chase the light

This weekend I headed up to Santa Barbara for a couple little road trips. Saint Barbara? Who knew? [LINK] First on Saturday to see a friend of the family’s daughter’s class project from Brooks Institute of Photography [LINK] and see a little bit of Santa Barbara. Then to Ojai on Sunday for a little birthday celebration. I haven’t actually stopped in Santa Barbara for years as I usually just think of it as a place to get gas on my way to San Francisco. I went over to the Santa Barbara Mission and had a look around. It’s in pretty good condition and has some nice grounds around it. Inside the church was a big basin of holy water (as seen in the photo) that I thought could serve up a very nice basin of holy macaroni and cheese because I was pretty hungry right then. Spent about an hour at the Mission and then went to the pier down by the beach and ate some taffy. The fudgy ones good, watermelon ones bad. Also saw a boat flip over in the wind. Then I got bored and kinda cold because the weather turned and went over to the book store and shopped a bit while I waited for my parents and aunt and uncle to show up. We went and ate some mexican food at Playa Azul. Good stuff. Which just continued my all mexican day from my lunch at Rubio’s. After dinner we headed over to the Lobero Theater for the Brooks Photography show.

The same time I was in China, Melissa’s class was also in China for 6 weeks doing documentary projects. Saturday was the multimedia show, dvd & book release, gallery opening and website rollout. A lot of great stuff to look at and really just made me want to go travel some more. I don’t think the presentation of the photos at the gallery did them justice. The foam core type mounting doesn’t really compliment anyone’s work. A small quibble to say the very least. The multimedia show was excellent and the dvd and book is put together well. Although the *C* and the *A* in CHINA need to be kerned in. Just sayin’. Actually that’s a bigger annowyance to me than the mounting at the show because many more people will be looking at the book, dvd & website! It reads *C HIN A* to me. They could probably use a typography class at the college. So, it was great to see the students work. Just fix the C & A please. [China: A Will to Rise]

So there ya go, my suggestions… no foam core type mounting and kern the C & A. Those are easy presentation fixes.

Then I drove home because I didn’t like Santa Barbara want to stay the night which just meant I had to drive up to Ojai the next day to be entertained by little Ryan and his 4th birthday. He likes caterpillars and Scooby Doo apparantly. Ate two pieces of cake. Drove home the coast through Malibu because the freeway route is real bore. Crashing waves along the shore is way better than crashing cars along the median.