after nearly 2 years in the usa there are two things which are just wounderfull for gadget fans.

1. netflix

a service which sends you as many dvd's as you want for 14.99 a month.

2. gamefly

a service which sends you as many games as you want for 14.99 a month.

now people tend to argue with me, but I prefer to own the game, so I always can play it over and over again. Sure if you this kind of player it makes sense, but in my case I play a game once and than grab another one.
The average game has 10 - 20 hours of playtime, means I need 2 - 3 weeks to play this game and than get a new one. The other thing with console games is, they are series and every year cames the next part and the older parts dust in the shelf... 

a small story about what can happen to you in the us during sitting at venice beach.

Oldtimer to the left was swinging his flag with the indian on top and was also selling some stuff.
As we can see he looks not very wealthy so now we try to figure out what could have happen.


After he was sitting there a while, a cop come by with his bicyle. And talked to oldtimer. After a short while he called for backup. So oldtimer stepped to the left and start swinging his flag like hes mad and shouted something nobody could understand. The cop was just next to him and did nothing. 15 minutes later backup arrived.
Now we had 1 oldtimer, 1 bicycle cop, 2 suvs with 3 other cops. I guess they tried to much his age to make it fair for him.

The 4 cops now cuffed him and searched him. They discovered a pipe and called for reinforcements... 10 Minutes later 2 other cops arrived. And moved him into the suv and moved his stuff into it too.





Finally the local band tried to support oldtimer and started singing a song.

Jonny Cash - Folsom Prison.

what we still can't figure out, what did oldtimer wrong in the first place, but we needed 6 officers to arrest him. Truely a scarry oldtimer.

After I went the last weekend to venice beach california I had the possibilty to take some nice shots of a couple of bikes.

I think everybody heard about the famous muscle beach and the street performance at venice. Its kinda overrated, the muscle beach is really disappointing and the performance, is not really so impressive. I was only impressed by 6 breakdancers, who put a damn nice show up.

I also have to admit that its not true that there are many rich, famous, good looking people at venice beach. Honestly, the most should change into clothes thats hides there body, and not show so much. Its like always, fat american laying on the beach. But they are defnitly rich...

what else to say about venice, you can buy stuff, you can spend a lot of money for food. Parking is expensive, arround 25$ for a day. And it's crouded.

nothing is so important like a good breakfast.

so lets make a classic tri-tip sandwich.

Sandwich:

2 - 3 lb tri-tip
baguettes
salad
onions
...

Dry Rub:

salt
pepper
thyme
chayene pepper

Sauce:

bbq sauce
coconut milk

Recipe:

take the spieces and mix them. Mix the cocnut milk with the bbg sauce to taste. Afterwards remove unneccessaery fat from the tri-tip and rub it with the spieces.
Let it rest for 2 hours at room temperature. Preheat the oven to 350F and roast the tri-tip for 70 minutes. Brush it from time to time from both sides with the sauce. When the meat is medium done turn on the broiler for 5 minutes each side. To give it a nice sizzeling crust. Than take it out of the oven and let it settle for at least 20 minutes! This is important, so that the meat can collect its juices and don't dry out when we cut it.

Slice the meat in the thinnest slices possible. A slicer would be prefered, but you can do it with any sharp none setteratted knife in your kittchen.

now build your sandwich and enjoy!

the last weeks in california,

at first my parents visited me and toured a little around and discovered vacaville...

A little bit later they produly showed me what nice stuf they got there and how cheap it all is. It reminded me a little when my girlfriend was in berlin and discovered how "cute" shoes you can buy at deichman ( cheap ass shoe store in germany )

anyway I'm glad my parents had fun and so we drove a little bit arround with them to sonoma county, lake berryessa, san francisco ( we joined them there for a couple of hours only) .

Shortly before they left, I got me a new toy, called Xbox360. I'm kinda suprised about myself to spend money on such a toy, cause I always preferred a pc. But after playing with it for nearly 2 weeks I really have to admit: It just do the job...

so a short review:

graphics: wounderfull in HD mode, kinda weak in SD
noise: this thing is very noise so you need to set 8 - 10 Feet away or turn the tv very loud
games: I just got oblivion, and I love it
demos: its very nice that you can download demos for free, so I tried a couple of games sofar.
online: battlefield 2 online is just a hell of fun. But still unsure if I gonna pay 60$ for it
media extender: I didnt had a windows media center available, so I just used the windows vista demo and its way to slow to navigate with it. Sofar I need to find somebody who has a mediatester to see if its worth the 100$ to stream movies and dvd from harddisk. 

after the bbq was done on saturday we were relaxing in the sun and got a nice visitor. A 6 feet long boa was moving arround in our front yard.

Ok as we all now pythons and boas don't live in california in free nature. It was my neighbours boa enjoying a little bit this nice weather before she had to go back in her tank in the inside.
And my neighbours was watching the snake and asked us if it would be ok to let her in the grass for a couple of minutes, so she could clean the tank.
At least it gave me the possibility to make a couple of nice pictures.

It's summer again, that means time to bbq. The problem with bbq's is you need a grill. So I had a little gas chrill last year, but somebody decided to steal it... Anyway I saw saturday morning this awesome weather and decided time to get a grill. Now the big question gas/electric/charcoil what to buy.

Electric is no choice, to dry, not portabel. And we all no a gril has to be portable to get it to the beach. So charcoil has the best taste, but the disadvantage of exensive preheating and lots of ash. So I went with a gasgrill. Its fast, its clean and somewhat portable. Obviously gas grills are the most expensive grills out there. They start at 25$ for something what you cant call grill and go up to 5000$ what I would call insane.

So it should be:
- portable
- from a good brand for replacement parts and propan supply
- under 200$
- large enough for a couple of burgers and crabs

mean it's sounds like a weber Q series and the small ine is just to tiny and the big one ( preffered by me) way to expensive ( 360$ or so ). So I decided to go with the medium one ( Q200 ) which was still somewhat portable ( 18 kg ) and has enough space for all what you can think of. The price of 179$ is close enough to my limited and with some propan, tools, food... we hit 300$ in total for the weekend.

A first test:

- crab legs -> jummy
- jumbo prawns -> jummy
- shrimps -> chewy, go for prawns next time.
- steak -> tasty
- corn -> tasty
- spare ribs -> to fat, I stick with my oven ribs
- turkey burgers by my own recipy -> perfect
- trout -> perfect
- calamary steak -> i don't like calamari, awefull....

result: me laying lazy and round in the sun for the rest of the day.

Now the burger recipy for 4 Burgers:

- 30g butter choped in small pieces
- 1 clove garlic chopped
- 1/4 onion finley chopped
- 1 cup vermouth
- salt + fresh pepper
- 1 Pound ground turkey
- 1/2 wet bun, ripped in little pieces

mix the ingredients in a bow for a couple of minutes and make 4 pattys out of this. Put these on the grill for 5 minutes each side. Now grab some buns, cheese, onions, lettuce and build you burger.

During my time in monterey I tried to get some shots of cormorants and as we can see these little bastards are hard to catch. Its nearly impossible to get a nice sharp picture with a 300mm lens. Anyway the main problem with birds is they are moving, moving objects tend to blur so we have a lost in details. To fight against this we can use either a flash to freeze the motion ( to far away) or use a really high shutter speed ( problem underexposure) so we change to higher sensity (grain). So to find the right balance is the main question.

This picture was shot at 300m, F5.6, 1/800, iso 400

Another example for the grain of a higher iso is This picture was shot at iso 800, cause it was during the late afternoon and it was cloudy. I prefer to have some grain in my pictures and more details instead of just a blurry unsharp picture.

When you zoom into this picture you will notice the small ammount on grain, nothing serious and it also could be removed with some software like NoiseNinja if you want to spend 40$ for it.


This picture was shot at 300mm, F6.3, 1/2500 and, iso 800.

This picture was a shot in from a fishtank in the Monterey Bay aquarium.
First mistake was to shot from the side. Cause so we have a gradient in the picture. But the nice things are the wounderfull colors in this shot and the main jelly fish is crisp and sharp ( for the conditions ) We dont have a high problem with noise here ( shot at 800 iso) because there is a very high contrast in this picture.

As we can see the other jellyfish are kinda blurry, cause stupid me forgot to set a higher F than the camera decided. I tend to forget this. The right would be F8/F11 to get an overall sharp picture of them. Maybe I should switch back from the Programm modus to Aperature priority modus. This would give me under this condition way better shots. One day I will learn this to analyze it right before I shot a picture. Another problem is my lens. As you can see on the corners on the pictures it tends to vignet ( damn whats the right work, dict.leo.org is ofline). This is lens specific and I paid for this lens 80$ or so. I think I can accept that its not perfect and step up to a better lens ones I can afford this. You can reduce this effect a little with removing the UV-Filter.

This shot was taken at 28 mm, F3.5, 1/50, ISO 800

As far as filter go, I don't have the money to use some right now. I want to get a circular polarizer and a nd-gradiant filter arround 0.3 - 0.5. A warming filter would be an idea, but I can create the same effect afterwards with photoshop/gimp. Also important to mention is to buy the right size. Its better to by all filter in the same size, 77mm in my case and get some step up filter. So you don't have to buy the filter again when you get another lens.

The best example for wrong focus setting we have in the picture of the left. The idea was to have the seagul and the wave in focus. As we can see the waves are nice and the bird is sadly blurred. This happens because of the depth of field of large telezooms when there wideopen. In this case if would be perfect to stop the lens down to F11 . We have a shutterspeed of 1/2000 in this picture, so we would be ok with down to 1/1000 or even 1/500 to get a sharp crisp picture and still have the waves breaking without blurring.

This shot was taken at 300 mm, F5.6, 1/2000, ISO 200

  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.