Tag Archives: photography

Unbelievably Nice

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UW Library

It is currently 75 degrees and not a cloud in the sky. Everything is greening up quickly and wonderfully, and it’s just spectacular. I am once again at Zoka, drinking an iced chai and getting my daily writing done. I also grabbed the pictures off my camera from last evening… I only took a few, but they’re kind of fun in an abstract sort of way. It’s warmer and clearer out tonight, so I’m actually planning to head back this evening with my tripod, and see what I can pull out. (I’m still pretty proud of myself for getting the shots that I did get as clear and steady as I did via handholding… it helps that I tossed on my 50mm f/1.4, which made for speeds that were as short as possible. (1/5 of a second at 11:30 at night? Not too shabby!) Using the tripod, I’m planning on doing some long duration shots instead. Hmm.

They’re playing the new Panda Bear album here at Zoka, and I’m definitely digging it. It’s a nice coincidence that the honorable Mr. Ellis was mentioning them not too long ago. Panda Bear, for those not in the loop, is one of the core members of Animal Collective, a fantastic band for those not familiar with them. This is one of his solo albums, and musically it’s got some Animal Collective flavoring, while remaining relatively unique, intermixing more ethereal, electronic influences into the work. Something to add to my rapidly increasing list of albums and artists I’d like to pick up.

Chatting with Dad earlier today, and going over some of the photos I uploaded yseterday evening, it seems one of my perennial problems is cropping up again: it’s pretty noticeable, in, say, this photo. Do you see it? Yeah, my horizon line isn’t level. For whatever reason, a lot of my shots have a 1-2 degree drop on the right side of the horizon. It looks level to me when I take the picture, and one theory I have is that since I tend to have my head cocked slightly to the left a lot of the time, my brain is compensating by adjusting what I see to be “level”. Dad thinks it may have something to do with my posture and grip on the camera. Frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if it was some combination of the two. Thinking about it, even shots I take on a tripod tend to have that drop, so the notion that it is movement from pressing the button down, or a cockeyed method of holding it I don’t think would fully explain it. It’s certainly not an insurmountable problem, even in post, but it is something I need to be more aware of happening.

So, a question for readers: do you like me adding thumbnails and pictures to my posts? Is it a worthwhile habit, or would you rather I just link to the gallery if I want to point out an image? I’ve been opting to use thumbnails mostly, out of deference for those on dialup, and will likely continue that trend, but I would like to know whether people like the break from my text-heavy posts.

Furthermore

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Tulips at the Bellevue Botanical Garden

I spent the afternoon photographing in Bellevue, first at the Botanical Gardens, and then from the rooftop of the mall parking garage, of the skyline as sunset approached, and then finally down by the lake, looking out at Seattle as the sun set. I’ll be getting pictures up in a bit [Update: Pictures are up, 22 new shots.], but I did want to share something.

A little while back, I posted a random thing I heard on KEXP on my LiveJournal (usually one-liners and quizes and stuff like that goes there… feel free to add me, but you’ve been warned). It was about two ducks in the road, a female duck dead, and the mallard standing near her, looking at her like “I can’t believe she’s gone.”

When I was down at the lake, there were two ducks, a couple, swimming around, heckling the kids who were there. Another mallard showed up, looking lonely, and was shunned by the couple, until finally he just sort of paddled off by himself. I couldn’t help but wonder if it was the same mallard who lost his mate in the road. Felt bad for the guy, if I knew how to speak duck, I wanted to pull him aside and tell him it’d be alright, maybe buy him a duck beer or something.

Just needed to share.

Breaking Radio Silence

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Awesome Tree

Sorry for the delay in posting — I usually post while I’m at Zoka, but their internet has been down for a few days (something of a comedy of errors which doesn’t need getting into, in theory it’ll be fixed later today). I finally decided it was time to actually pull the laptop out at home and do catchup on it. I’ve been experimenting with a new RSS reader found via the inestimable R Stevens called Vienna. It’s free, it’s fast, it’s clean, and the interface will do. So far, I’m really liking it.

One of the main reasons I’ve pulled out the lappy is that I have pictures from my recent trip to the Washington State Arboretum on it (“trip” might be more epic than I really intend… it’s like 10 minutes away). I’ve redacted and uploaded a dozen or so images from that trip, so if you like pictures of blossoming dogwoods and cherry trees and such, swing on through. I’ve been reluctant to go in and fill in extra details and titles with the pictures in the gallery, because I’m not sure if it would be a wasted effort if I end up transferring to a different gallery solution (ZenPhoto is currently in the lead for an alternative). We’ll see. In the meantime: the image to your right is this awesome tree in the Arboretum. The branches have wrapped around the trunk in this great pattern, with just a few branches swooping out and down (as you can see). I loved it, so I took a shot and tweaked it a little in photoshop (adjusting contrast, color, etc). In fact, almost every shot in the gallery has at least a little Photoshopping… but generally VERY little: auto color, auto contrast, auto levels, adjust image size, save as jpeg at level 6 compression. I’ve been fiddling with a few a bit more, but generally for the sake of play.

In other news, still no job, but my resume is updated and available as a PDF here. Critiques welcome. The lack of a references section is intentional… I have people who’ve agreed to be a reference, and I’ll happily provide that information upon request, but I agree with the trend towards not listing it on a professional resume. It’s a privacy thing.

More Links

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No, I’m not trying to turn into a linkblog. There’s just been some interesting things out and about lately, and thought I’d share.

Setting Your Night Photography Goals

I found this blog through my father, and have been enjoying the photography and writing he posts. While he’s primarily focused on the topic of night photography (as fits the topic of the blog, and a subject near my own heart), what he talks about with keeping yourself motivated and on track by setting yourself good, clear, reasonable goals is really worthwhile no matter what sort of creative work you’re endeavoring to do.

Canon 5D

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I picked up the Canon 5D today… more on that later, but here is a quick (and wildly reduced in size… I could count hairs) picture of my dog Freya. (Mickey, ping me if you want a larger image, I have some others as well.)

Freya! with a Stick!

Geek et Photo

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Despite having the ability to do so, I’ve never really had much use for camera raw. This was mostly because the version of Photoshop I purchased did not yet have the Camera Raw plugin, and it was simply too much of a pain in the ass to jump through hoops to modify or use otherwise. This all changed, however: I picked up a copy of Photoshop CS2 the other week, replete with the latest version of the Camera Raw plugin, plus the oh-so-handy DNG converter (DNG is an open standard raw format… DNG stands for Digital Negative). It’s given me the necessary motivation to dig out my camera again.

I’ve been focusing on portraiture the past few days, as it’s something I feel I need to work on. They’ve frankly been more “candid” than “portrait,” but that’s fine; I needed to work on candids as well. It’s also been a nice way to meet new people, though I doubt any of that will go anywhere (not that I’d mind, some of the girls have been really nice, I’m just being realistic is all). If I get responses back giving the okay, I may post some of them (and yes, I am a stickler about this), once I’ve sufficiently meddled (I never really saw much difference in handling raw versus jpeg until I was able to do so natively, damn some of those bells and whistles are neat).

In other news, UPS has decided to decline my damage claims on my monitors. I’ll be calling the claims company tomorrow, and if that doesn’t go well, I’ll be filing a complaint with the BBB. What’s the point of insuring your items if they’re not going to cover it if there’s damage? (For the record, out of 8 boxes, 6 were damaged. One was crushed in half; another was ripped open on two corners, and the others were partially crushed and dented. This is including the factory-packaging 22″ monitor that had large stickers on the outside of the box saying “Fragile”. The only two that were undamaged were the computer boxes, both of which were filled with ultra dense packing materials and covered in company graphics that screamed “HI, I’M A COMPUTER!”) I packed these boxes myself, I was there when they were picked up, and I can say with 100% certainty that these boxes were intact prior to being handled by UPS, and that they no longer were intact when they were received.

One Hundred Fifty and 0/100

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So, this is my 150th post. I suppose now would be a good time to go back through my previous entries and see where I was, where I am now, and how the hell I got here, but really I’d rather not right now. I’m a long-winded fucker, and that’s a hell of a lot of writing to read. Maybe later, when I’m feeling more nostalgic/philosophic.

I’m currently sitting in my living room, on the futon, with my legs up on the coffee table. The patio door is open with the screen in place, letting the air circulate through the house because it’s been exceptionally nice out. I can hear birds outside, and I’ve plugged my iPod into my stereo, playing through my uber-compilation (475 of my favorite songs, no duplicates, set to random). It has largely been a good day, so I’m not entirely sure why I’m feeling vaguely sour right now.
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UberCon

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For those readers that are new: read the old posts to see my prior concerns about UberCon. For the rest of you: it went far better than I had feared, but not as well as I had hoped.

Let’s get the basics out of the way: UberCon was a hell of a lot of fun. Everyone seems to have had a really good time, including myself. More importantly, many of the vendors have already expressed interest in returning, so things are looking QUITE favorable for UberCon III, to be held sometime in late March-early April. Having had a sit-down with Kevin, we’ve worked out a lot of the issues that were bothering us, and things are going to be firmed up in a more final fashion sometime in the next few weeks.

I got to meet a lot of really cool, interesting people: I had made it explicitly clear prior to the convention that I was not volunteering for anything, and was coming as an attendee. This allowed me to roam as I wanted, and talk to who I wanted without having to worry about having to be somewhere. I even exchanged information with a few, so I’ll be able to keep in touch.

The only major letdown was the number of people: we had more than last time, but not by much. This could be for a variety of reasons, and really didn’t hinder anyone from having a good time. From a business standpoint, however, it was disappointing.
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Back in Vermont

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I’m back in Vermont for the first time since the beginning of August, and likely for the last time until April. It’s interesting to be back… the elation I felt as we touched down certainly reaffirms my firm belief that regardless of where I live or for how long, Vermont will always be Home.

During the days prior to leaving, I spent time with Mickey when I could (she’s been working) and for the rest of the time, I’ve been working on getting a local mirror of this site working on my computer. This took far more effort than I’d expected (or was really necessary), as I decided that it would also be an opportune time to update my versions of Apache, MySQL, PHP, and Perl on my local machine. After all said and done, I reverted Apache to what it was, MySQL got downgraded from 4 to the latest version of 3, and PHP and Perl actually managed to be updated (though not without trials and tribulations)

I’ve almost got it working, I just need to figure out why my author database isn’t working on the local machine, and how exactly I can fix that. I’m sure given a few hours to root around in the MovableType forums, I’ll find a solution. Once that’s done, I’ll be ready to really start gutting the site and making the more significant changes that I want to do. Of course, my reference books (O’Reilly’s Definitive Guides to MySQL, XHTML, CSS, and PHP, plus the PHP Cookbook) are all at home, so it may have to wait until November. We’ll see. (Well, I’ll see, since all changes will be on localhost until I have it running smoothly, at which point they’ll all get migrated to the website.)

I digress. Mickey’s father showed up the day before I left, travelling the countryside on a photo safari that I’m quite envious of. We all did some wandering, and swung by the local camera store (where Mickey thinks I should work, since I seem to be so good at evangelizing various types of equipment), and in general had a good time. Finally, Mickey dropped me off at the airport for my redeye on JetBlue to Vermont.
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