by Bruce | Sep 14, 2014 | BELphotos, People, Photography
![Lois Davis held the winning ticket at the Starbucks of Toms River Grand Opening on Thursday, August 21, 2014. [L->R] Brian Higgins, District Manager; Caroline LaVallee, Assistant Manager; Lois Davis, Raffle Winner; Merideth Newman, Store Manager.](https://i0.wp.com/www.belphotos.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Raffel-Winner.jpg?resize=474%2C338&ssl=1)
Lois Davis held the winning ticket at the Starbucks of Toms River Grand Opening on Thursday, August 21, 2014. [L->R] Brian Higgins, District Manager; Caroline LaVallee, Assistant Manager; Lois Davis, Raffle Winner; Meredith Newman, Store Manager.
A few weeks ago I was asked to make some photos at a Starbucks store grand opening in Toms River, New Jersey. There are more than 20,000 Starbucks stores worldwide, and I was able to do a shoot at one of them. I feel pretty good about that.
The layout of the store is unique and not a cookie cutter version of another store. I don’t believe that Starbucks has ever built a store in that fashion. Every store that I have ever visited, coast-to-coast, was always a unique layout.
I had a lot of fun making the photos and got to do some coffee tasting and some new pastry tasting. I’m a plain black coffee guy and was able to taste some of their most interesting blends brewed ‘french press’ style.
A raffle was held for a door prize and Lois Davis of Toms River, NJ held the winning ticket for a basket of Starbucks Coffee Cheer.
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by Bruce | Aug 23, 2014 | Photography
My son Robert and his wife Jackie increased his branch of the Lukaszewicz Family Tree by one on Friday, August 22, 2014. Gavin Robert Lukaszewicz entered the world at 10:22AM, presenting at 7 lb. 5 oz. and 22 inches long. Both mother and baby are doing well. Gavin makes me a grandfather for the fourth time and he’s also the first grandson. Welcome Gavin Robert Lukaszewicz.
Gavin Robert – 6 lb 5 oz
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by Bruce | Aug 16, 2014 | Photography
Grande – Bold and Black
Starbucks is one of my go-to places to read my on-line newspapers and just relax with my favorite brand of coffee. I used to visit a store about four and a half miles from where I live, however, Starbucks opened a new store just over a mile away. This new store is much more convenient and there is a lot less traffic to contend with getting to the new Starbucks as well.
Since I’m always making photographs, making one of my morning coffee is not unusual. What’s different about this one is the post-processing treatment; cartoon style, a style that I always like to play with. I have several apps that manipulate photos in this way. Comic Life 1, 2, and 3, Halftone, and Adobe Photoshop Elements allows a lesser variation of this as well.
I recently downloaded an IOS app named ToonsCamera. What 
makes this app different from other cartoon type photo-processing apps is that this one applies the changes live, on-the-fly. As you shoot your video and as make your still shot. Pretty neat, huh? Of course you can massage any photo that you have in your IOS devices photo library.
Not bad for a $1.99 app. I was actually able to grab it while it was for FREE on iTunes for a few days. That freebie is now $1.99. Still a very worthwhile purchase. I can see this blossoming into a more upgraded app as the developers get more positive feedback from users.
The developer is Code Organa, L.L.C. and the app requires IOS 6.0 or later, and is compatible with iPhone, iPad and iPod. The app is optimized for iPhone 5, and works very well on my iPhone 4S.
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by Bruce | Aug 16, 2014 | Photography
A few days ago, I came home in the afternoon and my Internet and cable television were both down on my Comcast (xfinity) service. This never happens in the afternoon. Usually, I will experience an outage late at night, and always in the last five minutes of Boardwalk Empire, The Bridge, or some other late night show; like clockwork. They must have an automatic reset of the network at the same time every night; hey Comcast, how about 3:00AM instead? But, I digress.
Xfinity (Comcast) Account App
Trying to call Comcast at that hour or any hour for an outage is always an effort in futility. However, I remembered that Comcast updated it’s apps recently so I decided to bring up the Xfinity My Account App on my iPhone.
After launching the app and signing in, I was pleasantly surprised. There it was, right on the screen, Multiple Outages. I didn’t have to drill down through many pages of data and questions, it was all right there on the opening page.
The best part was I did not have to spend any time on the phone with the Comcast “trouble-shooter” reading from their script … Comcast – unplug the cable modem. Me – will this make everyone else’s cable on the block come back? No thanks, no patience anymore. For the price I’m paying for service, you should have a truck parked in front of the house just in case I have an outage.
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by Bruce | Aug 11, 2014 | Photography
August Moon
I have tried to make a decent photograph of the Moon for over fifty years. Now that might seem to be an exaggeration of sorts, but I can tell you that is how long it took me to finally get it almost right,
By a decent photograph I mean in-focus, not over or under exposed too much and not obscured by a haze. Well, tonight I was finally able to make a tick mark on My Bucket List as is shown by the above photo. It is still not as crisp as I would like it or as I have seen in other photographers work.
The humidity was 74% and the air was heavy. I don’t know if that was a reason for my less than perfectly sharp focus. I do believe the sharpness that I did meet was in part due to the TriggerTrap app. It was the first time I used it for this type of shot since I purchased it. Definitely a very useful and easy to use app.
August Moon Equipment
Equipment and settings:
- Nikon D90 set on manual, ISO 200, Aperture set at F11, Shutter Speed at 125, and manual focus as well.
- The lens is a Nikon AF-S Nikkor 70-300 1:4.5-5.6 G ED also set to manual focus, VR set to off. The lens was zoomed in at 300mm.
- Apple iPhone with the TriggerTrap app, using the Timelapse option. TriggerTrap to Nikon D90 dongle.
- A heavyweight SLIK tripod to further reduce any vibration.
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![Lois Davis held the winning ticket at the Starbucks of Toms River Grand Opening on Thursday, August 21, 2014. [L->R] Brian Higgins, District Manager; Caroline LaVallee, Assistant Manager; Lois Davis, Raffle Winner; Merideth Newman, Store Manager.](https://i0.wp.com/www.belphotos.me/wp-content/uploads/2014/09/Raffel-Winner.jpg?ssl=1)
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