Photography Sucks

I got into photography in the 1980s. I was poor. Whatever money I had, I put into hardware, rather than film, paper, lab time, etc. This is typical me: I like guns more than shooting; I like cars more than driving.

I bought ridiculous things, such as a $900 Nikon 80-200 f/2.8 zoom. I captured one pretty great shot, thanks to this lens (it's hanging above the chair in which I'm writing this post), but no more. I'm not sure that one shot was worth $900.

My development as a photographer was stunted by a lack of funds, which translates to a lack of gumption. The Great Artiste would have shot and developed and shot and printed regardless of financial constraints. Film is as cheap as credit.

I've been thinking a lot lately about buying a Nikon F3, the nonpareil of 1980s cameras. They've finally come down in price to the point where they are semi-affordable (maybe $250 for an F3HP with the legendary MD-4 motor drive). What I've realized, after shooting a lot recently with my little Canon pocket camera, is that the digital revolution delivers what my imagination was dreaming of in the 1980s with the F3/MD-4 combo. The idea of the six-frames-per-second MD-4 coupled to the F3, is that the photographer would have the freedom to shoot 36 frames of anything and capture, at best, that one beautiful moment.

That's not how it worked out... except, kinda it is.

Now I see a scene that holds promise and start shooting, and shoot until I get the image I want.  Here's an example that played out in our side yard this evening.  I really like the final image, but would never have gotten there without the freedom afforded by digital.

This might get interesting...

I like how the light illuminates the spray, but this is not a good picture.

There's potential here..... Maybe.

Kinda boring.

Closer... 

Nah...

Wait a minute!!

Eureka!!!

Interests and Annoyances

There are recurring interests in my life that are annoyances of sorts. For instances, I'm basically annoyed by the fact that I'm interested in videogames. I wish I wasn't. But I am, and after deciding recently that all I really wanted to play was badass FPSes such as Rage (which is awesome, if very derivative -- so maybe not awesome, maybe just very fun with excellent, if overrated, graphics), I've now been convinced by the numerous critics singing its praises that I must play Persona 4.

Here's the rub: I've got a PS2 that came to me free of charge from someone who'd acquired a PS3.  Awesome! But it's in the basement attached to a 19" CRT TV. Not so aweome.  Plus, the newest version of Persona 4 is for the little handheld PlayStation Vita and it's supposed to be even better than the super awesome meg-fantastic PS2 version.

So I guess I gotta buy a Vita.

Now for most people making the adequate amount of bread that I make, dropping $260.00 to get this thing I really want would be no big deal. For me, it's akin to climbing Everest: months of planning, weeks of prep, and a short but exhausting period of execution. So here's the plan: eBay the DS, with its accessories and all games for $100. Sell my old phone (the not so lovable Droid X) with its charging station, et al. for $50.  Buy the Vita and P4G (as it's referred to) for $110 out of pocket.  Play the game over the next year or two (it's a long game -- 90-100 hours), then sell the Vita for at least $80.  Net cost to me (not counting the costs of the DS and the X): $30.

Okay, so that covers Annoying Interest #1.  Annoying Interest #2: guns.

I consider my family (the one where I was an electron, not the one where I am a proton or perhaps a neutron) to be a gun family.  I got a 20 gauge shotgun for Christmas when I was, like, 13. I got a concealed carry permit when I was 18.  We shot guns at camps and, on rare occasions, inside our house in the city of Syracuse.

Earlier this year I bought a shotgun. Now I'm thinking pistol.

The problem with it all is that the thing I need that is most like my need for a hole in my skull is another hobby. I don't have time for another hobby. Currently, I can't regularly saddle up the bike and ride off for a few hours on a Saturday. I can plop down in front of my bitchin' 22" TV and play Rage for a few hours. I can barely maintain my bike, car, and real estate. So taking up a time- and money-intensive hobby like pistol shooting seems foolish.

On the other hand, it's something I want to do and I'm 42 and not, as it turns out, getting any younger.

My reason seems to be tussling with my lust for life. We'll see who comes out on top.

Upgrade Time!

I've now had a cell phone for 20 months, and am eligible for an upgrade through Verizon. It's tempting, because the Motorola Droid X (which was not my first choice, but was what I got after being sick of the unavailability of the Droid Incredible and the HTC Evo) is slow and getting slower. There are probably fixes to this, including rooting (which I've never attempted, although that was one of the things that attracted me to Android in the first place). The slowness would almost be worth demonstrating on video, but instead I'll use words. Touch the Wi-Fi toggle widget, as a for instance, and it will take five, ten seconds -- or longer! -- to even register the touch. Then the little impeller icon spins and spins for... thirty seconds? Longer? Before turning off the damned wi-fi. Touch a contact icon to make a phone call, and you get a similar wait. When I need to make a phone call quickly, this becomes maddening.

So be it. It's a damned space age minicomputer. But it's human nature to want something to work the way it's supposed to. A hammer with a wobbly head is also annoying. The worst thing about the Droid X, though, is that the headphone jack is so sensitive that it renders the FM radio (an app I use five days a week during my commute to and from work) nearly useless. If you so much as breathe on the jack when the FM radio is playing, the phone starts the music player. It happens over and over.

As of March 15 I'm eligible for an upgrade. The Galaxy Nexus is appealing, but I have the sneaking suspicion it's not really a Nexus. And it's got a mediocre camera. I don't want another Motorola. The HTC One series looks pretty sweet, but they're not out yet and no word on whether they're coming to Verizon.

Thankfully, the Android community came to my rescue in the form of Headset Blocker. This free app solves the most frustrating problem of my phone: the sensitive headphone jack. Turns out that the phone senses a disturbance to the jack as a signal from an in-line pause/play button (that some headphones, but not mine, have). This is a hardware issue, but the app fixes it by telling the phone to ignore any "signals" from the headphone line. Bammo! The phone is still annoyingly slow, but at least I no longer want to throw it into traffic three times a day.

So I will wait another six months or so and see what comes along. I want my next phone -- if I even renew the data contract and keep owning a smartphone -- to be a quantum leap forward in functionality.

We'll see.

The Canon Color-Temperature Curse

I've owned two point-and-shoot digital cameras: both Canon SD digital elphs. Both awesome, after a fashion (and this coming from a dedicate Nikon guy back in the film era). But both of my Canons have suffered from a chilly blue color temperature that drives me nuts. The picture above is the way the Canon sees things. The one below is the way it looks after I've cranked the color temperature up to 11 in Picasa. Way better, no?

Maybe next time I'll buy a Lumix.

HDR Camera, Part II

I've gone HDR Camera crazy!

This app has now made the Droid X my preferred camera for landscapes, easily beating my Canon PowerShot SD940 IS. The Canon has a spotmeter, which is a huge advantage in any camera. But for landscapes, where 95% of the time the sky is at least two stops brighter than the land, HDR Camera wins every time.




The disadvantages of this app are:
1) you take four photos, slowly, to produce one picture;
2) it takes a while for the app to load;
3) you are shooting through a phone's camera lens, meaning it's slow and tiny with no zoom.

The advantages are:
1) awesomeness!



You can even take portraits with it, but you need to advise your subject(s) to hold still as if they are being daguerreotyped circa 1849.


Otherwise you end up with grotesqueries such as this:

HDR Camera

The camera on my Droid X is pretty good: it's an impressive 8 megapixels (which seems better than, for instance, the iPhone's 5MP, until you come to understand the Myth of Megapixels), but more than that, the pictures turn out quite nice. They're sharp, with good color, etc. More than acceptable for a phone camera.

But recently the camera stopped working. Actually, the default camera app stopped working. Retro Camera still worked. So while I was trying to figure out how to fix it, I downloaded HDR Camera, a free (but ad-supported) replacement for the standard camera app. It doesn't apply funky filters like Retro Camera and its ilk. However, it does do HDR (high dynamic range) photography. I've been interested in HDR ever since I discovered what it was and saw the pictures.

Basically, HDR takes three or more shots of the same scene at different exposures, and uses the best bits of each. So rather than having a well-exposed Elizabeth against a bleach-white sky and next to a dark blot of tree-shadow, the sky is dark blue, Elizabeth is still well-exposed, and the dark blot is revealed to be rich green grass under the tree. Nothing is burnt-out, nothing is under-exposed.

HDR in the hands of a really good photographer, with professional grade hard- and software, produces some pretty startling effects:


So I tried HDR Camera for the first time today and it works very, very well. With "real" HDR, the camera needs to be on a tripod so all three or four pictures line up exactly, and can be blended together. Somehow, HDR Camera gets around this. It takes four pictures and somehow calculates better exposure ranges for different parts of the pictures.

I've only used it twice, but it worked well both times, even though my handheld phone/cam was moving around quite a bit. Obviously, it's not going to deliver the goods like professional equipment and software would, but it's exciting that it can provide any HDR effect at all.

The first picture, below, is with the regular camera app, the second is with HDR Camera:

I was excited enough about the results to buy the "pro" (i.e., ad-free) app for $0.99 on the very first day I used this app. It's only the second Android app I've ever paid for.

Finally, Game Night!

I went a little boardgame crazy this year. In December (OK, technically last year) I bought Arkham Horror for Anson for his birthday. It was expensive, but worth it not only because he's my oldest friend, but also because it has the most pieces of any game ever made. Then in May when we were in New York I bought Settlers of Catan for myself. We didn't play it for the first time until last weekend (that's more than three months later). Somehow, two vital pieces had gone missing by then, although I'd only opened the box once in NY, under strictly controlled conditions. (My suspect: Elizabeth Rose Larrison! How, when it was on a shelf way above her reach? Answer: she's a three year old! Why? Answer: she's a three year old!)

I really like games. I like them more in theory than in practice. This is evidenced by the numerous obscure role playing games on my bookshelf (Anyone remember Skyrealms of Jorune? Didn't think so.) that I never played. This thesis is further supported by the videogames I bought cheap from ebay and never played, or played very little. (Sorry, Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines.)

Even without the missing pieces, Settlers was awesome. It's complex at first, but the rules make so much sense that you only need to hear them once before they set into your mind. Amazingly, there's no conflict in the game. It's all about cooperative trading and development. Needless to say, Aaron, Barb, and I enjoyed it and can't wait to play it again.

Maybe in another three months.

Windmill, Southeast Portland

Until a few weeks ago, I would walk Suzanne to sleep almost every night: tuck her into the sling, and walk the streets of Woodstock up and down, round and round, trying to avoid crossing the major thoroughfares, enjoying the sites and sounds. The skies at sunset are awesome at this time of year.

This windmill was one of the things we encountered. I like it.

(And this video, brief though it is, is a textbook illustration of why tripods are important.)

The True Long Island

 

The title of this post is an oversimplification, but this image (might be worth clicking to enlarge) sums up a day's frustration in trying to get to the beach. The shoreline in New York is private. In Oregon it's public. One day when we were driving around, looking for a beach to go to (besides the private beach the Braccos have access to), we ran into either $20.00 day use fees at State Parks, or this. Streets that dead-ended above the beach with No Standing signs everywhere.

Kind of a bummer.

Lessons of the Newborn, Pt. I

Newborns teach me how wonderful it is to have two upper extremities. Life becomes a deceptively challenging exercise when one of your limbs is occupied more-or-less constantly with cradling a beautiful, sleepy infant child.

Have you ever tried to wash your hand? Have you ever tried to type a blog entry one-handed?