Author Archives: Alan V
Life and cameras
life has gotten an update bringing it up to today. Yay life.
Last week was a stop in Phoenix to visit my parents. We went to the Pima Air and Space Museum.
Also last week was Kathleen’s wedding. Yay wedding!
Other photos from the trip can be found at photos.
So I safely made it back to Pittsburgh this weekend… and I went from the awesome San Francisco weather to the awesome Phoenix weather to… surprise, surprise, awesome Pittsburgh weather. Actually, it’s been unusually nice for March… more like mid-April weather than anything.
As such, I have been taking extended breaks in the afternoon from work to go enjoy the weather and photograph.
Also shot some photos of 8 today.
Been pondering camera lenses (and future body purchases) lately.
At this point, I have two paths I can go down: I can invest in AF-S DX lenses that will work with the more intro-level Nikon DSLRs, and replace my D90 with a lower-level body (like the D3100 or D5100) when it dies… or I can invest in more full-frame lenses (like all of my current lenses except for one) and get a full-frame body (like the D800) when it dies.
The big difference here would be between the 18-200mm DX lens and the 28-300mm FX lens. Each will be between $700 and $900, so both is not a reasonable option. (Not to mention they cover most of the same range anyway, so it’d be dumb to get both.)
I’m really not sure that a more expensive, more professional body is worthwhile. I mean, yes, I use my camera way more than most people. But I don’t shoot studio shots, or sports, or things that would require me to have instant access to a wide range of features that the more professional bodies offer. (I don’t even ever use most of the features, like white balance settings or bracketing or viewfinder grid lines or AF modes.) As such, the only benefit to the D800 would be the full-frame sensor, but that alone is not worth the $2500 difference in cost between bodies.
Which leaves me feeling like I should aim towards a lower-level body. These have the benefit of being cheaper ($500 or so) and ligher (which is important given how much I carry my camera around). I can’t think of one feature the lower-level bodies lack that I would miss. (Well, maybe support for the infrared remote. But that is so minor and I’ve used my remote exactly once since I got it.)
So the only downside here would be that none of my current lenses will autofocus with the bodies, meaning I would have to invest in a new series of lenses. If I do this, I’ll probably invest in DX lenses (which are not full-frame), which means that a future transition to a full-frame camera would be much more difficult than it is now. But this still seems like the right thing to do.
Which means my next purchase will likely be the 35mm f/1.8 DX lens. At some point, I should probably also switch out my 50mm f/1.8 with the AF-S version and sell my 70-300mm.
Yay cameras.
San Francisco
I am in San Francisco through Friday. Yay San Francisco.
Photos!
Plane. Yay plane.
Southwest in Vegas has these nice ceiling-mounted boarding signs instead of the poles they have at other airports. I think these are nicer.
There’s a tech company ad on the BART based on insanity wolf. This is rather… bizarre.
Sunday dinner, as always, was all-you-can-eat pizza at Local. This time I went with Ian, Trisha, Ben, and Mark.
Afterward, we went to Jeremy’s for games.
Monday dinner was Stone with teisenbe and Kempy.
Dinner tonight was Xanh in Mountain View with jgrafton, Jack, Krieger, Ben, dfontain, Gopi, Raphael, and Erik.
You win a day (and one internets)
It’s still the secret bonus day, so I guess I should make a post.
Almost 5 years is enough time for people to lose interest, right?
It occurs to me that I angst and whine and complain way too much on the internet about things, especially about things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme of things. I used to angst about grades way too much. Now I tend to angst about feeling stressed/incompetent at work. Silly me.
Semi-relatedly, I’m generally glad I deleted my Facebook and Twitter accounts. Social media may be useful for connecting people, but it also tends to promote a lot of short-form superficial interaction over long-form meaningful communication. And it also means I don’t have control over my data.
I had a Glee-related dream last night, which is strange given I haven’t watched the show since the “New York” season finale that was everything wrong with the series combined into a horrific hour. (And I hear it’s gotten even worse since then.)
The dream involved something like Mercedes’ dad getting a job in Chicago and moving there, and Sam following her in a car. We get shots of Mercedes staring forlornly out the window of a moving truck before the truck whips a quick 360 and drives back toward its origin. Camera then switches to Sam who is driving, craning his neck backward to see the truck drive off (but not turning around himself and also not hitting any other cars). He gets a job in a strip mall somewhere between Lima and Chicago, and we then shift the story to his adventures and dealings as a paranormal investigator there.
Yay bizarre dreams. Pretty much all of my dreams are in third person, but this is one of the few I remember where I’m not actually present.
For those I have not yet poked: I will be in San Francisco next week from Sunday evening through Friday afternoon. Tentative plans include all-you-can-eat pizza on Sunday, dinnar things on Monday, and dinner in Mountain View on Tuesday. Let me know if you are interested in joining for some of these.
Automation, cards, yay
life has gotten an update that brings it up to present day. Yay life.
I’ve also posted Tartan photos at photos.
While I was batching photos today, it occurred to me that I should learn how to write Photoshop scripts to do the watermarking and resizing for me. (Previously I had been using the standard Image Processor to resize, then watermarking manually.)
The result is this script that opens the watermark files, then resizes and watermarks all jpg images in the selected directory.
Yay scripts. Maybe someone will find it useful.
In non-scripty-Photoshopy news, I’ve been working a bit on cards for the next People Wars expansion, Celebrations.
I mostly just like this image. Josh is over 6’5″ and Jen is shorter than 5′, and it’s amusing to see them together. (Yes, they’re both standing up. Here’s what happens when he kneels.)
Their individual cards are also interesting because of the effects I gave them.
I think it’ll be interesting to see how these work out in the game.
Yay things.