today was the day i finally received my new toy, my tamrom 90mm F/2.8 macro and sofar its fun. Specially in the combination with the TTL wire which I received a week ago to get the flash of my camera and I wished i spend these 20$ a long time ago. It's amaizing what you can do if you can move the flash around.
Now I'm trying to get my pictures as sharp as I want. The lens is incredible, but I lack the right technique. So time to pracitse.
To the left one of the first trys of a small 1 inch large flower which looks ok, except for a lack of sharpness zoomed in at 100%. Related to my manual focussing, I guess.
today I read a nice article about a wounder full toy, http://www.sonos.com/ It is kinda useless in our apartment but i see a lot of potential for this little thing if you got a house.
Like one for the patio, one for the bedroom and one for the living room. And all can managed over a central remote and are connected to any NAS.
The problem is only a system like this including NAS cost easily 2k. But it's a nice idea.
sofar my xbox does the job just fine, if I ever use it for music cause is a waste of energy to keep the pc running...
the power of pgsql.
I hate writing database dependend code. It's a nightmare to change it when you need to move to another database system. My current situation is that I need to update millions of values in a table because we changed our data model.
So I was thinking writing a script in java or python, but this was to much work and would cost me 1 - 2 days. Instead I wrote a small plsql script which does what i want.
declare
cursor SAMP_CUR IS select "sample_id","class" from samples;
v_sample_id integer;
v_class varchar(256);
begin
open samp_cur;
loop
fetch samp_cur into v_sample_id,v_class;
exit when samp_cur%notfound;
update RESULT_LINK set "class" = v_class where "sample_id" = v_sample_id;
end loop;
close samp_cur;
end;
it took maybe 10 - 15 minutes and does what I want.
Sadly I hade to write some insane applications in plsql on my database to synchronize it over webservices with another database which Is a pain in the ass to move to a new system. I'm honestly thinking about making test with 3 database systems in future to find a new dbms.
H2
postgressql
mysql
cloudscape
H2 and cloudscape have the insane adavantage that they are based on java and I can develop java based code in the database to enhance it.
so long time no post so a short update what's going on. Basically live is like always busy with work and going to move from my loved oracle database (ok love/hate relation ship) to a postgresql in the next couple of month. So starting to read up on postgresql issues.
my plans for summer are
- camping in joshua tree
- going to germany to get a visa
- riding my bike more often
- maybe stopping in england for the 26th birthday of an old friend
- finally scraping enough money together to get this damn macro lens
more comes later...
currently I have fun profiling my application for a couple of memory leaks and issues with performance.
So the first step was to install a profiler for my favorite ide, called eclipse...
...3 days later I gave up with all the stupid error messages under linux 64bit and installed netbeans 5.5 from sun. The profiler works somehow, but the IDE is an absolute disaster. It is inflexible, ridiculous slow and just not able TODO the job in any fast way.
i'm very disappointed so far and using the old system.out.println approach again :(
long time no post,
a new year started,
christmas is over and my wallet starts to recover,
car makes still problems,
still tons of bugs in my programs,
as we can see the new year is just like the old year. So a review of the last month...
ate food -> got sick
drove to temecula -> stuck in traffic jam forever
shopping for gifts -> lost my car -> freezing -> 60 minutes later still freezing-> found car
Christmas -> tons of gifts :)
drove to Davis -> awe full storm on the highway
stop at gas station -> fell in paddle -> freezing and hurt
still driving to Davis -> getting more windy
got a cold -> life sucks
new year -> laying down with cold -> life still sucks
went snowboarding -> got sick -> drove back to Davis -> life is just not getting better
power out at work -> PC died -> I have to fix it -> lesson learned -> 10 ups ordered
sitting at work -> fixed a bug -> discovered 2 new bugs
trying to get a coffee -> cafe closed -> soda machine broken -> being thirsty
so thats my life right now :(
on the bright side we had a wounderfull evening with a cheese fondue and a couple of friends...
being bored in the traffic jam.
today I had the exciting task to drive down to Temecula. A relaxing 500 mile ride...
So I left davis at 7.30 in the morning to be at the starbucks at 6.45 and on the highway at 7.00
A couple of hundred miles later (420 to be exact) I passed Los Angeles and got stuck on the 91 east. 2 Hours later I finally arrived at the 15. From here it's just 35 miles (or 40 minutes) to Temecula....
if the egoistic bank robber would have decided to not rob the bank this day and getting shot another day. It turned out that the cops shot him on the Higway 15 South and closed the only connection to Temecula for me. So I was sitting here and moving at incredible 1 mph, till I got to the section and they (The cops) winked all cars from the highway. As I learned in the DDR, if there is a line, go at the end and wait, you will get something. In this case a police officer led us around the closed part of the highway to a section which was open and I finally could continue my journey to Temecula.
Christmas is coming soon so my parents though it would be nice to have some pictures from me and Lindsay. A professional photograph was a little bit expensive and hard to find in Davis so we decided to shoot them our self using a simple flash, a remote release and a lot of time. Once we had a handful pictures which where acceptable we optimized them in photoshop, cropped them, transformed them to black and white and done. The hole procedure took about 5 - 6 hours and the next time I need to make sure that the focus point is better and for portraits of more than on person, I should use an aperture of 8 - 11 instead of 5.6. But for the first try I'm quite satisfied.
Right now I'm spending my time in Davis waiting for packages, cause amazon was able to send them everywhere, except to our flat. Which also means that I had to delay my Christmas trip and Lindsay flew already to Temecula :(
fun on a Thursday
it looks like I'm getting somewhere with my photo stuff. More and more people are telling me that I take wounder full pictures and I even sold pictures...
na I sold only 3 pictures so far, but its a start.
anyway time to take an old pictures which I took when I got my camera and analyze it.
Ok whats wrong with this picture?
today a friend offered me an incredible deal. A complete pc for 100$ So I asked him whats in the box?
A pentium IV 2.4 GHz
1 GB Ram
60 GB Harddisk
A shitty graphiccard
A wireless pci card
so short I bought this box, so that my girlfriend can play her sims game, we have a place to store movies and songs and I can play my stupid eve-online....
But when you buy a pc you also need a Monitor and a graphiccard. So I went to Frys and got a nice 20" Dspaly from samsung and a Geforce 6600 OC + some speakers.
complete price for the package was 500$, which is perfect.
...and tomorrow I go to the garage and get my car fixed.
why do I post a picture of a dinner,
the reason for this is quite simple. On thursday evening I got home and my lovely and now very proud girlfriend suprised me a dinner. It's basically tiny little chicken ( better known as very tasty snacks...) with zuchini and a good glass of wine.
The chicken's are called game hen and which is translates to "Rebhuehner".
mhm what can you do on a visit in temecula late in the night...
basically nothing except for keeping an eye on the shotguns, but thats another story. So I used the chance to hunt the antichrist of photographie....
called cinnamon the cat.
why is it the antichrist? Because it's fast, never stays for a second on one place and have so many different colors. The problem with the colors is if I expose for the white the pictures are under exposed, if I expose for the black, they are overexposed.
result of an exciting hunt at midnight....
mhm today my photo shop elements 5.0 license expired and I have to admit I really like this program. It provides the most of the stuff what I need right now. So what did I actually miss in photo shop elements? Actually only the curves from photo shop CS2 and the channel mixes. Which brings us to the gimp which is a nice program but lacks one important feature. It doesn't allows adjustment layers which are my favorite feature.
Time to download a photo shop CS2 trial to find out what else is use full.
Oh by the way as you can see in the picture, fall finally started here in California.
What is wrong with this pictures?
I really want to get rid of the shadows under the leaves and get some more details out. This can be done with a second flash on a very low angle.
today I received my big experiment, actually I did two experiments. The first was to order a user totally manual lens ( Nikon 200mm AIS F/4) for 89$ and a couple of years old.
The second experiment was that I ordered some high class steaks online from omahasteaks.com and I'm quite disappointed by the new york stripe steak. It was not tender at all. So I will send them an email in the morning to get my money back or at least a refund. At 90$ ( I got 50% off, normally is 180$)for 4 pounds of meat I expected a better quality.
The second experiment on the other hand surprised me. The lens looks brand new, has no dents, no scratches and an outstanding quality. And the manual focus works very well, I just wish I had better eyes or a Nikon DR6 which magnify the viewfinder and makes it easier to focus for me.
So tomorrow I will try to catch some birds with the 200mm lens to see how well I can focus under pressure. Sadly it won't work to use this lens with a 50mm reversed lens as macro for 4:1 magnifications. The pictures I got are more or less hit and miss pictures.
Which finally brings me to the conclusion that I will get over short or long a real macro lens in the range of 90 - 105 mm. So I can hunt bugs and have a working distance of over 2 cm from the front element.
As we can see in the first picture the reversed 50mm f/1.8 works very well for 1:1 magnification of still objects. But show me one bug which won't run away when you are 2 cm away from him with this combination and your hand is is 2.5 cm away turning on the aperture ring to set the depth of field.
Ok you always can freeze the bug before hand...
The pictures are taken at
today I finally received my reversing adapter and it's quite stunning. My little 50mm f/1.8 is now a macro lens with a magnification ration of 1:1. So I think I don't need a real macro lens anymore, which just saved me 400$ and I am very satisfied with the sharpness of the little lens.
Another ridiculous thing from Nikon is that they charge you 80$ for a wire to disconnect your camera and flash. Lets look in the future if I would get such a wire and later maybe another flash I would also need another wire. And I can't see me spending 160$ for 2 stupid wires if a wireless controller is around 250$ which can connect and remote control as many flashes as I want.
But why do I want to get the flash of the camera in the first case? Basically the idea is to define where the flash highlights are and on another angle you can increase the details in an object, like a sheet of paper.
i'm also very proud of me that I resisted to buy a used 300mm f/4 AFS today for 400$ (normal price is arround 950$... There had to be something wrong) And I have enough lenses right now to play with anyway. Lets wait till march.
...this post will be updated with a picture later...
it finally happend, I sold my first picture. Sadly it was the picture from the SR-71 blackbird which was supposed to be deleted a while ago and is now finally deleted from my website. Shit happens.
So lets see how much pictures we need to sell so I get my money back for what I spend sofar.
Nikon 28-80 mm F3.5-5.6 50$
Nikon 50mm F1.8 100$
Tokina 19-35mm 150$
Nikon 70-300mm F4.5-5.6 G 150$
Nikon 200mm F4 AI 100$
Nikon SB-600 Flash 180$
Bogen Tripod + Midi head 260$
B&W circular Polarizer 100$
Nikon D50 699$
It sound that I have to sell 200 - 400 pictures minimum to get some money back and its amazing how much money you can spend if you buy something here and something there. I just wished I had bought good glas in the beginning instead of getting the cheapest lenses available.
progress with macros.
I'm finally getting a little bit better with my macro pictures. The pictures on the left are both taken with a combination of a 50mm and 70-300mm lens.
What acutally reallu surprises me is the quality of my camera with this combination at ISO 1600. I did'nt need todo any noise reduction afterwards and only incresed the sharpening and saturation a little bit to reduce the extreme CA.
Now why would I ever want to have a macro lens?
Maybe because you can focus from infinity to 1:1. In the case with the reversed lens you barley have any working distance
and you cant say lets go farther awy to reduce the magnification, because of focus issues. So you need to stick with a magnification 1:x at distance y. Which leads to very limited framing.
so yes I can't wait until I got enogh money to actually buy my 3 dream lenses.
landscape: sigma 10-20 or tokina 12-24 (both arround 500$ new)
macro: tamrom 90mm or sigma 105EX (both arround 400$ new)
wildlive: nikon 80-200mm F/2.8 or nikon 300mm F/4 (both arround 900$ new or 500$ used)
At last but not least the wounder full R1C1 Flashkit from Nikon, which is ridiculous expensive at 600$ for 2 Flash's and a Commander.
I will consider the lenses for wildlive when I'm not able to use the 200mm F/4 prime I orderd last week for wildlive, because of missing metering and autofocus.
I also found a really nice website today which explains how you spend your hard earned money...
