Today is the June 23, 2010 the first day of the Alameda County Fair at the Alameda County Fair grounds in Pleasanton, CA. I love the County Fair. My first time to the Alameda County Fair was back in 1984. My parents had moved to the area after my dad took a job in nearby San Francisco. I had gone to the Orange County Fair many times as a kids and teenager. This was the first time I got to experience a real county fair, something like you would see in an old Hollywood movie.
The Alameda County Fair has Horse Racing on the oldest one mile horse race track in the United States. I also love to check out the livestock from the 4H clubs throughout the county. The kids in the 4H clean, feed, primp and prepare their charges for auction.
Whether you like the livestock, carnival rides, exhibits, horse racing or the fried fair food whatever the reason go to the County Fair. While you are there, take a few images. If you do take a few pictures upload them to my California’s County Fairs flickr group. It’s free and fun. Here is the link to the the flickr group California County Fairs. The group has a total of 105 members, you could be 106. Hopefully I will see you at the fair, if not there, then hopefully in the flickr group.
2010 Alameda County Fair Calendar
As you can imagine from the title I was using the wrong White Balance (WB). I kinda liked the look of the extreme blue in the sky and in the ocean. I was distracted with talking to a photographer and his wife that were shooting with a Fuji 617 or a 6×17 film camera.
At one point during the day I remember saying to myself that my images looked really blue and washed out? Duh! One of the big rules of thumb, before you take your ist shot, check your camera settings and reset your settings in the camera.
I shoot RAW so it’s that that big of a deal to correct my Oh $#!t moments, and I have alot of those… Shooting RAW is so forgiving that it helps when making a mistake like this. Plus you should always shot it right in the camera first so you don’t have to spend a ton of time in post processing.
I think they should have that warning message in your camera that says “You sure you want to take this image with these setting Dummy?” Ahhhh no, but I’m just a dork fish…
All this week I have been preparing for a trip to Orange County. I am traveling to OC in the next week for a series of Job interviews. No, it’s not for a photography job, it’s for my chosen profession of a Financial Services Professional (Equity Trader). Anyone that knows me personally, knows that I was laid-off from my job over a year ago. Yes, it was a huge disappointment, however I never thought I would be unemployed for this long. The job market has been very bleak at best.
In preparing for my upcoming interviews I realized that I didn’t have a business card. I have cards that I made for photography, but nothing for my profession. Last night I rectified this little issue. I spent a few hours before I went to bed, and made some financial business cards. I had some ideas of how I wanted my business cards to look like. I didn’t want to just use the free templates that vistaprints.com offers. I wanted to have a personal touch.
A fes days ago I was fooling around with Wordle and created a couple Wordle graphics and posted to my blog here Financial Buzz Word Bingo . I mentioned that I was going to use them for a project. I decided to use them for my financial business cards. I downloaded the photoshop .psd layout file from vistaprints.com. I used photoshop to put my business card layout together. Next, I uploaded the finished file to vistaprints.com and added the text. The next step and most important step, I had my wife prof the card before I finished. This is what my business card looks like. If you notice I didn’t add an address, because I am looking for a job in the Greater Bay Area and in Orange County. I didn’t feel that the address was as important. My wife had made the suggestion of putting my Securities Licences on the card instead. I agreed that this was more important since I worked so hard to get them during my career.
I am working on a new project for job search, and I thought this would be a good start. I am not really sure what i should use it for, but it was suggested I should use it on the back of my business card.
*** Side note: if you use Google Chrome for Mac as your web browser, Google Chrome does not support Java. You need to use a web browser that can use Java to use wordle and to view this link.***
Financial Buzz Word Bingo
Wordle Resume
Happy Easter Everyone
My wife teaches third and forth grade combo class. Every year they do Life Science, so they hatch chicken. This is some one of the first baby chicks from this years hatchlings. The kids in the class named this one after me, since I played chicken herder this year and got all the fertilized eggs for them to hatch. 102 or 9 dozen eggs for six third grade classes.
Every year I go into the my wife’s class and do a chick fashion shoot. I do a different theme. The first year was KFC Box theme. Last year was a KFC Bucket theme, this years theme is Easter.
The eggs in the basket are real. They came from the same hens that laid the eggs that these baby chicks were hatched from.
Here is the link to the Chicks set
Image 45/365
Sunday Valentine’s Day my sweetie and I went to Fenton’s Creamery in Oakland to split Sliders and a Fenton’s Famous Black and Tan Sundae
Image 44/365
Paper White in Oakland/ Piedmont California
Image 43/365
While shopping at Trader Joe’s
