…the newest member of the fam.  My wife got him for my birthday.  The name is a form of the Irish name Neal, it means “champion” and is the first name of President Mandela of South Africa.  He’s an Airedale Terrier like his bigger sister Sydney (who happens to be pushing 14 years old - I guess that’s 98 in people years).

We drove 10 hours round trip yesterday to Plains, Georgia (home of Jimmy Carter and the giant peanut that greets you when you get to this largely agricultural town).  We saw fields filled with magnificent sunflowers, ripe watermelons and of course, rows and rows of peanut plants.  Nelsson (or “Nels” as we’ve taken to calling him), lived on a 300 acre farm owned by a former civil engineer (retired) for the state of Georgia.  He and his wife raise Airedales and had a nice kennel there with 12 ‘Dales all together.  Nelsson was 1 of 5 boys and 2 girls in his litter.  He is very gentle and passed all the Volhard puppy aptitude tests we tried on him with perfect results for somebody looking for a family dog.  Vaughn likes him a lot – Sydney is not as crazy about him, yet …  In Vaughn’s prayers last night he included the puppy, which he thinks is his cousins’ dog, Diamond.  We’ve been working with him today to get him to call the pup Nelsson.   He can’t quite do the “N” so he’s Elson to Vaughn.

He’s an insanely adorable little guy and so far well behaved.  He loves running around the block and sticking close to his family.  Looking forward to all the goofy funness that is the airedale.

Anyways… here’s two photos… taken at the end of the day, yesterday after we got home from the long trip.

I started the whole creative thing when I was a year or so old.  I started out drawing and have pretty much kept it a part of my life ever since.  It’s therapeutic and keeps the Adobe Illustrator skills fresh.

This illustration was done in Adobe Illustrator for the line art, then brought into Photoshop for some very mild shading.  I am currently working on making the characters part of a flash based game.

This is a 16 image stitch of the place I go often to shoot the car at the gate.  It’s usually a different every weekend.  I cropped about 4 images off the right side so it’s down to about a 12 image stitch.  Some of you may recognize some previous subjects in this image… like the truck up in the air and the Plymouth Fury II to the right behind the fence.

Click on the image for a wide zoom.  It’s 1200 pixels wide so if you are on a small monitor, your browser may scale it to fit and cause the quality to go down.

Got a big wide screen? Check out the extra large version.

New PJ’s… and a he just had to have the mask.  He’ll be sleeping with superpowers tonight.  Yep, it’s late and I caught him doing the squinty eye.  doh!

I recently got a bunch of gear from White lighting (Paul C Buff Inc.) including some new heads and a Vagabond 2. I’ve always known them to be good on the support end from previous gear I’ve owned from them… but this good? First up the Vagabond 2 inverter started making some noise… what I think it was was just a wire hitting a cooling fan blade that I could have fixed myself but didn’t want to risk voiding a REALLY good warranty (3 years) - but instead of saying send it in, they shipped me another one and told me when I get it, send the old one back… and we’re not talking a little $50 item here. They sent it next day too. Then the case the vagabond came in lost a zipper pull which I think got pulled in a state of panic when, during a shoot, one of my subjects opens a door to a building we were trespassing on and it opens (WTF) and the alarm goes off so it was panic time (and a lot of expensive gear getting tossed around)… so I call them up and 3 days later, there is a pull in the mail for me.

Top notch gear, insane support. Definitely worth the extra moolah.

This post has been added to a new category - gear. I’ll be doing some reviews of the gear I use to help those that are in the buying process figure out what (and what not) to buy. I’ll be doing a review of the Vagabond 2 soon.