Gnubbs Blog

These are some photos from my recent trip to Peterson Automotive Collection. I would love to hear your opinions either in the comments or in Flickr. These were all shot with my on-camera flash. I never, never, never shoot with a flash. I was a bit surprised that these came off so well.

The above photos are of the same body panel on a Ford GT40 Mark III and a Ford GT from 40 years. These photos will be printed and framed next to each other.

Why can’t my dash look like the dash from a Dusenberg?

Hood ornaments used to be so much more than they are today. Yes, that is a devil thumbing his nose at you. From an old ford Track Speedster. Awesome.

Today I got in my order from www.adormapix.com of prints from the photos I took in Glacier National Park.  Over all, I am pretty happy with both adoramapix and my photography.

Adoramapix has good prices on 4×6 prints on good paper.  Additionally, the allow FTP uploaded of images instead of having to use some client java/web software.  This is a huge advantage in my book because I can set up my ftp software to retransmit if a transfer is interrupted.  With the client software I have seen, you mostly have to start over from scratch if there is some error.  I think that I picked the wrong paper for my prints — skin tones look great, but greens and blues are  pretty muted.

My photography has some good points and bad.  Using my D50, I am getting much better at capturing good exposure.  It has taken some work, but I am learning to be much more careful than I used to be.  My compositions come out with mixed results.  A handful of good, but mostely still bad.  Getting composition right is much harder because it is much more the art part of photography.

The other problem I am having is getting sharp images.  This is largely due to my lens being slow, and not using a tripod.  I can also play with increasing the ISO that use to allow faster shutter times, but mostly I think that I need to invest in either a nice tripod or some faster glass.

Overall, I am still pretty happy.  Total cost of prints from this trip — $25.  And the number of usable prints is much higher than I was getting with film.  Film I would have spent $100 and gotten half as many pictures that I like.

I guess that I have been neglecting my blog a bit lately. Sorry about that. Here is a brief rundown of what has been going on lately, hopefully I can expand on these a bit more soon.

1. AWD sucks if you have to replace a tire

I love my car. I love all wheel drive. Usually. A couple weeks ago, I had a slow leak in one of my wheels and took it in to be fixed. The leak was caused by a screw in the treads, but when the tire came off the car, my mechanic spotted a blister about the size of a baseball on the inside sidewall of my tire.

Part of the beauty of AWD is that if you have to replace one tire, you have to replace all your tires. Has something to do with differing tire heights between the new and worn tires wreaking havoc on the differentials. Much cheaper to replace 3 extra tires, than any one of my 3 diffs.

Luckily I was able to find a smoking deal from a fellow pirate. I got a set of Konig Rated R 17×7 wheels, with pretty new Bridgestone Blizzaks on them for $400. I’ll post pics of the new shoes soon. This got my car back on the road, but now I am in the market for another set of 17’s with summer tires on them.

2. Closures are difficult to teach to C++ programmers

I gave an hour presentation on Ruby to the Software Reading Group here at work this week. They were looking at me like I was suggesting that we overthrow the emperor.

Almost immediately, they wanted to know how typing worked. The idea of a (more or less) untyped language seemed to freak them out a bit. Then I got to blocks and they seemed truely baffled. After a bit of explaining, some of them got it and some of them thought that I was just using some sort of fancy GOTO. I came to the conclusion though that if you don’t get blocks, you will see no value in ruby. The ones that didn’t quite get it, seemed to think that ruby was no more elegent or concise than C++/STL/Boost.
3. I love digital photography

I have been getting my photos from Glacier ready to send out to be printed. I have been using Adobe Ligthroom for photo management, and Photoshop CS for editing. To be honest, on my old G4 800, both of these programs are pretty slow. I really need a macbook for this…

Anyways, I love digital photography. I shot about 320 frames on my trip, and was able to pick out about 60-70 that I liked. I have now spent a couple of days adjusting exposure, editing out some lurkers from otherwise nice landscape photos, adding in some lighting on faces in some frames shot in difficult lighting, and cropping photos.

In my film days this would have meant paying for 9 rolls of film and development. Not a cheap prospect. The end result would have only been as nice as the 60 frames I liked before editing. This digital thing is much cheaper, and provides me with so much more control. On the screen at least, the end result is significantly nicer than my old photography.

That about sums things up. Stephanie and I are going to a nice dinner tonight, so I should have a good weekend. The chef used to be the private chef to the King of Jordan, so I expect that the food will be very good.

I wrote last week that I just bought a Nikon D50. To start with, I am very happy with this camera. It certainly does everything that I need. Plus, this whole being able to see an image right after taking it and not having to pay for pictures is awesome. I have shot more photos this weekend than I did the entire year leading up to it.

One of the projects that I worked on this weekend was to build a macro lens. I will blog about that when I get a chance, but I want to pop a picture online in the mean time. This is a photo of my blastomossa coral in my aquarium. Each of the polyps in the photo is about as big around as a dime. This image was shot with my homemade macro lense at f5.6, 1/320th exposure, ISO 200. Overall I would say this is about 1:1 magnification. I realize it is out of focus, but bear with me.

Today I am getting my first new camera in about 5 years. I am finally making the jump to digital. The initial outlay of cash sucked, but considering I will save about $100 in film and development just on my upcoming trip to Glacier National Park it shouldn’t take too long to break even and start saving money.

I went with the Nikon D50 for a couple of reasons. Nikon because all of the lenses I own are Nikon. The D50 because it is a great value, has so many features that I will only have my artistic skills to blame for poor photos, and because I could find it in stock. The D70s which has a couple of features that I would have liked to have had is out of stock everyplace that sells it for less than MSRP.

I ordered my D50 off of overstock.com, factory refurbished. I am not wild about the factory refurbished part, but since it was in stock and $100 cheaper than anyplace else I figured I would give it a shot.

I will post my impressions, and hopefully some photos in the next couple of days.

Blogged with Flock

My wife has asked that I give her a list of things that she can buy me when looking to get me random gifts. I thought that it would be appropriate to put it out here just in case any of my friends are also in the giving mood.

Climbing Gear

Wild Country Technical Friends (any size 1 – 6) $55 each (catch me when I fall)

Camp Tri-Cams (any size 0.5-1.5) $16 each (catch me when I fall)

Petzl Rescue Pulley (up to 3) $40 each (for glacier travel)

Bluewater 60m 10.2mm Eliminator Rope $135

Black Diamond Neutrino Carabiner (any number) $7.95 each

Black Diamond Positron Carabiner (any number) $7.95 each

Car Stuff

Valentine One Radar Detector $399

Perrin Front Endlinks $140

Perrin Front Sway Bar $139

Perrin Rear Endlinks $125

Perrin Rear Sway Bar $179

STI Carbon Fiber Side Markers $105

Pink WRX Front Badge $35

Perrin Radiator Shroud $60 (keeps my car cool)

Other Stuff

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs $68.78

Button Down Shirts (Oxfords, stripes, solids, whatever.) I like J.Crew, Polo, and Kenneth Cole. Colorful, but not flamboyant.

Nikon D50 or D70s Digital Camera

Nikon F5 Film Camera (you can find these used for about $500)

A nice film/slide scanner

When I first posted about my new car, someone demanded that I post some pictures of it. Well, I am not quite ready to post those pictures but I am getting there. Once you see the pics, I think that you will agree that the wait was worth it.

Anyways. In preperation for taking some shots of my car I borrowed a friends digital camera. My wife has a little 2 or 3 megapixel digital camera that I can use whenever I want, but it doesn’t have the image quality that I am looking for in a camera. The camera I borrowed is a Nikon D70 SLR. After playing with it last night, I need this camera.

The image quality is truely outstanding. It has a 6.24 megapixal CCD and all of the bells and whistles you would expect from a serious digital camera. Since I shoot Nikon gear, all of my lenses work with this camera. Also, since I shoot nikon gear the interface on this camera works exactly how I intuitively expect it to. It is nice that Nikon has been using very similar interfaces to thier cameras for a while.

The best thing though was that I shot about 200 images last night. I spent time shooting my wife’s herb garden, our day of the dead figures, and random other things. This would have cost me about $120 in film and development with my regular camera so I would have never tried out a lot of the stuff I tried last night. That is the value in digital cameras in my book. The fact that your cost per frame goes down pretty close to $0.

Now I just have to come up with the $1000 to buy this camera. I will post car pics soon.

gnubbs

This photo is from the trip that Stephanie and I took to Grand Teton and Yellowstone National Parks this past fall. I finally got around to developing all of my film this past week. (I had ~10 rolls of film at between $14-20 a roll for processing. Back off.) One of the new services my lab offers is they will upload a scan of each of your frames to thier website for free.

With the background out of the way, here is my critque. First, it is very grainy. I had ISO 400 film in the camera when this lighting hit Mt. Moran. So, I am left with a very grainy shot. Second is that there is not a lot of content in the clouds. They were there so there wasn’t much I could do about them, but they are not dark and sinister enough to tell any real story. So, I am left with a pretty sunset on an overcast day. Still, I really like this picture a lot.

Film: Kodak ISO 400 Color Print Film
Equipment: Nikon N65, Nikon 24-120 lens, Generic Tripod
Processing: resized and used an Unsharp Mask in the gimp