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.)