Puffins!

H had mentioned he was looking for photographs of Atlantic puffins. I decided to spend time today finding and scanning these negatives. These photos are from the summer of 1998, when I went to Maine with my then-boyfriend's family. I am fairly certain this is Machias Seal Island. The scanner I use now is an Epson Perfection V500 Photo, the camera I used then was my Minolta Maxxum 650si, the lens was probably a Promaster 28-200. Each image has been adjusted in Bibble 5 - just rotation, crop, white balance, and some exposure balancing. There are visible grains (it's consumer grade film, some ISO 800, some ISO 400) dust (I'll re-scan any important images with the dust removal tool enabled) and focus errors. I don't miss film.

First Pictures from Sony Alpha 850

Here you go. For the first set of photos from my new camera, I decided to take pictures of one of the first cameras in my collection.



After downloading the RAW files to my computer I discovered that Bibble does not yet support the a850 (Bibble 4 goes up to the a700, and Bibble 5 preview 2.2 has the a900, but the a850 is not in that release. I hear the next preview release is imminent, but I JUST GOT A NEW CAMERA and I WANT TO PROCESS MY RAW FILES!)

The nice looking picture above and immediately below were processed using DxO Optics Pro 6, free trial edition. I'd be more impressed if it hadn't crashed three times and taken so dang long to complete the batch. Bibble has me spoiled for speed, that's for sure.



The foggy version below is what happens when Picasa 3 converts the files to .jpg. I'm really not impressed at all. What were they thinking? I kept this one for reference and deleted the rest.



I haven't even installed the Sony software, other than the plug-in that lets Windows explorer preview the RAW files as thumbnails.

We went to a park this afternoon so I could take some outdoor photos in the daylight. Our weather this weekend is unseasonably warm, so it was a very nice walk. For today, I switched the camera to take RAW+jpg, so I'll just upload the .jpg versions and wait for Bibble to catch up before using the RAW files.

My plans do include taking detailed pictures of all of the cameras in my collection, so this blog may be very photo-geeky for the near future. I'm having fun, at least.

Hot Wok Village is Closed

I know this will be crushing news for some of you, but Hot Wok Village is closed. The sign is gone, the doors are locked, the lights are out. I've got mixed feelings on the situation. It was an interesting place, serving interesting Indo-Chinese food. But, the last time we went there the food I ordered put me into so much pain that I was out of commission for the rest of the night. And I don't mean because it was spicy - I think there was something chemically wrong with what I ate.

We've got other options. There are many Indian and Chinese establishments in the Schaumburg area that haven't tried to kill me. The Himalayan Restaurant serves some Indo-Chinese food, and the service we've gotten there was very attentive. Yu's Mandarin is the best Chinese restaurant in all of space and time. And Udupi Palace is a great place for vegetarian selections - with a wonderful lunch buffet.

So, I'm sorry RK, you'll have to find another source for coconut water served in a real coconut. (If anyone knows why HWV closed, please leave a comment. Thanks.)

Waiting for Trick or Treaters

Official trick or treat start time in our town is 3pm, and no one has showed up yet. (Okay, we finally got a group at 3:47.)

What have I been up to? Mostly work and crocheting. Being on Ravelry.com has encouraged me to finish projects faster than before. But, I think my next project will be a sewing project, to make something to hold my crochet hooks.

I'm very close to ordering a new camera - the Sony Alpha 850 - with the justification of doing the wedding photography for some friends early next year. This is exciting because the a850 is a full-frame sensor, which means that the FPA is the same size as a 35mm piece of film. So, it will let me get nice wide-angle shots again with my 17-35 zoom lens. The APS-C sensors multiply the apparent focal length of a lens by 1.5, which is nice at the telephoto range, but I prefer wide angle drama.

The weather is getting colder here, but at least today is sunny. Most of the week has been rain, but at least it isn't snowing yet.

Same old, same old, you know?

New Church Organ

One of the organists at church posted this video to YouTube of him playing a recessional at the end of service. (I'm not in the group you hear singing in the background - I missed church this morning.)

The video shows the altar set up in "contemporary mode" as it is for most of the year. For Lent, they go "old school" and put back the beautiful carvings. Here is what the altar looks like on Easter:




(There was a slight change to the pipe configuration after I took this. I should go back with the good camera and take more organ pictures.)

Homecoming Bonfire 2009

The wood was too wet, so the structure was still standing by the time our group left the scene to go to dinner. I think this was the best ignition I've seen - a flaming something was launched at the bonfire using a trebuchet!

Get-it-Out-of-My-Head Crochet

While we were at Cedar Point (yes, again) last weekend, one topic of discussion in line ended with me thinking about if a Klein Bottle could be made in crochet. I poked around online, and found that while several people have patterns or product for sale using knit and crochet, no-one has something like what I've been mentally designing. The concept is stuck in my head, like a song you keep remembering, and I've spent enough time refining it that I think I can actually make it work in real life.

At Stitches Midwest 2009, Habu Textiles had a booth. I bought many strange and wonderful things there, including two skeins of fique material. Here is a photo of the start I got on the Klein bottle next to the rest of one skein.

From a Gettysburg Monument

Senior Project Whiteboard

I found a stash of older image files on a backup hard-drive. It includes photos taken with my first digital camera, which was a Kodak peripheral for my Palm IIIc. Here is a picture of the whiteboard from some point during Senior Project at Rose-Hulman. I love that graph!

Tinfoil Hat

DSCN2694
Originally uploaded by prismglass

I got my PIV (see http://csrc.nist.gov/groups/SNS/piv/index.html) on Friday. I put this pouch together this weekend. It is going to live in my purse and help shield my RFID stuff from bad guys. The Flickr set has more details in the captions for the other photos.