today I read a new article at one of my favorite sites, strobist.com. Vivitar just introduced a cheap all manual flash which I promptly ordered.
I want to try to work with several flashes since a long time, specially related to macro stuff. But i just refuse to pay 320$ for a Nikon flash which would allow me todo this...
...so i paid 80$ for the vivitar which does the same and just looks ugly and is 100% manual. So i gonna learn something and don't have to toy with this fancy i-ttl from nikon. I use the i-ttl with my nikon SB-600 which is nice but not really needed.
now it just needs 7 - 8 days till its delivered. So I gonna play with it at the weekend afterward. I also ordered some color filter samples which where free of charge (0.01$)
to the left is a picture taken with my 50mm f/1.8 lens of ceasars palace. Like always its not straight. Some day I will invest 20$ for a bubble level...
an example for las vegas prics. The cube on the left is arround 1 inch x 1 inch x 1 inch and was filled with ice cream. You also can say it was maybe 1 - 2 scoops of ice cream.
This little cube cost 10$, if I had this known before, I think I would have skipped on this. But so we got two of these and yes the ice cream was good, but not worth 20$ in my opinion...
...yay caesar palace is fun, but what you exspect from a hotel where the cheapest room cost 500$ a night?
two days ago we went to las vegas to check it out and figured, its a very nice place to be, but boy its expensive.
Lindsay's mum was so nice and paid for a very nice room in the luxor (picture to the left), so that we had once a nice hotel. i'm just always to cheap to pay 150$+ for a night for a hotel room (no breakfast or sood), motel 6 was always ok...
Food prices where interresting, the cheapest we got was some tacos for 10$ or a quesadia for 11$. This was our lunch...
For dinner we went to the luxor buffet, cause the steak resturante where I wanted togo was a little bit to pricey. I'm used to pay for a good ribeye or filet mignon arround 30$, but that sirloins are starting at 35$ and filet mignons arround 50$ was a little bit to steep for my wallet. The buffet was "only" 20$ a person and damn bad. At least we where full afterwards.
For a obvious reason we only spend a day in vegas, which means we where walking arround a lot (120 Fahrenheit/48 Celsius) cause we wanted to avoid traffic and some walking could be only good...
six hours later we where sitting in a corner, lindsay feets hurt and something was wrong with my hip, basically i'm still limping which is just rediculous. So we went back to our hotel, had dinner, dressed up and went back outside. Idea was to check out the club 'coyote ugly' which has quiete a good reputation. So we went there and had to bribe the bouncer to went in. Which was a waste of money, cause the club basically just sucked. imagine an empty room with a bar and 0 tables or chairs. So we left 2 minutes later and had some drinks in our hotel. The bar was nice and each drink was arround 12$, which was pricey but not too bad. We where supposed to had fun and we had. I was just disappointed that it is not lik you see in the good old movies (casino...)
To say short, if you see one casino, you saw them all. no free shows, the show we wanted to see was 85$ a person, so we passed on this. We both thought later that we maybe should have spent the money. But still its a rediculous ammount for the cheapest seats. We didn't even bothered to ask what the blue man group costs.
What else to say I drove back to davis today and only need 6.5 hours for the trip, new record and needed to stop 3 times to fill my tank up. Which is rediculous for a 400 mile drive. I think it was related to my average speed...
like every year at 4th of july there are lots of firework and bbq's around. So I made my first attempt shooting a firework.
After a couple of minutes I figured out that 70mm and 50mm are to long and switched to a 19-35mm lens. it turned out that the 35mm worked perfect for the job.
i set the exposure to 30 seconds and an aperature of 25.
Out of 20 shots, 8 turned out pretty well and can be found on
http://picasaweb.google.com/berlinguyinca/Firework
tommorrow we try to figure out how to make pictues of fancy hotels in las vegas. We are staying at the luxor.
this morning I went to circuit city because I read they have SD cards in stock. So I decided to get some for our Las Vegas trip in 2 days.
So I got 3 new cards and wanted to pay, when I noticed that my credit card was gone. So I paid with my secondaery card and started to figure out where I used my card.
And remembered I that we went for dinner last night at claim jumpers, so I took my trusty gps and told it find me the closest claim jumper and drove there. It worked and they handed me my card which was than used to get another piece of cake and a cheap (20$) graduated nd filter to find out how usefull it is.
I will test it tommorrow and maybe I can get some nice sunset pictures...
after my extremly exciting drive down to san diego and thx to my gps I didn't get lost, but it choice of wayfinding is retarded...
basically after the third tollroad I was out of money and now I can pay a 50$ fine because I was missing 10 cents to 1.75 for the toll...
So I decided to give this hdr hype a try and did 3 quick shots of this truck (under/neutral,overcomposed) and merged them together in photoshop. And it works quiete nice. /sofar I like it for static scenes like a parked car in an area with barley any wind. The disadvantage is that you can't use this technique if you got movement in the scene. so I going to get 2 or 3 graduate ND filter tmmorrow or so.
lets see how many i can put on my ultrawide before I get in trouble with vignetting again.
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.
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 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.
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 :(
