Posts tagged Photography
Dinner and Edmonton Tweetup
May 10th
Last night after I finally had to give up on the UPS guy coming with the RAM for my Mac Pro, I went to go pick up Diane on our way to her coworker An’s place for dinner. An had spent the entire day cooking up a storm. When we got there, her entire kitchen was filled with lots of food! We started our dinner off with salad rolls — they’re kind of like not deep fried spring rolls. Next were some freshly deep fried spring rolls, and then a bowl of wonton soup. After that the other two guests arrived and we continued to eat. There was grilled pork ribs, shrimp and chicken skewers, shrimp and squid stirfry (I’ve never had squid so tender and non-rubbery before!), and a bunch of other great foods as well. I ate so much that I didn’t eat anything all day until dinner.
Today was the Edmonton Tweetup. A while ago, I joined twitter and blogged a bit about the experience. To put it quickly – I was a bit bummed out that I was the first of my group of friends to join the twitter experience. Well that’s changed a bit, thanks to @mastermaq who found me using twitter local. After just a couple of weeks, I had several twitter friends and the service became useful for me. Not long after that, Mack started organizing a twitter meet, which apparently is affectionately called a tweetup. The planning and organizing ended up with today being the day for the tweetup.
I showed up with Diane and we had a great turnout. We had at least 14 or 15 people there, and it was great to meet everyone. There was quite a large range of people who showed up — young people, older people, and a fair range of fields (although most were tech related in some way). It was quite a fun time actually. I spent a lot of time chatting with @bruceclark since we shared an interest in photography, but I also chatted with quite a few other people. It was a most enjoyable afternoon.
After the party seemed to have waned a little, I returned home for a short time before heading out to the airport to pick up my parents who were in Europe on holidays for a month. I took them out for supper as a mother’s day thing since the actual Mother’s day involved driving my sister to a couple of gigs. I got to hear a little about their trip, and it was good to have them back in town 
This evening I played a bit of poker, having my first real downswing at 200NL since an early downswing when I first moved up. Downswining 7 buyins is not my idea of a fun time. All sorts of crap happened to me that I had somehow avoided for the most part over the last little while of playing. Oh well, it can’t all go my way. I’m still up playing those limits, it’s just unfortunate that I couldn’t continue the trend that’s been lasting for the past little while. I guess it brings my winrate down to a much more sustainable level. It just sucks for it to happen all at once like this.
So I’m off to bed. I’m taking Megan to her first of two gigs tomorrow at the Radisson Hotel (formerly the Coast Terrace Inn) tomorrow morning. If you’re in the mood for some fancy brunch with some harp music for entertainment, feel free to stop in between 10:15 and 2:15.
Heraldk
Metaphoto on the Slopes of Lake Louise
Feb 28th
This is my friend Kepi on the slopes of Lake Louise. Both him and I are interested in photography so we had our cameras going for most of the weekend!
Sonata Arctica Show Review
Feb 18th
This was a long time coming. I’ve been so busy this last week that I haven’t had a chance to talk about the latest Sonata Arctica concert here in Edmonton.
SA made their second appearance in two years at Edmonton’s Starlite room last week. I was able to get tickets and go, so I continued to support the band’s efforts to increase their North American fanbase. If they keep coming back they should do just that … this show was sold out!
My only real complaint about the show was that it was too short. They got on stage late due to the doors opening at 8:00pm, and two opening bands on the slate. The first opening band “The Order Chaos” was not too bad. They only played three songs, but I might have to look into their music a little more to see if I like it. The second band was called “Sanctity”, and they were … almost as different from Sonata Arctica as you could get and still stay in the same genre of music. Sure they had metal riffs on the guitars, but where Sonata Arctica is classy, melodic, and appealing, Sanctity was rude, crass, and unappealing. I couldn’t wait for them to get off the stage.
It’s too bad SA couldn’t play a longer set. They totally have the repertoire to play a two hour or longer set, but because of the late start there was no way that was going to happen. Still, they did play a good set, and I enjoyed getting the chance to try and take some band-in-action photography and video with my P&S camera. I think I did a decent job!
Big news as well, Edmonton… Nightwish is coming to town to play the Starlite room! I’ve already bought my tickets (you can get them in a presale from a link off their webpage). So once I see them, then all I’ve got to see is Kamelot and Rhapsody and I’ll have seen my top 5 favourite metal bands! How exciting!
Heraldk
Glowy
Dec 10th
Welcome to my backlog. I’ve continued working through my old photos in Aperture — rating them all and getting them tagged. This is one of the first photos I took with my XT after I got a tripod. I was pretty interested in experimenting with night photography, so I took a number of shots like this. This one turned out pretty well, although if you look carefully you can see how the camera moved a little when I hit the shutter button. I’m happy I have a shutter release switch now! Still, I really like how the clouds look in this photo, so I thought it was worth uploading. This is the building across the street from my building.
Equipment
Nov 27th
This is my photography equipment collection so far. My brand new 70-200mm f/4L IS USM just arrived yesterday, so I haven’t had much chance to run around taking photos with it yet. Check the notes on the photo for what everything is! This photo was taken with my old Canon Powershot A10 that I won in an IGA store contest. It is obviously not pictured
Pictured:
Apple Macbook Pro
Canon Digital Rebel XT body
Battery grip
Canon 70-200mm f/4L IS USM
Sigma 17-70mm f/2.8-4.5
Canon 18-55mm f/3.5-5.5 (kit lens)
Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM
Tiffin 67mm Polarizing filter
Canon remote switch
Canon battery charger
USB cable
2GB spare flash card
Crumpler Sinking Barge Laptop/camera bag
Not pictured:
Canon Powershot A10
2 Canon Batteries (one inside camera)
2GB flash card inside camera
Alexandra
Sep 11th
I had the pleasure of being one of the few people invited to the recent wedding of my friend and colleague Darse to his Alexandra. I was quite honoured to be there since it was a minimal wedding. I was there to document it through photography, and I think I did a fairly decent job for my first wedding shoot. This photo is Alexandra overlooking the river valley. They had chosen a really beautiful location not far from the royal museum. Hope you like the photos that I’ll upload from their wedding!
Dandelion
Sep 10th
Recovery
Aug 17th
It seems that after any big event, my work habits need a couple weeks to return to form. This has been the case after coming back from Vancouver — for some reason I just have trouble ramping up to get things done again. Thankfully, today has seen some sign that these problems are starting to pass. I’ve started cleaning up the DIVAT code base, and have plans to make it a) more efficient, b) more correct, and c) implement a service for people to run the DIVAT analysis on their own matches.
Another thing I’ve been trying to do is get some of the raw video files from the matches, and make a few highlight reels of quotes and good hands. The quote highlight reels I should be able to do now … it’s just going to take some time. I didn’t realize just how long it takes to watch video to find good clips. I’m not really sure how people do this in real video editing, but my methods are extremely slow and time consuming. Ugh. So expect a highlight reel, but don’t expect it soon.
What else? Things are going well in general. I’ve been playing super mario strikers on the Wii lately. It’s a pretty fun game, but it’s also frustrating. I can’t seem to pass the “Crystal Cup” difficulty level. The game (which is soccer, mario style btw) format involves playing a 6 team double round robin tournament to seed a single elimination tournament amongst the top four places. When you win the two matches in the single elimination tournament, you get to play against a new team which you unlock if you win. The problem I’m having is that before each kickoff (at the start of the game and after a team scores), the level knocks out some number of players from each team for the entire time between kick offs. This seems to be entirely random … but it seems to screw my team over every time. You see, each player on a team has his own unique traits. Some are slower, but have a better shot, some have a poor shot, but are fast and can pass really well. If you get stuck with just your slow scoring players, then the opposing team has the freedom to run circles around you … and you give up a goal or two that way which so far has cost me the game more often than not. I’ve only managed to eke out one victory in this format in 7 games. So frustrating.
My roommate, Mike, has an interesting carrot-on-a-stick approach to writing his thesis. He’s already bought an xbox 360, which sits under his desk until he finishes his first draft of his thesis. Incredibly, he’s less than two weeks in and he’s already got one chapter left to write. I can’t really imagine how hard it is not to crack that box open and play some of the coolest next-gen games. Speaking of consoles, I’m pretty impressed with the xbox actually. I haven’t played much of it, but it looks like it has certainly helped kill of the PS3. Of course, the jury is still out, but between the Wii and the 360, I really don’t see the PS3 finding room to compete.
Diane and I have finally begun planning out our wedding. There’s a pretty long list of things we’ve got to arrange. I don’t suppose anyone has any suggestions on who we should go with for a photographer? It’s really hard for me to tell how one person’s photography style will suit Diane and I. I suppose the correct way to go about this is to meet with several photographers and see what they have to say for themselves and talk them through a typical wedding shoot. So that’s the next thing we need to do. It’s a little surreal, thinking about getting married. It doesn’t seem like all that long ago when I was a socially awkward little kid running around. Now I’m a socially awkward person that’s somehow getting married in a few months. Huh. Who would’ve thunk it?
It’s been awhile since I last updated. Part of the reason for that is my shiny new Macbook pro which has had me spending time tweaking it and playing with my photo collection in Aperture. It’s amazing how much time you can fill up just installing different programs and fiddling with settings. That might also be part of the reason I haven’t been all that productive over the last couple of weeks. Fortunately, my productivity should increase now that I have my laptop all setup!
Anyways, I’m off to a games party tonight. Hope everyone is having a good summer and is planning on checking out the fringe this year. Should be fun!
Heraldk
More Shopping
Apr 22nd
So I’m rather enjoying my new camera lenses. Enough so that my interest in photography has been piqued to the point that I would like to be able to take my camera around with me to my daily activities so that I can get some photos of the cool things I see once in awhile. This means that I needed a bag. I literally spent a couple days looking at various camera bag options on the internet — comparing features and capacity. At first, I thought the best plan would be to get a minimal bag that wouldn’t bother me when I carried it along with my other gear (or perhaps one I could fit into my regular day backpack). But most of these solutions didn’t really work for me. They either didn’t fit quite enough of my gear, or they were too bulky looking (it is hard to tell looking at them online, but I had a tape measure out and spent time visualizing these things).
Finally, I made the switch in thinking … what if I bought a bag that replaced my day bag. If a bag existed that had some dedicated camera space, and perhaps a spot for a laptop, it would be an ideal carry-on type bag for travelling as well as a good day bag for my day-to-day activities. Eureka! There does exist such a bag! The Crumpler Sinking Barge. It’s a tad pricey, but with the amount I spent on my camera/lenses, I think it’s totally worth it. I can’t wait for it to arrive!
Heraldk.
Lenses!
Apr 9th
Today I ordered a couple of new lenses for my camera. The first was an easy choice: a Canon 50mm f/1.4 USM – which will be my main lens when running around indoors. I’m actually a little disappointed that I didn’t start my research on this until really late or I might’ve had the chance to order this lens *before* the reunion which would have been beneficial several times. Oh well, I will have it soon!
The other lens I ordered took me awhile to decide upon. I ended up choosing this guy: a Sigma 17-70 f/2.8-4.5 DC. There were several other lenses I was seriously considering, including a Canon 17-85 f/4-5.6 IS USM and the Sigma 24-70 f/2.8 EX. In the end though, the one I chose won out because of its very reasonable price and the combination of features it has. There seems to be a lot of mixed reviews concerning the Canon lens. Some people love it, but a lot of people seem to hate it. The 17-70 I chose didn’t seem to have these polarized opinions (though there is some concern over getting a good copy of the lens). The 24-70, on the other hand is a really nice looking lens. However, you may have noticed that I do a fair amount of scenery photography, and I felt that I would dearly miss the wide-angle capability that I can currently do with my kit lens. When I go travelling, this is the lens I will be moving around with so I settled for the 17-70.
If you’ve got any comments for me I’d love to hear them — I’ll hopefully get the lenses soon and will give them some in depth tests while I still have the option of returning them.
Heraldk
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