Valderi, Valdera

The date was September 29, 2004.  I sat in the right field bleachers with my buddies Patrick and Louie.  We were at Olympic Stadium for the final match of the Montreal Expos.  For as long as I could remember, I was a baseball fan.  Though I wore the cap of the Oakland A's for several years, the real team that had a hold on my heart was the Montreal Expos.  There are so many memories.  Going to the game as a kid with my family, the great players over the years, the moments shared with friends and so much more.  This weekend baseball returned to Montreal with a series of two games between the Toronto Blue Jays and the New York Mets.  I didn't end up getting tickets to either of the games, mostly due to my hard head and some hard feelings I'm still harbouring against Major League Baseball.  I figured I'd take my own trip down nostalgia lane by mixing an older passion with a newer one.  The first thing I needed to do was haul my old Expos cap out of the closet and wash a good layer of dust off of it.  Sadly, my old tri-colour cap had died many years ago from years of use.  This cap I actually bought at that last game and I don't think that I've ever worn it since.  I then needed to put my cap on something so that I could get a shot of it.  Luckily, My Lovely Assistant was in the process of baking a cake and had taken out her display stand.  As it was sitting on the kitchen table, I knew I had found what I needed.  I propped my cap on top of the glass cover, grabbed my flash and snapped away.  The first photograph you see was taken at f/11, 1/250sec, ISO 100 at 68mm.  While I was checking out the first batch of photographs that I took, I though it might be nice to take a similar shot, but vertically rather than horizontally.  My only problem with that idea was that my flash doesn't really work out that well shooting vertically.  So, I opened up the blind on the kitchen window to let a little more sun in.  It's a rather grey day over here so not much light ended up coming in.  The second shot was taken at f/8, 1/50sec, ISO 1600 at 42mm.  I ended up playing with it a little bit in Photoshop, using the Curves tool which kind of washed out a little bit of the white fabric in the 'm' portion of the logo, but made the blue of the cap look much nicer.  For those of you wondering how the logo works, it's basically three letter cursively attached together.  The 'e' for Expos, 'm' in the middle for Montreal and the 'b' at the end for Baseball.  I was watching the game on television while working on these photos and this post and kind of wish that I hadn't let my hard head get in the way of my being at the game myself.