Category Archives: Photography

Photo Firsts (Vicki, Amanda) and Parade!

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Today was the Chinese New Year parade (yes, a week late). I went and wandered Chinatown with Ally, Blake, Dan, and Robert and ate cheap food and watched a stream of dressed-up people with flags and Dragons. It was fun. It’s actually really a good idea to have two cameras: a nice DSLR for events and a portable P&S for wandering. I would not have liked carrying around my D90 all day, especially with me running from Brannan and Embarcadero to Post and Market in under 10 minutes (since the Muni was going to be 5 minutes and I figured I could beat it and save $2 in the process, and also get some exercise… and yes, I did manage to beat it by about a minute).









Em’s brother also came to visit her. I guess this is the first posted photo from my D90 (since life hasn’t had one posted from it yet either).

Anyway, here’s my first photo of Vicki:

August 12, 2002 in the PPA office after school Sophomore year.

First photo of Amanda:

August 31, 2001 in the portables during lunch Freshman year.

Photo Firsts (Pat, David) and New Camera

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My D90 arrived today.
The camera is awesome. I am extremely happy with my purchase.
The first photo it took was of Sharon, but it’s not a very flattering photo (she is eating), so I won’t post it here.

Matt had a birthday party today at Ally’s. It was a good time. Photos will be posted on photos 2 at some point tomorrow. are posted at photos 2.

I also did some statwanking and went back and redid stats to separate them into equal chunks (rather than basing chunks on the academic year). Also got stats for Patrick and David, since all my high school photos are tagged now.


My first photo of Pat from August 17, 2002 at the PPA Beginning-of-the-year party.


My first photo of David from August 20, 2002 in the hallway of Unit 5 at PPA.

Edit: Stats can be found here

Camera

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Items Ordered   	 Price
1 of: Nikon D90 12.3MP Digital SLR Camera (Body Only) [Electronics]
Condition: New
Sold by: Amazon.com, LLC
	$779.95

Scary. I just spent almost $800 with one click. Still, it’s something I’ve been needing for a while (since my D50 is competely busted now) and Carnival is coming up in a little over a month and Greg and Zeke and my aunt are visiting next month. Still, I feel weird spending so much money.

Life lately has been full of tagging photos. In 4 days (Friday after work, Saturday sometimes, Sunday sometimes, today after work), I have managed to tag May, April, March, February, and January 2004 and December 2003 photos. This means I now have a total of 183748 tagged photos with only October and November 2003 remaining between me and 100% tag completion.
(I have also completed the task of writing all the tags to the photo files, so I can easily migrate to Picasa at some point if that becomes necessary.)

I have also been following my goal of taking more different pictures. Life has been updated pretty consistently with both life and daily photos. As soon as I finish 100% tag completion, I will work backward in life so that there’s photos all the way back to 2000. Fun.

That means, of the goals I set for myself this year, two are now significantly underway. That’s not bad for end of February. Unfortunately, as they were sort of in priority order, I need to catch up on Scala learning, but meh. :)

Life is good.

Photo Dump

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I spent most of the morning tagging photos, managing to finish up September 2003. I’ll probably go to May 2004 next and tag backwards so I can start working backward on life.alanv.org as well.

I also did some digging around and discovered that Adobe Photoshop Album (which I use) stores its tags in an Access database. This is actually kind of awesome, because it means I can export the information from the program into an XML file (or other format). Looking at a preliminary dump, it appears that there are two relevant tables: one for tags, which contains a row for each tag that basically gives the tag an ID (and stores information like parent tags and tag ordering), and one for photos, which contains a row for each photo that gives information like filename and path to the image. The photo table also contains a column that appears to be a base64-encoded bit vector. My assumption is that this bit vector is how the tags on each image are stored (based on the tag ID in the tag table). I’ll probably try writing a script to parse this stuff so I can generate dumps of tags by photo or similar. Still, it’s nice to know that I’m not locked in to using PSA forever, and can export my tags to some other program by some means.

So yeah, without further ado, photodump from the past few weeks:

Brian and Danny at lunch after the volunteer event at Glide.


Simon at lunch after the volunteer event at Glide.


Awesome cupcake boxes from the KaraVan.


The Bay Bridge as seen from Colt Tower. Also a bit of downtown.


A game of Kubb at work in the Spear 7 courtyard area.


Release food… Buca di Beppo this time.


He’s so pretty! :O


Ally in her new apartment.


The Container Store’s awesome rainbow-colored selection of hangers. I was amused.


Matt hugging the roll of bubble wrap at the Container Store.


Ally contemplating the fuzzy lime at dinner at 21st Amendment.


Matt in Shawn and Daniel’s awesome living room.


Shawn in his living room.


Shawn and Ally attempting to restrain each other.

Also, the Daily Photo Project seems to be good for me. It gets me out of the house at least once per day, and it’s making me notice things I never have before. I’ve been doing it every day, but uploads will be done in batches because it’s a pain to move files from one computer to the other.

I am really missing my DSLR though, especially now that I’m forcing myself to take more different photos. I might have to get the D90 this month.

Tonight is all-you-can-eat pizza at Local. Om nom nom nom.

Daily Photo Project

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Today’s been an interesting day.

First off, life has gotten an update from the past few days.
In addition, it has gained a new section: the Daily Photo Project.

My last entry got me thinking that I really want to take more different photos, since all of my photography as of late has been random documentary photography of social events (work meetings, board games, rock band, food out) and that kind of sucks. The result is this project, where my goal is to take at least one photo each day that is “different” from my usual photography… that is, a photo with no people in it (or at least minimal people) where the subject is something I would normally never think twice about. Let’s see how long I can keep this up.

Additionally, Justin is currently moving to a new apartment. This would not be too terribly interesting for me except for the fact that he has a ton of Magic and WoW cards that he doesn’t want to move with him. As a result, I found myself dragging a suitcase full of ~12,800 trading cards home at around 8 this evening. I missed the bus by a few seconds and the next wasn’t for 15 minutes, so I figured I would walk to Geary and Fillmore (from Green and Fillmore) and catch the 38 instead, as it would take me around 15 minutes and the 38 stops closer to home.
Unfortunately, I didn’t take into account the hilliness of the area… nor the rain… nor my lack of direction in the area. As a result, I spent 5 minutes going the wrong way down Fillmore (down a rather steep hill) only to have to turn around and head back up that hill. My shoes, unfortunately don’t have much traction when wet, and pulling a very, very heavy suitcase behind you doesn’t help either. Overall, there were three really steep hills to climb (where I would actually slide backwards if I stopped moving due to the weight and the rain) and it took me about 20 minutes to go three blocks. Once there, the remainder of the walk was relatively easy, and I somehow managed to get the suitcase onto and off of the bus. Yay adventure.

So yeah, now I have a shitton of Magic and Wow cards that I should build into decks and play with. Yay more cards? Thanks Justin! :D :D

Also also, my parents and uncle had been visiting for the past couple days (took yesterday off of work to explore the city with them). It was a good time and I miss them already.

So yeah, two goals from my last post are now in progress (tagging photos and taking photos) as I have started tagging high school photos again (and have finished August of my last year of high school). Yay progress. Yay goals.