Tag: life

Our friend Barry is the gun totin' type.  He made a bunch of targets and goes out shooting every so often.  He invited me to go with him on Saturday to do some shooting, but also to take some pictures and video.  We went with him and some others.  We drove out into the Central Valley to some Bureau of Land Management land where it's legal to shoot.  So it's pretty much a desolate set of hills and canyons which make nice backstops.

We set up a pistol and rifle course to run through.  I had not shot a pistol before this so I was fairly lousy with it, but I was a little better on the rifle.  Because of my lack of experience I did the course with a .22 pistol and a .22 rifle.  But later on I was able to fire an assault rifle, a .45 pistol, a 9mm pistol, and a .357 magnum revolver.  Those are pretty fun guns to shoot--the .357 really packs a punch.

Here are my favorite pictures and the video of my run through the course is at the end, you won't want to miss that, I'm sure.

We were out pretty much the whole day, we left town before sunrise and got back after sunset.  It was long and exhausting.  The high temperature out there was in the 97-99F range.  I did pretty well with the help of my Subway visor and my polarizing sunglasses, but by mid-afternoon I had a pounding headache behind my eyes.  I'm just not used to that much intense sunlight.

I also made a rookie mistake of taking ibuprofen (for said headache) on an empty stomach.  That made for a rather unpleasant experience of focusing on keeping my stomach calm while riding home, exacerbated by the fact that nausea is a symptom of severe dehydration and it wasn't immediately obvious whether it was the ibuprofen or if the 5L of water / Gatorade I drank wasn't enough to keep me hydrated.  But the nausea subsided half way home and I haven't experienced any additional issues, so I guess I'm alright.

And now the moment you've been waiting for: Kyle's run-n-gun, with the oh-so-manly .22 pistol and .22 rifle (which I managed to drop the magazine out of while swinging it off my back).  I don't think I did too badly having never fired a pistol until this day.  I did a lot better later after practicing and learning how to properly fire and suppress the instinct to compensate for kickback before the shot occurs (not that the .22 has much kickback, but those larger ones sure do).

You can download it too: 2011-08-27 - Kyle Run and Gun (small). Use "right click -> Save file as..." to download it.  The file is 30.1 MB so it may take a few of minutes to download (depending on your Internet connection speed).

Yesterday I convinced Jess to go for a hike with me up at Del Valle Reservoir. It's a nice area just outside of the Livermore city limits. I haven't done anything outside in awhile beyond driving to/from work (or bicycling the same occasionally) and I wanted to be outside since it has been nice out.

So yesterday we drove out to the reservoir and did a short hike, about 1.2 miles. We stopped about halfway through and rested. While resting I took a bunch of pictures, none of which quite turned out how I had imagined. The wind was blowing rather strongly, so I thought it might be fun to try and get a picture of the tall, dry grass covering the hills blowing in the wind. Kind of like the kind of pictures you can get of water where it looks silky. Well, that didn't quite work out, it mostly looks like a blurry mess, but I was able to adjust one to look kind of nice. I used an oil painting effect to get a somewhat impressionist version of the hillside. It looks okay, but there's nowhere really for your eye to settle.
As we began hiking again we passed a bunch of thistles. We happened upon one that was growing all by itself which presented a nice opportunity to get it isolated from the background. As I mentioned, the wind was blowing so I didn't have much control of the exposure besides cranking the shutter speed up as fast as it would go in order to keep it from blurring. This also meant I needed to bump up the ISO, so the shot came out a little bit grainy, but I think it still looks pretty good:
After the hike we stopped at Wienerschnitzel for some ice-cream. On our way to the reservoir we had seen that they were selling 79-cent soft-serve ice-cream cones. Jess, however, opted for a caramel sundae instead. Regardless, the ice-cream was good. I would be more than happy to make a regular thing of hiking / photographing for 1.5-2 hours and then getting ice-cream.