I finally got the time to shoot some pictures in the lab and like always I'm surprised how much I like my macro lens and my ultra wide angle.

For example the picture on the left was shot at 10mm with a SB-600 Flash + Blue Gel from the left and the onboard flash to highlight the microscope.

The second picture is a part of an Agilent auto sampler and uses an orange filter in front of the SB-600.

To say it short I really start to make progress with my flash photographies since I got the D80, it's just wonderful to have a wireless flash.


Tonight we are going to go out for sushi, again, to celebrate the good bye of Mercedeh, which is leaving tomorrow.

By the way both pictures are more or less straight out of the camera. I just applied some curve management.

ok I finally hit the problem every photographer has, my stuff gets to heavy and my lenses are not long enough. For example the attached picture is a 100% crop of a picture I shot with my D80 and my 70-300mm VR zoom and as we can see I was not able to get close enough to the bird, which was flying above me.

Current identification says that's a red tail hawk, but I'm not 100% sure about this. Anyway after playing since 1 week with the D80 i finally archived correct exposures and my keeper rate is around 60-70%. At least exposure wise. So I think it was the right choice to buy it and time to save money for the next couple of month till we see a new toy which I need to have...

at least ducks tend to be very cooperative and don't run away, as we can see in the second picture.

-----

Nachdem ich seit einer Woche mit der neuen Kamera herumgespielt habe, kam ich zu zwei Erkenntnissen

1. ich bin glücklich mit der Kamera und muss jetzt mal wieder bissel sparen
2. wie immer ist das Teleobjektiv nicht lang genug

leider ist es auch so das man als Amateur sich grenzen setzen muss, und so sieht es aus das ich keine Falken fotografieren kann oder halt damit leben muss das sie sehr klein sind. Alternativ kann man ja auch probieren mal in den Bergen wandern zu gehen und erwischt sie da.

Wenigstens sind Enten dem fotografieren nicht abgeneigt, aber nachdem ich so ca 200 Fotos von Enten in allen möglichen Kombinationen habe sind sie nicht mehr so beeindruckend. Vielleicht komme ich ja mal näher an die Reiher oder Truthaene an ohne gleich angegriffen zu werden

the power of photoshop, currently I'm playing with the photoshop CS3 demo and I have to say I really like the new version. For an example the pictures we see are the basic 3 steps in my workflow, the color picture is straight out of the camera, the first B&W is after some adjustements and a B&W conversion in lightroom and the last B&W is after post processing in CS3. The main goal was to remove the stuff in the background from the picture. In total I spend maybe 35 minutes on this picture and it's far from perfect, but it's a start and I'm satisfied so far.

I'm also getting more and more comfortable with the D80 and finally start to get pictures where I'm happy with the results. Also the ISO 3200 speed proved to be very usefull. For example the picture bellow was shot at ISO 3200, mainly as a test and it works very well for B&W.

Die letzten Tage verbringe ich ueberwiegend damit mich in Photoshop CS3 einzuarbeiten oder wie ich denn die D80 benutzten kann. Zum beispiel die Serie am oberen ende dieses "Post" ist ein beispiel fuer meinen momentanen Arbeitsablauf. Als erstes werden die Bilder mittels "Adobe Lightroom" importiert und belichtungs fehler korrigiert und in schwarz/weiss konvertiert. Anschliessend benutzte ich meine PS CS3 Demo um stoerende elemente aus dem Hintergrund zu entfernen, oder kleinere optische Korrekturen vorzunehmen. Anschliesend werden die Bilder exportiert und landen je nach verwendungszweck bei picassa for blogs oder bei zenfolio fuer online Betrachtungen.

finally my database is working again and I found atleast one backup which did what it was supposed todo.

But now i really need a weekend...

for some reasons I had nothing todo today and did not feel like working on a saturday. So I went outside and watch one of the regularly softball games and snapped some pictures.

And i'm really amazed about the speed of the camera, except that I needed to switch sd cards so often and really need to get some sandisk Ultra III 4 GB cards for the future.

...the wishlist gets longer and longer. Sadly the D80 has also the problem that the high iso noise is pretty bad. I was really spoiled with the D50.

So the rest of the day I will spending at the pool, reading and working on a new backup program and hopefully get my database up and running...

The rest of these pictures you can find at:

http://berlinguyinca.zenfolio.com/p296703648

still trying to figure out if I want zenfolio or not. SmugSmug would offer me the possibility to sell pictures. Basically of each picture print you can define how much goes in your wallet. But i'm not paying 130$ a year for this service,not if i don't sell pictures for this amount of money.

for some reason I have a lot of time, prob related that every try to restore my database takes 4 hours, so I decided to grab my new toy and try to create some dramatic pictures on the cemetry near by.

90 minutes later i figured that the D80 is pretty difficult to use and I will take a while till I can use the metering on the camera. So far I have no way to predict the outcome, which kinda sucks. Also the noise is pretty damn bad over iso 400. I got 3 keepers out of 100 shots, which is pretty sad...

The best shot was the picture to the left. Which I don't know if I'm happy with it or not.

I also got an email from paypal that they are very sorry and will reimburse me for my trouble. Seems like we are making progress with this problem. I'm still waiting for feedback from the victoria insurance and my attempt to cancel the policy.

So what else,

i spent some time with my neighbors, or in other words tyler and I played a car racing game and kim was going nuts with my camera.

addicted to coffee,

since 20 hours I'm sitting here and trying to fix the database. It sadly lost alot of data after a bug in my software occured and for some reasons oracle does not like the thing i want;

please restore the backup from tuesday night...

nope its not happening...

To the left, I taking a break and playing with the D80 and filtered flashs, quite nice for out of camera with minor adjustments.

the smile of this little fellow represnts my current look,

my D80 arrived and I'm very happy that I got it instead of the D200. I really can use all functions over buttons and the integrated wireless commander mode is just wonderful. Not I just need to find a way to sync my Vivitar with it

Now I just need to learn how to use it.


...btw the picture needs a second a flash on the other side to highlight the nose shadow. But a friend of mine got my second flash so not much I could do.

ok since I get more and more pictures I need to find a new website to store them. Which brings it down too two possibilities:

smugsmug.com
zenfolio.com

so far i got a trial account at zenfolio which I really like and just playing around with it...

http://berlinguyinca.zenfolio.com/

so i just got of work and went to the camera store to compare the D40 with the D80 with the D200 and the D200 feels so right...

The D80 is so slow compared to it and just feels to small in my hands. I never thought there would be much off a difference, but certainly there is a huge difference between these 2 bodies. Is it worth 700$ difference?


Ok I gave in and did the smart choice, I ordered a Nikon D80 which is more than enough camera for myself and have to accept that it wont shoot at 5 fps. The Nikon D200 was just to much money.

crap,

my idea to wire money for free to Germany with paypal did not work to well. 31$ Transaction fee for wiring 800$ and it takes 2 weeks or so in total.

Next time I move my lazy ass to the bank...

..I also just managed to sell my D50 for 300$, which hurts badly but still better than have laying it around or breaking it during converting it to IR...

now what camera to get is the big question...

edit; now i was charged another 23 euro because the was some problem with my bank, pa pal ruely sucks

just playing with the 25 year ol d 200mm F/4 AIS. Which always suprises me how good this lens is. Specially for the price I pai last year, it was around 60 or 70$ and is completly manual, which means you need to:

- estimate the right exposure
- manual focus it
- estimate the exposure for the flash

which was quite easy, cause I only can use F/4 right now, otherwise the scratch becomes visible, and I just need to adjust the power of the flash.

Btw bottom picture is straight out of the D50, top picture is slightly enhanced.

I'm also really impressed with my database system at work, it just works right now. Scheduling/Import/Export, starting of cluster jobs, quality. All just seems to work.

So I finally can concentrate on some parts like Frontends and more statistics.

you are also never, ever supposed to google your own nickname. I use my nickname now since close to 3 names and boy I got a lot of hits with stuff I would had not expected.

- reference to photo forums, yeah I expected this
- reference to my mistake with feature pics, ok happens
- reference to my xbox gaming profile, I did not expect this, but it shows that I play not very much
- reference to work related stuff, ok seems logical
- reference to eve-online.com stuff, this now really surprises me. I was way to addicted to this game

0 references to my blog, time to change this

berlinguyinca
berlinguyinca
berlinguyinca

...maybe it's working...

ok another week, another fight with oracle procedures.

This time I figured out that I need some materialized views to speed up my statistics. So what you do?

You create a basic script...

bla bla bla

...create materialized view ...

bla bla bla


now you execute this script and all is fine and dandy, except...

the next time you execute this script, it crashes because of the obect exists already.

A simple fix to this problem is:

--check if the view exist and if this is the case drop it first--
open get_results for 'select count(*) from all_mviews where mview_name = UPPER(''MY_FANCY_VIEW'') and owner = UPPER('''||user||''')';
fetch get_results into maxCount;
close get_results;

DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('count is: ' ||maxCount);
if maxCount > 0
then
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('dropping existing view');
execute immediate ('drop materialized view '||user||'.my_fancy_view');
else
DBMS_OUTPUT.PUT_LINE('no view exist with this name');
end if;

...create materialized view yada yada yada...


you can find the infos...

...about all registered views using:

select * from all_views

...about all registered materialized views

select * from all_mviews

...about all registered tables

select * from all_tables

ok I just got back from the wonderful party and It's so much fun not to drive. I think it was one of my best ideas lately to just walk instead of drive to a friends place.

I finally could have a couple of cuba libre and enjoy some fun rounds of flip cup...

Ok for the people who don't know anything about flip cup. Basically flip cup is all about flipping cups which can be described by a couple of mathematical formulas. But lets keep it simple, what do you need for this game:

1. a backyard/patio/garage
2. an even number of players
3. an matching number of plastic cups
4. lots of beer, preferred corona or hefe weizen
5. a table as long as possible

how to play it:

1. every person gets a cup
2. every cup is filled with an inch of beer
3. now the players are lining up on each side of the table, each side defines one teams
4. once this is done you decide on which side of the table you start to play
5. the first two persons flush down there beer and try to flip their cups
6. because they are clumsy, they have to try it again and again till they finally done it
7. once they flipped their cup the player next to them flushes their beer and flips the cup
8. people start shouting go go go
9. the first team who flipped all their cups is declared winner of this round and you start a new round
10. now you define the victory conditions, 3/5/7/9/11/.../n rounds. it has to be an uneven number
11. don't forget to call names on the other team...
12. make sure you don't have Jon in you team :P

result of the evening:

Team europe: 2 (martin,Natasha,helen,keith,mel,gert)
Team usa: 1 (jon,jon,sharon,dave,miss X (Danielle?),another person)


right now I'm sitting here and reading Tom Hogans Nikon D80 book...

...still sitting and reading, 230 pages done, damn this camera can do way more than my D50. The only real difference between the D80 and D200 is

- 3fps vs 5fps
- plastic body vs metal body
- unsealed body vs sealed body

so I think I really go with the D80 instead of the D200 and keep the change for some nice trip.

Lindsay and I even thought about making a scuba diving license (the second for me, but I feel I need to take the lessons again, since its so long since I was on my last dive) and you can dive with contact lenses these days, which puts me finally in the situation to see something under water...

...now I just need to learn to deal with the sharks, my idea was diving in tahoe, but friends told me tahoe is basically very clear and cold and empty water. Barley an fishes to see.

The really nice thing is dive equipment cost like 50$ for a day which includes 2 air bottles.

ok today I spend all my day time working on a self portrait of me. This seems like the final result and I'm quite satisfied with myself.

I also figured out that I give myself a Nikon D80 + MB-D80 for (early) Christmas and trying to see what I can get for my D50 before I invest the money to fix it.

Time to go to a party now :)

ok so I played the last couple of hours with:

stripes
eclipse
myeclipse

and testing how simple it is to develop applications. So far I have to say that vraptor2 is much easier to use than stripes, but stripes itself is pretty mighty and easy to use. Specially compared to struts.

Sadly the combination of myeclipse + stripes + jboss doesn't work very well together which means I need to have two installations up and running.

first developing using myeclipse, the jsp editor is just wonderful
second deploy and testing with eclipse wtp

time to find another jsp editor, which is at least as good as the myeclipse editor...

this week I spend most of my time with paypal.

The basic idea was to create a couple of accounts to synchronize my banking accounts in the us with the accounts in germany and other way around. Which was supposed to be a easy task turned out to be a freaking nightmare, we will see if it worked mid to end next week.

I also checked out a couple of nikon cameras and got several estimates to get my camera fixed.

Final solution:

I get an IR filter as soon as i get my paycheck and switch the scratched element with the help of a friend. He does the soldring, I take the thing apart and lucky me, I have access to a dust free enviorement at work.
I never belived that it can have so many advantages to work in a lab.

The weekend will be pretty boring, just a party on saturday evening and the rest of the time I will end up working. Like always, the todo list gets longer and longer and I want to learn some new programming standards.

Last but not least,

http://stripes.mc4j.org/confluence/display/stripes/Home

seems like a pretty cool webframework.

Dear readers as you can see I have several advertisements on this website. These are created based on content in the blog and I would highly appreciate if you click on these advertisements from time to time.

This supports me with some money which I can put in better camera gear...

For example this is the report for the last couple of days:

Date	Page impressions	Clicks	Page CTR	Page eCPM	Earnings
7/10/2007	10	0	0.00%	0	0
7/11/2007	4	0	0.00%	0	0
7/12/2007	9	0	0.00%	0	0
7/13/2007	15	0	0.00%	0	0
7/14/2007	14	0	0.00%	0	0
7/15/2007	25	2	8.00%	30.46	0.76
7/16/2007	10	0	0.00%	0	0
7/17/2007	4	0	0.00%	0	0
7/18/2007	4	0	0.00%	0	0
7/19/2007	5	0	0.00%	0	0
7/20/2007	1	0	0.00%	0	0
7/21/2007	30	2	6.67%	44.88	1.35
7/22/2007	5	1	20.00%	134.64	0.67
Totals	136	5	3.68%	20.45	2.78
Averages	10	0			0.21

Which means I already got 2.78 for doing nothing, just because somebody clicked on some stupid links...

Ok thats the best I can do to remove the scratch on my camera using photoshop.
Basically the scratch causes reflection which darken specific pixels and in return you have the dark line of the picture. Now I can lighten this line with very careful dodging...

The problem is this is really time consuming and took me close too 2 hours to correct.

So I came up with following plan,

1. order an infrared filter
2. replace the scratched element with the filter
3. sell the converted nikon D50
4. buy a nikon D80/D90, this will be around august/September

The reason that I convert the camera instead of fixing is, the IR version have a higher resale value than normal versions.And I'm quite sure i can find an electrician who is able to install me this filter for 50$.
After I read more about this procedure it seems fairley easy, except for the soldering part.

i'm also starting to like the vivitar el cheapo flash.

The bad

- sucks batteries dry
- not many adjustments possible
- very large and ugly
- problems to trigger with the optical trigger

The good

- it does what its supposed todo
- very easy to use
- very powerful compared to the sb-600

Over all I prefer the SB-600 compared to the vivitar. Mainly because I can adjust it in very fine steps and works perfectly with nikon cameras. But the SB-600 cost also 189$ compared to the 89$ of the vivitar, which does what it's supposed todo.

And its wonderful to have a second flash, as you can see with the fish pictures. These shots would have not been possible with only a single flash. it also works very nice to highlight shadows in case of 'teddy' portraits.

Basically what you are going todo is put the vivitar somewhere to provide enough light to fill your object of interest. And use the second flash for removing unwanted shadows or setting highlights.

today I decided to play a little bit with chanel based saturation. And for this I decided to annoy lindsay fish 'diablo" a little bit which is by now 33 cm long.

So we put on flash to the right site of the tank, one flash on top of the tank and taking 10 - 20 picture to find the right exposure for this job.

Sadly I was not able to use autofocus, cause the water was playing havoc with the system from my D50. If you look at the picture, specially close to the Fin you can clearly see the scratch, which I still need to correct in photoshop, but this will take a little bit. The fish is fairly complex with all his scales.

now about these specific look,

this is actually very easy to accomplish you just need to reduce the saturation of each color channel. In this case it was green/yellow to remove the color from the plant and blue/aqua to remove the water color.

did I mention I love light room? It is so simple todo these kinds of things. And like always we have trouble with the blown highlights. Because the scales are so reflective. I tried to compensate for it, but it doesn't always work as i want and these where the only usable shots out of 100 pictures or so.

oh last, but not least use a circular polarizer to remove reflections from the fishtank. This can be even improved if you turn off all lights in the room. The used aperture was around F/8 and the used shutter speed around 500 to get rid of the ambient light. The flash's where triggered over pc cord or an optical trigger. And the pccord is just frustrating, you need to check the connections all 2 minutes

ok now after trying a couple of hours to remove the 'scratch' in the picture I gave up. i'm just not able to remove it and all what happens is that the picture looks fake. i tried dodging and cloning.