- I am Engaged!
14 Jan 12On December 24, 2011, at around 12:45 a.m., Amanda Kate Rubino and I got engaged.
Check out Amanda’s blog, The Ring Diaries, to see the ring and for more info.
- Interview with John Durant
15 Nov 11Originally posted at The Primal Challenge blog. Enjoy!
I had the great fortune of being able to listen to a lecture by professional caveman John Durant at Hillsdale College last night. I also got to hang out and chat with him for the evening and he graciously agreed to do an interview for The Primal Challenge! Click on the link below to listen to the interview.
Interview with John Durant (approximately 13 minutes in length)
Topics: The gourmet hot dog party that started it all, the role of community in keeping you with your new identity, advice for people who want to start blogging or doing something in health, why so many libertarians are attracted to paleo, and advice for people just starting out with paleo.
For those of you who don’t know him, John is a barefoot runner who started the NYC Barefoot Run, a health entrepreneur, and a libertarian who runs a popular blog on the paleo lifestyle, Hunter-Gatherer.com.
I had a great time chatting with him and learning from him. Thanks, John!
Here is a photo of John at the Hillsdale Lecture:
- Diving
13 Nov 11At the beginning of the semester, I got to spend some time down at the pool shooting some fun photos for the Hillsdale Collegian. The sports editor wanted to run a profile on the swim team’s new diver, Gretchen. She is the first diver Hillsdale has had since the 2008 season.
Gretchen
Whenever the Collegian runs profiles on people, we almost always have some sort of portrait and an action shot. Sometimes portraits can be pretty bland, such as a regular mugshot against a white background, so I decided to go the extra step on this one. I used the pool and diving board as the backdrop and used two strobes to light Gretchen. I used a shoot through umbrella from camera left as my main light, then set up another strobe with a spot grid behind Gretchen on camera right to open up the shadows on that side of her face.
Timelapse
This timelapse was the main art for the story. It ran pretty large in full color and I got a lot of compliments on it. The photo was pretty easy to do: I set up three strobes on 1/2 power across the pool from the diving board and fired my camera in burst mode to get Gretchen in 10 different frames as she dove into the water. I then chose 6 of the frames and masked them together in Photoshop.
Hesitation and Anticipation
When we were finished with the portraits and the diving shots, I asked Gretchen if she wanted to do one more shot, a fun one this time. She enthusiastically said, “Sure!”, so I came up with this. I had her carry an umbrella up the diving board and clamp it on to one of the rails. I then had her go to the edge of the board and act like the was afraid to jump off. It didn’t run in the paper, but it was still fun.
- Lighting Smoke Trails
10 Nov 11I shot this for a story at my college paper about the city deferring the medical marijuana decision ruling four consecutive times. We needed a catchy jump from A1, so I came up with this. This was a fun shoot. We got some strange looks, but good results.
Disclaimer: These are hand-rolled tobacco cigarettes. No illegal drugs were used in these photos. While I am in favor of drug legalization, I am most certainly not in favor of using drugs. They destroy our most valuable asset, our mind.
Strobist info: Gridded LP160 to fill the face in and a bare LP160 at a higher power as a rim/smoke light, shot from behind the subject’s right side. I also used a snooted 430EX to light the hand with the cigarette in it. Cactus V5 triggers.
Strobist info: Gridded LP160 to fill the face in and a bare LP160 at a higher power as a rim light, shot from behind the subject’s right side. Cactus V5 triggers.
- National Review Online
10 Oct 11One of my photos was on National Review Online today!
The photo was of the recently dedicated statue of Former President Reagan that was dedicated here at Hillsdale College last week. The Reagan statue is Hillsdale’s most recent addition to the Liberty Walk.
Here is a larger version:
- Recently on The Primal Challenge
07 Oct 11
Above: Chicken Stuffed with Spinach, Feta, and Bacon – my latest recipe at The Primal Challenge.
I’ve been posting frequently over at The Primal Challenge. Check out some of my recent posts:
Welcome Two New People to the 30 Day Challenge!
Mass Production, Restaurants, and Food Quality
Primal Apple Crumble (a recipe from my parents!)Also, here is the recipe for the delicious dish in the photo above:
Chicken Stuffed with Spinach, Feta, and Bacon
Ingredients:
3 chicken breasts
1 bag of fresh spinach
Feta cheese
1/2 lb of bacon, dice all but 3 pieces
1/4 onion, diced
3 cloves garlic, minced
Black pepper
Olive oil- 1. Preheat oven to 425 degrees F.
- 2. Heat your favorite fat (I used olive oil) in a skillet and start cooking the diced bacon along with the diced onion and the spinach. Saute it all together. Don’t worry, the spinach will cook down quickly.
- 3. Butterfly the chicken breasts.
- 4. In a bowl, mix the sautéed spinach, onions, and bacon with however much feta cheese you prefer.
- 5. Spread the minced garlic inside the butterflied chicken.
- 6. Put the spinach, onion, bacon, and feta mixture on 1/2 of each butterflied chicken breast and fold the other side back on top of it.
- 7. Top each stuffed chicken with the pieces of bacon you set aside earlier.
- 8. Place on a pan and bake at 425 degrees for 35-40 minutes, or until the chicken is fully cooked. Turn the broiler on for the last 2-3 minutes to brown the top of the chicken and crisp the bacon.
- The Primal Challenge: Smoothies Revisited
29 Sep 11
I posted about three of my favorite primal breakfast smoothies over at The Primal Challenge today. Click over and check it out!
I know I have been linking to my posts over at The Primal Challenge quite a bit. I will post some original stuff (photography, thoughts, recommendations) on here soon. Stay tuned.
- Light temperature, Sleep, and F.lux
17 Sep 11I posted again over at The Primal Challenge today. Here is the post, in its entirety, below:
I don’t know about you, but the “no glowing rectangles an hour before bed” rule is difficult for me. At Hillsdale I am usually so busy that I can’t avoid using my laptop before bed, lest work go unfinished. That used to affect my sleep a great deal, but then I came across a tip in Matt Madiero’s book, Roots.
Matt recommends a great piece of freeware called F.lux. Made by Stereopsis, F.lux is a free, cross-platform (Windows, Mac, and Linux) piece of software that changes the color temperature of the screen on your computer at night to the ambient light around you. Normally, screens are set around 6500 K, roughly the temperature of sunlight, which is great for waking you up, but not for allowing you to fall asleep. Some CRTs go all the way up to 9300 K. F.lux changes your screen temperature at sunset to around 3400 K, which is roughly the temperature of halogen light.
When I first installed the software, I didn’t think it made a noticeable difference until I turned it off a few hours later in order to edit some photos. When I turned F.lux off, the screen hurt my eyes! I can’t definitively say it has improved my ability to fall asleep since I’ve used it because I am getting more exercise during the day and I am usually exhausted by the time I go to bed, anyway. Since turning it off hurts my eyes so much, though, I suspect that f.lux is at least not hindering my brain from making melatonin to make me sleepy.
Stereopsis cites a lot of research which deals with the effects of color temperature. Here is an excerpt:
“…we surmise that the effect of color temperature is greater than that of illuminance in an ordinary residential bedroom or similar environment where a lowering of physiological activity is desirable, and we therefore find the use of low color temperature illumination more important than the reduction of illuminance. Subjective drowsiness results also indicate that reduction of illuminance without reduction of color temperature should be avoided.”
- from the paper: “Effect of Illuminance and Color Temperature on Lowering of Physiological Activity”So, does this mean it is okay to use your computer all of the time before you go to bed? No. It is still best to keep things pretty low-key and dim before you go to bed. You should also avoid having lights in your room at night. (I covered up all of the lights on my gadgets.) When you must use your laptop at night though, lower the color temperature with F.lux. Also, if you are the type of person who reads for an hour before bed, use a bulb with a lower color temperature. Wikipedia has a good chart of common bulb color temperatures.
Want to know something interesting? Those most of those curly florescent bulbs that Congress is trying to get you to buy are around 5500 K. So not only do they contain mercury and are more expensive than incandescent bulbs, but they are also ruining your ability to fall asleep. As Bastiat noted so long ago, government intervention has unintended consequences.
