(no subject)

I hope the remote shutter release I bought on Ebay for my camera shows up before MFF. I didn't think it would show up before Windycon, though I'd kind of hoped it might. Maybe it'll be there when I get home today. Who knows.

I need to do more shooting with a smaller aperture. I think my pictures will look a little sharper in general. I keep opening the aperture up pretty wide so I don't have to switch to faster film or use flash, but I wonder if that's causing general quality problems. I was trying to shoot at f10 through f15 or so in Gary instead of open to 3.5 or 4 and I think my pictures there came out a little bettter because of it. I wish I could afford a nice fast general use prime. Say, f2 at 30mm or 40mm?

I'm still having trouble with capturing some of the bright, vibrant colors that I see in front of me. In the post office in Gary, Indiana, I saw one of the most beautiful things I've yet seen in an abandoned place. Rich earthy browns in the wooden blocks that once composed the floor, thrown into piles by frost heave. Soft living greens in the mosses taking their sustenance from those old tree-bones below them and the water dripping onto them from the wide ceiling above. Warm, tranquil yellows and oranges from the sun, just beginning to set, shedding it's light through the broken panes of a tall, dignified west-facing window to cast a brilliantly contrasting rectangular pool of gold on the floor of the ruin, highlighting the beauty of nature reclaiming her land.

Yet my pictures are just...flat. Washed-out. Dull. If I turn the saturation up to maximum under Irfanview, it approaches what I saw with my naked eye, but still it's not quite the same, and tweaking the settings that much, I think, loses me some quality in the image. I wish I knew how to get those colors on, so to speak, film. Do I need to cary a gray card and set a custom white balance? Do I need to shoot in Raw? I wish I could go back again and spend an hour or two shooting that same scene in all the different ways. But I'm sure that, with the change of the weather and the seaons, it's gone now. I'll just have to do my best to learn well enough that I can capture the next scene of beauty that I have the serendipity to encounter.

(no subject)

Thanks to the knowledgeable and articulate ankhorite, who I just added to my friends list, I bring you the following link that I shamelessly stole from her info page and which I have been looking at between building computers and answering emails all day:

Hamsters!!!

I opened the video feed in a new windows and shrunk the window down to match the size and stuck in the corner of one monitor. Now I have hamsters to watch while I work! Oddly enough, I find it kind of soothing. Particularly when the chubby one tries to climb onto a wheel and falls off. *giggles*

Thanks Ankhorite; hope you don't mind.

(no subject)

My Friday for MFF that I asked to take off was declined, and there's not a lot going on the rest of the year apart from Christmas, so I used the rest of the four days I have left and, employing ancient arcane arts of avoiding work, combined them with the days that my whole company has off to produce a beautiful slackeresque alchemy.

I have every day of the year from the 20th of December through New Year's Eve off. Every day, that is except the 26th, which I have to work since my team lead has the day off. That's ok. It would have been fun to have fourteen days in a row to stay home, but I guess I can pop into the office for eight hours in the middle of the stretch.

(Of course, this is all pending approval by moiracoon, the official puppy-scheduler. Got to make sure she doesn't have anything else planned that I need time for.)

Can I go home yet!?!?!?