Happy Birthday to me!!!

Happy Birthday pop-up card from Yasuko

Today it is my 38th birthday… I tend to dislike my own birthdays, since they just remind me that the clock is ticking and every year that goes will never come back… but this one was actually a pretty good birthday and this is why I am actually writing about it

It all started with a nice snow storm. I really hadn’t paid much attention to the forecast in the past few days so it almost came as unexpected. It started snowing yesterday night, pretty heavily, continued through the night into this morning. When I woke up, pretty early this morning, I looked outside of the window and I saw about a foot of snow, give or take depending by the wind gusts, covering the parking lot outside of our living-room window. You can see it in the pictures below…

The view from my window yesterday night before going to sleep and this morning, around 8AM

I lived long enough in Long Island to know what that much snow really meant: all school closed and most offices and workplaces closed for the day. My office in reality is always open, 24/7, since we always need people to babysit all the server (aka. monitor the operations), but my boss David was so nice to allow me to stay home to enjoy my birthday. I did have to work a little but just because I had some leftover tasks from the weekend, but it didn’t even matter since my mood was already set in vacation-mode

As soon as Yasuko woke up she hugged me, wished me happy birthday, and gave me a card. It was a beautiful popup card and I had to take a picture of it (see at the beginning of this post) because it was just the most beautiful card I have ever seen Thank you Yasuko!

In the late afternoon, once it stopped snowing, Mickey and I decided to go to take some pictures at a beautiful local park, and that was the real gift of the day. Just when I thought I was going to stay indoors most of the day, avoiding the freezing wind blowing the snow all over the places, he invited me to go over to his place and go take some pictures. It was a really cool idea. Sometimes i tend to get very lazy and comfortable at home and I need to be pushed outside. And so we went, and we did have a really good time. I think I got a couple of good shots and you will see them probably in the next few days on my photoblog (http://www.gallarotti.net)
Thank you Mickey!

New Design www.gallarotti.net

As some of you might know, since the beginning of 2009 I have been working on reorganizing my web-presence, trying to increase the visibility of my portfolio and my work. In order to do so I opened a new photoblog and I started working on careful search engine optimization. This allowed me to reach quickly the first or second page on google for searches like "long island photographer", "photographer in long island" or "music photography long island". After I saw some results I went back to the layout of the blog and started working on rewriting the CSS almost completely. It has been a slow process because I have been working on this in my spare time but today, finally, I am proud to present the final design of my new photoblog! C&C are welcomed

How to plan a vacation at Fuji-san

Most of you who follow my blog and/or my flickr account will recognize this image.
I t was taken on March 23rd, 2008 at Yamanaka-ko, the most interesting, in my opinion, of the five lakes that surround the fuji mountain.
I loved this image from the very moment I shot it. Of course I was hoping to get a little more yellow and orange sunset-like colors in the sky, but I thought i had been lucky enough to get these beautiful images.

Well, today I found a Japanese website that has a high resolution webcam placed few yards away from where I took this picture from. The webcam shoots an image every minute and the website allows the user to watch online the most recent image, the last 24 hours or even images from any month of the past year!

And so, I started browsing around and found out that I was VERY lucky to get the image above. Feel free to browse, month by month of 2008. For all summer long there were very few interesting days. Mostly Fuji-san kept being covered by a thick layer of clouds with rare exception, until the fall. A few interesting images can be seen on October 29th, November 11th, November 19th. December was a pretty good month with a lot of good sunsets and one amazing sunset in particular on December 22nd.

So I guess the lesson learned is… Winter and early spring are the only good months to go at the Fujigoko region hoping to get some good shots. The second lesson is, to plan to stay a minimum of 2-3 days in order to avoid cloudy days. Honestly I think a 4-5 days short vacation around Fuji-san might be even better.

photoblog.gallarotti.net

I know, I know… I don’t even update this blog once a month, so what’s the point of a new blog? Well I have been doing some reading recently and I arrived to the conclusion that the main reason why I don’t update my regular blog often is because I am really not a write or into writing… What I like is taking pictures and a photoblog is what is supposed to suit me the best.

So here we go, let’s try this… and there is no better way to begin the new year than cleaning the desk, clearing our minds and coming up with some new project, isn’t there?

photoblog.gallarotti.net