JJP Designs | Photo Ninja

So a friend asked for some advice... She had been trying to get some photos of her daughter playing high school basketball and facing the eternal challenges of photography in a school gymnasium... She brought her camera and lenses over and explained that she had spent SOOOO much time on YouTube watching videos and finding that none of the tips she gleaned from them seemed to help... I decided that instead of walking her though what would likely have been her 4,738th lecture on the 'exposure triangle', I would try to distill down the relevant pieces of information she would need, and only those pieces, into something easy to remember but solid enough of a base that it could be built upon going forward... So, I decided to create a character. In my head I called him Ignatius Scardino Onofrio - I.S.O.... FYI - Scardino and Onofrio are family names from my lineage... Ignatius is just a fun name... ;) Before introducing her to Ignatius I gave her some core relevant bits on...

Yesterday, our female husky, Raven, killed a fly... My wife described the scene: She was crazy like the Tasmanian Devil going after it and then stood over it with an odd look on her face as she looked from the dead fly, then to me, then back to the fly... it was kinda' creepy. What I heard in my head as my wife relayed the tale... Raven went wild like a feral beast and then presented the carcass of her slain foe to me and said... "I have slain the beast in defense of the ancestral lands and now present it to you as fealty to the family Pino - we shall feast in honor of this event and speak of it in prose for generations to come!" So... You are all invited. We strongly recommend you bring tokens of honor to present to Raven... and please don't be late. Oh, and Raven now prefers to be referred to as "Your Majesty the Great Defender and Amazon Warrior Princess" DISCLAIMER: We are not responsible for what happens to you if she finds out you did not ...

How has a simple pile of paper, string and leather survived for so many years and in the face of so much technological assault directed at it? This is part of my series of blogs to explain what exactly is the Essence of a Book by photographically exploring my personal library. And I'm starting with my limited edition of The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night... There is something about a book - a REAL book... that has permanence - that says to the reader that the author committed to their words and thoughts... and the act of producing that book, those thoughts, on a typewriter gives the author the ability to physically produce their thoughts and ideas - instantaneously and indelibly. Here you just barely see the almost imperceptible indentation of letterpress. Today we crave the telltale indent that says we are beholding a work of handmade skilled craftsmanship but back in the day it was typically considered by many to be bad form to press into the paper to the e...