Daily Photo

Mmm… Tempura green beans.

What a treat. Last weekend in Los Angeles I met a friend for noms at a place called Nest at WP24. It’s a Wolfgang Puck restaurant serving Asian fusion cuisine. Kinda pricey, but not ridiculously so, and very casual attire.

We shared some appetizers, and they were all super good (here’s the menu), and at the end of the meal I felt decidedly happy and full, which is basically the kind of food critic I’d be. I’d say things like, “The food made me happy and full, and I drooled, so I give it four stars.” 🙂

If you’re ever down there in the LA area and looking for a good place to eat, you could do a lot worse. I’m just saying. Try to grab a table facing the windows, and time it just before sunset. You’ll get some gorgeous views of downtown LA.

It’s the light trail, man. It’s where all the lights crossed the Sierra Nevada mountains back before the trains started…

LOL! Sorry, that was crazy talk.

Light trails! — those pictures with the long lines of swirling light that look a little fantastical and science fiction. They’re created by keeping the camera shutter (the “eye” thing that opens to let light into the lens) open longer than usual.

And nowadays you don’t even need a giant fancy camera to create them. A lot of smaller cameras let you adjust the shutter speed (in this case, increasing it up to a full second or longer). I used a point-and-shoot (the Sony DSC-RX100) — actually, my favorite point-and-shoot of all time.

You want to look for the setting on your camera that controls the shutter speed. On my Sony, it’s the “S” setting on the dial.

To get this shot, I set the shutter speed for 20 seconds.

That’s a while, and the key is to keep the camera as still as possible, ideally setting it on a tripod or windowsill (an improv tripod), which is what I did.

Normally, the shutter opens and closes in a fraction of a second, usually a fortieth or sixtieth of a single second, but by leaving it open a full 20 seconds while the camera itself remains still, the static objects in the shot, like the buildings and highways, appear to be still, while the moving objects in the shot, like the lights on the cars, are captured as beautiful trails of light. Everything also appears brighter (making it a great way to capture stars in the night sky).

(Side note: conversely, by setting a quicker shutter speed, like to a thousandth of a second, time appears frozen. That’s how photographers do things like capturing a baseball player’s swinging bat, or a flying hummingbird with wings that aren’t blurred, or capturing a single drop of water, or a certain blogger girl jumping in her dress.

To keep the camera as absolutely still as possible, I also used the two-second timer feature. That way I didn’t even have to press the shutter button, which would have caused the camera to move a little.

I was also sitting in a pitch black hotel room like a psycho creeper, LOL! But there was a method to my madness… I turned off the lights so they wouldn’t interfere with the final pic (I also turned off the camera’s built-in flash).

The end result? Light trails of LA cars on the freeway!

Now that’s a hot pepper.

Get it…? Pepper? Hot? 🙂

Anyway, gardening. I love it, especially this time of year when everyone’s gardens are overflowing with fruit and vegetables.

My current produce bounty: bell peppers and cherry tomatoes from my deck garden.

The lemons, peaches and regular tomatoes are from my uncle’s garden in Union City, and the blackberries are from my parents’ yard.

In a word, yum.

Have you been noshing on any fresh fruit or veggies lately from your garden or someone else’s? What kind of stuff grows there?

Saw these beautiful hibiscus in my next door neighbor’s yard this afternoon and had to share them with ya. 🙂

Bravo, Mother Nature. Bravo.

But the two maneki-neko cats that live on the windowsill in my office keep telling me, “Do it! You need the Kate Spade Hello Tokyo Cat Purse, Jimi Flats and Cat iPhone 5 Case.”

I’ve had my eye on these for a while…

I’m not sure how much longer I can resist that purse, man. The cuteness is clawing at my soul.

For the record, I’m going to file this under “Crazy Cat Lady Problems.”

QUESTION: What do you get when you combine cats and mystery novels?

ANSWER: A friggin’ boatload of awesome.

I was at Barnes & Noble last Saturday perusing the magazines and young adult sections when I saw a familiar greenish yellow glint out of the corner of my eye.

Cat eyes.

There were probably dozens upon dozens of mystery novels with cats on their covers. I learned that there’s an entire sub-genre of mystery-solving cats. MEOW-ZA!

Did you know about this? I had no idea.

I have so many new books on my wish list now…