th?dr (too hungry? don't read) aka Friendsgiving

Yes, that is bacon.

Dave and Ken hosted a 'Friendsgiving' celebration at their place on Saturday because they are awesome. The result was a pot-luck with amazingly awesome homely food.
Let's all start with sweets. Mmm... Peet's Coffee's ginger loaf with cream cheese
Candied yams =)
Ambrosia(yes, even mere mortals can now enjoy it)
Crushed Pecan Sweet Potatoes
And now wash it down with some warm spiced wine. It is amazing. Seriously.

There was also Rainier's amazing sweet potato pie which i didn't have to opportunity to take a picture of... because it was too delicious.

Now onto the savory...
So moist!
Cornbread. Yes, it was fantastic.
Green Bean Casserole. First time i've ever had it... I think.

Dave also made delicious Ham in the shape of Hanimal. Scroll over to see more deliciousness.
Potatoes of mashed. Elaine did this amazing dish justice.
Rene's amazing dip that made mine look like turd. Thanks Rene...
After the food coma, we decided to play pictionary. This is where Ken says, "IT'S DIGNITY! GAH! DON'T YOU KNOW YOU EVEN KNOW DIGNITY WHEN YOU SEE IT?"

One more for the road. It's Lalaine! Scroll over the picture.

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Another year

Nothing better than the support of your friends.

I really can't believe that my friends pitched in to get me a lens for my camera. Thanks again Matt, Elaine, Dave, Winnie, and Ed. (Also Justin for the selection). This is an amazing lens, the 35mm. The F1.8 is SOOOO COOOOL! What an awesome gift! Yes, be jealous.

But along with that...
My mom's friend was going to throw this stuff out, and she convinced him to give it to me. Now I have two SLRs! Yes, feed the addiction!
What it includes:
The Canon AE-1 SLR. A classic sexy beast. A Canon 50mm FD F1.8 lens is attached.(note: this is all shot with the D40 with 35mm)
The AE-1 next to a Vivitar 28mm MC F2.8 lens.
A Vivitar 70-210mm MC F4.5 lens. Looks almost like a pipe bomb of sorts.
Flash!
And an old school cleaning kit.

I've already gone out and bought three rolls of film as well as a battery for the camera. Currently 4 shots have been taken. We'll see how this all turns out if I ever get them developed and scanned.

As for the 35mm lens gift for the D40, I've taken it for a little bit of a test fun(I meant to type 'test run' but 'test fun' does sound more fitting) and it's pretty awesome.
The lens at F1.8 really does an amazing job of focusing on the main subject in the picture and blurring out (softly) the other objects.
Obligatory Pho sauce picture. Taken by either Dave or Winnie. Sexy.
It looks good even in low light and with people.

Thanks to these gift givers, I will be more addicted to cameras. Thanks. (Take that last statement how you will.) No, but seriously, thanks guys!

Also for those of you who called and texted and left messages on facebook, thanks for the birthday wishes. This old man can barely remember you all anymore be does appreciate it.

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Learning from the stars

After hearing about the Leonids meteor shower, I knew I had to try and capture it with my camera to learn more.

There are a couple of things I've learned from attempting to take these shots.
#1: Find a darker spot. The light pollution from the city affect the shot of the stars, resulting in the whiteness at the bottom of this picture which I played around with on photoshop. The lights giveth and the lights taketh away.
#2: get a remote for longer exposure. I tried to manually hold the shutter at the bulb setting for as long as I could, but even the slightest movement can cause blur. A remote would help my D40 prolong its shutter for up to 15 minutes at a time instead of the 30second preset.
#3: There are many many stars that can't be seen by the naked eye. I could only really see the brightest ones that night but not all the ones that are here in the picture.
#4: Landscape is important. Like my friend once said, there needs to be something boring in the picture to enhance the interesting parts. Perhaps the rule of thirds need be applied with the bottom third as the tree line or something.
#5: Make sure to pre-set focus to infinity before taking the shot. It is difficult to notice blur when everything is dark through the viewfinder. Since my kit lens does not come with a focus meter, an advice I read was to pre-set earlier in the day by taking a picture of something far away with autofocus and remember the position for later use.
#6: Bring some buddies and warm clothes. I went by myself to take pictures and couldn't capture any of the shooting stars in the shots. However, I did see a couple and the enjoyment of that would have been maximized with more people.

and #7 without a picture: RAW files are interesting. I took all of these pictures using the RAW format for the first time and it is very interesting and useful in situations where one wants to edit pictures. All I needed to do was to open the RAW files up in Photoshop and the options were there for me to tweak as I wanted it. However, I realized that such a process is also daunting. If there were many many shots, I would have had to go through each one and edit as I see fit, which is extremely time consuming. RAW is fun to edit, but time consuming. JPEG is more restrictive with editing, but is good to go. Those are the give and takes.

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Finally photos worth posting

I've been taking pictures here and there since my last post but most have been average as I keep visiting the same places at the same times. Last night, I decided to go to Lake Merced after work and see what was going on there.

I walked down in the dark to the pier and put up my tripod and went at it. Photography is good especially when you're a loner =P

I think the things in the left are the docked dragon boats the local team uses to practice with on the lake.

I took a couple pictures of this area but this was the only one I really liked because of the bit of glowing light behind the trees. It's so strange to see the stars and how uniform they seem.


The picture was on the soft setting when I took it at a 2 second shutter. The mouse over picture is with a more vivid setting at 3 seconds.

I took a black and white picture of the same tree but decided I need to edit it a bit. I got rid of the lamp post on the right and set auto contrast. I just wanted to take a picture of the shape of the tree.

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subbing

The curry invites you in...

That delicious mixture was concocted by my culinary friends Dave and Ken who seem to have perfected the art of comfort food.
I usually find that one of the best destressers for me is having a good converstation with friends over food and drink. You fill your stomach as well as your need to converse.
The cause of stress you ask? Studying for the CSET test. This is the high school I went to in order to take that test.
I figured that I should reward myself afterwards and take some pictures. This didn't come out very well, but I wanted to take a picture of this awkward looking call box in the middle of nowhere.

I decided that I wanted to take the scenic route home and drove down Balboa to get to Sunset. I saw the Balboa theather sign and just had to stop and take a picture. The picture came out really dark however. This is a picture with the active-D lighting set on the 'low' setting. What it tries to do is make darker areas and shadows brighter and more visible. Mouse over to see the active-D lighting set on 'high'.

I don't really like using active-D as I can see visible noise in the dark areas that are lightend. A friend of mine said that I should try to give a negative saturation on things with more noise and so this picture is at -80% saturation. Then I wondered, what would the picture look like with positive saturation? Hover over to see what it looks like with +40% saturation. I like the colors on that much more.

It brings into question, though, when a photo becomes a painting and whether 'enhancing' is changing wholly. I'd rather not get into that right now.

Here's a picture of the blogger who thinks he knows how to play the guitar. What a loser.

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single picture filler post

Way under prepared for tests tomorrow but at the request of a friend(no, it's not a penis pump), I figure I would at least post up one picture I took recently:

I am still working on nighttime shots and there is still much to learn. I think this picture is alright. The street lights are what really bother me because of how 'starry' they look. Someone told me that this is just the way it's going to be because of the aperture blades of the camera. Maybe slow shutter speed pictures just need to be in much darker areas. Apparently there is a meteor shower happening soon. I'm considering getting a remote to play with shutter speed for that, but then again, it will require that I go somewhere dark. Maybe Twin Peaks?

That's the bay bridge by the way, which closed down last weekend because some stuff fell off of it. Bridges are fun. Anyways, hope to post more after I finish my tests =/.

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(almost)Non-picture post

It's not what you think it is, I swear!

Or maybe it is, I don't know. It's the latest in my arsenal of photo taking accessories. This sweet thing is a bulb blower used to clean dust off the sensor of my camera. Remember that speck problem? Gone. For now anyway. I haven't been able to take pictures lately because I've been terribly busy with studying for the CSETs. Currently, I am procrastinating and figured I'd rant.

So the issue about the speck on the camera is (to me) more profound that what it seems. There were a couple of options before me in terms of what to do once I found out the dust speck was there and that it was past the 14day return policy on defects.

One option was to bring it back to the store and see if a manager could possibly still honor the camera as a defect as the dust is on the sensor and I've had it for about 19 days. This would have worked because one of the managers at work was cool, however, we were out of stock of my camera. Nuts I say.

Another option was that I can leave it to Geek Squad to send the camera to Nikon to clean it for me. When I asked the guys how long it usually takes, they said, "A couple of weeks". It's a typical vague Geek Squad answer. I've had the camera up till then for 19 days and I've almost used it every day since. Would I be willing to wait "a couple of weeks" and leave my camera to hands of people I don't know?

My third option was to ask online about what I can do. I had a general idea but I wanted to know exactly what options I had in front of me. This is what I find great about the internet. It is an amazing tool for people who are do-it-yourselfers or weekend warriors. A couple of posters suggested I get the blower and actually clean it manually myself providing some detailed instructions. This seems very right to me seeing as I started this hobby with wanting to learn. How could I learn about problems with my camera if I just sent it off to someone to fix? I have the same feelings about car repair, but that would lead to tangents on more philosophical issues and i'd contradict myself way too much.

So I went to Action Camera on Taraval and 26th st.(cool camera store; lots of oldies) and picked up the 15 dollar blower and the rest is history. I could have potentially lost 'a couple of weeks' with the camera if I had gone with that option and I would not have learned anything. 15 dollars for a new skill I have for the rest of my life and the life of my camera? Worth it.

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Daylight savings

I've realized that it takes a lot of dedication to maintain and update a blog, especially a photo blog. I've been rather busy lately and I've fallen asleep pretty much every night on my bed once I get home. I have taken some interesting pictures lately though so I figured it would be best to post my favorites.

The brat again.

One more

I went to the beach the other day on a whim and decided to take pictures of the sun setting. I was there from about 5:30 till about 6:45 freezing my ass off, but I got some nice shots in and also came to a realization that there is a dust speck on my sensor that I need to get clean. I asked about the curious case of why it appears in some cases and not in others on the Nikonian forums and it turns out that based on the aperture setting, sometimes it can't be seen. Most of my pictures are on a lower aperture setting and so, I wasn't able to see it. I usually set my aperture setting high for landscape shots and lo and behold, dust speck. But let me post a picture before I continue ranting.
Where is the speck you ask? Well, I used this ingenious little device called, The Internet, and asked its google oracles what can be done about this. The council converged and gave me a sign: Photoshop, clone tool. Thus I began my arduous journey to understand and master the technique that is the clone tool(That is a farce because I haven't mastered anything. I just clicked around to get rid of the dust speck).
I thought the sky looked good in this one. I've been studying at Barnes and Noble lately and I've been looking at this photo book when I have brain farts. One of the points it made was that if I was in a situation where I had to decide between vivid sky and shadowy stuff or not-so-great looking sky versus visible stuff, that the former might be better as it makes those certain things look more like monuments but also, they become focal points of the picture.
The setting sun. It's such an even looking picture with the wave hitting the sand at the right angle. Weird.
Last shot I could take before the sun fell behind the clouds.
I thought that this picture was really gorgeous. The colors are great and the water seems almost fake. It's weird also because the horizon seems to curve upwards at the edges, but all it really is, are the clouds. Kind of a fisheye feel.
Time continues.
The last bits of light at this setting.
Clouding the mind, with clouds.

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