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The pictures here have suceeded, in the space of just a few minutes, in convincing me that I need to do some HDR (high dynamic range) photography. (Dig in and look at the ones in color.) These are images produced by a process like taking three exposures, at 'correct' exposure value, up three or four stops, and down three or four stops, then compositing them together digitally to expand the color and light range.

Wow; these are just jaw-dropping.

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I managed to get my bike in to the shop on Saturday while I was home from MFF. I have a twenty-one inch Giant Option that I haven't ridden for five years or so; since I moved to Michigan and back.

The repair estimate ended up being high, which is fine with me. My shifter was repairable (he thought I'd need a new one), my chain was salvageable, and the broken spoke on the back wheel turned out to be a bad spoke nipple (whatever that may be). With a tune up and new grips to replace the ones that were falling off, it was happily under a c-note to get it all done. It may seem silly that I'm doing it now when the weather is getting colder, but I used to ride in the snow all the time. I've really missed my bike, and I happened to have some money from the server I sold, so I went out and got it done.

The couple short rides I've gone on since have made it worth it. They've also made it very apparent that it really has been five years since I've ridden. Oof!

I spent last night organizing my twenty gigabytes worth of photos. I had tons of stuff that were in subfolders of folders called things like 'pics', 'more pics', 'moremorepics', 'pics 2'... you get the idea. Fortunately, most of them were labeled at least well enough to figure out what they were, and my pictures should all be relatively findable now.

It always makes me kind of melancholy to go through old pictures. I can't quite explain why. I'm very happy to have them, but I don't always want to look through them. I just always end up feeling wistful and missing the past a bit. It's actually the same way that I feel about things sometimes. Years ago, I tore a bunch of pages out of my school notebooks that were full of doodles I did while sitting in class. Looking at them made me uncomfortable in ways I still can't quite put my finger on. I kind of wish I hadn't. At the same time, maybe it's good; that way I don't have sentimental attachments to a dozen half-full notebooks from college that would end up sitting on my shelf because I couldn't bring myself to get rid of them.

Anyway; pictures. It's funny; I'm missing pictures from one Midwest Fur Fest that I was at; I must not have had a camera then. *shrugs*

I'm running into problems with sorting things. For instance, I have one folder called 'roadtrips' and one called 'weird america'. In the roadtrips folder, I have a folder for all the pictures from the trip that Andrea and I took to Baraboo with posicat. However, among those pictures are all the hundreds of shots I took of the House on the Rock and the Forevertron. I don't want to break up the road trip collection, but those two bunches of things really belong in the weird america category too. My current plan is to just throw shortcuts into the weird america folder. I think that this is something that a cataloging program like Adobe Lightroom might help me do in a more intuitive way. If it's good enough for edbook who has hundreds of thousands of images, as opposed to my probable five or six thousand, then it's worth at least a look for me.

While looking at lens reviews (and here's a fantastic site for doing just that), I looked at the comments on the lens that came with my camera. Now I knew that, as such things go, mine is pretty lackluster. My favorite description of my ef 28-80mm f3.5-5.6 II, though, was a note from someone who felt that the lens has (and I'm paraphrasing here, since I'm riding home in the car right now and can't get to the site) single-handedly soiled the reputation of Canon 28-80mm zooms for all time. Most of the reviews were of a similar, if less vehement, nature. I can't wait, then, to try the 50mm f1.8 prime that my mate has confirmed for me is waiting at home for my arrival. *bounce*

I really think I'm going to look into a nicer walk-around zoom to replace the one I have too, but that will wait 'till into next year. I may think about a flash, or a battery grip, first too.

Thanksgiving with my extended family was really nice; I don't see them very often these days. I need to schedule that time at the story corps booth with my grandpa soon.

I got some pictures, though not as many as I might have since the Jack Russel Terriers who live in the house go spastic at the sound of the shutter or the flash of the camera. I was unable to shoot with them around because they'd go temporarily insane, dashing around randomly and barking their heads off.

I talked to my grandpa and uncle about a turntable to use to convert grandpa's 78s to digital, but neither of them are familiar enough with the modern offerings from the industry to have recommendations. I guess I'll poke around online and see what I can find. Grandpa talked about buying one for me in return for me copying them for him, so I'll find a few and run them by him. Suggestions are still more than welcome from any of my friends who know about such things.

Andrea and I had a gathering at our house too on Saturday, but this is getting long enough that I'll write about that separately.

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I want to thank everybody who came by to visit and hang out this past Saturday; it was a really nice gathering and I'm so glad you could all make it and be a part of it.

We had my brother, akreaveter, show up first. While I was showing off a few pictures from MFF to him, awfulhorrid and bookwurm arrived. Soon enough, we also were joined by (in no particular order) sabrinageek, uncle_vlad, wyldkyttin, emrldgrrl, crimferrett, posicat, tybis, and my parents, farm_cat and bartonfender. We also had samiitiger and tincrash in attendance!

We didn't actually make it to the Jones Soda holiday pack tasting, or to the games that Awfulhorrid brought with (or that we had stashed in the cabinet), but that's alright. To me, that means that everyone was having such a good time talking and being social that it was enough to keep them all occupied. I think that that's a success.

I ducked briefly upstairs a time or two to look at tech with a couple people and to be away from the rush for a few minutes, but all in all I really had a good time and didn't have much difficulty even with so many people around. I very much hope we can do more things like this in the future. Some smaller get-togethers for games and stuff would be nice too; Andrea's talked about setting up a weekly game night at a coffee house in town; maybe we can get a group for that if it comes together.

I guess that's about it. Thank you all for coming; each of you were very much appreciated, and I'm sorry that we missed those of you who coldn't make it.

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I've had a chance to take a handful of pictures with the new 50mm. Now, my baseline standard might be pretty low. Before my SLR, I'd used nothing but point and shoots. Once I got my SLR, I had a lens that, apparently, is one of the worst ones made for this camera.

So when I say that the pictures I'm getting from my new lens are just awesomely better than the ones I've been getting from the other one and they just look phenomenally clean and sharp, I'm going without the experience of having used anything really nice, like Canon L series glass.

But that's ok, 'cause I can get pictures like this now:



This is so much sharper and clearer than I could possibly get before. I've become used to pictures looking slightly blurry or fuzzy at full size, only getting sharp as I zoom out and fit them to my screen. This one, at full blown up size (which this is not), looks like you could just keep zooming in forever. Admittedly, the focal length is going to be a limitation, and as I expected, it's just a bit long for some close indoor work, but all in all, this thing rocks!