i was trolling through livejournal when i came upon a post that caught my eye. this guy had written an open letter to ashton kutcher; it was a funny jab at his life and acting. but what really caught my eye was how he signed the letter — “jeff zacuto”.

i blinked. zacuto? this guy lives in los angeles. my dad’s stepfather was named zacuto. i replied to this guy’s post and gave him my background on the zacutos. turns out my dad’s stepfather was his grandfather’s brother.

i’m not sure if there’s any designation for that kind of relation, but i said we are quasi-related from the intersection of our two families. it was weird reading him say that my uncle bob is the stepbrother of bruce and carolyn, since to me they are stepbrother and stepsister of bob :) anyways.. small world!

shot in santa cruz, california, yesterday

had a great day today. i went to my favorite coffee shop today and read about the zone system. it’s really sinking in now. the other day i talked to a guy at keeble & schucat about exposure and meters. that plus playing with my new light meter (thanks mom and dad!) and thinking, i’m starting to understand: zone system, compression+expansion, lattitude.

i decided to practice shooting today so i loaded up some film and went down to santa cruz.. i haven’t been there in ages. i ate a corndog.. i looked at the pier through one of the pay scopes, i watched kids on the roller coaster. i took notes on what i was shooting. i picked some subjects i knew would be off from normal average-metering. i used incident metering as a test (to get a ballpark) and used spot metering and averaging to decide what to shoot at. some of the shots i wanted to adjust the overall exposure.. so i’ll see how all those turn out.

i ate pizza-by-the-slice for dinner and headed back home. it was a great day.

last night alex and nick came over for an imprompu movie night. we watched sur mes levres (“read my lips”), a french movie that got excellent ratings. and it was a pretty good movie. turns out alex’s dad is doing art photography for a living now!

tonight i have to pick up a friend at the airport. tomorrow i’m going to boman’s after coffee to help out with the dinner party.

my grandmother said she wants a computer some day. i asked her what she’d use it for. pornography, she said.

i love my family :-)

from my test roll last night, playing with the holga and a vivitar 102 flash..

i just developed 10 rolls of film. half of that i shot in the past 48 hours. i am catching up, though (i still have undeveloped film from my roadtrip).

i took a look at the machine i run (which is host to offramp.org and other domains). there is about one and one-half gigabytes of outbound traffic each day on the machine. i estimate two-thirds of that is web traffic (according to august numbers). that’s a lot of traffic. no wonder it’s lagging the connection it’s on. :-/

guess what i did.

i finished up a first version of my photo website. i emailed someone who is opening a new gallery close by and is looking for new/fresh artists. then i emailed someone looking for pro-bono photography for a debut cd cover. scary!