Last night, I decided that I was going to go for a run in the morning before it got hot. I set my alarm for 7 and went to bed. I woke up at 7 not really wanting to go for a run, but instead, go for a bike ride. Realizing I hadn't taken photos in a while, I grabbed my camel back, GPS and camera and took off for a 20 mile bike ride that lasted nearly 2 hours.

One of the hardest things to do with light photography (in my opinion) is to get the subject (the light) in focused, and have the correct f-stop, ISO, and shutter speed set correctly. I got extremely lucky in my fist guess based on where I was and took an amazing first shot. I'm not sure if it was pure luck, or if it was just me actually knowing what I was doing and setting it up right. Either way, i was super happy that I got this shot. I'll post some more photos tomorrow when I have time to do the photo editing.

One of my favorite things about light painting is that you can literally have no plan and still end up with a really cool photo. I didn't mean for there to be an "A" in this photo, but that's just how it turned out. Do you see it?

Not only did James and I do random light painting, but we played around with my external camera flash. James wrote his name in the air in cursive, backwards, threw the light off to the side, then posed. When he was ready, I hit the camera flash and stopped the exposure. It's a very simple thing to do that makes the photos much more unique and personable.

Even though it's not a very interesting photo, the story behind these three drawings are awesome. I've been working at Wolf Robotics for a little over eight months now, and they finally put me in some more advanced training that interns don't always get to do. The training that I got into was "IRC5 Rapid Programing with ArcWare". That means nothing to you and very little to me. Let me break it down for you. IRC5 is the type of robot and robot controller we primarily use at Wolf. it's made by ABB robotics (the big giant orange robots you see in car commercials welding on bare car frames, that's the type of robot I was using). "Rapid" is the programming language (it's some acronym, but I don't remember what it stands for), which is a mix between G code language and the C++ language (for any of you who know what those are). And "ArcWare" is just the software used to run the welding equipment we use.
Anyway, the way it all works is really simple. Through a "teach pendant" that the programmer has in their hands (think of it as a $7,000 iPad that does WAY cooler stuff), they can do quick programming. The first picture is what I used to program the robot with. I started with the head outline (at the top), then had to define the center arc point and the end arc point for each half of the head. That's why there is a cross in the center dividing it all up. I basicall went point to point and taught the robot what moves to make. Once I was finished with the programming, all I had to do was put down a new piece of paper and hit "play".
Took me about 15 minutes to program this and make two copies. Considering that I just learned how to do all of the programming a few hours earlier, I say this is winning with a $60,000 robot. Can you believe that I got paid to do this today?
You can watch a video I took of the robot making the center image here.

Since I don't have a real diploma yet, but there is a good spot on my wall for such things, I decided to put a few of my "certificates" on my wall (why not?). The top one is one I got a little over a year ago for taking a 8-day class through CSU, and the bottom one is one I got today for completing IRC5 programming training at work.
I'm probably going to get a lot of these as I am in more and more training classes, but for now, there is a spot for them so i'll keep putting them up. It makes me feel fancy.

I woke up this morning remembering my mom wanted to go to the peach festival, and realizing she was expecting me to show up 5 minutes after I woke up. After my 45 minute drive, we went to the festival. With cooler temperatures than last year, it was a pretty good time. Went to Lafayette, ate some peach cobbler and a peach smoothie, bought some peaches, and headed out.

Last weekend at the Lafayette Peach Festival, I took a few pictures of some sculptures and intended to put them in a separate blog the day after I posted the pictures of the actual festival. Due to classes and hanging out with friends I haven't seen all summer, I never really got around to it. So here they are, a few days late, and I should be sleeping right now.
This sculpture is really interesting, it's called "April Charm" by Deedee Morrison. Kind of makes me think of large gem stones, or paper weights. I'm not quite sure what to think of it.

I was planning on seeing this play anyway sometime this or next weekend, but it turns out CSU has a new thing called "Free Ticket Thursday" where students can get a free ticket any time during the week for the Thursday performance of any play at the University Arts Center. So something that I was going to pay $7 for, I ended up going for free, and ended up going with some friends that were already planning on going. Sweet deal for me.
This play, the Comedy of Errors was a lot different than was expecting. The time setting was set in normal-ish time, instead of Shakespeare time. It felt like a normal play with weird talk. The way the program described it was "Shakespeare with a Tim Burton Twist".

This afternoon I got invited to go to Mexicali for lunch with Katherine. The Audi-Porsche dealership is right next door, and they were having a car show (which they do like every month). Since neither of us had plans the rest of the night, I suggested walking around.
This picture was the first one I took, and I had the F-Stop set really high from the last photography I did, which created these awesome sun stars on the hood everywhere. It was unintentional, but I like it a lot.