Photography

I’ve been an amateur shutterbug for a long time. This tag is primarily for posts about photography and the associated tech.

Misty Morning

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NSCC Wetlands

Shooting in the wetlands around NSCC that make up part of the Thornton Creek Watershed.

This was my first day experimenting with using the (all manual) 70-210mm f/4-5.6 zoom lens. Lots of shots that weren’t quite metered correctly (since it was a lot of guesswork), but ended up with a surprising number that I actually liked. This lens also seems to have something of a “soft” look that (to me) works really well for these nature shots — I’m not sure if the “soft” look is supposed to be there or not, but hey, if it works….

Mystery Flower

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Flowers

Since I’m not babbling much at the moment (work and school keep me busy, I’m behind in my reading and keeping up with news, and I’m spending a lot of my free time either with Prairie or taking pictures), I figure I can at least (try to) post a picture a night before I go to bed.

We’ll see how long I manage to do this regularly. ;)

iTunes “Spybreak!” by Propellerheads from the album Decksandrumsandrockandroll (1998, 6:58).

New Toy: Nikon D70s

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Thanks to some very kind assistance in the mysterious and tricky realms of credit and financing by the best girl in the world, I’ve got a new toy to play with for my birthday:

New Toy!

  • Nikon D70s
  • Nikkor 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 G (the kit lens included with the D70s)
  • Nikkor 50mm f/1.4 D
  • Quantaray 28mm f/2.8
  • Quantaray 70-210mm f/4-5.6 One Touch

So. Many. Happydances.

This is only one half of a deal, though. See, while I’m working on rebuilding my credit after doing a rather impressive job of digging a financial hole for myself some time back, it’s still in pretty sad shape. So while I’m at a point where making payments on a setup like this is quite reasonable, there was no way my current credit score would allow me to finance this.

The deal, then, is simply this: in return for helping me with the credit end of things, I quit smoking and apply the money I’ve been throwing away on smoking towards making the payments for the camera. It’s all a matter of priorities: what’s more important to me? Continuing to throw money away at something that will do nothing except make me sick later in life? Or better my health while putting the money towards improving my photography?

Really, not a very hard choice to make.

So, while I may have a rough few days or couple of weeks ahead of me, I’ll just pick up the camera every time I have the urge to pick up a cigarette. It should make the transition from smoker to non-smoker far easier to deal with.

Now…it’s time to go play!

iTunes “Do You Remember the First Time?” by Pulp from the album Hits (2003, 4:20).

Calico (AutoStitch for Mac OS X)

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Panoramic photography is something I’ve been playing with for years — long enough that Prairie was amused to see that I was taking multi-shot panoramics back when I visited Europe during my high school years, long before I had any way to assemble them together with anything more sophisticated than scissors and tape.

Unfortunately, the state of panoramic software on the Mac has been less than I’d like for quite some time now. Apple’s excellent Quicktime VR Authoring Studio is long out of date, without any sign of it being updated for OS X (in fact, searching for it on Apple’s site only returns references to it, with no official product page listed). Canon’s Photostitch is used fairly frequently, but I’ve never been that thrilled with it. Functional, but it doesn’t really “feel” like a true OS X application, and it doesn’t allow for much tweaking or fine-tuning. Other Mac OS X panoramic tools are either commercial and expensive, or command-line ports that I’ve never taken the time to investigate fully (such as Panorama Tools). For a time when I had a working PC I used The Panorama Factory and was quite happy with its range of options, but since my PC finally gave up the ghost, TPF’s performance under Virtual PC wasn’t good enough for me to continue using it.

For the past year or so, though, I’ve been keeping an eye out on AutoStitch. It looked to be the “holy grail” of panoramic creation software: originally created as a research project at the University of British Columbia, it produces truly automatic panoramic photos, stitched from multiple photos that don’t even have to be aligned or all taken with the same exposure (a 57-shot example is shown on the AutoStitch page). The problem, of course, was that AutoStitch is PC-only. Still, I kept seeing incredible panoramas that AutoStitch had produced, so I’d occasionally check in to see if a Mac OS X port had popped up yet.

This morning, my persistence paid off. I’m not sure when it first appeared, but Kekus Digital has produced a pseudo-port of AutoStitch for Mac OS X (licensing the AutoStitch technology in a Mac OS X package) called Calico.

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2006 Emerald City Comicon

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I spent a few hours wandering around this years’ Emerald City ComiCon today. Most of the pictures I’ve posted to Flickr are of the costume contest, but there’s quite a few from my wanders through the showcase floor as well.

Two things definitely stood out as I made my rounds.

Jetfire, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAFirst was coming across what appeared to be a mint condition, still in the box version of Jetfire, my all-time favorite Transformer toy. Probably only as good as it was because it was a pretty direct rip-off of the Robotech Valkyrie, but I never cared. I’d have loved to have grabbed this, but at $225, it was a bit out of my reach.

Shel Silverstein's Different Dances, Emerald City ComiCon 2006, Seattle, WAThe second find was a copy of Shel Silverstein‘s ‘Different Dances‘, which I’d never heard of before. It’s definitely not one of the kids’ books that Shel is most famous for, as I quickly discovered when I started flipping through it and immediately found a four-page spread titled “The Deadly Weapon” (pages one and two, pages three and four, both Not Safe For Work if cartoon drawings of naked people fall into that category). While I couldn’t afford the $125 that the book was priced at, it turns out that Xebeth might have a copy that she could send my way. Neat!

The rest of the Con was pretty much as to be expected, with the usual Stormtroopers, Jedi, and other assorted oddities wandering around. Not at all a bad way to kill a few hours on a Saturday afternoon.

Happy π Day!

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It’s π day (3/14). Whee!

Randomness:

  • I’m in the last week of the quarter, touching up my last paper for English (no final, yay!) and cramming through the last few sections of Math in order to be ready for the final on Tuesday. Hence, why things have been relatively quiet lately. There has been action in the ‘eclinkticism’ sidebar (also known as my del.icio.us account, but a definite dearth of actual content. So it goes.

  • I’ve sent off my one birthday wish to my parents, and they’ve said they’ll consider it. Yay! This, of course, now has me wishing that my birthday was just a little bit earlier in the summer. Heh. In any case, I’m keeping my fingers crossed. I’m not, however, posting just what the birthday wish was, as I don’t want to jinx anything.

    • Said birthday, by the way, is May 3rd, at which point I’ll be turning 33. The same age Jesus was when he died, according to tradition. Should anyone want to get me anything (including, but not limited to, friendly e-mails wishing me well, cards, books, music, money, a 30″ Apple Cinema Display…y’know, little things…), I won’t complain.
  • Thanks to a random Google search, my first girlfriend dropped me a note to say hi and get back in touch. Pretty mindblowing, but it’s been a lot of fun catching up with her.

  • As we move into spring (finally!), I’m looking forward to getting out of the house a bit more over the spring/summer festival season and finding some more good photo opportunities. Events that I’m hoping to show up at over the coming months (pending days off from work, financing, and other random things that might get in the way), some of which Prairie is looking forward to accompanying me to, others of which she’ll smile indulgently, roll her eyes, and pat me on the butt as I walk out the door:

    1. Sakura Con 2006 (Saturday 3/25): Seattle’s anime convention. While I’m not huge into anime (I’ve enjoyed a lot of what I’ve seen, but I’m no big fan), I’m planning on heading down to wander around on Saturday, when they’re having their costume/cosplay contest. Should be lots of fun costumes wandering around.

    2. Emerald City Comicon (Saturday 4/1): Seattle’s comic book convention. Again, I’m not a huge comic fan (my collection consists of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, Alan Moore’s Watchmen and V for Vendetta, the Clerks comics, and issues 1-10 of The Tick). However, I did have fun taking photos when I stopped by last year’s ComiCon, and hope to do the same this year. Again, I’m aiming for Saturday, to take advantage of the day’s costume contest.

    3. Norwescon 29 (Friday 4/12 – Sunday 4/14): I’ve been hearing about Norwescon since I came down to Seattle, as many of the regulars at the_vogue are also big into sci-fi, fantasy, role playing, and all the other various forms of entertainment that can be found at a fantasy convention. This year, I have a few friends that have been planning on going, so I figured it could be fun to take the weekend and actually go to this thing to see what I thought. Should be interesting….

    4. Folklife (Saturday 5/27): This will be my third jaunt to Folklife. I’ve got a small set of photos from 2004 and a larger set from 2005, we’ll see how many I come home with this year. Planning on Saturday as a definite day, other days may happen depending on scheduling (there are other people at work who also want to hit Folklife, we’ll just have to see how the weekend works out).

    5. Seattle Pride Parade (Sunday 6/25): Unfortunately, this one’s questionable right now, as that’s inventory weekend at work and the schedule is marked “NO OFFS” for this day. I’ve mentioned (ahem…whined…) about this to my manager, but I’m not sure yet if I’ll be able to make it or not. A shame, as I’ve been there in 2001, 2003, 2004, and 2005.

    6. Bumbershoot (Saturday 8/2 – Monday 8/4): A possibility, but questionable at this point. Prairie and I skipped last years, and may end up skipping this year also. If it weren’t enough that ticket prices keep getting higher and they’ve dropped Friday from the festival schedule, we’re looking into the possibility of taking a 2-week trip down to California in September, so timing and finances may not allow adding Bumbershoot to the mix. Until that’s confirmed, though, it’s still a tentative on my list.

And…I think that pretty much covers everything for now.

Oh, one last thing. Battlestar Galactica just wrapped up their second season. Oh. Wow. So good. If you’re watching the show, you know what I’m talking about. If you’re not watching it…well, you should be. Grab Season One from Amazon or Netflix, and Season Two from iTunes, sit your butt down, and watch the best sci-fi to grace the small screen in years.

Okay. Now I’m done.