This will be the first of many reviews I will post following my vacation to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. It has little to do with photography but if you are going to be traveling to the area, I hope this helps.

 
We stayed at the Comfort Inn and Suites in Hollywood, Florida.  There were a few reasons that we stayed here.  It’s close to the Fort Lauderdale Airport, I have a membership deal with Choice hotels (the basic “stay so many times and get a free night” type of thing), and the price was reasonable.  With that being stated, on with the review.

 

If you look at their web site, they state that “All spacious guest rooms feature safes, hair dryers, coffee makers, irons, ironing boards and cable television.”  We must have not received one of these spacious rooms.  You couldn’t even close the bathroom door unless you were almost standing in the shower.  The space between the bed and the dresser was barely enough to wheel our luggage past.  I wouldn’t exactly call that spacious.

 

The room was booked through Orbitz which didn’t mention that only some rooms had refrigerators and microwaves.  We were under the impression that all the rooms had these.  It wasn’t a huge deal breaker, we just filled a trash can with ice (more on that later) and put our bottled water and soda in that to keep cool.  There was a huge cabinet where it looked like a refrigerator used to be, but no such appliance existed.

 

The “High Speed” internet wasn’t.  It was very slow and took quite a long time to upload photos from the trip.  The fact that the guest services book had instruction on how to connect to the wireless network was handy.  Unfortunately, the information was incorrect and a username and password had to be obtained from the front desk.  That may not seem like a big problem but you see, our in room telephone did not work.  Any time we needed something, we had to walk down to the front desk for service.

 

How many times did we need to go th the front desk?  Let’s see, first our door wouldn’t lock, had to get someone up there to fix that.  Then there was the internet issue described above, and our room keys stopped working and we had to have that fixed.  Has to walk down to ask if there was any decent place in the area that delivered pizza one night because I didn’t want to call all two and a half pages worth of pizza places in the phone book to find out (you see, the phone didn’t work).

 

I have to say, the room was kept nice and clean by housekeeping.  Nothing went missing and they kept us stocked with little soaps and shampoo and some very bad coffee.  They received a decent tip for their efforts.  The only problem we had with housekeeping was the inconsistant times they came.  Some days, we would be back to the room around 3:00 and the room was done.  Other times, we came in around 5:00 and they were still in the room.

 

Now about the other little things.  The ice maker frequently ran out of ice.  We would fill our pail in the morning and again when we got back in the afternoon.  Some days, there was just no ice to be found.  Another little thing was that the alarm clock didn’t work.  There was no way to change the time or set the alarm, it was just set at whatever it was and none of the buttons did anything.  This wouldn’t have been that bad if we could have had a wake up call.  The last issue was that the TV only had about ten or fifteen stations, the color was horrible and the volume was terrible.

 

If I had to rate my experience at the Comfort Inn in Hollywood Florida on a scale from 1 to 10, I would give it a solid 5.  It was a clean place to sleep, the breakfast wasn’t bad, the pool was nice, the bar was a joke, but the staff was friendly.

 

As of late, my luck with technology hasn’t been great.  My desktop PC was giving me a bunch of problems.  It was running slowly, acting glitchy, and crashing from time to time.  I thought I had some spyware or maybe a virus causing me all of these issues.  After running scan after scan, it turn out it was not infected with anything.

I went online and configured a new PC and ordered it because I knew mine was about to kick the bucket.  While I still had some functionality, I started to back up all the files I needed to my Drobo backup drive.  Halfway through the file transfer, my computer just died, blue screen of death dead.  It wasn’t the typical BSOD with a bunch of codes saying what went wrong, oh no, it just said there was an unknown error.

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Due to my upcoming work schedule, I will have to take a short break from my Picture of the Day project. This is part good news, part bad news. My schedule will have me working ten hour days with a two hour commute each way (depending on traffic). The bad news is, I have to wake up at 1:00 a.m. to get ready for work and I won’t get home until 4:30 or 5:00 p.m. That isn’t going to leave me much time to do anything except and sleep. The good news is, I only have to work four days each week for the next two or three weeks.

  

This schedule will make it difficult to take the time for photography during the week. My goal it to spend the next few Fridays doing nothing but going out and making images. I will bring my camera with me to work and maybe get a few opportunities to take some pictures, but no promises. I’m just going to make the best of the situation and try my best to keep up with my goal. If all else fails, i will post five images on Friday to make up for the rest of the week.

Click image to enlarge

  

After removing some of the Mountain Man beard, I set up for some more self portrait shots. This is the same basic setup as before with the addition of an accent light from behind. I went with no light modifiers except for the reflectors. The light is a lot harsher but adds more contrast to the image.

  

Click image to enlarge

  

A second studio session resulted in this image. I was having technical difficulties as the batteries in my radio receivers started to die and my strobes wouldn’t fire. As I fixed the issue, the water became very saturated with the food coloring I was dripping in. This was just about the last usable shot I made before everything became one color.