Reading Binge

July 19th, 2009

Recently I have been on a fantasy reading binge. I’ve just been sucking them down.

The first three, from the library, are a fun little story about a slum girl who becomes an extremely powerful magician. It was good enough to be disappointed that the series is a trilogy and there will be no more, but not so good that the disappointment lasted long.



I bought the following on my Kindle, as they were either free or very reduced price. Some of the linked prices are apparently for gold plated special editions, but on the kindle they were all about $7.

The novels are a sort of “Hornblower goes to Pern” story. That’s right: the British Navy is fighting Napoleon again, but with dragons! Tiny bit of interesting social differences among the dragon riders, too, as some of the most powerful dragons will only allow themselves to be ridden by women.






And, lastly, also from the library the most recent installment of the Codex Alera by one of my favorite authors, Jim Butcher.

Santa Cruz High 14, Harbor High 2

March 27th, 2009

This afternoon, for the first time, I went to photograph a local high school sporting event. In this case, Santa Cruz High vs. Harbor High. Santa Cruz crushed Harbor with monster innings in the 2nd and 3rd, scoring 13 combined runs. Here is a big reason why (click image for the complete gallery):

Unfortunately, the field is completely surrounded by chain link fencing. It is in a residential neighborhood, so this makes some sense, but it sure makes photography a challenge!

I was using both a 300f4 and 80-200f2.8 zoom, both with a 1.4 teleconverter. On a tripod just over 2m from the fencing itself due to crowd constraints.

I had a really good time, and will definitely find more local games to shoot.

I am ready for spring

March 24th, 2009

What I’m Reading

March 18th, 2009

41DKVqEumZL._SL160_.jpg
Non-Designers Design and Type Books

 

 

Sometimes I am called upon to create internal web sites for various projects. Usually, they are not very pretty and that has always disappointed me.

Last Christmas I found the Non-Designer’s Design & Type Books at Bookshop Santa Cruz to have around for the next time I needed to create a little site, with the hope that it would look better.

Well, that time has come. So far, the book is interesting, and I do have hopes of creating something that is not as ugly as usual for an engineering site.

Ordered a Kindle

February 12th, 2009

Yesterday while sitting around not feeling well I was browsing the Amazon Kindle web site and noticed that they have the Financial Times available for $9.99 per month.

I work from home and go out to lunch nearly every day in order to converse with actual people, instead of my keyboard. So, about 4 days a week I purchase either a Financial Times or (when Bookshop Santa Cruz is sold out), the Wall Street Journal. A quick calculation:

Kindle cost with FT subscription: $359.00 + (12 * $9.99) = $478.88
Buying the paper: ($2.71 * 4) * 52 = $563.68

So I have ordered a Kindle to try. There is a very Stranger in a Strange Land quality to this device.



One of my favorite books as a teenager, it includes a few paragraphs with a character reading an electronic book.

So, I’m excited. Hopefully it won’t be on back-order for too long!

Is this thing on?

January 26th, 2009

Bzzzt. Kracle …

Hello? Hello? Does this still work?

Hmm. What does this knob do?

snap!

Madera Stage Race – Criterum

April 14th, 2008

This past weekend I drove to Madera to photograph the criterium stage for the Madera County Stage Race. Having received 100,000 hits on my Santa Cruz criterium photographs, I thought it would be fun, and it was. I thought I had sunburned my knees (kneeling down to get a better angle rubs off suncreen), but that turned out not to be the case.

Photographically, this was a much more challenging environment than Santa Cruz. Not only was it nearly 100F degrees out, there was not a cloud in the sky or flat background on the course. I tried a number of things, but the photographs are problematic.

The sky around the rider should be a nice pale blue, but to expose for the rider the sky just had to go and be all white. Notice the shadow on the riders face, caused by the rider himself! The blob on the left is a trailer, which littered this industrial course. The UCLA team was fun to talk to, and I stayed for their race just to photograph them.

I often find it useful to concentrate on a single rider or team. The racers go by very quickly and trying to get more than 1 shot per lap is nearly futile. Being patient, finding a rider/team you recognize in the viewfinder and then panning on them works better for me. If there is a breakaway or a rider off the back, they can get more shots, like this fellow:

This was about the best location, but I like to move around and couldn’t stay here all day.

After receiving so much interest last time, I finally decided that I could at last make use of the Creative Commons licensing I had read so much about. I’m not going to make a lot of money on these shots (when I say “a lot of interest”, that is decidedly relative), so I decided to embed this license in the photographs:

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 United States License

Prints from smugmug are reasonable, and digital rights are taken care of by this license. Me, I use smugmug to serve the links as well so my bandwidth limits are not impacted, but if you want to download a shot of yourself, please go right ahead.

Vanderkitten

April 7th, 2008

Yesterday, April 6th, I photographed the Santa Cruz Classic Beach Hill Criterium. Despite coming very close to getting a bit of sunburn (yes, I used sunscreen and was wearing a TWiT hat for extra geekiness) I had a great time.

The image at the top of this post is my favorite of the day (click to enlarge). Straight from the camera with no adjustments, just like it should be. Poster sized, it would look really fantastic! For a big print like that I might consider making a few adjustments to lighten her face, but only a little and paying attention to the highlights in the helmet and the white of the shorts.

The image was captured with my Nikon D200 and 80-200f2.8 AFS lens at 175mm (about 260mm effective). The Vanderkitten rider (name unknown) is just coming up to the corner before the wall. I especially like the reflection in her glasses. And I like saying “Vanderkitten.”

Vanderkitten. Vanderkitten. Vanderkitten. Man, that just rolls off the tongue!

This is not the first time I’ve photographed my home town criterium. The experience has led me to know where to find the shots I like best, and since I do this for fun I’m the one that counts! One of those places is the corner at the bottom of the course along the river just before “the wall” that leads up to the start/finish line. The wall is a short power climb that blows up every field (even the pro’s this year) and the last corner is tight, so the field has to slow down more than they do even on the climb itself.

That little climb sucks, by the way. In training it’s nothing, but racing up it is a whole different matter, especially when you have to do it every 2-3 minutes for an hour! Here is a view of the wall from the bottom:

What you cannot see is the false flat that continues all the way to the finish line and really saps your legs just as you think you should be able to catch back on!

This shot also illustrates why I like to get in close shooting cycling. With the mens pro peloton this image would be more interesting, but only because there would be more riders. The wires would still be an eyesore, and if the cloud cover had not been there the sky would have been completely blown out. That is the primary reason I zoom in: to get a good exposure.

Photographers like the morning and evening “golden hours” because the scene brightness range fits our film better. If the darkest darks and the lightest lights are more “stops” apart than your film can handle, something has to change. This is true whether the film is digital, slides or print. My D200 has an exposure latitude of 3EV, as measured by me. If the brightest part of the image and the darkest are more than 3EV apart, the light areas will loose detail and become increasingly white, or the darks will loose detail and be increasingly black.

Here is an example where I used manual spot metering to try and expose for the riders faces. This took several laps to adjust. The effect of trying to expose the faces properly caused the background to fade to black. Notice that his helmet still has over-exposed specular highlights that would have no detail in a print:

Bike racers are also very fond of black and white in the colors of their uniforms and bicycles, so extra care must be taken if you want to make prints that don’t look flat. In this regard, the previous image fails, as the rider is wearing an all black jersey and there is no detail left. Without his right arm in the image, he would be a disembodied head floating in a sea of black! Hmm. That might be an interesting crop.

One way to compensate is to eliminate problem areas from the scene and reduce the scene brightness range. So I zoom in and eliminate the sky. The shot below might be better with some of the open space to the left cropped out, but I thought the line of the chain link fence in the background would be even more distracting that way, so I left it alone. Being a little further out gives more of an impression of movement as well.

The smiling tactic is unnerving, isn’t it? Easton SugarCRM must teach their riders to smile because most of them do it. Sure makes for fun photographs! Again, in a print, I would adjust the exposure around her face to that it would be more visible. But that can be done, while getting detail in the white of her sleeves cannot once it is lost.

The Motivation of a Turnip

April 3rd, 2008

Earlier today I was asked what the MotivatedTurnip was and why is he riding again? There is a cake in the oven, so I have a few minutes and a shiny new blog in which to post the story!

The tale begins in 2000 with a bunch of bored engineers sitting around a conference table describing how unmotivated we were. Things were bad. We were seriously unmotivated. That is probably what the meeting was about, though I have no memory of the agenda. I do recall saying something like “I have the motivation of a turnip,” and everyone laughed. Not long after that, our team decided to use AIM IM as a notifier. I had to create an account, my name was taken, and the MotivatedTurnip was born.

The handle made me laugh, and it was quirky, so I kept it. It googles well, too. Having it in the blog keeps that going.

I added “rides again” because I used to have a Sun Microsystems blog called MotivatedTurnip. I still work for Sun, but I rarely posted. Even though I work on Linux, none of my projects are open source and all are pre-release. Can’t blog about that.

Not wanting to use a corporate blog for personal posts, I deleted it after a year and a small handful of updates to move here to my family site where I decided to just use my real name. That may ultimately turn out to be a mistake, but I’m not trying to hide so why not?

Tybalt wants to kill you, Romeo

April 1st, 2008

Nika Ezell Pappas as Tybalt in the 2008 Shakes-to-Go production of Romeo and Juliet

I love theatre. The talent, artistry, passion, and the spectacle enthrall me. But moments like this one from Shakespeare Santa Cruz’s 2008 Shakes-to-go production of Romeo and Juliet blow my mind and keep me coming back. This image of mine could step right out of a Renaissance painting (I love it for that alone) and in this moment Nika Ezell Pappas as Tybalt has made me re-consider Romeo and Juliet.

Romeo and Juliet is a play nearly everyone knows and understands. It is performed frequently because of this, and because it is a reliable seat-filler for any theatre even though many people are bored with it. I certainly was, until I saw this image, and really thought about what I was seeing while I gazed at it for hours. Seriously. Hours.

Most productions of Romeo and Juliet that I have seen approach the play from what I will call the adult viewpoint: family feuds, injustice, loss, grief and death. The last time SSC performed this play the set reflected this by being grey, imposing, and screaming “WE’RE ALL GONNA DIE! BADLY! BE SAD NOW!” I hated it. By the end, I WANTED both Romeo and Juliet to just die already so I could go home. Director Mike Ryan’s approach in this production appealed to me much more. This Romeo and Juliet is all about lust.

Lust for honor. Lust for blood. Lust for sex. Lust for life that immortal teenagers have. Here’s some STG:RJ lust, wrapped up in Catholic school uniforms, acted with both talent and the smokin’ unconscious energy of youth by Christine Behrens and Aeon Brady:

Lust is what Romeo and Juliet is about. They’re teenagers. The parents hardly enter in to it, and their slightly older and wiser friends cannot stop them. Seen this way, the play is the archetype for every teen drama on T.V.: just substitute some banal conflict for the fighting, and substance abuse or sad music and emo kids for the death scenes, and you have an entire season of the O.C.. Everything else falls in to place because the lust remains.

The image at the top of this post (of which I picked up a 20×23″ canvas print today) conveys Tybalt’s lust for blood. Tybalt will kill Romeo at the dance, and nothing can stop her. But she is stopped, easily, by Mercutio, and is completely surprised.

Romeo is in the background, on the right. On the left is Benvolio, Romeo’s tusty companion played by Shashona Brooks. Tybalt has just been re-directed by Mercutio (off frame to the right, pulling her arm) so that Romeo can escape. And Tybalt is in shock.

The kind of shock that the young have when their purpose is thwarted, enraging them. The rage must be re-directed, so Tybalt kills Mercutio in a later scene. Mercutio’s death sets up all of the following conflict (or deaths, if you prefer) in the rest of the play, and it all starts with this image.

The eyes. The face. The breaking of focus on killing Romeo shines through.

And now you know how we go from a play about teenage lust to limp productions dripping in woe. Even engineers like me (or especially?) over think it and read 700 words into a single, fuzzy, image and then leave out the lust while exploring these other ideas.