Author Archives: jamesdwong
Family Portraits: Behind the Scenes
Following up on our previous post about our long-awaited family photo session, I wanted to share some behind-the-scenes pictures and videos that we took during the shoot. Because we’re not the primary focus of most of these photos, I think they serve to underscore the natural beauty of the setting while the pictures we are in also highlight what a lighthearted, casual experience this shoot was. The photographer, Jenny, deserves all the credit in the world for putting our occasionally-fractious troop at ease.
Gallery: Family Portraits: Behind the Scenes
Family Portraits 2025
For years, Julie has wanted to have a set of family portraits taken by a professional photographer. This fall, while Joe was home between the end of the summer term and the beginning of the fall semester, we finally made it happen.
We drove up to windy Davenport Beach on a Sunday afternoon in late August for a very casual session with Jenny Shih, who was a fellow parent at Discovery preschool during William’s time there. The experience was free-form and relaxed, which suited us just fine. We had a brief moment of concern when Julia revealed the depth of her distaste for beaches and sand just as we pulled up for a 90-minute session on a quintessential stretch of the Northern California coast, but Jenny quickly put everyone at ease and got some great shots.
This was a long time coming, and the kids had a blast doing it. If we ever can get everyone in the same place at the same time, maybe we’ll even do it again someday.
Gallery: Family Portraits 2025
William’s Sixth Grade Picture
It’s fall, so it’s time for school pictures. This year’s photographers turned things around very quickly: Picture Day was September 9, and we had the digital copies in our inboxes in under a week.
Willow Glen Middle School requires students to wear uniforms every day, so Picture Day was special in that William had a small measure of freedom to choose what he wore. He ended up going with the same new shirt that he wore to our family photo shoot (more on that soon), so I guess that purchase was a winner.
There’s a small version embedded here, but you can find the full-size photo in his gallery.
Gallery: William’s Class Pictures
Back to School 2025
It’s August in San José, so that means one thing: it’s back-to-school season. Summer vacation here always seems impossibly short, and this year was no exception: William’s first day of sixth grade—and his first day of middle school—was August 7, which feels incredibly early. As always, there are pictures.
Will’s introduction to middle school actually started the week before with WEB (“Where Everyone Belongs”) Day, the official orientation for incoming sixth graders at Willow Glen Middle School. At WEB Day, the kids learned some of the nuts and bolts of middle school, including key information like: how to get from class to class; where to find lunch; and the school dress code.
On the actual first day of school, William walked around the corner from our house to meet up with his friends Elsa and Soren on Malone Road. The three of them were gracious enough to allow Julie and me to accompany them all the way to the corner across the street from the school, but not a step further. William is generally an agreeable kid, but he is nearly twelve, and his tolerance has its limits.
His first day went smoothly, as have the days since. He’s still mostly socializing with his friends from Booksin, but I expect that they’ll start to mix with kids from the other schools that feed into Willow Glen Middle soon. William has always been socially adaptable, so we don’t expect any real problems on that front.
The end of the set includes a couple photos from the KCAT Film Festival, which is an end-of-summer celebration for kids who went to summer camp at KCAT, the local television station run out of Los Gatos High School. The film festival presents the short films made by the campers over the course of the summer. KCAT is William’s favorite summer camp, by far—he attended several week-long sessions this year—so he was excited to see some of his work on the big screen. I’m sure he’ll want to return next summer.
Gallery: Back to School 2025
Midsummer
I’ve been working on a long post covering our East Coast vacation last year for some time now. But a disastrous combination of overwork and writer’s block has made it a struggle to get the piece out the door. In its place is this short update, along with an accompanying photo gallery.
Since Will’s promotion at the end of May, the summer has flown by. We’re past the midpoint now: this time next month, he’ll be in middle school. His time has been taken up by a series of different camps. He started the summer with a couple volleyball camps, as he was thinking about trying out for the school team next year. He followed that with a few weeks at KCAT, which has been a favorite of his for several years now, and next week, he’s attending a camp where he’ll learn to make Minecraft mods. Suffice it to say, he’s been busy.
Nestled in there was a two-week trip to Camp Campbell. He had a blast at his one-week mini-camp last summer, and was eager to stay longer this year. We drove up with his friend, Henry, and dropped the pair of them off on Sunday. After that, Julie and I were more or less on own for thirteen days—Julia more or less takes care of herself most of the time.
We even made plans to see the latest Mission Impossible movie, just because we could. It was a treat to go out without worrying about getting home for bedtime, but the evening was slightly marred by an incident on the drive up to the theater. We were cruising along U.S. 101 at highway speeds when something—we’re still not sure what, as it was dark and moving quickly—came out from under the car in front of us. I couldn’t swerve into an adjacent lane to avoid it, and I was hesitant to slam on the brakes and potentially cause a pileup, so I attempted to maneuver around it while staying in my lane. It didn’t work. Part of the object went under the front right wheel of my car, and after we passed it by, we could hear something scraping and dragging in that area.
We pulled off the freeway as soon as we could and pulled into a nearby parking lot. A cursory inspection revealed that the fender liner over the wheel had been torn off and was hanging on by one or two attachment points; hence, the dragging sound we heard. We tried to remove the liner completely, but lacking proper—or any, really—tools, we couldn’t get it off. That left us with a dilemma: should we continue on to the theater, scraping the damaged liner on the pavement the whole way, or should we skip the movie and drive home? We were around the halfway point, so we decided to press on and catch the film, at the risk of making a bit of a spectacle of ourselves all the way from Santa Clara to Mountain View.
The movie was a pleasant diversion, and when we emerged a few hours later, we steeled ourselves for the drive home, knowing that it would be accompanied by the sound of the dragging liner for a solid twenty-five minutes. But a minor miracle occurred: when I put the car into reverse and backed out of the spot, the liner tore off the rest of the way. We hopped out of the car, threw it in the trunk, and made our way home in blissful silence.
It turns out that we had lost our under-carriage cover in addition to the fender liner. This was an expensive part to replace, and the repair ended up costing us over $1,000. Maybe I should have slammed on the brakes after all.
But at least it was fixed, and I wouldn’t have to worry about that part ever again, right? More on that in a future post, perhaps.
That long preamble aside, the photo gallery accompanying this post includes further exploration of film photography. For this round, I switched to Ilford HP5 Plus film in place of the Kodak Tri-X I used for previous efforts. I like the results, though I’d be hard-pressed to say that they’re dramatically different from what I achieved before; maybe the contrast is a little less striking (or overstated, depending on your perspective), but the difference is subtle.
The majority of the photos cover drop-off day at Camp Campbell; I took an evening trip to Vasona Lake County Park a couple weeks later to finish off the roll. I’m looking forward to finding opportunities to play around more.
Gallery: Midsummer
Fifth Grade Promotion / Farewell to Booksin
On August 17, 2009, Julia started at Booksin Elementary School; that occasion is captured in the photo below. Last week, almost sixteen years later, William closed out our family’s time there with his fifth grade promotion. We’ve recorded the moment, as we are wont to do, with photos and even a few videos.
We had a student at Booksin for fifteen of those sixteen years, missing only the year between Joe’s move to middle school and William’s entry into TK. That makes for fifteen Back to School Nights, fifteen Open Houses, and fifteen Walkathons (more or less: Covid and wildfire smoke played havoc with Walkathon in a couple years). But no more: William is headed to middle school next year.
The week leading up to promotion was hectic. The fifth graders had activities almost every day, and Julie was one of the co-chairs of the promotion committee, so her days were extremely full, as well.
One of the highlights of the week was a class trip to Golfland for around of miniature golf on Tuesday. Wednesday featured a fifth graders vs. teachers kickball game, which was won by the teachers, though William insists foul play was involved. On Thursday, the last full day of class, the students gathered for the fifth grade breakfast, during which they received their yearbooks and sang along with a slideshow of photos (assembled by Julie earlier in the week). To commemorate our final pickup after school on Thursday, Julie treated William to a special surprise: she arrived at his classroom in an inflatable dinosaur costume. He was embarrassed, of course, but notably less so than Joe was when Julie wore the same costume to meet him at the airport when he returned from Belfast. Everyone else loved it: kids were lining up to say hello to the friendly orange dinosaur.
The promotion ceremony was scheduled to start at 9:00 on Friday, but the proceedings were delayed a bit by problems with some of the decorations, much to Julie’s frustration. It didn’t help that it was forecast to be the hottest day of the year so far: a heat advisory was in effect, and the high was supposed to be in the upper 90s. No one wanted to be out there when it started to warm up.
The proceedings finally kicked off around 9:15, and things went smoothly from there. William was wearing his well-loved navy suit, which is definitely too small for him at this point, so he looked dapper as he collected his promotion certificate. At the end of the ceremony, the newly minted middle schoolers stood and faced their families and sang a song they learned at science camp: Shooting Star, which is a long-standing fixture at Camp Campbell. As camp songs go, it packs an emotional punch.
After that, there was nothing left to do but for the kids to return their chairs to the classrooms, sign out for the last time, and say goodbye to their teachers and friends. It took us a while to get away from the school—Will and Julie both had a lot of people to bid adieu—but we eventually escaped and met up a short time later for brunch with some of his friends and their families.
It’s going to feel very strange this fall when the school year comes around and we won’t be preparing to send someone off to Booksin. William will be biking or walking to school with his friends, so our days of daily drop-offs are behind us, at least for now. And we won’t be looking forward to spending a hot day in October watching kids walk endless laps around the school yard. Middle school will be an entirely new adventure—one William is very much excited about—but there’s still a sense of loss from knowing that the Booksin phase of our lives is at an end.
Julie’s Birthday and a Visit from Joe
We’ve had a busy spring so far: William has baseball, the school play, math olympiad, and chess; Julie is the chair of the fifth grade promotion committee; and Felix has had terribly uncontrolled diabetes, which has at times led him to use parts of the house, such as the landing going up to the second floor, as an open-air latrine. It’s really very unpleasant.
But one of the highlights of the spring so far was a visit from Joe, who opted to spend his spring break with us. He flew in on the last day of February and stayed through March 8. Naturally, we have pictures, including a few from Julie’s birthday a couple weeks before his arrival. This set actually wraps around the contents of the previous collection, which covered a few specific events during Joe’s visit.
Joe had a fairly relaxing stay: I think some downtime was just what he wanted after the intense first few weeks of the semester. The opportunity for a break from the cold Boston weather was probably also a draw. His local friends were mostly out of town—their breaks didn’t line up with his—but he made time to connect with a few of them online to chat and play computer games. He also offered me a look at some of the work he’s doing in his first-year computer science class. Parts of the curriculum seem to have been designed based some of the same principles that underlaid COMP 210 when I took it at Rice eons ago (in fact, some of the same people may have had a hand in designing both courses), so I found it fascinating. It almost made me want to go back to school.
William, of course, was over the moon at Joe’s return. For weeks leading up to the break, he asked when Joe was arriving on a nearly daily basis, even though he knew the answer hadn’t changed since the last time he asked. I think he just enjoyed thinking about Joe’s upcoming visit. He was ecstatic when he woke up the morning after Joe’s arrival—the plane from Boston landed at SFO after midnight—and the two of them found ample opportunities to play and roughhouse while Joe was here. William loved it, and, I’m pretty sure Joe did, too. We’ve long held that William is as good for Joe’s mental health as Joe is for William’s.
The album also contains some pictures from William’s spring musical performance, his (and our) last ever at Booksin. Naturally, he dressed up for the occasion, as he loves to do, and his friend Sam joined him in wearing a suit. The class sang and played recorders—I hope to post video soon—and that was that. We’re well into the era of “lasts” at Booksin, and it’s a strange feeling to know that we’ll soon leave this part of our lives behind after so many years as part of the school community.
On Joe’s last night here, he, Julie, and I went to Symphony San Jose for a performance of Beethoven’s Eroica. Julie had reserved the tickets weeks before, looking to indulge Joe’s love of music, and made sure to book his return flight late enough that we could deliver him to the airport after the end of the show. I don’t think I’ve ever been to the symphony before, so I have no basis for comparison, but Julie and Joe, both of whom have deeper musical knowledge and experience than I do (which is to say, more than none at all) enjoyed it, which I take to mean that it was an impressive performance.
After the concert, we zipped home, changed out of our fancy symphony clothes, and gave Julia and William an opportunity to say their goodbyes before we drove Joe up to SFO to catch the redeye back to the East Coast. The next morning, he was safe and sound in frigid Boston, and we were back to missing him.
Birthday Dinner / Home Opener
It was my birthday this month, and how did I choose to treat myself? At the risk of annoying my family, I got out my film camera to take pictures. And, taking things a step further, I visited eBay—an increasingly hazardous proposition for me of late—and bought a new lens, a Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 zoom, because I got it into my head that I wanted to take some pictures at one of William’s baseball games.
The first half of the set was taken at my birthday dinner at Palermo, a local Italian restaurant that isn’t especially fancy, but offers some basic dishes prepared well and presented in a pleasant, family-friendly environment; as we were sitting down for dinner, some of William’s friends from school were leaving.
The lighting in the restaurant was a little challenging. I was using a 50mm prime lens that is reasonably fast, but it was still difficult to get sharp pictures from some angles. I left in some fairly fuzzy shots—presumably blurry due to camera shake—just so I would have some of William and Julia. Luckily, the pictures of Joe, who was in town for spring break—more on that in a post to come—turned out a bit more sharp.
The second half of the set was taken at William’s opening home game of the baseball season. This is his first year at the Majors level, so everything is moving a little faster than he’s used to from his experiences the last two years. But he’s working hard to catch up. He managed to walk and score a run in the game, and his team, the Pirates, came away with the win. He’d been thinking about asking for a transfer down to Minors for another year, but after the game, he was settled on staying where he is. I firmly believe the hits will come: when I throw wiffle balls to him in the yard, he crushes them; Julie has been taking him to the batting cages regularly to get used to the speed of the in-game pitches. Where we need to focus is on making plays in the outfield, which he hasn’t had many opportunities to do in game situations.
The light wasn’t a problem at the game, but at 300mm, the new-to-me lens is a little shorter than the 100-400mm lens I use with my digital camera. As a result, I wasn’t able to get as close to the action as I’m accustomed to. I’ll have to get used to it, though, because I have no current plans to buy more lenses for my retro film setup.
On the other hand, I do have a couple more rolls of film, and I have been eyeing a 35mm prime to use for just walking around. It would probably be healthy for me to suspend my eBay account before I do something I regret.
Gallery: Birthday Dinner / Home Opener
Springtime Experiments with Expired Film
As I mentioned in our last post, Julie and I purchased an Advanced Photo System (APS) point-and-shoot camera before we got married because we wanted to be able to take nice pictures on our honeymoon. We also thought that it would set us up well for the future, since APS was the hot new(-ish) thing in consumer photography, and it had a bunch of amazing new capabilities, such as automatic recording of time and date information as metadata and mid-roll film changes. Compared to the drug store 110 cameras I’d played around with on family vacations as a teenager, the camera we bought seemed like the pinnacle of high technology.
Of course, this was the fall of the year 2000. By 2003, digital cameras were outselling film cameras, and when our daughter was born in 2004, we bought a brand-new digital point-and-shoot so we could take pictures to our hearts’ content (and we did). In all, I think we used our APS film camera a grand total of three times: on our honeymoon, as planned; on a trip to Point Reyes for our first anniversary; and when we bought our house in 2002. Our investment in the future of photography didn’t work out very well for us.
I was surprised, then, to come across a completely unexposed roll of APS film as I was digging through our bin of photography gear last month. It had to have been sitting in our closet for at least twenty years, and had probably been expired for fifteen. I could have just thrown it out—that would have been the most sensible thing to do—but I’ve been deep into oddball photography–adjacent projects for the last couple years, and that led me to an inescapable conclusion: I was going to shoot this film.
That decision led to a conundrum: I have no idea where our original APS camera is. I’m sure it’s around somewhere—knowing myself, there’s no way I would have thrown it out—but there was no way I could put my hands on it. So, I did the obvious thing: I bought an APS SLR, the Canon EOS IX, on eBay. And, unwilling to stop there, I bought a lens, as well: the generally well-regarded (but inexpensive) Canon EF 24-85mm f/3.5-4.5. Did I have other EF-mount zoom lenses I could have used with this camera, as well as the 50mm prime I used just a couple months ago to shoot a roll of black and white film? Of course. But based my research, the consensus seems to be that they produce significantly worse images than the EF 24-85mm model, and that clearly wouldn’t do for a project as important as this one.
So, with the equipment sorted out, I was ready to shoot my single roll of expired APS film. The conventional wisdom on the Internet seems to be that you should overexpose expired film by a stop for every 10 years since its expiration, so I set the exposure compensation control on the camera to +2 stops and went to work finding things to photograph around the house and in the yard. It’s mid-February here in California, which means that, for all intents and purposes, it’s spring. As such, there was plenty to focus on. You can see the results here; I’ve also included a picture of the camera in all its late 90s glory.
All things considered, the photographs turned out surprisingly well. I had no idea whether the camera and lens would even work, since I had bought them sight unseen from anonymous sellers. And the film was a complete wild card: though, as far as I knew, it hadn’t been exposed to temperature extremes, it had been stored around the house for twenty-plus years with no particular effort put into preserving it. Taking those factors into account, I was very pleased with the images I got. Neither the camera nor the lens has image stabilization, so camera shake was a problem for indoor shots, but brightly lit outdoor scenes came out better than I had any right to expect, and the color wasn’t too far off.
In all likelihood, I’ll never use this camera, or shoot another roll of APS film, again. But the equipment was dirt cheap compared to modern photography gear, and I had a great time putting it all together and using it to take some pictures.
Occasional Dispatches from San Jose 
