United

After some thoughts and more thoughts, I decided to simplify my life a bit (!?!) by bringing several web sites and blogs under the same roof. My photography web site will stay www.tanko.ca , only that I will close the Photoshelter one and set it up on a free standing host. For a few more weeks the Photoshelter one will continue to breathe under quasarphoto.photoshelter.com, after that the site will be closed and all the data deleted from their server. I really like Photoshelter, no complaints about it, but my site is always just a subdomain of theirs and somehow I would like to taste a free standing site with more options in the future. Will see how that goes.

As for the Blaze the Vizsla blog will migrate to
tanko.ca/BlazeTheVizsla, which actually is up and running already. The calgaryvizsla.blogsot.ca will stay as-is for now, all the new posts will go to the new address.

Visit my new stock  photo site at fotocourt.com

I don't need no drugs to calm me

Dog. Off-leash. Here and there comes along a law obeying citizen who hints me that the law requires the dog on leash basically all the time.  Sure, zee law. I've been lightened up about that in the barking lot where, lets face it, people swing by daily for a deep inhale of weed. Just about every time I park there somebody is relaxing . It's a nice park 'n all fresh breeze from the river. Then it hits me in the lungs. I hate it. The advise I give to my daughter is" if you dope yourself as much as your mother and me did it all together , you're gonna be fine". That comes down almost to none. Why almost? We go here and there to some rock concerts. The last one was Roger Waters in Edmonton. He sung the wall one end to other , I tell ya I was in heaven. High there. Level 3 tickets,( OK, Blaze just walked up to me and gave me the look " I haven't peed for an hour now". "Cool it dude, you had 5 walks today, you're gonna get dehydrated"). So ya, back to the Wall. Where was I? Level 3  tickets and a nice draft upwards of smoke.  Man, they should write on the door "Caution, proceed with care, drugs are consumed within  these premises". Now you know that I'm naive. I was quite Comfortably Numb by intermission. Some friends , who we ran into during intermission, lightened us up that" that is expected during a Pink Floyd concert". I didn't rectify "It's Waters, not PF" . I was having some migraine start-up already, I always have it after I sniff that crap. The whole thing was absurd. Is. Ya know, the audience was more like a Cruefest one, just about fitting into the Rexall Place, a pretty ran down arena, Roger was singing meaningful lines down there,not really fitting into the picture ,( I dare to rise him to Orwell and Kaffka level), the guy beside me was yelling just about all the time some very short fragments of words , whenever the music broke through his smoked up brain with some delay here and there, swimming through the air and pulling some tribal dance. I had to switch seats with my wife before he would knock her out. After some Hungarian evil eye thrown at him he apologized and took off , who knows where, seeking for space for his private act. So yeah, we were engulfed in haze , rancid popcorn and some cheap pizza & salsa smog. Sometimes I wonder how the hell they can sing down there, feels like the back alley of a cheap restaurant. The smoke started to get in my eyes badly and my throat was scratchy like hell. Run Like Hell came up and I was feeling every beat of it in a meaningful way. Looking around I was quite sure somehow that the bigger chunk of the crowd would not even notice if suddenly Waters would switch with Britney Spears in the middle of the song , OK lemme be bad, with Lady GaGa. So yeah where's the law ? Funny how it goes no ? Recently a friend of ours was turned away from a celebration because he had his kid with him and inside alcohol was served. Sure bud. Go down to Vegas, you can ask your kid to hold your beer while you smoke a joint. But keep the damn dog on leash, will ya ?!

Double treat

Are dogs under the weather sometimes? Do they "fool moon fever?". For sure Blaze had a better day than me. He had a nice big walk/swim and a second treat in the dog park. Me? Never mind...but somehow I recalibrate my mood in the evening when  ( dunno why) I went o Kijiji and checked out the price of some Canon 5D's. There was this guy giving it away for $ 550.00. Ended up with $ 535.00 ( gotta have deal no?). Now I have a nice back up camera, just in case. I love 5D's, they have  a nice bright sensor and "huge" pixel sizes ,8.2 microns, the largest of all. Don't get fooled by megapixels, they mean nothing if they're crammed in a small sensor and yield lotsa noise. Mark II has 21 mpix but only 6.4 microns. Mark III  goes 22 Mpix and sensor goes to 6.25 microns. But at the end of the day all tech talk goes south if the lighting and composition is crappy.

NAVHDA 2012 kick off ( for us)

It was a nice kick off day at NAVDA training today. Blaze had the pleasure to do some field work and even get dirty in the march a bit. He did not go too-too far into the water, but from my perspective, he went far enough as much he loves the marsh. Field was on the stronger side, nice points and he broke the point only on one bird.  Not bad for a season starter. After lunch I pulled a strobe and camera from the car and we took some dog photos. The sky was on of those incredible blue ones with some nice clouds. Putting the sun behind the dog I balanced the light with one cranked up ABR800 ringflash ran on Vagabond Mini. The result was cartoon like.

it's that time again

Blasting through water to retrieve then dry up in a forest run.

photo assistant

this is a photo assistants life in the garden