And the capstone

I'm not going to lie... I did the border treatment because I screwed up and didn't level the image in the viewfinder while I was taking this picture. Whatever.

This is the 156th three-a-week image, which means I successfully completed my goal from January 2. That time has seen me acquire these three lenses, the 25mm extension tube (not pictured or involved in this picture), and the off-camera flash cabling I needed to do the light this way. I took 5464 pictures between the first and last in this series. Not all of the pictures I've labeled three-a-week were technical masterpieces; most of them were little more than snapshots of things I found amusing. The important thing is that I ended up using my camera during the year, especially at times I might not have thought to otherwise.

I have yet to select a goal for next year, but I doubt it will be as formal as this year's resolution. I also doubt I'll need the formality - I seem to have gotten into a habit of taking more pictures regardless of my intent to post them online, and I actually haven't had a picture printed in quite some time. Maybe that should be a goal as well, regardless of what I set up for myself as far as tripping the shutter.

My walls are pretty barren, after all.

I guess, though, that's half the draw to working with digital anyway; I'm no longer bound by the delay, so I choose not to incorporate it at all. I do miss the experience, though, and I'm really looking forward to popping the 43 onto my MX and killing a couple rolls of black and white or color slide film with that.

He waits.

Sure is my cat. Thanks, new tripod and 50/4 macro!

Buck Rogers

This was in the space toys case at the Dulles thing. I liked it, but if you look real close at the way the picture looks, it almost has a film air about it. Shot in raw, for the record.

Nonproductivity

Sorry about the cat again... I tried to get out and take pictures downtown, but nobody else wanted to take the metro in Saturday night. Oh well.

waaah

The sunset today was shaping up to be really nice... until a large cloud developed for about 20 percent of the sky arc in the west. Boo. It was going to mean a quick side trip to Centennial to try to get a picture of nice red or orange clouds over the lake.

Instead, I came home to find my cat yelling about how I was home. Fine by me, of course, just a little harder to justify photographing.

Yardkitty

Jeff said it was chasing doves through the common area behind the house. I don't think that shot turned out very bad, considering that it was through glass with my 135 wide open (f3.5).

Here's a crop of the bird (unprocessed):

kitteh

He's too motion blur, but whatever. I needed a picture to even out the count, and he was being adorable, and I really like using my 24mm lens.

on Unattainable Goals

There's a Verizon Wireless building we drive past every day on the way to work... each year, at Christmas time, they deck the top side of the building with a pair of wreathes that are lighted and blinky. They're spaced out toward the ends of the building... and below them, in the center, is a cell antenna.

Two eyes and a mouth.

It looks like a giant robot surveying the road. I've speculated it would be fun to get a picture of it at sunset, with a red sky behind it while its eyes are aglow. Unfortunately, their parking lot is gated, which means there will be no good opportunity to take a picture of the building as such. The depression is further compounded by the fact that the only way I'm even going to be able to show you is by doing a shot from the car on the way in during a morning commute.

Oh well.

Holiday oddness

I'm not sure what's most different about this winter:

--Two days of work beyond the end of finals before the school closes
--Two days off after Christmas week
--Not having to go anywhere to see family for the first time in 8 years

I feel kind of weird about it, that's for sure.

Oh, that and spending three days at the zoo the weekend before New Year's...

Petparty

That's my cat, Spencer. He and the dog are best friends, as is evidenced by my cat's willingness to clean the dog's right rear leg.

Fanboy

I had to put away the little stack of accessory boxes on my desk, so I figured while I was at it, I might as well photograph all of the Pentax stuff I've bought since I turned 23.

Fanboy much?

Chibi Snowman

Portrait of Swedish Crap

Repair phase

Well, so to speak, anyway. I wasn't productive tonight photographically like I had hoped, but I did fix my nice bass earlier, then i played it for over an hour. Both of my hands even still work!

I figured out both why it was so quiet and why it was so hard to play - the strings were twice as far away from the neck at the 24th fret (second octave) as they are on my other bass. I had to let out a lot of neck tension, too - the neck was way too straight and needed relief. Basically, inverse squares being what they are, the output was a quarter as strong as it should have been, and it was taking twice a normal amount of effort at almost all frets to depress the string.

Second, as previously discussed here and here, I repaired my amplifier. This time, for real.

Want to know what the culprit really was?

Input jack was loose.

The moment I tightened that up, the horrible noises went away. I noticed this was a problem because as I was moving around while tethered to it, the sound would kick up again. "Hmm," I thought, and went over and felt the moving part. Ding! All better.

If not one artistic pursuit, then another.

GI-tar

Yep!

Hork

Wait, why am I wet?

Cat in a tub.

If not stealing my seat on the couch, that's his favorite place to be.

Hello window bug

Picture 8000! Happy birthday, camera!

Backlit?

Hooray stuff!

Lauren came up with the frame idea on this one. And found the subject, I think.

Winter Colors

24 wide open in front of McKeldin - thanks eternal fall!

Nerd graffiti part 2

This being part one...

Splitting the line

I would have put this up on Friday or Thursday or whenever I took it, but I forgot. My bad.

omgbubbles

Hand sanitizer! Fun for photographers and the obsessive compulsive!

no srsly

I know this puts me at +1 for the week, but seriously... the cat ... yeah.

the yard wolveses is all growed up

It probably deserved it.

Kitty

This thing fell off the wall shortly after I took the picture.

Fighting the cold comes with a price

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I have to shut down Ace so I can rearrange my room such that my bed isn't touching two outside walls. Since that means moving my desk, it also means no power for a while.

Good run, though.

Prosimians make me smile

Yeah, okay, fine - technically, this was taken last week, but I like lemurs, and that means you have to put up with it.

Battery Change!

Image number 7713 (11/3/07) marks a new set of batteries in the camera body.

Change history:
07/23/06 - 1,151 - 1,151 - Olympus Camedia CR-V3
12/28/06 - 2,812 - 1,661 - Energizer e2 lithium CR-V3
04/30/07 - 4,537 - 1,725 - Olympus Camedia CR-V3
07/22/07 - 6,228 - 1,691 - e2 lithium AAs
11/03/07 - 7,713 - 1,485 - Olympus Camedia CR-V3

I was initially puzzled when I got that last figure, but then I remember I did a lot of on-camera review the last time my mom visited, and also, I've tried to use the camera a few times when it's been colder than normal toward the end of the life span of the batteries.

You may also be interested to know that I got a set of eneloop rechargables to use in my flash. Each battery weighs 27 grams, while each e2 lithium AA battery they replace weighs something on the order of 17 grams.

Oh well.

Triple shot from Sunday:

Ceres looks so peacefully lazy up there.


There was a keeper coming to give the two white cheeked gibbons their medicine... the female started making subdued cooing noises at the poor guy once she realized what was up.


Not a part of the collection, but I had been standing about 15 feet away from this hawk before it decided it needed to go soar instead. Hiding behind a lightpost made it really easy to stalk him (guessing on the gender, it was really small for a redtail though, but otherwise an adult). None of the closer pictures worked well because of the wind and the fact that the camera was being stupid and autofocusing on the branch immediately behind the bird due to the wind blowing everything around.

Sorry for the four shots at once - I didn't get a chance to upload Saturday night because I had to start getting set up for yesterday - I did work at Boo at the Zoo, came home, passed out, and woke up with an allergy thing... very no bueno. Anyway, the remainder of my week is Tuesday and Wednesday at work, Thursday at work then a SMH staff meeting, then Friday at work, then a Saturday shift at the zoo again.

If I didn't post now, you weren't going to get anything this week.

From Saturday:

Here's a white throated sparrow's butt from Saturday. There's a pair (male/female) that's hanging out outside my aunt and uncle's window. I hope they stay, they're funny little birds.

Why, hello there!

There's not supposed to be five inch mantids cruising around on October 23, right?

A trip for Fall

I'm sore, but I got what I wanted out of Gettysburg today.

Sleepy kitty

What's molting on our porch?

Updated: These are ladybird beetle larvae. I've found seven now.

This is five more pictures of them at 1:1 magnification - each frame is 15.7mm tall and 23.5mm wide. The one that actually looks like a ladybug is the same one that, above, looks rather like an eyeless cabbage patch kid. How quickly they change over a single day's time.

i see wat u did there

Brown phase Eastern Screech Owl.

I tried to use Pentax software as a workflow-type solution, but it's impossible - any change you make to one image's settings is duplicated on all additional open images.

I'm not sure when I'll have time to fix this. My car isn't so good at starting right now; it has a tendency to not do so immediately after it's been running. I haven't yet figured out the problem; I know it's not a voltage issue, as the car isn't even trying. I can hear relays click, but there's no drop in voltage in the system - none of the indicator lights dim. It seems to only happen when the car is not cold. I have a bad feeling the wiring for the starting system is failing, which sounds like one of those things that is "it's the labor, not the parts."

Incidentally, I read about what's going on with my temperature gauge - it's been pegged off-scale high while the key is on since quite some time ago; apparently, it draws its information from a second sensor, and that sensor can fail.

I win

One big moth.

Incidentally, I attended the night portion of the Tamron outdoor photography workshop today. Interesting experience... the photographer for the Beltsville event is Don Gale. He takes a really hands-off approach to image touchup/manipulation, so I think I'm going to do everything in my power to pay attention to what he has to say about exposure and white balance.

Note of interest - I was the youngest person there, if not by 15 years, then by 10 years.

For the next 18 hours or so, I've got a Tamron SP 90mm f2.8 macro to play with. Should be fun tomorrow at Patuxent wildlife refuge.

Tiny Footwear for Tiny People

Existentialism

Indeed.

What's in a standard?

I just engaged in something of a back and forth about the Design rule for Camera File system specification sheet.

The whole issue was that someone thinks the most important thing that needs to be added to the K10D firmware is the capacity to write five digit file numbers into the filename.

I assumed this meant IGP_12345.JPG for a filename, which exceeds the 8 character limit.

Being the helpful internet jerk I am, I said they needed to tell the JEITA instead of Pentax, then, in a change of heart, edited my message to apologize, then say that they needed to tell the JEITA instead of the dprevew forums.

Naturally, someone took issue with that, asking "who cares?" I had to go on a mini-standards-compliance rant, proclaiming that it's stupid to allow camera manufacturers to do whatever they want and still label the cameras as being DCF/EXIF compliant, and that it's stupid to allow the camera manufacturers to do whatever they want because it makes (literally) everyone else's lives miserable.

OGM, the wikipedia article is wrong - it's really alphanumeric characters, not just letters! Well, that's fine, but my initial assumption was that the person wanted a digit added, not a free character converted to a number.

I did some research, specifically, looking at the examples in the DCF specification (hosted here for free if you'd like). Apparently, DCF allows different sets of free characters in the same numbered folder within the DCIM structure.

This is phenomenally stupid in my mind, because any given write device should have a consistent set of free characters. By allowing them to change from file to file, you're opening the door to both users and reader-class devices having a hard time identifying what device produced what file if it ever becomes necessary down the road. I could see it being an issue for me, as well - if my *ist DL wrote an IMGP4032.JPG and I purchased a second *ist DL, I would at least have the expectation that I could come up with a duplicate IMGP4032.JPG. If I bought a K10D now and started shooting, I'd eventually get to IGP_4032.JPG, and I would be able to tell at a glance which came from which camera. Sure, there are EXIF tags and theoretically larger file sizes, and the actual pixel dimensions would be different if I had to open them, but they'd both be different at the name level. If I bought a K10D and it had a five digit code, and then I bought a followup camera, and let's say both used IGP to identify the files as having been 1)image files 2)written by a Pentax camera 3)in three alphanumeric characters, I could shoot to IGP04032.JPG on both and not have any idea which came from which without parsing EXIF, especially if they were similarly spec'ed as far as the sensor and compression are concerned.

That seems, to me, counter to the notion of even having a specification in the first place.

Furthermore, the DCF specifies the first four characters as free and the last four characters as file number. In my mind, no part of the free characters should therefore be used as an extension of the file number.

What would I suggest people do instead? Well, my filesystem right now is set up in a way that would make it fundamentally impossible for me to create duplicates. Each day I upload, I create a new folder encoded like this:

071004
07, the year digits (let's face it, I won't be shooting until 2107, but even if I do, I can batch rename)
10, the month digits
04, the day digits.

Unless I take over ten thousand images in a single shoot without uploading, I'll never run into a duplication situation with one camera. With two, I can't conceivably see the file numbers coinciding unless one of the bodies were to fall into serious disuse, but still saw some action every now and then. My better plan would be to have one DCF body at a time, or to rename my "Camera JPEG" folder to "istDL JPEG" and create a new directory for the new camera.

There are simple workarounds, most of which amount to "don't keep ten thousand images in a single folder." I'm wondering why I'm the only person that doesn't seem to have a problem with all of this, but I'm glad JEITA seems to think the same way - in camera, it's specified that a new folder (101PENTX instead of 100PENTX) should be created.

I still think it's stupid that they allow different free characters, but whatever - as long as the standard does its job, I'm happy.

For love of color

I don't know why this ended up so soft, but look at the lighting in contrast with the clarity of the color of the sky...

Spider

Probably three inches tip to tip... this spider is just hanging out by the basement side door for KEY right now. Pointy.

Gas Cylinder

I don't know why, but I think that's awesome.

el Gato

Eh, I need some flash portraiture practice every now and then, right?

The kitteh am adorable.

Cell phones killed them all!

Night hornet

DA 50-200 with the 25mm tube and AF-360FGZ flash.

Why there's a single hornet pestering our door lamp, I don't know.

A Study in Color

With the fisheye, 13mm f4.5 1/2500sec. Not the best composition, but I liked the contrast of pink and yellow and everything else. This is why I have extreme wide angle lenses, too - I wasn't all that far away from the flowers.

Cheezburger

My flash... apparently it stops doing preflash TTL exposure when the battery runs low enough. Neat feature, but I'm also ever so slightly past the intoxication limit that lets me remember to check my shutter speed. Most of the pictures of the cat have ghost ears or ghost tails because the shutter speed was too long.

Lemur Laziness

This is what being a lemur is all about. The ring tailed lemurs do this on the ground, the red ruffed do it in the trees.

That's the male, whose name I've forgotten. He seems to have a darker coat, but he also has an ear tag.

Fun fact! The lemurs yell at each other to announce their territory after the building closes. Sometimes, this triggers the howler monkeys; I have yet to hear the howlers going off, though.

Oddities