The other day I found myself thinking about television comedies—I'm not entirely certain why—and specifically about the dominance of Friends in the late 90's and early 2000's. It was this huge phenomenon, and although there were shows that I liked better and watched more religiously, once Seinfeld ended there simply wasn't any other TV comedy—possibly any show of any genre—that competed with it in terms of broad popularity and cultural impact. And as I thought about it, I realized that I don't think there has been any show in the post-Friends era that has really come close to the same level.

Mind you, there are some very popular and very funny shows out there. Modern Family is excellent, and shows like How I Met Your Mother and The Big Bang Theory seem to have big followings. But all three of them still feel relatively niche, especially in comparison to Friends. The current show that I think probably comes closest is the NBC version of The Office, but even that feels more on a level with shows like Frasier or Everybody Loves Raymond, neither of which ever really got out of Friends' shadow, in my opinion, despite being pretty popular.

Even today, six years after the show ended, Friends remains a huge cultural touchstone. Along with Seinfeld, it's probably the sitcom I most often hear referenced in normal conversations, even more than shows that are currently airing.

But I wonder if that's the kind of thing that will last. When Jason is older, will Friends continue to be iconic, the way that I Love Lucy still is? Or will it be more a generational thing? Friends ended four years before he was born, and when I look back at shows that were popular shortly before I was born—shows like M*A*S*H or All in the Family—I don't find them particularly relevant to me. I am aware of their past popularity, of course, and I might even catch some references to shows of that era, but I'm not sure how much is due to a real, lasting cultural impact and how much is just because I have an interest in trivia and pop culture history.

Even the shows that I might have seen as enduring classics before, like The Cosby Show and Cheers, don't seem to really be much a part of the cultural fabric of people much younger than me. Try referring to someone as a "Cliff Claven" type in a conversation with a 20-year-old; I bet that more often than not you'll be greeted with a blank stare.

But maybe I'm way off base here. Maybe Friends was never as big a deal as I remember it being, or maybe there are a lot more shows from the past that continue to be a big deal now. What do you think?

This was one of the last shots I took during our trip to Balboa Park this weekend. This woman crossed the walkway right in front of us, and the combination of her umbrella, clothes, hair, and makeup turned both my head and Juliette's. I snapped several shots in a hurry as she walked by; I like this one the best because of the moment of recognition evident on her face.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority exposure mode. Focal length 200mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/160 sec, ISO 200. Here again I did a fair amount of post-processing in Aperture 3. The original had a much brighter background and darker subject, so I bumped the exposure and recovery (each +1). I then reduced the overall brightness (-0.5). Then I added a strong bump to midtones using a curves adjustment and brushed that in over the woman and umbrella. To help isolate her from the background, I pulled back the saturation (0.8) and vibrancy (-.2) and applied that to the background and the man in the foreground. Then I burned the background and the man and dodged over the woman and umbrella. I wanted the background even darker, so I used the vignette tool (intensity 0.7, radius 0.92) and brushed it into just the top and right side. Finally, I used the Intensify Contrast brush on the umbrella to bring out the tones a bit more.

Thoughts for improvement: I still need to work on getting the exposure right the first time so I don't need to do as much work afterwards. I think I may have actually overdone the post-processing here—it looks a little too played-with.

"What's Your Perfect Lunch?":

A couple of weeks ago, my wife and I got together for our final summer lunch together for the year. She’s a teacher, you see, so during the summer she has a lot more time to do things like take our son on fun outings, work on projects around the house, and meet up with me for lunch. As always, though, the summer has wound down, and she’s back to work again, which means no more weekday lunch dates for us.

I mentioned before that we went out to Balboa Park on Sunday afternoon in order to let me shoot. Despite the fact that the light wasn't great and I couldn't get a good angle on any of the actual dance performances, and even despite the fact that I didn't really get any particularly great shots, it turned out to be one of the most enjoyable and interesting shoots I've done recently.

They say that photography is the art of seeing. For me, what that has meant is really being aware of what's going on around me. As I've developed my eye, I've found that I'm nearly always composing a shot in my mind, and I've started noticing interesting people and things everywhere.

What was really great about this shoot was that for the first time, I felt like Juliette and I were on the same wavelength. Oftentimes, I'm paying attention to the photographic possibilities while she's paying attention to what we're actually doing, which can lead to us clashing a bit. (I don't blame her, either. A few weeks ago someone at a party said to me "It must be nice to have a photographer in the family," to which I replied, "Well, it's nice to have the photos, but it's also nice to have a husband who's actually involved in what's happening instead of just taking pictures of it.") This time, though, she seemed to be seeing the scene the same way I was, even surprising me by pointing something out at the exact moment I had noticed it.

That's what happened with this photo. We were headed back to the car and noticed this mom and her son walking just ahead of us, and we both recognized the moment simultaneously. Juliette had just started to turn to tell me to snap the photo, only to find me already sinking to one knee to get the angle.

There are a lot of ways to feel close to your spouse, but I particularly love times like that where our thoughts and awareness seem to be completely in tune. I'm smiling now just thinking about it.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority mode. Focal length 86mm, aperture f/4.5, shutter 1/4000 sec, ISO 200. I did a fair amount of post-processing in Aperture 3: first I applied the Daylight WB preset, then bumped the exposure (+1) and recovery (+1). The sky was way overexposed, so I brushed in a curves adjustment over the sky, pulled way down. I then used the Orange Filter B&W conversion preset. I dodged the mom and son, then burned the entire ground. Finally, I added some vignetting (intensity .51, radius 1.01), mainly to change the focus of the lighting.

Thoughts for improvement: The main thing here is that there was way too much contrast in the scene for a good exposure—I was shooting almost directly into the sun, so the sky is very bright and the subjects were in shadow. I ended up splitting the difference, mainly trying to avoid blowing out the sky and figuring I could brighten up the subjects in post, but it might have been better to shift brighter in camera, instead, as the subjects are still pretty dark. There are also some halos around the treetops and the tower that resulted from brushing in the curves adjustment, which I couldn't get rid of. Finally, I wish I had gotten just a slightly better angle so that the top of the tower weren't cut off.

I've been meaning to write a post about Disney's Beauty and the Beast (or, as Jason calls it "Booty the Beese") for a while now. Three months ago it was one of Jason's favorite movies, and we watched at least a few minutes of it several times each day. As always, though, procrastination managed to steal away the relevance of the topic to my daily life, and now Jason is much more into Cars and Toy Story.

I had a bunch of little bullet points to develop, but the main idea I had for the article was to talk about how unsettlingly close to a Stockholm syndrom sort of scenario the movie is. Need to find a woman to love you so you can undo your pesky curse? Easy enough: just grab the first pretty face that comes by, hold her prisoner with no hope of escape, scream at her, and threaten to starve her and she'll come around. Yep, that definitely sounds like "the most beautiful love story ever told."

You can imagine my dismay, then, when I saw this video linked by one of my Facebook friends this afternoon:

Same point and funnier than I could have done it. So I guess that idea is out the window. All that's left is a few of those leftover bullet points:

• Somehow, the animation in Beauty and the Beast doesn't seem to hold up as well as the animation in The Little Mermaid, despite—or perhaps because of—the fact that it's so obviously more technologically advanced. The ballroom scene, of course, seems pretty dated now, but even the more traditionally animated scenes seem less impressive than their older counterparts. If nothing else, the cels seem to stand out more from the backgrounds.
• I do have to admit, though, what they accomplished with the backgrounds in terms of parallax processing and simulating a rotating camera is pretty darn impressive.
• Comparing the two movies again, it's interesting how much more like a Broadway musical Beauty and the Beast is than The Little Mermaid, both in terms of the songs and the voice acting.
• Angela Lansbury's performance of the title song may be the best, most affecting song performances in any Disney movie. She was 65 when that movie was in production, already over 40 years into her film career and more than 80 credits under her belt. It's a pretty song to begin with, but hearing the age and experience in her voice adds a poignancy that gets me in a way I wasn't able to understand when the movie was new. I tell you what, Peabo and Celine have got nothing on her.

This is another one of the performers from Steam Powered Giraffe. This one's character is called Upgrade.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority exposure mode. Focal length 165mm, aperture f/5.3, shutter 1/160 sec, ISO 200. I added a similar blurred overlay layer in Photoshop CS5 to enhance contrast and give it that soft glow, but I also used a layer mask to apply it just to the midtones. (Duplicate layer, apply Gaussian blur with radius 5, set layer mode to overlay, apply layer mask, apply image to layer mask, solarize layer mask, move layer mask white point to the left, flatten image.) After that, I used the vignetting tool in Aperture 3 to darken the background. This left her coat too dark, so I brushed the adjustment out of the bottom of the picture.

Thoughts for improvement: This looks pretty good on my laptop, but on my work monitor (which is dark and uncalibrated) it's way too dark. I should probably have increased the brightness or exposure in post, or just had a better exposure to begin with.

This year, for the first time ever, we're planning to have Christmas in our own house. It's been a whole thing, involving lots of discussing and hemming and hawing (mostly by me), planning and forecasting, and taking stock of what he have and what we need. It turned out that one thing we needed was a new dining table, since our old one really only sat four people comfortably. We took a quick jaunt to the furniture store on Saturday morning, and by the time Jason woke up from his nap Sunday afternoon, it was delivered and in place.

Jason is a little unpredictable when it comes to sudden changes, so I wasn't sure whether he'd be excited, indifferent, or enraged about the new table. Fortunately, it seems to have gone over pretty well. In fact, he seems quite taken with it.

Sunday evening when we sat down to dinner, I said to Jason, "Can you say thank you to Mommy for making dinner?"

"Thank you, Mommy, make dinner," he said. Then, totally unprompted, he turned to me and said, "Thank you, Daddy, my table."

"Um, you're welcome," I replied. "Do you like the new table?"

"Yeah."

In fact, he likes it so much that every meal thereafter he has thanked one or both of us for the new table. I tell you what, I could get used to this.

You know what might be a fun idea? Just for tonight, I'm going to try writing this post as if I were Heather Armstrong. I figure, she must know what she's doing, what with her sponsorships and millions of pageviews and no day job, so what the heck? Let's give it a shot.

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Weekends in the Sakasegawa household are a constant game of "Stay Ahead of the Tantrum." If you don't have kids, you've probably never played this game, which is a shame because it's only the BEST. GAME. EVER. The rules are simple: you and your spouse are given an unspecified amount of time to try to come up with some way of keeping your toddler occupied and amused. If you succeed, you get to start over again. If you fail, you get to enjoy the company of your toddler, except that your toddler has been replaced with a coked-up half-Tasmanian Devil, half-banshee that only knows how to scream I WANT MILK and throw things.

So this weekend we decided to go to Balboa Park on Sunday afternoon because there was a dance festival happening and we thought Jason might like to see it. The way we figured it, he'd either like it or he'd be a good example to all the teenagers of what can happen if you don't wear a condom. Besides, we needed to get him out of the house, if only to give the dog a break from having all of his tail hair pulled out.

I mean, really, if anybody deserves to have a quiet afternoon of Diners, Drive-ins, and Dives reruns and licking his empty nutsack, it's Cooper. Dude puts up with enough.

Right. So we got there just in time to see a bunch of really nice-looking kids from one of the local dance schools start their show, during which Juliette and I whispered to each other about how probably none of them were going to be making it to the finals of So You Think You Can Dance any time soon. (KIDDING.) When the first dance was over, I turned my head just in time to see Jason starting to shift around in his stroller, and I'm thinking OH MY GOD, HERE IT COMES and just waiting for his head to start spinning around.

Except, what he actually did was clap and say "Yay!" And kept sitting there. And sitting there. For an hour. Just watching and clapping. Mind you, this is the kid who can't make it through a whole episode of Sesame Street before he starts yelling DON'T LIKE ABBY FAIRY SCHOOL.

I said to Juliette that we needed to follow these dancers back to their school and take up residence in their studio and she was like, dude, you know dance studios don't usually have WiFi, right? And I was all, dude, WHATEVER TOTALLY WORTH IT.

I mean, really, you have to have your priorities straight in this life. Right? Right?

Over the past couple of years I've developed a sort of book-sharing friendship with one of my co-workers. I lent him a couple of Neil Gaiman novels, and he lent me The Stone War. It's been working out pretty well for both of us.

I'd recently let him borrow my copy of Cordelia's Honor, and a couple of days later he stopped by my desk.

"Have you read The Warted Man yet?" he asked, a note of excitement in his voice.

"Warted Man?" I repeated. "Nope, don't think so."

"I'll bring it in tomorrow," he said. "I think you'll like it."

Of course, it turned out that I had misheard him, and what he had actually said was Warded, not Warted, which makes for a pretty different mental image. Happily, I hadn't read (or even heard of) that one either, so I put it into the queue.

He was right, I did like it.

In The Warded Man—author Peter Brett's debut novel—humanity struggles for survival in a world where demons called "corelings" rise from the earth every night, destroying everything they come across. The only protection offered comes in the form of wards—magical symbols painted onto homes and city walls that repel the corelings. There is no other way to stay safe, no way to fight back, and when someone is caught outside after sunset—or, worse, when the wards on their home fail—death is swift and terrible.

Against this backdrop, we are introduced to three young characters from three different towns, between whom the narrative skips back and forth. Arlen, a boy whose rage at losing his mother to the corelings while his father cowered in fear drove him to strike out on his own to find a way to fight back against the night. Leesha, a Healer's apprentice who becomes an outcast in her village after her fiancé lies about having slept with her. Rojer, raised by a Jongleur—this world's equivalent of a traveling minstrel—after his village is destroyed by corelings. We follow these three through their youth and into young adulthood as they each uncover hidden talents that may help turn the tide against the corelings.

Because it's the first episode in a series, much of The Warded Man works to establish the backstory of the characters and give you a peek into the world in which they toil. Indeed, about the first two-thirds of the book fall into this category, with things not really picking up until near the end. You'd think that would make the book feel slow and uneventful, but rather than relying on exposition, Brett instead largely focuses on the characters' individual stories, giving us only glimpses at the larger world and its history. The result was a book that was hard for me to put down once I got going.

If I had to make a comparison to other works, the closest I can think of might be Terry Brooks' Shannara series, which also features a fallen world in which dark forces run loose. But Brooks had a tendency to rely pretty heavily on cliché—in fact, the entire first book of that series is blatantly derivative of The Lord of the Rings, and though over the course of the next several books he sort of grew into a more compelling writer, I'm not sure I would really put him in the top tier of epic fantasy authors. Brett, on the other hand, seems fresher in his approach to the genre, and although the novel starts out a little stylistically thin, it continues to develop with the characters—a trick that made me suspect that Brett is a better writer than I had initially guessed—and there's also enough content to pull you in anyway.

The only real negative experience I had with The Warded Man was in not discovering that it was part of a series until I was three-quarters of the way through the book. I hate having to wait for new episodes, so I usually prefer to wait until a series is complete (or at least mostly complete) before starting. Based on the strength of this first volume, though, I think I'll just have to suck it up and wait for the sequels, because it seems like they'll be worth my time.

Started: 2010-07-25 | Finished: 2010-07-29

Purchase from Amazon

I was itching to get out and shoot yesterday, so we decided to check out the Celebrate Dance Festival that was taking place in Balboa Park this weekend. One of the first things we saw was a group called Steam Powered Giraffe, a "musical pantomime troupe" that wasn't, as far as I could tell, actually part of the festival. They do a sort of "singing robots" act that Jason loved. I got this shot of one of the performers—whose character's name is Rabbit—in between a couple of their songs.

Technical info: Shot with a Nikon D40 and Nikkor 55-200mm VR DX lens, in aperture priority exposure mode. Focal length 200mm, aperture f/5.6, shutter 1/100 sec, ISO 200. I bumped the exposure a bit and cropped to 4x5 in Aperture 3. In Photoshop CS5, I added a blurred overlay layer to increase contrast and give it a bit of of that painterly, glowy feel (duplicate layer, set blending mode to overlay, apply Gaussian blur with radius 5, reduce opacity to 50%, flatten) then sharpened with a high-pass overlay (duplicate layer, apply high-pass filter with radius 5, set blending mode to overlay, reduce opacity to 80%, flatten).

Thoughts for improvement: I probably should have upped the ISO, as the shot was pretty severely underexposed. I'm also not completely sure about using an overlay diffusion and sharpening—I like the way it turned out, but the two might be working at cross purposes.