justin owens

I’ve been wanting to take night photos at the Berkeley marina, but keep putting it off. It’s been so cold recently that I haven’t been able to work up the motivation to get my ass out there. I figured I’d post about my intent to make it tonight, because I can’t lie on my blog, so now I’m totally obligated to go. I’ll check back later and we’ll see how that went.

I made it up into the Berkeley hills last week, twice in one day actually. I first went up during the day to check things out and to learn the route. Good thing too, the streets are really confusing up there. I found some nice areas along Grizzly Peak Road with a full view of the bay, it was really impressive. I look forward to making more trips up there. I want to catch it when San Francisco is being swallowed by clouds, I want to go up on a misty day and or night, and I want to make it up there on a really clear day. I’d also like to take my telephoto lense and get some nicer shots of San Francisco.

I’ve had mixed feelings about the gallery software I’ve been using on this site. It has some nice features, but it’s rather bloated and runs kinda slow. Maiki has a basic install of it that seems to run better, but I’m still not convinced. Part of that comes from needing to use the wpg2 plugin to integrate gallery into WordPress.

I recently came across a different gallery option for Wordpress entitled nextGEN Gallery. I’ve been testing it out and so far I really like the results. The only thing it doesn’t do for me is video files (for my animations), but otherwise I think it’ll do the job.

My test galleries:
Color Photography
B&W Photography

289 Kimi and I went on a photoshoot in the Berkeley hills today, the view was quite spectacular. I took this panorama on Grizzly Peak overlooking Oakland, Berkeley and San Francisco.

I used Hugin to stitch the separate images together, it’s a nice piece of software.

I get to start my mini thanksgiving vacation this evening, I’m rather happy. We had a still life due today for our Analysis of Form class, we were quite busy with that the last few days.

I made an animatic for my final project proposal for my Experimental Animation class, hopefully it’ll be approved. Animatic. EDIT - an animatic is a animated storyboard, it’s used to plan out the timing of an animation before production starts.

I want to post to this site on a regular basis and in an attempt to help with that, I decided to make a regular blogging day. Tuesday it is.

I’ve been spending a lot of time figuring out how I want to use this site. Originally I was going to use it as a portfolio for my art, but after getting frustrated with various blogging sites (LiveJournal & Vox) I decided to also blog here.

I’m working on updating my gallery with projects from school (Academy of Art S.F.), as well as keeping a journal of my experiences there. So far I’m really digging the school, but more on that later.

I got back into photography a few months ago, I’ll be updating with some new photos shortly as well as adding a new color album.