If you’ve been a fan of Skillet within the last few years, you’ve probably heard their song Lucy from their album Awake. The song is extremely emotional, and it seems that it immediately resonates with many, many people (I know that it sure did for me.) At previous concerts, and interviews, John Cooper (who is the lead singer and bassist of Skillet, and the author of this song) declined to detail what the song was about.

He said that it was about regret, and that people have adopted it for themselves, and he didn’t want to ruin it for them with the real story. However, during Skillet’s recent tour, he has told the story of Lucy before singing it. Here is what he said at their sold-out double-headliner show with TobyMac at the Target Center on November 13, 2010..

“..this week is the very first time that I’ve ever told what this song is about, because, uh, it’s very special to me, but I feel like it’s time to talk about it a little bit, so.. listen up while I tell you a story about a young girl and a young guy who found themselves in a hard situation. They didn’t know what to do when they found out that she was pregnant; they were young, they didn’t have any money, they were scared, they didn’t want to tell anybody, they didn’t know what to do, and the only option that they could see was to terminate the pregnancy. So that’s what they decided to do… they went to a clinic, they had the procedure done, and at first they felt relieved that all their problems had gone away. But then something happened that they did not expect… and that’s over the next few weeks, which turned into a few months, they began to feel an intense sadness… and a pain and an agony and a guilt that wouldn’t go away. They didn’t know what to do, so they finally went to see a counselor; they said look — tell us what to do, we just don’t know, and the counselor made a suggestion. The counselor said here’s what you need to do — stop acting like you had a procedure, and act like you had a death in the family. So the couple went home and they made three decisions; number one, they decided to have a funeral service for the baby; number two, they bought a tiny little headstone; and they last decision to make was what to name the baby. After a couple weeks they finally decided they would call her… Lucy.”

– John L. Cooper in concert, November 13, 2010; transcribed by Nate Carlson, natecarlson.com

Many people had their theories about what the song was about.. my wife was right, I was wrong. “Lucy” is about the pain that can follow an abortion.. it’s kind of ironic to me, as “Lucy” is one of the songs that I often sing to Kai when he is really upset, and it really helps calm him down.. so Lucy, whoever you were, you live on in the hearts of your parents and in all the people your song has helped, and as the song says, you’ll one day meet your parents again:

Here we are, now you’re in my arms
Here we are for a brand new start
Got to live with the choices I’ve made
And I can’t live with myself today

Me and Lucy walking hand in hand
Me and Lucy never wanna end
Got to live with the choices I’ve made
And I can’t live with myself today

– Lyrics from “Lucy” by John L. Cooper, as performed by Skillet

Related posts:

1. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics
2. Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog
3. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

I was walking the dogs this morning, and ran across this car up the street.. Minnesota license plate ’1RQ’.. I don’t know anything that this could mean besides ‘IRQ’.. a rather geeky concept.. what d’ya think? Is there another meaning? Inquiring minds and all!

Related posts:

1. New puppy!

I recently posted the results of my first attempts at HDR photography. Since then, I’ve been craving more – what can I say, it’s fun! I had some time to myself at home tonight, so I found some random items and, well, took pictures of them. For better or worse, most of this collection should probably be called the ‘vice collection’ — cigars and booze.. I was looking for something with interesting color, and well, that’s what I found!

I’m not planning on posting any of the original images, before and after shots, etc here.. if you are interested in that geek-info, comment, and I’ll get it up!

Also, if you have any suggestions of ‘good things’ to take photos of using HDR, I would love to hear about it!

First, the non-vices. ;)

Crown Moulding ledges with sundries

One thing that caught my eye were the shelves on our living room wall where we have some of our wedding keepsakes, etc, and some of our favorite wedding photos on a 5×20 print above one of the shelves. I like the way this turned out..

Our wooden bassinet

Anyone who’s followed my son’s photo blog for awhile has seen this wonderful white wooden bassinet pop up a few times. My grandpa made it ages ago, and I love the darn thing. I think I went a bit heavy on the HDR on this one, but rather like the result – what do you think?

Now, for the vices..

Doublewood #1 – uncorked bottle

One of the scotches I enjoy on the rare occasion that I drink it is Balvenie Doublewood. Here is an image of a bottle with the cork out along with all the packaging that it came with. I like the way that the HDR makes the caramel color of the scotch pop.

Doublewood #2 – corked bottle

Same bottle of Balvenie Doublewood as above, but with a cork in it. ;) I love the shadow on the tube.. using HDR allowed me to accentuate that much more than a single photo would have.

Doublewood #3 – with a cigar

When my wife and I took a trip down to the Dominican Republic two years ago, we brought some cigars back with us – some hand-rolled cigars from a small shop, and some Dominican “Cohibas.” I don’t know how related these are to Cuban Cohibas, but they seem pretty decent. I am also not much of a cigar smoker, but man alive, it goes well with scotch! In any case, here’s the bottle of Balvenie Doublewood yet again, this time with the cork out and a Dominican Cohiba.

Dominican Cohibas in their box

Here’s a HDR image of the Dominican Cohibas in the cigar box that they came in.

Booze-a-plenty

A selection of liquor from the shelf that I thought looked interesting. In the foreground is a bottle of Grey Goose; behind it stands Sailor Jerry, a bottle of Beefeater gin, and a bottle of Hypnotiq. I’m not sure if it’s sad that only one bottle in this photo has been opened, even though three of them have been on my liquor shelf for at least three years..

I liked the results of many of these shots, but outdoor shooting was much more fun! I will have to go exploring outside and see whatelse my lens can find.

Related posts:

1. Playing around with HDR Photography

My wife and I recently took a quick overnight trip to Stillwater, MN for our anniversary. We came out of the Dock Cafe right around dusk, and I saw some opportunities for some pictures that I thought could be cool, but knew that a single standard exposure would not capture the reality of what is there. I hadn’t ever tried HDR photography before, but knew enough about it to know that it’d take the results of several bracketed images and let me build an image that captured what I actually saw. So I went ahead and took four sets of bracketed images – the first set I did 7 images, and the rest I did 9 images. Once I got back home, I figured I’d do some searching to see how to assemble them, and came across a HDR tutorial at Stuck in Customs. I used that tutorial as a baseline, but edited the workflow a bit as I went.

Set #1: Stillwater Lift Bridge

This is a photo of the Stillwater Lift Bridge – a major landmark in the area. I also love the old-school houseboat in the foreground! The HDR image above was built from 7 bracketed exposures, where the others were built from 9. I think this is my favorite out of these first four I’ve tried. My process for this image:

1. Import the raw images (I always shoot in raw on my D200, got tired of JPEG long ago) into Lightroom 3
2. Select the seven raw images in Lightroom, right-click, go to Export->Photomatix Pro (Note – this assumes that you have Photomatix installed as per the article above!)
3. Select 16-bit TIFF for the output type, ‘Generate HDR Image’, ‘Go Directly To Tone Map’, and enable the automatically-add-to-Lightroom option, with stacking. This will stack the final image with the first image (which is the image that you would get from the camera if you weren’t bracketing), and makes it easy to find for processing.
4. Ran through the Photomatix process as recommended in the Stuck in Customs article, until things looked ‘right’.
5. After I was satisfied with the HDR image, I opened the final image in Photoshop, and did some artifact correction (replaced the wavy flag caused by multiple exposures with a breeze blowing the flag around, and cleaned up some ghosting from a person entering the frame from the right as the images were taken.) I also did a bit of minor color correction to get things to ‘pop’ a bit, and did noise reduction with NeatImage Pro.

If you are interested, here are the original images this was assembled from, in order of exposure:

As you can see, the HDR version just has more ‘pop’ than any of the others – but I didn’t take it to an extreme.

Set #2: “Old Building”

This image is of a building that you can see from the road by The Dock Cafe if you look back towards Highway 36. Not sure what the building is – would love to hear from anyone who does know! This was assembled from 9 images, using the same technique as above – the only difference is that I did not need to do any artifact correction. Original images..

Set #3: Stillwater Trolly

This image is also taken from the street right in front of the Dock Cafe. It is of the Stillwater Trolly, which was shut down for the day by this time. 9 original images; I did not edit the final result, but should have – there are a ton of artifacts present in it. I didn’t really like the final result all that much so I haven’t bothered.. but if anyone else enjoys it I will either make raw copies available or do the work. ;) Originals..

Set #4: The Dock Cafe logo

Last attempt of the night is a shot of the logo for the Dock Cafe (good food and atmosphere by the way!) Again, not all that happy with my HDR result, so didn’t edit out the artifacts in the lower-lefthand corner. Originals..

That’s all folks..

So that’s it for my first foray into HDR! Love to hear what anyone else who has played around with HDR thinks of my results, critiques and flames are welcome. I’d also love to hear from anyone who hasn’t touched it yet but would like to! :) Thanks for reading and hope it was interesting at the least!

Related posts:

1. HDR photography – around the house and vices
2. John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics
3. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

I was driving to work the other day, and spotted this garbage truck with the best company slogan I’ve ever seen..

The slogan on the garbage truck is “Satisfaction Guaranteed or Double Your Trash Back”.

I love it. From a quick Google search, it appears that this is quite a popular slogan for a variety of trash companies.. this particular one was Highland Sanitation.

No related posts.

A friend of ours was having a engagement party up in New Hope, MN tonight (June 25 2010).. we knew the weather was going to be kind of nasty, but we figured that Tiff’s parents live about four miles from our friend’s house, so Kai could be with a babysitter nearby, and decided that we’d go ahead and partay. ;) However, between the time that we dropped Kai off at Tiff’s parents and left for our friend’s house, the rain had picked way up and made roads that we had been on 15 minutes before impassable. I (as usual) had my camera along, and snapped some photos while we tried to find a route to our friends house that wasn’t covered in a few feet of water.. it took us about 30 minutes to travel those few miles. In any case, the good news is there didn’t seem to be anyone hurt!

Click any image for a larger view

Flooding under the railway overpass on 42nd Avenue/County Road 9 between Quebec Ave and Oregon Ave in New Hope, MN.

Crystal police officers have arrived to help make sure that nobody is in the flooded cars and keep everyone safe.

There are five vehicles in the water that I counted; three of the cars are almost entirely submerged. A witness mentioned that there was a baby in one of those cars, and that the man driving had carried/swam the baby out a few moments before we arrived.. yikes!!

If you look on the right hand side of this photo, you can see some water movement – almost seems like water was channeled into this area.

Sorry for the poor quality photo. ;( One of the three almost-entirely-submerged vehicles.. there is also water pouring down from the apartment complex which has suites for lease!

I believed the SUV in the upper left of the photo actually tried to make it through the water after I started taking shots – not positive though. I was amazed at the number of cars we saw going through water that was far too deep for them to handle as we found a route to our friend’s house.

I was curious what the guy in the blue shirt was looking for in the car.. maybe he was the owner trying to get his belongings? Who knows..

Crystal police officers wading into the water.. about this time a fireman standing near me turned to another officer on the scene and asked if the PD needed the fire department’s boat. That would have been interesting! You can also clearly see the flow of water from the apartment complex above in this picture; look behind the railing in the upper-right third of the picture.

Officers taking charge to make sure that everyone is accounted for. From the moment they arrived (which was about a minute or so previous to this shot), they were putting together who owned each car, making sure that nobody was missing.

Fire department and police officers arriving on the west side of the flooded area.

At this point I think most of the onlookers realized everything was OK, and the cars that were not in the water started trying to get out of there.

About 10 minutes later, as we’re back on the road trying to find a non-flooded route, we came across some kids who were quite enjoying the turn of events.

Swinging above a nice pool of cool water.. life is grand!

Oh, and in case you missed it in the teaser image.. if you ordered a pizza from Sarpino’s Pizzaria (763-746-7990 I guess!), and it failed to arrive on time, and they gave you a long story about the delivery guy getting caught in a flood, they were not lying. You wouldn’t want the soggy pizza anyways, would you?

By the time we were headed back to Tiff’s parents to pick up our son and head home (around 11:15pm?), the roads were totally clear again, and there was no real sign of flooding – crazy! We drove under the same underpass that hours before had at least 3-4 feet of water under it.

For anyone involved in this – hope that you get things straightened out with your insurance companies ASAP, and if anyone was injured in the storms, to a quick recovery! Also, a sincere thank you to the police officers, fire fighters, and other emergency response personnel who respond so quickly to these type of events — your work is appreciated!

Oh, and if anyone wants tips on how to get the stench out of a car that has been flooded.. well, my advice is probably not to, but this stuff might work…. ;)

No related posts.

Our pups (Chimo and Oakley) have been going to Woofdah for a couple years now.. we tried a few different doggy daycares in the Minneapolis area, and this is by far the best one we have found (which is also conveniently located near us in Burnsville.) The staff actually gets to know our dogs, and is able to tell us if they are ever acting abnormal at daycare, and genuinely cares about us and the pups.

They have been renting space in a warehouse up until now, and needed a larger location, so they just finished up their new building. It’s located right across the street from Burnsville High School, so it’s a few blocks closer to us – although my choice of routes to get there will be limited a bit. ;) They had an open house at it today (May 15 2010) for the two-legged customers to explore the new place.. normally customers are unable to go into the dog areas because of insurance reasons, but today there were no puppies present, so we got to check it out. (By the time this goes up, though, the pups will probably be there!) I decided to bring my camera along and snap a few photos.. hope you enjoy a peek into the new building! Make our dogs jealous and tell them how great it is – they won’t get to see it until Wednesday..