Now done at the beach

I don't have the energy to parse 425 pictures tonight, but I am back from four days around Ocean City, points both north and south thereof. Not much luck on the birds, but I do have plenty of neat caterpillars to share.

I seem to have died again, sorry

So I uh... well, it's been a while, and I might put together a meaningful story and some photo albums tonight or tomorrow, but instead of that for now, you can have this:



Never order deep-fried Oreos at the Maryland State Fair. You WILL feel terrible after eating them.

An exercise in avoiding packing slips:

'71 VW Super Beetle (baja)
'72 VW Super Beetle (autostick)
'75 VW Thing
'91 Mazda 626
'92 Geo Storm GSi
'93-95 Subaru Impreza 2-door
'94-96 Dodge Caravan
'95-97 Chevy Astro
'96 Nissan 200SX
'96 Mazda MX-6
'97 Chrysler Town & Country
'97-99 Mazda Miata
'98 BMW 328i
'99 Toyota Tacoma
'00 Toyota Camry
'00 Nissan Sentra GXE
'01 Lexus RX300
'03 Toyota Prius
'04 Kia Sedona
'05 Nissan Sentra SE-R Spec V

For convenience, I have chosen to ignore the various U-Haul trucks I've driven. Bolded means it was my car; Italicized means family car.

my god

Look how long it's been since I've updated, isn't that amazing?

I can tell you the following things about the last two or three weeks:

1) I have been trying to take some pictures here and there. I may even get the chance to post them tonight!

2) That said, I lost the directory structure on my boot drive last week and had to order a terabyte hard drive to start doing time machine backups because I got tired of how difficult it is to back up a broken hard drive. The "good news" is that it left my directory structures for my /Users/ folder intact, so I was able to get preferences, bookmarks, email, and whatever else saved. The bad news is that I lost /System, /Library, /Developer, and /Applications, which meant I had to find and reinstall all of the software I run. Truly awesome, and now hopefully a thing of the past.

3) I bought a car. Last Wednesday morning, my Nissan 200SX started making a weird grumbling noise out of the right rear side of the engine. It had been sounding like I was driving a Ford Explorer, or maybe like I was driving around in reverse, for about three months by that time, and I figured that since I can't work on my car myself and am unwilling to dump six times the blue book value of the car on it in engine repairs and STILL have unresolved suspension and brake issues, it was time to move on.

I really liked that car, though. I was sad to see it go. So, to assuage my misery, I did the only logical thing - if a 200SX held up for 180k miles, why wouldn't a Sentra? I e-dated some Sentras around the DC area and found two I would be willing to go look at. One was in Rockville (I think), the other was in Silver Spring, both at dealerships. Being that MileOne is closer to work, and that the Sentra they had was equipped with a sunroof, I thought I'd go check it out first. Good thing, too - it turned out to be a 2005 SE-R Spec V. They only made 3,800 of them that year, which means this car joins the '72 Autostick Super Beetle in the "somewhat rare cars I've owned" club.

Seeing as how I bought the car because I liked driving it, because it's in pretty good condition, and especially because the B15 chassis reminds me a lot of the B14 on which the 200SX was based and I loved driving that car, I have decided the car is a retrofit upgrade of an older chassis design and have named it accordingly - it is to be called the Enterprise-A. Yeah, that means retconning the SX as the NCC-1701 despite the fact that I knowingly acknowledge never having christened it with ANY name, let alone a really nerdy one, but such is life.

This does hold some benefits for the rest of my daily activities, though - the car can carry me places without fear of it falling apart on me, it's insured way better, and it's pretty fast and handles extremely well compared to any car I've driven since my Baja Beetle. I need to do two things to it though - one, install an intake, preferably cold air; and two, install a precat-less exhaust header so I don't run the risk of disintegrating and aspirating shards of cat substrate. I don't plan on driving it hard all the time like everyone else does, but seeing as how a QR25DE engine costs about 2600 dollars by itself, I don't want to have to deal with that outside the warranty period.

Anyway, like I said, I'll have some graphics for you later this evening if all goes according to plan. Sorry for boring you. Oh, and GMT - sorry I didn't buy your go-kart... expediency and all that, but it sounds like the spirits of the two cars are at least related.

Gallery from Tuesday

Wide-angle exploitation:


Also:


And finally:


Gallery of 47 here. My kit was, excepting one, all primes: 10-17 fisheye, 14/2.8, 24/2.8, 43/1.9, 50/4, 77/1.8, 135/3.5. I actually used all of them, and, except for maybe a couple of the first trip out with the 50, all of them should be tagged correctly for focal length, since the camera asks for K/M/A lenses.

Two notes: first, I've been using the auto-resize option in JAlbum, which means that if you want to see the full up-to-1000-pixels-to-a-side image, you can click on the little arrow/hard drive icon in the lower corner. Second, I bought a Mac Mini today to better help me cope with the demands of processing this stuff. It took me 2 hours on my PowerBook G4 to sift to this set of pictures; I didn't even end up exporting all of the keepers, either. It's just too resource intensive to do this stuff on a PowerPC processor anymore. At least, any of the ones I have access to. An addition to that, as an amusement - I got the 4 gig ram upgrade and the 320 gig internal hard drive upgrade, but I got them from Newegg, and it cost me less to get those along with a FireWire 800 to 400 cable than either upgrade would have individually from Apple. All I'll have to do is test my skill with a putty knife, and I've taken apart an iBook before, so I think I'll be fine.

Today

I don't mean to alarm you, and I don't have anything other than this to post...

but today...

I saw a delmarva fox squrrel. It was somewhere between Rt. 18 after Kent Island and the 50/404 intersection. I've never seen such a large ash-colored squirrel before!

How's it going with Lightroom?

Well, so far -

• Deletion of photos - I've killed 3/4 of my existing library. I began that operation with 11,250 photos, almost all of which were from my *ist DL, and started deleting the ones I no longer needed on my hard drive. I finished at 2,895.


• Keyword tagging - the main impetus behind organizing my library was that someone asked me what a blind pig is. I have a picture of the one my mom has, but I had no idea where it was. Now I can sort on broad categories or, in the case of animals or parks, specific species or locations.


• Playing with the import process - I don't have high-test computers, so doing the development stuff as batched as possible is key. One of the biggest problems has been generating previews throughout the deletion and tagging processes, so I'm now trying to figure out what the best import workflow is going to be. I just tried "standard," and that went reasonably quickly for 84 images (yes, Josh, mostly compressed PEF). I haven't taken it out and done one shoot yet, though, so I can't comment on how the on-import tagging features work yet.

So there you go. I may have pictures to share by the end of the night, but chances are, my next upload will be tomorrow.

IT'S A LION, GET BACK IN THE CAR!

Some more here.

Initial impressions? Shake reduction sure will be nice, but more than anything else: I have ISO 100, and I don't have to go into menus to control metering area or focus modes. Two wheels is a bit of a gimmick at this point, but I don't know - maybe I'll start shooting in manual as a response. I can't complain about the JPEG quality, but I don't have anything with any significant color in it here at my apartment. I think tomorrow, I will spend my lunch break taking pictures of all the junk I have on top of my desk from various angles. Autofocus is fast, the shutter is smooth, and buying this camera also upgraded my AF360FGZ because it actually supports being a wireless master controller. I'm going to go play with my stuffed santa after I finish this post.

It's heavy, though, and it doesn't quite hang right from the fingers the way the *ist DL does. I also need to get a better feel for why it shows me ISO on the status LCD in Av instead of shots remaining; I can sort of understand that being in the viewfinder, but not where you have to take your eye away from it. I haven't used live view yet. I might go to Patapsco Valley with a macro lens and tripod this weekend to play.

Update: Here, this was fun...

OH NOES THE MEGAPIXELS!

Hey remember that one time when I used to take a lot of pictures? But how it sort of also used to only happen during the summer?

Well... I have a bit more of a reason to take pictures in the next couple of years:



Tax man said "Go stimulate the economy" so I went to Penn and bought a K20D. First shots to follow as soon as I'm done getting the battery charged, getting the Photo Lab software installed and updated, and getting the custom settings done the way I want them.