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Framed

Framed

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I just got my photo of the Japanese Gardens printed and framed. I went and got a 24×20 print made on photo paper by a local high-quality printer who did a good job with the proofs and tweaking it for large prints. I then went over to a frame-it-yourself joint and got it put on foam-core, double-matted, and then framed. All said and done it was about $175 (framing being the majority of the cost), but it came out great.

Here’s a shot of it hanging on my wall. And least you think it’s not too big, I was using my wide-angle lens and that’s a Dell 2407 24″ screen to the side:

They think I can probably go as big as 30×24 without digital artifacts – which is huge.

If you think you might like a print (frame/unframed) let me know as now that I have the digital matte file saved with them, they can do further 24×20 (not exact dimensions) prints for a reasonable amount. Going up to 30×24 pushes it quickly to about $100/print (no frame) so just email me if you’re thinking about it, but the 24×20’s are very reasonable. Batch jobs are cheaper – so just email and if a group wants to go for prints, I’ll see what the rates are.

This one came out so good that I’m probably going to do a couple of my other photos.

Great day for hard drives

Great day for hard drives

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Finally.

After years of buying hard drives that say 400gb, but format out to 372.529gb, Seagate lost a class-action suit that accused hard drive manufacturers of using misleading statements about the capacity of their hard drives.  Hard drives have traditionally used 1,000,000,000 (1 billion) bytes for 1 gigabyte, but everyone else uses 1,073,741,824 bytes = 1 gigabyte.  The difference comes from using the next power of 2 (2^30 = 1 gigabyte) vs actual byte count (1 billion bytes = 1 gigabyte).  All other computer components (i.e. memory) use the power of 2 notation; looks like HD manufacturers will need to start doing that now too.

But the good part is that you can cash in (or at least help the lawyers cash in).  Go to this online form and fill it out if you’ve bought a hard drive before January 1, 2006.

DJ Justice Hit Portland – and I was there

DJ Justice Hit Portland – and I was there

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About 2-3 weeks ago, I went to the sold-out DJ Justice concert on a Thursday night. A friend tipped me off on the tickets going on sale and I got like the 125th ticket for $15 (he actually got ticket #1) – which then apparently sold out in record time. The set got started about 11pm and I just about left about 1:30am when they were finishing up. Then, off to work the next day.  Thankfully I’d gone home to bed right after work so it wasn’t too bad.

It was a good concert, but those midnight weekday midnights are hard to do.  Probably why this was the first one I’d been to in almost a year. Still, they are famous for the song D.A.N.C.E. Turns out there were a few folks there with video/sound going. Here’s two clips from the actual event:

DJ Justice does the song DANCE @ holocene Portland
http://youtube.com/watch?v=bido5jzhUS0

DJ Justice @ holocene (as shot by my buddy on his little Canon camera.  He didn’t know he was taking video while dancing – so just listen, don’t watch and it wasn’t him trying to be artistic)
http://youtube.com/watch?v=TvQLqPAPbDU
(hehe, I forgot they’d used the bit from Metallica at the end)

Nissan hits 190,000

Nissan hits 190,000

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Well, my trusty old ’93 Nissan just rolled over 190,000 miles yesterday on my way to work. Unfortunately I didn’t pay attention and missed seeing all those delicious 9’s roll over to the satisfying 0’s – but it’s a fun milestone anyway. There’s a big part of me that wants to get this car to 200k, which might happen next year or so if I do a bit more driving than usual.

I must admit that I’ve been ‘seeing other people’ and test driving a lot of different cars (Audi, Lexus, Nissan, BMW, Toyota’s, Subaru, etc) . Problem is that none of them have really taken my fancy yet; and the idea of plunking down 10-30k on a car isn’t really high on my list of things to do. So, I keep driving the Nissan. That and having no car payment for the last 7 years has been sickeningly sweet.

libPNG/zLib compile error fix

libPNG/zLib compile error fix

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Annoying little gotchas whos solutions are hard to find. Here’s one I’m making a note of on my site so I don’t have to look it up later:

Compiling libPNG requires compiling zLib as well. On Microsoft Visual Studio, you’ll get errors about invalid instruction operands:
inffas32.asm(647) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(649) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(663) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands
inffas32.asm(720) : error A2070: invalid instruction operands

All due to the same assembly language problem. Fix them using the dword ptr command to clear up the reference:
– movd mm7,[esi]
+ movd mm7,dword ptr[esi]

Link

Mt Hood

Mt Hood

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Got a great shot of Mount Hood right at sunset from the Pacific Crest Trail.

It was a real whim that I went up there.  It was a beautiful day – one of the few we have left before the winter rains come – so I wandered up to Mt Hood as sunset approached.  As it turns out, it was a 3/4 moon too – which I just got lucky with.  I hiked out to the spot I planned to shoot from.  But as sunset came I was somewhat disappointed with the colors even though it was a beautiful, cloudless evening.  I guess I was hoping for more oranges/reds – maybe a little Alpenglow (I’ve seen Mt Hood light up before – so I know it happens).

The pictures were just so-so in my book, so on a whim I switched to black and white.  Well, the oranges/reds that I did get on the mountain acted just like a red filter and as soon as I saw it I went ‘Wow’.  Maybe you will too.

Some random thoughts and a quick weekend shoot

Some random thoughts and a quick weekend shoot

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Saturday was simply wretched – constant rain and wind all day, so there was no photo shooting. Instead, I had the perennial fun of getting to re-install my OS because the latest driver for my Intel motherboard RAID controller completely pooched the Vista shutdown cycle – and no amount of restore points helped. Shutdowns would just hang which meant every time you restarted you were told the raid was corrupted/shutdown improperly and would need to re-verify the whole raid (2+ hours). I’m now on my 4th Vista re-install, and I’m becoming more and more unhappy about the stability all the time. (Vista Ultimate 64-bit by the way). Plus that with just weird/random connectivity problems with my USB ports and odd audio behavior and I was ready to re-install. Now everything works again – but why? I had the same driver versions installed before, the same patches – why is the old install so unstable and a fresh one not?  That coupled with the latest drivers not always working as well as the previous ones (64-bit versions) and things just feel dodgy in Vista 64 land – which is very quickly grating on my nerves.  I want to do my photos dang it – not lose all my weekend doing OS re-installs.

On the plus side, I picked up a BFG nVidia 8800 GTS OC, and it’s very very nice. Unfortunately for me, it came at the expense of my ATI XT1900 going south. A couple notes:

  • The fans on the ATI’s are universally TOO LOUD. I simply can’t stand any of their dual-slot fan/cooling solutions anymore, and their single-slot solutions are only *just* tolerable from the noise standpoint.
  • My XT1900 was just 2 days out of warranty when it died. <sigh>
  • 3dConnect is the worst company. They never gave me my $75 rebate after 8 months of constant remailing, messages, and emails.  They actually have a phone tree that at NO TIME can you actually talk to a real person. I went through the whole tree – you either leave a message (which will never get returned) or just get an automated response which tells you to go someplace else. Horrible – 5 thumbs down.  On top of that their manufacturing sucked – cards ran way too hot right out of the box.
  • Performance wise, the ATI XT1900 from a year ago is about the same performance as the nVidia 8800GTS released this year (as far as Steam/Half-life 2/CounterStrike:Source are concerned – which is what I do) nVidia cards suck on Half-life, which means you need to get a high-end one in order to get similar performance.
  • The 8800GTS is QUIET – I have yet to hear its fans kick on.
  • Now that I have DX10 compliant card at home, i can try some coding experiments out (muhahaha!)

Got up early on Sunday morning, hit mass early, and then went for a little shooting – and it wasn’t a bad day for it. I got a couple of shots, but I think the best ones are done for the year. On the fun side, I saw a total Nikon fanboy at the Gardens. Nikon D200 hat, Nikon everything. The gardens filled up with people fast when they opened for the general public (photo members can get in 2 hours earlier than general public), so after shooting and the folks started pouring in – I took off. This was from a weekend or so ago, but it’s still a good shot. I’m going to start looking into some really big prints here 30-40″ range for a large wall-size photo. Now that I have this 5D, the 4200×1900 resolution should be able to do so without any trouble.

Another…

Another…

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The fall colors have peaked, and are now well into reds at the gardens. Some of the trees haven’t started yet, others are starting to get bare.

It has been raining the last few mornings, so things have taken on a more distinctive wet look. Still some good shots, but I think I got my best ones already. Here’s one from this morning I took with my old Canon 17-40L lens. Man, you get some serious frame real-estate at 17mm on the full-frame 5D. This is actually cutting off the outside 15% too…

 

Another morning shoot out

Another morning shoot out

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Went up to my favorite shooting ground in the Japanese Gardens again this morning until my battery died.

A beautiful foggy morning with a light rain kept the colors popping.  It’s as good as it gets.  Got a bunch of more great shots. The peak color is now for all you photographers – get out this weekend!  I’ll be going tomorrow to re-shoot anything I missed, but here’s a new shot I tried in a place I’ve shot before.