Last Monday, Matt and I had the opportunity to help put on a bit of a kite show for a local news station out of Sacremento. The photo above gives you an idea what it looked like. Just about all the kites in the foreground are mine, joined by a giant octopus and trilobite in the background and another arch off to my setup's right. There's at least one more of my kites that didn't make it into this frame. But you get the impression...lots of kites. It was fun, and they recently put the piece on line (I even have a sound bite!), so I thought I'd share it with everyone. You can watch the piece by clicking here, or If that doesn't work, you can go to http://www.news10.net/news/specials/postcard/ and select the Berkeley Marina piece. You can also see more of my pictures from that day by clicking the image above.

Some of those many online tests are kinda fun, these are my results from a version of the Myer's Briggs personality test. I used to test as an INFP, but apparently my outgoing nature got the better of me, and now I'm an ENFP. For those of you who know my friend Jordan (who originally posted his results on his blog the other day), he is an ENTP, and that description seems to fit his personality pretty darn well :) What are you? Take the test here.

You Are An ENFP

The Inspirer You love being around people, and you are deeply committed to your friends. You are also unconventional, irreverent, and unimpressed by authority and rules. Incredibly perceptive, you can usually sense if someone has hidden motives. You use lots of colorful language and expressions. You're quite the storyteller! In love, you are quite the charmer. And you are definitely willing to risk your heart. You often don't follow through with your flirting or professed feelings. And you do break a lot of hearts. At work, you are driven but not a workaholic. You just always seem to enjoy what you do. You would make an excellent entrepreneur, politician, or journalist. How you see yourself: compassionate, unselfish, and understanding When other people don't get you, they see you as: gushy, emotional, and unfocused

In honor of St. Patrick's Day I made a point of updating my whisky pages, with both a new layout and more whiskies, including my first Irish whisky entry. Really, these pages are all an elaborate excuse for me to practice lighting technique for still life photography. Bottles are suprisingly difficult objects to light for multiple reasons. First, they're rounded so you get horrible hot spots from the flash no matter where you hide them if the lighting is direct, and seccond, getting even lighting across the contents can be quite tricky depending on the size of the bottle. Looking back at my early attempts I can say that I'm definately getting better, but I'm not sure that's saying much. At least I've learned not to mix lighting sources such as incadecent and LEDs, as that majorly screwed up my white balance. Oh well, sometimes you have to learn throug trial and error, and in the meantime I get to try new whiskies. To check out my progress in photography and read some snippets regarding whisky, click the tab at the top of the page.

Oh, and just for a touch of green:

(Click image above for more pics of wine country)

The first weekend of march we went up to wine country for the Russian River Wine Road Barrel Tasting Weekend. You buy a glass and the go around to just about any winery in the Russian River, Dry Creek, or Alexander Valley and taste the wines they'll be bottling soon straight from the barrel. It's a lot of fun but the price has gone up to $20 this year, so we decided to make a weekend of it and spent the night up there as well. As always I had my camera with me, and Amy caught me in the act above. I think one of our favorite new discoveries from the weekend was Paradise Ridge Winery, just on the outskirts of Santa Rosa. Their wines were pleasant enough, but what was neat about the winery is that they have a large sculpture garden in the woods in front of the winery to walk around. If you'd like to see more pics from the weekend, including many of the sculptures from Paradise Ridge, click the above photo.