since lindsay is in temecula I got the whole apartement to me with gives me wounderfull possibilities to play with towels and try to shoot nice artistic pictures. Which helps me understanding the principles of flash better. For example the influence of shutter speed with the use of a flash. Basically the slower the shutters speed the higher the impact of ambiant light. This means with a very fast shutter speed the only light which hits the sensor/film is the ligth of the flash and the ambiant light is removed from the pictures.

Now I just need to understand how the aperature affects this effects.

Btw I like the picture to the bottom more, the cooler tones are something different. Normaly all the pictures I see have really warm tones.

Today I decided to give my lens a rundown and shoot some birds in Davis. Which are rediculous hard to track.

I also received my 10x15 prints and looking now for frames to hang them on the walls.

At least 1 or 2 of them.

mhm something is fishy for a weird reason my camera just stopt metering and after I turned it off and started it again it worked again.

i truly hope it doesn't break right now, cause I need at least 6 month to get the money for a new camera and the D50 is not available anymore which means I would have to get a D80 or D200 which are way to pricey for my taste. I don't see me spending 1000-1500$ on a simple body. Specially the performance of the D80 is worse (metering sucks) compared to my D50 and the D200 is way to pricey and ways like 900g.

As of matter a fact the on board flash is dead, which is a very, very bad sign.

So I truly hope its not dying on me, but it looks pretty bad so far. So I think I should start saving, I only took 10500 pictures and the warranty just ended :(

On the bright site some random guy at nuggets stopped me today and talk all kind of stuff about my car. and told me he had a 1998 Dakota and put 280k miles on it before he sold it. Which is very nice to hear, so I don't need to get a new car any time soon. Which I prob couldn't afford anyway...

...Sofar I got 150k miles...

at 4 am in the morning I finally figured out how to put maps on the gps and now it seems to work fine.

I also decided at 3.40 in the morning to drive to work to pick up my cdrom and got promptly stopped me for:

- driving with a broken headlight, didn't know it
- driving 15 mph to fast

after testing me if I was drunk and also telling me i need to have a proof of registration with me... He let me go and i was very happy about this. Just saved me a couple of hundred dollar.

yay my gps arrived lets and it works somehow. Except they send me the wrong wire and I can't upload maps, which basically makes it a pretty expensive compass...

...which doens't point north, except you move for a while..

so I try to wdo some work arrounds and put maps on an sd card or so, we will see.

To the left a little curious fellow who decided to be my daily victim

what can you do on a Friday night in Davis,

how is about running away and making a bbq at mikes place to wish Barret a good bye and much fun in San Diego.

So what we got, several programmers and it's which have all something in common. Sharp knives and cameras.
Which means we ended up with around 4 cameras and nearly every consumer lens Nikon produces.

sometimes everything just works out perfect.

We are finally done with our vacation planning and will spend some time in the high sierras. This will be arround august.

I managed to sell my 70-300 mm el cheapo lens and added the money I got, to purchase a 70-300mm VR lens which came with 50$ rebeate. So it was affordable.
After it was delivered today I just put it on my camera and a little bird decided to check it out and landed in the tree in front of me. Sadly it was in the late afternoon so I had to shoot the picture at iso 800 and is only usable in black and white, but it was handhold and the VR works damn well.

Sofar I'm very happy with this lens, except that it's a little bit heavy and my small hiking backpack only fits 3 lenses now. Which means I need to decide what I take with me.

Sofar I packed it with:

70 - 300 mm VR zoom
10 - 20 mm UWA zoom
90mm macro

and a flash. Maybe I can squeeze somehow my 50mm F/1.8 or tokina 19-35mm in, but I doubt it. If I need more gear I always can grab my big hiking packback.

So what else, I stopped at our local hiking shop and got me some hiking pants and shoes. Little bit later I ordered a gps system for our trip, which was fairly cheap for 160$ and should take care that we don't get lost. It was kinda annoying to loose my car in the desert last year and I don't want to experience this again.

Lindsay is right now in San Diego and I'm going to visit her in 2 weeks and also move some stuff for a friend down there. Which means I can spend another 200$ on gas.

after I discovered several dustspots in my pictures and checked my sensor. I figured its time to clean the sensor so i went ahead and get some cleaning products from adorama.com, my favorite store and ordered them.

They also got a nice little buton which says: order history and showed me I spend roughly 3500$ sofar on this hobby. In the last 24 month.

maybe I should have bought a compact camera instead of a DSLR, nobody ever told me it's such an expensive hobby.

On the other hand its only 150$ a month which equals going out 3 times a month.

this time the lens was in focus and damn I love the 90mm tamerom macro. It's so incredible sharp.

Btw he stole a peanut!

this was the perfect opurtunity for a wounderfull picture of the day and I screwed it up. Accidently the flash fired and the lens was not focussed correctly.
So it was the best what I could make out of this picture and it would have been awesome if it would have been in focus and without flash. I still like, but to unsharp :(

during our park visit we where so lucky to find a deer. This was roughly a 1/2 - 3/4 mile away fromour car on a short hike. Like always I was lazy and had only my wideangle with me and so I sprinted back to the car, got my 300mm el cheapo zoom and got back ot the place and tried to get some shots of the deer.
Like always there was not enough light available and my el cheapo is not well known for incredible sharpness or detail. So this was the best I got do at ISO 1600 using a tripod and being 30 yards away.

One day I find a used 80-200mm F/2.8 for under 400$. I can't see me spending more for this on a lens.

it finally happens after 2 years of endless planning we finally managed to visit yosomite. And it's wounderfull.

We only did a visit to find out which places are nice and what can you see and how the roads are before we go camping there.

As first the roads are extrem narrow and curvy. My record was 1 and 1/2 turns of the steering wheel to get arround the curve and at less than 20 mph. So its a fun drive.

What ya need:

1. good sturdy boots
2. sun lotion
3. 2 par of free hands

What ya get:

1. waterfalls
2. climbing
3. hiking

The trails are all 4 miles+ long so about 4 - 5 hours a trail. So you need to plan a 2 day visit at least. You can catch fish and there are several small rivers. We did not find any bears, but a couple of deers and where engaged by a gang of squirrels. We got away, but it was damn close. The sqiurrels got away with one of the peanuts.

Picture wise it's wounderfull and you can make lost of nice composistions. I just felt a little bit limited by 3 factors.

1. you need a waist belt to carry your stuff, backpack is not a smart idea
2. a tripod is perfect as wander stick
3. damn I wish I had a 10 - 20mm ultrawide angle from sigma. 19-35 are just not wide enough.

picture wise i getting better, only shoot 80 and kept most of them. But like always you can find the bestoff on my picassa web site. I'm happy that I invested the 120$ last year for a nice circular polarizer. It works wounders with all kinds of reflections.

The picture was my favorite shot of the day.

hey we got another visiter in our apartment. And I start to getting a little bit better with my macro stuff. Still the DOF is far from perfect, related to the angle and not much I can do anymore. I was already at F/36 but the picture itself is damn sharp and its a hairy little beast...

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...

after I looked at my wallet this morning I decided to take the offered deal on a tamrom 90mm F2.8 macro lens and waiting that it get's shipped to davis so I can play with it. Sadly I wont have it before the memorial day weekend is over, but I gonna play with it afterwards.

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.

1. left a 6.30
2. arrive in Los Angeles at 12
3. arrived in Temecula at 7.30
4. went shopping
5. lost my car and was searching it for an hour ---> its cold in a t-shirt
6. 10pm arrived at Lindsay's house

So during the time waiting I shot some pictures and the best you can see on top. The taillight of a 2000 Ford Thunderbird.

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

• Thai food - 8$
• one beer - 3$
• two slices of pizza - 5$
  
• stealing sushi from Lindsay - 0$

laying down with food poisoning - priceless

• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish
• human kind is not supposed to eat raw fish

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?

• the white balance is off cause of the lamp in the background
• its very unsharp, problem is the cheap tripod which I had at this time and the long exposure
  
• there is no clear defined goal in this picture, where I'm looking at, what gives me this picture
• the crop is kinda bad, we could need more space on the right site and take off some of the top part

so what can we do in post processing to optimize it

• we can change the crop
• we can sharpen it a little
• we change the whitebalance
• we can convert it to blacl&white to give it a better mood and play with the contrast
  

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

1. 50mm f/18 reversed on D50 with SB600
   
2. 50mm f/5.6 lens on D50 with SB600
3. 200mm f/5.6 on D50 with SB600
   

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...