Archive for December, 2006

Sweetly sculpted of polyresin, each of these 9 figures is beautifully hand painted and delightfully detailed. Set includes Mary, Joseph, the 3 wise cats, shepherd cat, little drummer cat, angel cat and, of course, the baby kitten curled up in his makeshift crib. Largest figurine measures 4 3/4″H x 2 1/2″W x 2 1/2″D. Stable not included. Taken directly from the Collections Etc. catalog.

Dillards has gone through a major redo since Macy’s took over the Oak Park Mall. You would think Dillards could just keep creeping along making money with its regular sales. If you notice in this picture, the exterior of Dillards needed some major makeover in order to compete witht the upscale…..what the…… To the left. What is that? It looks like a huge jacked up pickup truck with a couple of ginormous flag poles in it. I have seen some pretty far left campaign-mobiles out on the road with Kerry stickers still holding on to life from the last election two years ago but this has got to be the boldest contribution to the GOP effort. I don’t have anything against a little patriotism to show support but this guy is just out to piss off liberals. “In your face you fancy, tree hugging liberals”, as he manages to get caught in a web of tangled high power lines.

I used a Canon Elura 2 and a Bogen Tripod. I tried to set all settings to manual as these consumer cameras like to average everything so you get mediocre settings for most every shot. Focus is set to manual. My camera is a challenge: so full of little buttons in inconvenient places. I didn’t bother with recording any audio as I knew I wanted to edit a montage. In fact I had the song I wanted to use picked out before hand. I had it looping on an mp3 player the whole time I was shooting. It really helped to keep me focused.

I edited in Final Cut Pro 4.5. Blew out the whites with a few keyframes in the 3-way Color Corrector. Adjusted for exposure on a couple of shots. Brought blacks down on the roof vent shot and the drips shot. No color correction. Used manual white balance in camera. I had a great time. Hopefully this will be a series. Let me know if this inspired you or if you are completely unimpressed.