foKuspoint

Goodbye West Coast

Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:52 -0800

We are moving again. This time it's the real thing, not just a couple blocks down the street. We are heading to the other coast.
This pelican acted as a model at a pier. He wasn't shy at all (I actually have no idea if he really is a he or not), and seemed to pose for the people in front of him.

I will miss the beach and the weather, and pretty much everything else. But it'll be also a new start, a beginning of something great!

Aster - The Enchanted Flower

Thu, 29 Oct 2009 21:47 -0800

I read today that aster flowers are enchanted, and beside the capability of warding off evile snakes (what about the non evil ones?), they are also seen as a talisman of love. I had no idea. Quite a versatile plant.

Skipper - The Fast One

Sat, 24 Oct 2009 07:56 -0800

This hungry butterfly is a member of the family Hesperiidae, and superfamily Hesperioidea (they are the only family in this superfamily). They are named after their flight habits: quick and darting.
This family of butterflies is rather large. There are over 3500 skipper species and they can be found world wide.

The Birds

Sat, 10 Oct 2009 15:30 -0800

What are these birds up to? Do they gather for a little afternoon chit chat? Do they plan an attack like in the movie?

Leaf - A Plant Organ

Sat, 03 Oct 2009 06:22 -0800

I made this photo last week on a short stroll through town after a lunch. Originally we planned on a longer walk, but the full stomach didn't really agree so the walk was cut rather short - just back to the car. Lame - I know.
Time seems to fly and we already have October. Temperature wise you wouldn't really notice here. It's quite warm. In the 90ies where I work and good 10 degrees less where I live. Sometimes I do miss having four seasons.

Fig Beetle

Sat, 26 Sep 2009 15:20 -0800

This spectacular beetle is called fig beetle (Cotinus mutabilis). It has this metallic green color that looks so stunning in the sunlight.

The name of this beetle sort of says what it likes to eat. Figs, but also any other kind of sweet fruit. They seem to be quite a burden when you grow fruit. You will never know how much will be left for you. Which is of course extremely frustrating or even financially disastrous if this is your livelyhood. But no matter what, I think they look beautiful (I don't have a garden).

A Spider Spins a Silk Web

Sat, 19 Sep 2009 07:21 -0800

This beautiful spider is a Garden Spider, probably belonging to the family Araneidae. I tried to find out which exact Garden Spider this is, I guess some kind of orb weaver, but wasn't successful. If you know, please post the name.

Diving In

Tue, 08 Sep 2009 15:24 -0800

A creepy crawly shot today. After lunch we had a nice walk around the Terranea Resort near Palos Verdes. The trail along the bluff is really nice and the view is awesome. This bee was busy drinking nectar from those little flowers, which are beautiful by themselves.

A Day at The Beach

Mon, 07 Sep 2009 19:22 -0800

Labor Day weekend. We went out to Huntington Beach, walked along the pier. It was very nice. The weather was great and the beach was packed. Many people took advantage of the work free day to have some fun at the beach before school starts again.

I finally did it - I bought a new Laptop, a MacBook. Oh do I love that little thing. Lightroom runs so nicely on it; compared to the Windows versions it seems snappier, faster even, although in theory my desktop is a stronger machine and has faster drives. My DVI KVM should arrive in a week or so. I can't wait to hook it up to my nice monitor...

House on a Slope

Sat, 29 Aug 2009 21:29 -0800

Today's photo is from Seattle again. This house is close to the public market. What caught my attention originally were the reflections from the building across the street.

A Constructed Dwelling to Store Your Life

Sun, 23 Aug 2009 20:18 -0800

Something more local today. The storage facility we use to store things. Many of those we haven't seen in quite some time. Most of them we probably won't miss. For this reason we went there to sort through some of the things. We didn't pay attention to the time and had about 10 minutes to grab some boxes before the facility closed.
What else happened... I (finally) built my own server over at VPS.net. Debian Lenny (that's a Linux distro), Nginx (a lean and mean alternative for Apache), PHP, MySQL. No stinkin' panel, all command line. That was educational and plain fun. Still some tweaking to do, but the majority is done, I think. I'll use this server for a new website that will go live hopefully soon.

The Morning Fix - Coffee

Tue, 18 Aug 2009 22:25 -0800

Back to our vacation - Seattle in the morning, shortly before our departure towards Vancouver. And no - this is not a Starbucks. I can't remember the name of this place, it's a shame. Not 20 anymore... We walked there from our hotel to get our morning fix of caffeine. It was good and strong. And yes, it was that early. We seem to be morning peeps.

Asking For Flowers

Wed, 12 Aug 2009 20:24 -0800

We had a dinner guest who brought us these lovely flowers last Saturday and naturally they posed as models for me the next day. This time I used my Lensbaby for a change.

As an unrelated side note for the Linux peeps out there. I noticed that the latest stable version of digiKam lets you update the focus length and aperture in a JPG file, plus a bunch of other entries I wasn't really interested at the moment. That's convenient. For the non Linux peeps: digiKam is a really nice photo management program.

Flavia Pennetta

Sun, 09 Aug 2009 11:35 -0800

I made this photo Friday night at the LA Women's Tennis Championships. Flavia Pennetta will play later today (2PM PST) against Samantha Stosur for the championship. More photos from this event can be seen in my photo gallery.

On a non-related note. Olympus sponsors the US Open, and since this tournament is part of the US Open Series they had a booth there at the event. I could hold the E-30. Now that's exactly what I want. Feels great in my hand. Since I recently bought 2 lenses this purchase has to wait a bit, but it will happen. The good thing is that the price will very likely keep going down.

Pike Place Market

Fri, 07 Aug 2009 06:00 -0800

Another photo from Seattle. This one was made inside the Pike Place Market. This is a really cool place to go and get your fresh produce, fish, meat, etc. They also have other things like soaps, fantastic jams (we bought some), and of course all sorts of other stuff.

We were really lucky with the weather. It was nearly Californian :-).

More photos from this trip are available in my photo gallery.

Seattle

Sun, 02 Aug 2009 21:27 -0800

On our way to Canada, our first real stop was in Seattle. We had a 1/2 day for sight seeing. Seattle is a really nice city - a good place to live.

This photo was made from the Space Needle (www.spaceneedle.com). The view up there is fantastic.

In this photo you can see downtown in the left half, the 2 sport arenas (Safeco and Qwest Fields) kind of in the middle and the harbor. What's very noticeable how clean the city is.

More photos from this trip can be seen in my Photo Gallery (Trip to Vancouver 2009).

Come And Fly With Me

Fri, 31 Jul 2009 20:38 -0800

Back from vacation and sifting through tremendous amounts of photos. This lovely fly is the first of my vacation shots. True, it could have been from anywhere, but this fly is Canadian, captured on Grouse Mountain.

Bathing Seagull

Sun, 19 Jul 2009 13:43 -0800

Last Sunday walk before my vacation. The water fountain in front of the Convention center is a popular spot for the local seagull population. They like to hang out in it. Swim around, take intensive baths. This gull was just coming up again starting to shake the water out of the wings.

Tomorrow we'll be on the road up north. Canada here we come. The next pictures will be from my trip.

Prickly Poppy (Argemone)

Sun, 12 Jul 2009 06:52 -0800

Prickly Poppy, a member of the genus Argemone, is a native to Southern California. They are really pretty with their large flowers that look like they need to be ironed.

Before The Firework

Sun, 05 Jul 2009 06:27 -0800

Hope everyone had a great 4th of July.
This year we went down to the beach to watch the fireworks since we didn't know if we could see them from the balcony. Turned out we could have watched them from upstairs, but being on the beach was a different and more fun experience.
This photo was taken before the official firework started. People didn't care and also had their own. The beach was quite populated and it was a lot of fun.