This weekend we finaelly went to Monterey to have a look at the aquarium and was kinda disappointed. It has so greatcritics and there were some awesome jellyfishs and some tank were impresse. Cause they mixed so many different fish in there. Like sharks, tunas and so one. Means they mied predaetors and there prey together in one tanks and balanced it somehow. But for 22$ a person entrance I exspected a little bit more.

in total we had a nice day and some pretty goo food, but we paid 200$ for gas, food, entrance fee... 

damn a long time ago I posted something, but it looks that lives goes more and more busy right now.

Its rainning time, that means you can't do anything in davis. So I started to play a stupid computer game, what is so amaizing that it eats a lot of my time...

Anyway today I was watching Ice Age 2, and damn it was pretty nice. They tried sometimes a little bit to hard to be funny, but there where nice jokes and the animations where sometimes just awesome. I sat there and where thinking, how did they do this clouds trees, water.

...I think I see it again next week....

what happens the last weeks since I'm back from germany?

That's a good question my so called clean roomates, are as bad as all other roomates I had before. And I figure more and more out, I don't like it to live with other people in one flat. Sure they are cleaning there stuff, the question is just when?

In Davis it's rainning season, but at least I found my new favorite resturant, Bistro 33. The fun part bout this is, that my girlfriend was working there. Up to now I only can say that Davis has 2 nice resturants and 1 nice cafe. Everything else is standard american food chain stuff. Not very good and fast.

The picture on top iss my kittchen sofar, maybe it will get better... 

Today I received my birthday gift, and yes I know my birthday is in a couple of days, but I couldn't resist and opened it today.

It was a nice backpack, specially designed to carry a slr, a couple of lenses, a tripod and a laptop. Actually I'm pretty amazed how well it is constructed and about the adjustments you can do. It's extendable, so you can plug other stuff on it like bags or lens holder.



The picture is the Okland By Bridge in San Francisco.


I also read a couple of articles about my new hobby, photographie and come more and more to the decciscion that the hobby gets more and more expensive. For example I always thought a filter cost 20 - 30$ and you can simulate the most filters with software like photoshop or gimp. Thats quite true, but neural density filters, graduated neural density filtes and ploarisation filters can't be simulated for obvious resons. I think I order them used and a couple of stepup rings, so that I buy one filter and can put it on every lens I own.

The picture was a random shot in Berlin, from the "Potsdammer Platz Arkaden".

I also made a couple of hundred shots from a skycraper, but no one of them was actually so as exspected. The reason for this was that the sky was to bright and darken so everything else. The solution would be a gradute neural density filter and a circular pol filter. I tried to simulate these effects with photoshop, but they turned out very bad. As we can see to the left.

after spending a week in germany, celebrating my dad's birthday I'm back in the us and had a nice suprise. I have 2 new roomates now and they are so clean. Every day I come home now I have a nice polished flat and they even had the idea to adjust the bills, so that everybody pays a fair ammount of money and not way to much like I.

Sad thing my car passed the smogtest and now I have to replace the front bearings. This car is ripping me off. So I reschedule my plans again and get my car fixed now.

ok first point done, my room is now a little bit cleaner, so I thougt lets give photoshop another try. And I have to admit the magic ward tool, is just great. It selected the areas of the different pictures exacly in the way there where supposed to be.

My originally idea to the pictures was to take the plane from the blue sky and put it into a sunset. Afterwards I added some trees and more clouds. I surrounded the plane with a nice blurry shadow to hide the cutting corners and to emulate movement. I also pasted a house in the left corner. And blurred everything, except for the plane, couple of time until it looks nice. To give it a drastic look, we converted it to black and white and played a little bit with the insensity channels.

It was a breeze, tomorrow I will try something similar with gimp. And the working speed of photoshop is great, except for the raw file handling what takes forever and a day.

it's a damn cold night...

actually not I just got home from dinner with my girlfriend and where supposed to clean my room, pack some stuff doing my taxes and go to bed, but after I started to clean up, I got so bored that I was reading a little bit at a website about the method: convert color to alpha. Sounds interessting. So I took some pictures, converted them to black and white to get some similaritys.
The result of 45 minutes of playing you can see to the left.

Now I could go back to the important stuff, but no I had to read another website about taking pictures and night time... this was even more boring. But I got some really nice results and the only reason that I stopped doing this, was that my cam run out of power, time to buy a spare batterey for 30$ for the next time. ( I only made 6 shots in the bulb mode with a totally senseless noise reduction afterwards. The exposure was arround 10 minutes each shot at iso 200 and F-Stop 11).

The other pitty was, whenever I tried to make a pictures of, say many stars at once. I was stopped by my cam: sorry you need an ultrawide lens for this kind of pictures. Now is the problem, there are only 4 lenses for this on the market (to get an ultrawide range with a nikon) and they are all arround 500$, or even worst the nikon brand (recommended, if you ever want to update to another nikon D-series) at 900$. Ok I could live with 350$, 500$ are way to much (out of the toy range.) and 900$ is insane.

The last 2 problems with pictures at night are, It is cold, so I finally have a reason to buy some new shoes (yes even I consider to wear something what's not called flip lops ) and even worse.: Why are stars and leaves moving. Please how is it possible to have a nice sharp picture at night, which needs a long time exposure, of say several minutes. And the wind moves the leaves and the stars are also moving somehow (or the earth was moving)

After beeing at work all weekend long, I tried to compare photoshop cs2 and gimp 2.10. What I wanted is to convert a simple picture of a sunset to black and white (ir) mode. The reason for this was just, that I need a nice programm for maipulating my pictures and I always want to go with the opensource version, so why should I use photoshop, except that I have more experience with it.

For example the picture on the right was created with photoshop cs in 2 minutes of adjusting some layers.

In gimp it was a little bit more difficullt. At first I had to play with the channels and afterwards I needed to optimize the curve to get a nice picture. The gimp version (left picture) has also a little bit more noise in the picture compared to the cs2 version. And less details

anyway I don't see me buying a photoshop license for 700$ just because some things are simple.

I also fixed my problem with the "Nikon Capture It" software by using a gimp plugin what can convert the files for me from nef to jpg, or just shoot in jpg mode anyway. Sure the software provide some nice features, but like always, gimp gives me at least one alternative.

To the left again is the original picture taken with a D50 and my 300mm zoom. I also figured out what I really need is a wide/superwide lens, because I tried to make some landscape pictures today and with my smalles zoom (28mm - 80mm x 1.5 factor). It's just not possible.

That means up to now I can take nice shots of flowers, can take shots of birds and airplanes, if I get them close enough. Sure these shots are all kinda unsharp, because I can't make a picture of an airplane, flying 300 mph with a stativ. Because the airplane is than already gone. And birds are even less patient! I think they had fun, watching me assembling everything, setup up the cam, setting the right settings for the light and finally I wanna press the shutter and the bird flew to the next tree. But on the other hand.




I just don't see me spending money on a 80 - 400mm VR lens from Nikon what you can buy for 1400$ from amazon. And the cheapest wideangle, cost also 400$ ( due the factor of my cam).

So lets focus on things far far away and not moving... Because for this I have everything I need, except for a flash. But this comes later, I have to learn to take pictures without a flash first

current events, actually nothing happens in the last week so far, me and my girl are trying to get rid of one of our flats so that we can move together. I went a couple of times snowboarding, this weekend I will try to go to the chinese new year festival in san francisco.

yeah life is boring right now. The picture is by the way a nice sunset in Davis and I have 3 days left until my Nikon test software expires and afterwards I running in problems to edit my raw pictures. Mhm I think I try a gimp plugin and if this not works. Then I have to buy it in March/April, whenever I have another 100$ to play with. But I stil think there are a couple of things which should be included in the camera package, like the 10$ remote I just ordered or the 100$ software, which is essential for this camera.

Anyway so I have right now 5 things on my toylist i wanna have up to the end of the year

1. a speedlight
2. a nice bag for laptop and camera
3. a 2.8 zoomlens
4. a surfboard
5. 3000$ in savings

hm part 5 sounds the important one right now to me... lets start with this , and I think I have to much and to expensive hobbys, a rough calculation

1. snowboarding during the winter time, 800$ a year
2. windsurfing during the summer, 1300$ a year ( need a new board, old one is to small)
3. camera stuff 600$ a year -> needed for other hobbys to make nice pictures

this saturday was lazy day, we just rent a couple of dvd's ( 4 brothers, american pie and the exorcism of emelie rose ) and watch them. For breakfast we made some crepes and for dinner we ate pizza...

today we went to sac, to celebrate chinese new year, had crab and some other overpriced stuff and during the night i decided to chase my girlfirend and take some closeups with my zoom, whats kinda difficult was, because the zoom has a minimum distance to focus of 4 feet. Afterwards we played a couple of minutes with gimp and finally got a nice picture.

this sunday we finally managed it to go together snowboarding at thahoe. It was just awesome and during the breaks we were talking a little bit about hte future and decided, would'nt it nice to move in all together?

so the plan up to now, we have 3 couples and a 4 bedroom house is 1200$ in a nicer part of sacramento. It's located 15 minutes awy from davis. After we did some math, we found out that we pay arroun 200 - 300$ rent a person. Whats compared to now is way cheaper and the house is nicer.

lets see what happens.

i also found my new car. The question now, do I want to lease a car next year? And I can't sell my truck for several reasons. Like I need a big car for snowboarding and windsurfing.

 

I think I'm way to stupid, I could spend the weekend in san diego, but no I have to work in Davis. I could stay longer at work, but no I had to leave. I could have gone straight home, but no I had to go too starbucks, I could have use the seatbelt, but no I thaught it's just 200 yards. I could have stop when the signal turned yellow, but no I had to go over it. I even could do this in the left lane, but no I was in the middle lane.result:redlight violation: 400$changing lanes in intersetion area: ?,not using seatbelt: 60$total >500 $ fine and a couple of points and a higher insurance rate.


if I just stayed home and in bed, I wouldn't feel so stupid at all. Could'nt I have wait this 5 minutes? 

after Iplayed with my cameras over 2 weeks and shot nearly 2000 pictures I decided to play a little bit with close up's. I don't want to call it macro, just because my focus range is at 3 feet with my 300m zoom. But the details are looking quite good.

...time to clean the knob I would say... 

how should I say this, I'm moving away from the holy grail of java and writing programms in C#...

yes I aways wanted to learn some more languages like python or ruby, but why I'm learning dot.net. I think the reason is that you can extend windows so easily with functions.

A small example of a problem I had. My users have to import files into my database as easy as possible. So I thaught it would be nice to extend the explorer by a button import.... I finally figured out its way easier, write a small programm and put it into the send to folder. So I developed a webservice and its only a handfull code, not like java where you have to work for your mony. No it was just 10 lines of quellcode.....


...the world is way to evil, and c# looks ugly....

At sunday we went to lake Berryessa and Sacramento. Berryessa is an artifical lake on the route 128 on the way to Nappa and its a really need drive, but not mucht to see.

Sacramento on the other hand is a normal big ugly city with one or two nice locations. We found one...

pics of sac are here. 

something about my style of pictures

so the most people are asking them self now, why are all these pictures in this special style, called septia. Maybe I like this style and it gives them an interessting touch. For example which picture is nicer?



the black white modus is just way to cold and is better for portraits anyways. The sepia is kinda warm and looks interessting and the original, is just boring and didn't say anything. except for look its foggy out here and I'm a tree.

but sometimes if you want to show someting with nice colors at a sunny day, for example macro shots from plants, you won't choose sepia.



in this example its obious, the natural flower is the nicest one. And black&sepia are just looking wrong. Another really good example are clouds.

so cunclusion, for landscapes sepia can look nice and should be used very carfully with everything else?

What are you doing on a nice rainy saturday? After a short stop in Walnut Creek I drove to San Francisco to pick 2 of my friends up and made with them a tour throw San Francisco. The traffic was like ever well organized, means the half city was shutdown and the other half was pissed and vrowed because of this. A while later and 68 pictures, my cam tol me, no more memory, please insert another card, wtf. I need a bigger SD Card 512MB are to small and to get all 45 minutes the laptop and transfer the data, it sucks. So I made some calculations, a fast SD Card with 512 MB cost 80$, with 1GB cost 130$, 2GB cost 250$ and a palm lifedrive which can hold 4 GB (and is an organizer) cost 400$. So the question is what should I get, a portable storage solution, which can hold 400 picures, or some more
SD cards which can only hold pictures? The problem is just that I'm broke, don't want to spend anymore money and affraid about the lifedrive, because it has so bad reviews.... And don't really need a palm, its just nicer to carry arround instead of a laptop and is the same price like 2 sd cards. We shoot close to 3 GB pictures this weekend.

anyway, after we left San Francisco, we went to Vacaville (middle of nowhere) because stepan and katja have to go shopping... a while later, actually a long time later we finally got to davis (next to the middle of nowhere), made dinner and afterwards we went to the graduate for country night...

...it was interressting.

other pictures from SF you can find under: here

It was thursday night a 3 am in the morning and I just got of work. So I decided to make a small test of the camera in the dark. To see how it performs with long time exposures. 5 Minutes later a police officer stopped next to me and asked me what I'm doing. Taking photograph? I thought this was obvious, because my tripod is not really small and has a cam on top of it. So I said yes I making pictures, no I'm not stalking my neighbours, yes I will be quit and so one. By the way the pictures are shot in front of my house.

today I got my zoom lens for my camera and it is very nice to have a range from 70 mm - 300 mm. I know that you cant expect wonders from a cheap 200$ lens, but the couple of test pictures i took are ok so far. The really nice thing is that on my D50 the lens is similar to a 105 - 450 mm objectiv. So you get a really long range.

The main problem right now is just it don't fit into my camera bag attached to the cam, so I have to get a camera bag too. I'm thinking about something like this or this.