Saturday, September 30, 2006

what a nice saturday, after I got my car running in the morning ( prob. leak in the servo system, but after I fill it up its working quite well). I got an upgrade for my bbq, a 20 Gallon propan tank. Background for this is that I never can find the special cadrigdes need and after a year the bigger tank repays for it self. The initial cost was 75$ including needed connection hose and one filling is 10$. Compared to the small gas cadrigdes I used sofar, which contain one pound of gas and cost 4$ this is way cheaper.

Anyway later this day I fixed lindsay's bike and helped my new neighbour with her bike. The evening I finished with a mini bbq and reading some articles over filter systems.

Oh my new neighbours stopped by and provided me with some cake, because I borrowed them my plunger... Posted by Picasa

after I payed last month 60$ for a Neural Density filter I figured out that this kind of filter system won't work for me. An example is in the left picture.
The picture itself is pretty nice, except for the shade arround the corners. This is due the screw one filter. The second problem is that the screw on filter are incredible expensive.
I want to have a couple of basic filters:

  1. nd filters 4,6,8
  2. graduated nd filter 4,6,8
  3. circular polarizer
  4. uv filter
  5. haze filter
the reason for this filters is you barley can emulate this effect in photoshop. Cause the reduce the ammount/change polarisation of light. Once you took the image, you can't do anything about the light anymore.

The good thing of digital cameras is, you can simulate with photoshop. The best example are diffuser or changing color temperature.

The thread filter have all one big disadvantage, one filter cost 50 - 150$ depending on the type. I'm not going to pay so much money for some stupid filters. After I ask "dr google" I found a cheaper solution, cokin/quantary slide on filter. A set with 6 nd/graduated filter cost 100$ and I only have to buy 3 adapter rings to fit all my lenses. So in total it cost me 170$. For everything I want.

this means I will sell my thread filter collection and buy for the money I get a cokin system, once its in stock again.

another problem is my tripod I bought in january for 25$ with my camera. It's incredible instable and really difficult to adjust. So over short or long I will look at another tripod with a better head. I originally bought this to getting started, but never thougt I use it alot. Boy I was wrong.
As soon as I grab my 300mm zoom, I can't do anything without a tripod. ( the pictures are incredible unsharp). With the tripod there atleast sometimes sharp.

this are all 100% crops at maximum range of my 70 - 300mm 150$ zoom lens. The zoom is always very soft after 280mm, but I prefer to spend 1500$ on a nice trip to hawai next year instead of spending this kind of money on a 200 - 400 mm VR or 800$ on a 15 - 200 mm VR which I would love to have.

It's considered the best lens on the market, and covers more or less the range i have with my 3 lenses. The major disadvantage is it only works with DSLR's with a cropped sensor and not with full frame sensors, which will be affordable in the next 10 years for people like me. So I will stick with my current lenses for the next couple of years.

review of sharpness with a 25$ tripod and a 150$ zoom

somehow lucky shot with a tripod of a pair of ugly birds, somehow sharp
(300mm, f/5.6, 1/640s)






unlucky shot with a tripod of a joshua tree at sunset
(300mm, f/8, 1/13s)

sadly I did'nt see it on the preview, so I could try it again. Main problem in this case is the tripod, cause at 1/13s its just to shaky. It could be improved with the remote, but I lost my somewhere in the park and oredered already a new. Lucky me it's only a 10$ thing.





lucky shot without a tripod of a jackrabbit
(300mm, f/5.6, 1/1000s)

it was arround 1 pm and I had more than enough light to work with








so what next:

I would love todo something with flash, but I'm affraid to invest that kind of money.

  1. 360$ for one flash (SB-800) to get started
  2. 60$ for a SC-17 TTL flash cable to detach the flash from the camera
  3. 200$ for a second flash(SB-600) for advanced lighting
  4. 20$ for a color filter set for each flash
the main problem, I can only use nikon flashes with the D50 or risking frying the electronics of the cam. It's a common problem with the cheap sunpak flashes. And somehow this seems to be to expensive.

Another idea to work on landscape fotographie, my preffered pictures

  1. 180$ for a Nikon DR6 Viewfinder, which allows me to actually use the viewfinder for pictures against the sky
  2. 100$ for a set of graduated filters
  3. 200$ for a flash(SB-600) to bring some light into the foreground and fill out shadows
  4. 50$ for some lights to lightpaint
i think I will go for some filters and improve my technique before I invest so much money.

Thursday, September 28, 2006

this morning I randomly discovered one of the coolest thing ever:

Lensbaby 3G - Bend • Lock • Fine Focus

and after a look of a couple of shots I really love the idea to play with this system a little bit. Ok before I have to learn a lot about fotographie, cause I have todo everything by myself, but it's never wrong to learn something...

a short review about this system (older version): review Posted by Picasa

Wednesday, September 27, 2006

After I worked with java straight for 6 year, i finally could convince myself to learn another programming language. The background was that I had to write so many bash scripts in the last weeks, that I think bash scripting is not the best way.

so I was looking for a language which has following features:

  1. plattform independent
  2. interpreter based
  3. fast
  4. good community
  5. good documentation
  6. has support for objects
so I decided to try python and I love this. It's so much easier to use than bash, more powerfull than bash and can be integrated into java and other way arround.

to try some advanced features with python I decided to use it for a small project. Basically transforming the pubchem database (arround 7 Million xml documents/ 250GB) into a script to import it into a sql database.

Monday, September 18, 2006

this morning I decided to visit the historical airfield next too temecula. And they have a nice collection of aircrafts from WW-I until the desert storm. This is also the big drawback of this museum. Instead of covering one topic, they try to cover all and it just becomes to much and you can't enjoy it anymore.

The planes are mostly outside and wingless. What means they are dusty and sometimes not a very nice view.

pictures

Friday, September 15, 2006

after a long time waiting my new lens finally arrived with my first filter ( except for uv's). And like always they send me the wrong stuff...

so now I have a ND 4x instead of an ordered ND 6x so I will order another ND later.

anyway, my new lens is a tokina 19 - 35 mm ( on D50 equals 28.5 - 52.5 mm). I got it for 125$ so it was a good deal and I prob. will sell it as soon as I finally manage to find a reason to buy the tokina 12 - 24 mm. I just don't like the idea to spend 500$ on a stupid lens. Lucky me this lens is always out of stock and never available.

But why I bough the other tokina in the first place? Basically I just want to have the possibility to shot landscape pictures when I'm going into the mohave desert on sunday and monday.

testshots Posted by Picasa

Thursday, September 14, 2006

finally, google introduced web albums. This means I can upload all my pictures to websites to annoy innocent visitors with them.

album Posted by Picasa

Sunday, September 10, 2006

yeah "my cluster" is working again.

now its time to get the current bugfixes into my sourceforge project

bbcs

my second "private" project is to get xen on my workstation and laptop to create a small personal cluster in case all the other clusters are backed or down like last weekend. Now I just need to figure out how to install the sun grid engine under linux or write a new 'at' based implementation for my cluster project with a minimal scheduler.

currently I'm trying to figure out how to get nice shots at nigth time.

my main problems are just, its so dark, you barley see anything in the viewfinder and I always have to be on my knees because of this strange angle. I think I finally will get an adapter for this in january.

its just such an insane ammount of money for a simple adapter and there are no off brands available sofar

At least I hope my neural density filter and the step up adapter arrive in time for my trip downsouth.


...we fill see... Posted by Picasa

Thursday, September 07, 2006

after we bought a bike for my girlfriend we needed a place to store them somewhere and they are a little bit to expensive to keep them outside...

so we decided to buy a rack to hang the bikes next to the wall. As you can see in the picture.

I'm just still kinda unsure if this thing will hold the weigt of two bikes, specially with our super stable paper walls...

top: 2006 fuji roubaix pro (gert)
bootom: 2006 swinn fastback (Lindsay)

the best thing was that the shop, where we bought the rack and the bikes gave me 100$ extra reabate for my bike because they had it on sale this day. So I ended up paying 1099 instead of 1399 for my bike.

...but sofar I had to invest 500$ in compounds like shoes, pedals, helmet etc.

only thing missing now is a bike rack for the car to get the backs down south for some rides during our vacation in two weeks. Posted by Picasa

who would belive it, the software which we are developing since a couple of years runs on smartphones, like my htc wizard.

setupx & binbase

it finally happend we have our flat and making progress with cleaning it and moving stuff in.

we also did the main mistake when you got a new flat...

...we went to ikea and got the standard stuff

- fondue set
- wok
- chair
- thousands small things...

anway it starts to look nice and over short or long we want to replace the fouton with a nice couch. This should be arround january. Posted by Picasa