Raymond Abril

There is an ‘experimental walnut orchard’ next to my neighborhood, and the clouds were really pleasant today with the light rain. I couldn’t get it all in one exposure, so I tone mapped these three.

Been working on this panorama in my spare time. It is stitched together from 129 images from my roof.

I’m enjoying making fractals now, and I’m looking to find other ways to be creative.

From my 3rd story studio, I can see every mountain in the valley. I have experienced the sunrises and sunsets of the different seasons and began to understand early man’s fascination with understanding the relationship of where the sun rises and sets and the seasons.

The entire reason I decided to buy my house was because of the 3rd floor loft. To me, it is a romantic sensation to sit at my desk and look behind my monitor to see the whole city, or to DJ with only the light from the street lamps illuminating my mixer. I would not be able to choose if I prefer to watch the sun wake up from behind South Mountain or fall asleep behind the Estrella Mountains.

When I first moved in, I chose to tell time by where the sun was in the sky. This experiment was interesting to impress upon the minimal amount of illumination upon my perception of days versus nights. It was a glorious portion of my life where I was free to read, write, create, and understand the physical world. Within the city of Phoenix, people are so used to staying indoors with everything closed to keep out the incredible temperatures. 110 degrees Fahrenheit at midnight? From my studio, I can see the Earth around me and it impresses upon me inspiration that has no comparison to anything else. I am surrounded by activity. Planes land and take off at all hours, sometimes as dots of light and others as curious objects in the distance moving at an angle.

What this view represents is a promise I made to myself to stay with my hometown and be a part of it as it grows. Phoenix is the 5th largest city in the country, and yet it is so very new. Newcomers often quip about the lack of culture, yet they don’t provide any of their own. I see Phoenix as a hot center for the future. One of my dreams is to open my own art gallery.

I decided to stay in Phoenix and purchase a house instead of traveling the world. The personal growth I have accomplished within my home have allowed me to develop a concise understanding of myself. The more of which is the plan I have laid out to someday realize the rest of my dreams. Besides, there will be time to travel the world later; and I will have my home to come back to!

I combined 3 12-bit RAW pictures from my camera on a tripod and merged them to 32-bit per channel. Click the picture to view the full version. I have much to learn about the process, but I just wanted the detail in the clouds to stand out. I’m experimenting with the process, and I’ll keep working on it. My Brightkite will have other pictures from the city.

In the meantime, I am going to appreciate the lights of the city at night. :)

Perhaps my fascination with flowers come from their rarity in the desert. When the rains come, they bloom en mass. If you wait too long, however, they are soon gone. Their beauty used to expand their empires and populate the world. I grabbed this picture on my way to get something to eat this morning. Actually, I was experimenting with the aperture override on my camera. Someday I’ll get a proper lens for taking macro shots.

I will be posting even so many more at my PixelBlog! I have so many sites and blogs to update and it does get tiresome, however soon I will have everything centralized. You’ll see :] A basic feed of everything I do can be found at my FriendFeed. With some time, I’ll have my page setup that shows everything I’m trying to accomplish and have finished… I’m excited!

As a child, I was always asking questions about the natural world around me. My back-yard was South Mountain, and I was free to roam and explore. My curiosity was not limited to natural phenomena, for I always wanted to know how things worked. How did the alarm clock work? I wanted to take it apart, however considering I was only 5 years old I did not want to be unable to put it back together.

My parents bought me several books filled with questions and answers, yet as encyclopedic as these were they only fueled my thirst for knowledge. If only there was Wikipedia in the 80’s…

The ice crystals in the upper atmosphere were always more interesting to me than “the man in the moon.” I’ve never seen the man, for even with a hyperactive imagination I had to strain to guess that the upper two darker mares were the eyes and the lower its mouth. I read a story about an artist showing his capabilities by drawing a perfect circle, and so circles have been fascinating to me.

I took this picture with the camera laying on the fence pointing upwards with a 30 second exposure. Even within 30 seconds, at full resolution the stars are a line from the rotation of the Earth.

For all I know, I still know nothing.

I’m not sure what the future holds, but what I do know is that the possibilities are infinite and unimaginable. What I expected my life to be at this point, that which I did think about for concerns that over-thinking my own life would disrupt the natural flow of events, is completely different than I ever dreamed.

Mostly, everything is phenomenally better than I had hoped. I feel enlightened, strong, enduring, proficient, and proud of myself. I do wish that I would have learned how to step away from work and relax by now. I am on a computer 14-18 hours a day or more, if there is work to be done. I love to work, I love the work I do, and there is so much more to accomplish.

It is a natural and fantastic feeling of satisfaction from accomplishing the things that I do. What I actually do is difficult to explain, and somehow & someday I will teach myself the needed linguistic technicalities to be able to comprehensively discuss my own life without feeling as though I am bragging about my accomplishments. I am more meek than that for I know that all I have done is nothing in the scheme of things. There is just so much more to explore, adventure throughout, and take advantage of as life develops and evolves in front of me.

For now, I think I should relax more. I have a big life ahead of me of Photography, Music Production, and actually working on my own websites instead of everyone else’s. Its time to focus on myself!

Watching my kittens grow up to be beautiful cats has been a humbling experience. I have been awake since early this morning because Locke wanted to snuggle on me, next to me, under the blanket, and then against my neck all morning. His meow is quaint, like a gentlemanly “mew.” He cries when I leave, and is an absolute daddy’s boy. To think that I almost did not adopt him:

When I first bought my house, I really wanted two kittens so that they would be able to play with eachother if I was not around. I was so excited and overwhelmed when I first saw their litter. There, on one of the last steps of the staircase, was a clump of fur made up of patches of different designs. All but one of the tiny kittens were sleeping together. The first one to catch my eye was the white cat that was chasing imaginary butterflies and jumping around completely crazy while the others slept. I knew I had to have him.

Next, I wanted a girl. There were two calicos and I decided to get the warmest and fluffiest of the two. As I picked her up, she melted in my arms and into my heart.

I had my two choices, but there was something that caught my eye. A cat with a fur coat that looked like he was wearing a tuxedo. I thought to myself that 3 cats would simply be too much, but he was handsome and I had to ask… can I have three? I would later tell people that it is because I have three floors in my house and so I could have one cat per floor, but honestly I’m not sure why I couldn’t leave him. He was just charming, sleeping there. Perhaps I liked the idea of balance - one crazy cat and one sleeping cat. Plus, since I was getting the ADHD kitten then I was sure that he would need a boy to play with. I was right.

The first night was so awkward. I thought to myself, what if they don’t like me and spend their time hiding somewhere? I had never had a cat before, and so many of my friend’s cats were loners when I was around. In order to get the white cat to calm down, I had to put him under the covers of my bed. The calico slept right next to me. The black cat slept at my feet. I was worried that he wouldn’t be fond of me… How surprised I would be.

I named them after Final Fantasy VI characters. Kupo is the white, hyperactive cat. Locke is the black gentleman cat. Celes is my calico, self appointed princess of the house.

Since I have such a huge house, we spent the first few weeks we getting to know it one floor at a time. Every night they slept on top of me. I would later count this as a mistake because now, two years later, they still sleep on top of me at times and I will wake up with a large weight crushing my chest and a fluffy tail in my face! After they became used to the whole house, they still did not like to be away from eachother and would meow when they became separated from eachother… or me!

Oh how they got in the way of my work! Sometimes I had to put them in a bedroom that was full of boxes just to get anything done. They were climbing on everything, and always sitting on my keyboard as I type.

Yet I have changed because of them. To have three cats follow me down 3 stories when I was just getting some water and then all the way up is love. To have them all cuddle up next to me as I lay down and purr at once is love. To be waken up 6 hours early because they just want my attention is selfish, but it is still love. And I love them back.

These days they give me a little more beathing room and as they grow up, they have relaxed. Still, Kupo is quite the attention getter and every visitor falls for him and so many people have wanted to take him for themselves! If only they knew how much of a pain he is!

I’m sure I would have amazing sleep, unscratched furniture, and a very quiet house if it wasn’t for their habits yet I am not sure that I would want to live a life without them. I’m not sure I was truly living life before they came into it. I know that I am now. They are my children and family, and I cannot live without them.

I am very fond of the desert and its cactus. They represent the virtues that derive from acclimating to a harsh, arid environment and prospering. Some day I would like to have my own Saguaro cactus, however they are quite expensive considering they are both a protected species and incredibly old. Such a symbol would serve to others as a visual representation of wealth, however a common onlooker would likely not see such a cactus as I see it: That I love the Sonoran Desert and all of its beauty.

It was a beautiful day full of fluffy clouds when my friend Aaron Z and I decided to just drive out into the desert. We took turns picking directions. When we came to a fork in the road, we would choose left, right, or straight ahead. We almost became stuck in some soft sand at one point. We came across a biker gang having a bbq about 40 miles along the highway on a side road that ended at a trash collection facility. All the while, I was enjoying the clouds as they moved across the sky; sometimes they merged and parted. I thought to myself that those little fluffy clouds were somehow the key to inner peace and tranquility. If only I could reach out to them and truly understand what they represented, however I could never reach them in my hybrid.

We eventually stumbled across the entrance to the Sonoran Desert and went for a short hike through the brush. The time of year was perfect and the temperature very comfortable. I was happy to spend time with my long time friend just wandering content knowing that as soon as the sun set, we would have to venture back home and I needed to savor as much of the experience as I could.

I don’t know how Aaron did all of the hiking in his sandals. I was prepared with multiple shoes and water, seeing as how I grew up playing in this desert as a child and as long as the basic necessities are addressed there was nothing to fear. Even if we somehow became lost, it was all part of wandering as a free soul with a free mind. I was experiencing clarity unlike any that I had experienced before and I was enjoying every moment of it.

The vastness of the desert is difficult to describe, however I created my first panorama of the desert from this very hill. You can see Aaron as a speck at the bottom left. I almost fell down the hill from tripping over my tripod.

As a young boy, I would often wander the desert surrounding South Mountain barefoot or on bike. To this day I recall experiencing the magnitude of life that persists in the desert, even as others tend to think that the desert is a lifeless biome. Indeed it is not! I have seen a family of Quail cross the dirt path, a Gila Monster wander by, and the birds and reptiles exploring the underbrush for food. I remember finding a cave along the mountain and to this day I have yet to find it again.

Today, most of that desert is gone. It was bulldozed before my very eyes so a prime housing development could take its place. This necessitates driving further into the dirt just to escape people. My connection to the desert exists on a plane of appreciative love. I still feel surprised when I find another creature, a sense of awe when I discover a 200 year old Saguaro, and humility when I consider that in the short time that humans have populated the deserts surrounding Phoenix, Arizona that constant development has not eradicated all of the beauty. The flowers I have seen on my trips are perhaps the most beautiful I have ever seen, yet to attempt to describe their beauty with a human language could never fully express the visions I hold so dear and close to my heart.

Someday others will see what I have seen, but for now it feels like it is too late. Children in the city no longer enjoy free open spaces. This is the price of progress and development, and I feel as though the last the adventurers.

Someday, would you ever wander into the desert and explore the magnitude of nature’s beauty?