cropped pan SOOC, Tanner and Beethoven

cropped pan SOOC, Tanner and Beethoven, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

Overexposed...But it grew on me. This is utter unedited, except for the crop. The large aperture letss you use a much faster shutter speed, minimizing your shake...giving your pictures the clarity of steady hands  I overexpose a lot more stuff with the 50 mil. I love my new lens. Mucho booty kickin'. It makes me look good. This view is through the slats of a little fence I hurriedly threw up... the puppies are off the chain, and roaming about the backyard at will. The stress of having to deal with either an escape attempt or long periods sleeping somewhere I can't find them is ...well, stressful. Yesterday, two of the sons of bitches, talked thier innocent sister, who is my favorite that I may keep, into disappearing for 45 minutes under the shed. I fruited. I was positive a hawk got 'em.
Tanner really looks better on a WHITE background

Courage....orifice is important.

courage., originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

The puppies, chemistry, work are kicking my ass. I miss my life of having a life and blogging occasionally. It has been so long, I had trouble navigating the dashboard. I got a new lens. With an f-stop of 1.4. F-stop refers to the orifice, that hole in your camera it sees the pictures through. I could have gone down to a 1.2, but that 1 leetle step would have added another three or four hundred dollars to an already obscenely expensive lens. This is what is known as fast glass. For natural looking photographs, the best thing is natural light. *boing* . Whodda thunkit?  
     So if you want to capture your loved ones, or the loved ones of your clients at their most uncontrived, and you bill yourself as a natural light portrait photographer you need fast glass, a lens that will permit you to photograph pictures in available indoor light, to avoid the washed look of onboard lighting. This picture of Smokey is through my new fast-ass 50 mil. courage. made it into E X P L O R E.
     E X P L O R E is Flickr's Showcase site, The Cream of the Crop. The top 500 most interesting shots out of a daily upload of 7.2 million . Yes. 7.2 million. There are people who have done this many times. A hundred or more. Some of the best photographers in the world. People who capture breath. I am not of this caliber, and never will be, but it was quite uplifting, to have one pop up to  # 365 before falling to the 400's . I have had that feeling 3 times now. courage. topped out at 365 of 500, my highest ranking to date. Go, me. It was like a goofy teen girl friendship note from God. It gave me a warm fuzzy. Taken with the new lens... one of my first shots with it.


    I must give these puppies away and I don't want to. I must give them away. All of them. I can only keep one (1). 
     Or maybe two(2).  
     Or  three (3). 
     I need Help.

I got Oppa's finger!

I got Oppa's finger!, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

The year I began attending GMC, I was accustomed to a tax refund somewhere between 1500 and 2000 dollars...It had been that way for years. I lost a minor to the passage of time and this changed, but that year I did not notice due to the homebuyers credit. That was sweet.
This year I noticed. In spite of the greatly reduced income of a small paint and carpentry contractor working his way through school, I managed to owe a buck or two...
Last Thursday, looking at an empty wallet and the overdue bills that I have caught up with my tax refund in the past, I wondered who was gonna handle this.
I got a call the the mother of someone at my church. I picked up a little job
This job pays about the same as a teenager on your taxes...
Thought that was kinda interesting.

Lookin' for Trouble

Lookin' for Trouble, originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

This non-prose world, called unreal by the rulers of this age, but real to people of faith, is the world entered by the mystic, the contemplative, the visionary, the prophet, the poet...For the modern man, truth...is arrived through prose...not intuition, not imagination, not wonder, not awe, not worship, not reverence, not trust, not faith. - Brian D. McLaren.

I tried to read " A Generous Orthodoxy" years ago as a denominational Christian. I've always thought too much, so my days in mainstream Religianity were numbered. I have a reading problem. Books are my crack. I've haven't pawned anything to buy books...yet, but it could happen. In spite of this proclivity, I could not finish Brian's attempt to reconcile ecumenism with doctrine in a major world religion that has fractured into myriad fragments, with much disagreement and (in the past...right?) bitterness. He was just too blasphemous. That much openmindedness was an antidote to faith, seemed to be the underlying sentiment in my little church. Brian wanted me to entertain the notion that my faith might have a few errors in it, and that when I disagreed with your theology, that you might have a point. My tiny Kentuckian congregation had some firm boundaries about stuff like this, even though one of our cliche's was "Don't check your brains at the door". I did like the fact that McLaren wears out parentheses. Perhaps we are distantly related. When I shelved "Orthodoxy" I didn't realize how arid the landscape was becoming...
Now, after a little time in the desert, I find him MUCH easier to swallow. (It's because you have apostasized, Brother! The Corinthians have turned you over to SATAN!). So my inner mystic (we all have one... it's kinda like an inner butthead. I have one of those, too.) tells me "Your pastor just referred to that heretic you're re-reading...and for five or six years you have not lost that book. It must be a sign!"
The question is (After all, Jesus performed a sign or two, and then went on to say wanting a sign wasn't cricket.)," By looking for writing on the interior sky, am I guilty of wanting to be the star of my own story? Or am I disappointed that my life seems to be unimportant in this Grand Epic, and simply hungering for a more significant role?"
I gotta go to work. Unfortunately the mule is in the ditch, and these musing will have to go in my inner "Drafts" folder. Who knows when I'll get around to cleaning that up?

Yeah, I know.

Yeah, I know., originally uploaded by Christopher Rauch.

    
     Suzie, my bitch (lol. It cracks me up to type that.) who usually sleeps diagonal to me on the left side, wandered in and out of the whelping area I prepared for her (a few towels, a couple old sleeping bags in the closet of Kelsie's old room) earlier this week. She's done that for the last few of nights, but last night she was unusually agitated. She woke me up about 1:30, and I figured she was in labor. I got threw down my good sleeping bag next to the whelping area, and that calmed her down quite a bit. She's a daddy's girl. I fired up the laptop and started re-listening to a podcast. every time I would drift away, Suzie would whimper, roll around, or simply lick my face, nostrils, and closed eyes, until I defended myself. I got a little coleman led lantern and the turning it on revealed that Suzie's vagina was REALLY funny lookin'. It was swollen (I've seen a couple swollen vaginas. This was different.), and looked somehow... too long. 
So I touched it ( I know, ewwww!), it was a LOT harder than any other  vagina I've ever touched. I began speculate and imagine that this is what a canine vagina would look like if it had a puppy in it.
     Guess what?
     I was right!  It  spit out a little water balloon that ruptured into what looked like a wet guinea pig in a condom. And since then we have been having puppies. Six  Seven of 'em in five hours. and she's getting that look again...