Butts are beautiful. Butts are funny. Animal butts are beautiful and funny. Case in point:

My Sonoma Sheep photo.

Animals lined up in an array of interesting colors or patterns grazing in a field or walking down a dirt road can make for interesting photography. You don't need to get the face of every single animal you shoot into the shot. Sometimes butts can be a very beautiful thing. They can also be funny too. Take the example from my very own gallery for instance. Say it with me out loud, "sheep butts." Kind of makes you chuckle and chortle there doesn't it. No?

Think of it this way. You go on safari taking a ton of shots of the animals that roam all over the African landscape. You don't pay attention to what it is you're shooting. You get home and sit down to sift through your shots to see what you want to keep. You get to a section where you were taking photos on the grounds of one of the hotels you stayed at and presto a whole section of nothing but zebra butts. After the sixth or seventh time repeating the words, "Zebra butt" you start to laugh and realize how beautiful and comedic those rear ends really are.

That example happens to be a true one. No, I didn't go to Africa and take shots of zebra butts but my camera did. My parents the SLR photography illiterate people they are didn't realize that my camera did some of the things it did when they were on safari and thus they ended up with an entire section of zebra butt shots. Going through the photos on their card I started to laugh when I saw a dozen shots of animal butts. Zebra butts and hippo butts had me rolling my eyes and laughing at my father's poor photographic skills. He's getting better I swear but it's with a point and shoot digital camera.

Yes my friends animal butts can be both beautiful and funny, especially when there's an interesting story to go with them.

Supposedly, as my info section shows, I have a website. It's a website that for lack of better terms is utter crap at the moment. I wouldn't recommend anyone look at it. I tried to have a gallery on my site but I totally fail at making them so I used an outside source to host and code one for me. That outside source changed hands and went to pot. Nine times out of ten I can't even get into the site and had to resort to putting one of my galleries in my list of favorites just so I can find the thing. The code that they provided for the gallery was removed and now my site is a sorry excuse of blank pages and links to nothing. The money I spend on my site each month has become a waste of good money. It's a waste I can't afford right now. So, it's either fix the situation and make my site work for me or give it up completely. I haven't updated the thing in a very long time and that reflects badly on me. It's so bad I haven't even looked at my own website in forever.

So once again, I'm trying to come up with a good design for site. I cleared some space on my hard drive and can afford to install my web design program again. However, I still want to have a gallery on my site and I don't know how I'm going to go about creating one. The lack of a gallery is what brought me back to Deviant Art in the first place. I want to be able to share my photography with people but I can't seem to do that on my own right now. I've been trying to get ideas for a new site design but I just can't get inspired. I look around DA for site links of fellow photographers but nothing seems to spark something for me. They have nice sites but they're really not what I'd do for a website. Add to that the desire to change the site address name, and you have one very antsy amature photographer. I just don't feel the whole anime aspect of my site anymore.

I gave up the web radio deal a long time ago due to financial reasons and I don't feel the whole Radio Free Mars vibe anymore. I'm more Indigo Eye now. If I went from hobby to job with my photography it would be under the Indigo Eye Studios banner not Radio Free Mars. I like Cowboy Bebop but I'm more photography than anime. Indigo Eye, which ironically was inspired by a manga passage, relates to photography because it describes the color of a camera's lens glass. To me, Indigo Eye is more of a philosophy than a description. It's a way to look at the world through the beauty of photography. It's life through the lens of a camera. It's taking that patience one must have with photography and applying it to the rest of your life. It's knowing that not everything will turn out perfect on the first try and that you may have to keep working and trying until you get the results you want. I think it's a good philosophy to have. If you apply it to the rest of your life you can live a relatively stress free life.

And so, I'm searching for the perfect way to apply that philosophy and way of life to my website. I want it to be less hobby and more portfolio. Someday I'm going to say yes to my sister and start doing real estate photography for her. Some day I'm going to get that other computer sitting around our house to work properly and use it strictly for putting together those photo tours my sister uses to help sell houses. A good sampling of my work is key for being able to get people to want to use my work. Yeah a good website update is in major order here.

Monday my parents and I went to the Chicago Botanical Gardens. I spent so much time taking photos of flowers and ducks and the landscape that I literally ran out of battery power. I wanted to go over to the Japanese gardens but the bridge to them was closed off. I at least got some interesting shots of a lot of flowers, insects, trees, and waterfalls. It had been years since I last went to the Botanical Gardens. It's a bit of a hike to get there compared to the Morton Arboretum that going there is more of a special treat compared to the Arboretum. Heck, my brother goes to the Arboretum so much it's almost better for him to be a member there. He runs twelve miles there every Saturday morning with his marathon training group.

Anyhow, expect to see more gallery updates from me in the coming days. I need to go through my card and pick out the best shots I took Monday and fix them up for viewing. Don't be surprised if I throw in a head of cabbage into the mix. The botanical gardens has a very extensive vegetable garden that they use to supply their Sunday morning farmer's market and sell at other local farmer's markets. For some reason I found the cabbage they had there an interesting photographic subject.

On another note I need to decide what I want my big birthday gift from my parents to be this year. Last year's gift that they were supposed to get me never happened because they could never decide on which phone to get me or what mobile plan would be best for us. So this year it's either get new bed linens or a 50mm macro lens. Macro zoom lenses are way too expensive at over $400 a pop. With those prices being high I might end up going for the bed and bath linens instead. As I said three years ago, photography is an expensive hobby.

I apologize for the assault I'm making on your watch list but I felt it was time for me to update my gallery. I have several shots in my "Indigo Eye" folder that had been on another site that I was using for my personal site's gallery. However, due to a change of hands that site has been experiencing frequent downtimes and unreliable service. The gallery being down way too many times has me wanting to get my photography in a more public location. So, until I finish unloading all of the shots in my "Indigo Eye" folder into my DA gallery this assault on your watch list is going to continue. Not to worry though, I won't assault it all at once. It'll happen in easy to manage chunks.

The more I sit here with nothing but the beep beep beep of my AIM in the background the more I'm wondering if Of Love and War would make a good title for that fic I'm working on. Now I'm wondering if Tales of Love and War would be better or if it sounds too cheesy. I really don't want a cheesy sounding title to my fic here. I kind of want to have something that will grab the reader's attention and make them say "Interesting title, I think I'll check it out." I at least want them to look at the first chapter of this thing. Oh and do you think I should stick with keeping the fic exclusive to MMO (Mediaminer) or put it up on the Hell Hole too and take my chances with all the Avatards. Mind you I haven't updated there in quite some time.