pieces of information away from this small airport north of Orlando. !) Ticket agents can be sadistic bastards when you mess with the que. 2) While awkward at first, cavity searches are a great way to meet new people. Sure you feel dirty and used when it’s over, but so does the other guy, and you don’t have to reciprocate.

Pissed? Good. So was I. Granted, you might be pissed at me, but that’s fine. Go see the movie. and you’ll hate yourself for not taking my advice of NOT seeing it.

Were to begin this sordid tale…

A long time ago, in a theatre far far away, a boy watched a brave man fight against Nazis and evil temple priests. The brave man used a whip and a gun, and he liked to punch people. A lot. Then, just after his dad got shot by some Germans, the brave man took a vacation.

For nearly 20 he roamed the badlands of the New England library circuit, searching for new and exciting treasures that he could go dig up.

Then the Soviet spies infiltrated America, kidnapped him, and took him off to a big warehouse, convienantly adjacent to a nuclear testing site. Shortly after they arrived at the National Undisclosed Massive Building for New / Unused Treasure Stuff (NUMBNUTS), Indie forgets that he’s Indian Jones, and starts thinking he’s McGyver. After finding the alien remains housed in the NUMBNUTS warehouse using gun powder and shotgun pellets, Indie escapes the soviets using a rocket car, only to wind up in the middle of Nucleartown, USA. That’s the little play town that got leveled during the nuclear test blasts in Nevada.

It’s ok, though, because Indie will save him self. He’ll use his wits, and his cunning, and a Fridgidaire model 9000t refrigerator. Apparently, during the Cuban Missile Crisis, people shouldn’t have built bomb shelters, they should have went a purchased a shiny new blast proof fridge. I was still ok at this point.

Then the bomb goes off.

Our hero gets hurled several hundres yards in a refrigerator, while EVERY OTHER STRUCTURE IN SIGHT gets atomized.It is at this point, I begin to get slightly worried.

Fast forward, and our hero is being questioned by the janitor from Scrubs. All hope for this movie is dying fast.

A couple of days later, Indie gets fired because he’s too good at being American for the likes of J. Edgar Hoover. Hope starts to creep back to life. Nothing says good movie like the Red Scare of the fifties. Enter dubiously strait Shia LeBeouf. On a motorcycle. I had to stifle the laughter. The dainty LaBeouf looks like a would be Fonzi at a rainbow day parade. But, because the clothing wasn’t enough of a disguise to make little Doris Dykers look butch enough, the gave him a tough sounding name: Mutt. It’s kind of funny, I guess. Indie uses the name that belonged to his dog, so why shouldn’t the kid? I would love to know what committee / focus group made this happen. I’ve prepared little packets of ground up glass disguised as Splenda for them.

From this moment on, the movie becomes less of and Indiana Jones film, and more of a Mel Brooks spin off, but with less humor, subtlety, or imagination. I would have felt less cheated out of precious life and ticket money if Christopher Walken had played Indiana Jones instead of Harrison Ford.

The movie just digs in deeper from here. At some point, the producers thoght “remember that cute trained monkey from Raiders? What if we get ONE THOUSAND of them, and they help the gay kid fight the commie lesbo chick? It’ll be HUGE!”

And so, the jerk who made King Kong do Jujitsu a couple of years ago got a phone call, and rushed out to ILM to make a ton or fake monkeys obey the bidding of a sexually confused biker chick named Mutt.

And we still haven’t gotten to the aliens.

To be honest, I pretty muchch checked out after the monkies, and didn’t pull out of my self-induced protective coma until I saw the alien mother ship coming out of the ground beneath the Myan city. There was some BS about a stargate, or protal or something, but I really wasn’t paying attention. It was hard to hear over the sound of George Lucan and Stephen Spielberg laughing around the fat cigars they were holding in their teeth.

All I want to know is, why does George Lucas like to rape the childhood memories of his fans? He’s like a less charismatic, un-inventive Steve Jobs. He hates his customers, he shows his hatred of us by releasing stuff, and we pay for it whether it’s good or not. I think he and Steve are brothers.