Dirkus Maximus

What a great day for a race! The water was a bit choppy, but the clouds kept the sun off us and the light breeze kept it cool. The choppy water definitely made for some interesting racing, slowing down some of the faster boats and keeping the heats tight. A couple boats had separate minor incidents because of the chop. They each spiked a sponson into the water at low-ish speeds during warm up laps, and proceeded to make a rather hasty and unplanned 180 degree turn. In both cases it shook up the driver a bit and managed to knock something in the boat out of whack, but neither the drivers nor the boats were badly damaged, and they were both in later heats.

Here’s a slideshow of some of my pics from today, you can also check these out on my Flickr account.

Created with flickrSLiDR.

I also decided to try a little HD video with the Rebel T1i I was using. This was shot at 720P, 30fps. It’s a bit shaky becuase 1) I was on a rickety dock that swayed in the wake of the boats, 2) I forgot to flip the IS in the lens to mode 2 for panning, and 3) I can’t hold a camera steady for shit. If you’ve got a decent Internet connection, make sure you hit the “HD” button in the Youtube player below to get the full resolution video!

I’m just about to head on out to the Carolin Cup International Regatta right now. I was going to do an embedded Stickam broadcast of the radio coverage, but… umm… there isn’t any. If I find out differently, I’ll spin back by the house and try to find the channel they’re broadcasting on, but I scanned the whole AM band and all the local FM stations and got nothin’.

I’m taking my laptop with me, so I may, possibly, perhaps, if I’m really really lucky, attempt to do a live webcast from the race, but I’m not real sure how well that’ll work on the craptastic “harbornet” free public access wifi down there. We’ll just have to see.

OK, so I *did* try to post some last week, mainly about the stuff I got done on my Honey-Do-List holiday, but the iPod ate my posts. Honest. I think the wordpress app pooped itself and isn’t posting any more. I’ll try futzing with it again later.

Anyhow, in unrelated news, the Carolina Cup International Regatta is this weekend. I didn’t plan a cookout this time around because 1) I failed miserably at it last time and 2) I’m dead broke and can’t afford the delicious grilled goodness for this weekend AND next weekend for the XBox party. Hell, I’m hoping I can host the XBox party at this point!

I’m going to be out at the waterside again this year, taking pictures. This time I went with a lightweight entry-level kit just to prove that it can be done. Seriously, you don’t have to have the top of the line to shoot an event like this. The extra weight around your neck is more often a burden instead of a bonus I’ll be shooting a Rebel T1i, mainly with an EF-S 18-55 and an EF-S 55-250. I also brought along a couple of the pro lenses, a 14mm and the venerable 100-400mm shotgun-style “nosebreaker” telephoto zoom. You never know when you’re going to have to shoot in tight quarters or pull in the action from across the harbor, right?

Just for grins, I also brought home the Powershot D10 waterproof/drop-proof/freezeproof camera (again). I have no idea what I’m going to do with it, but I FREAKING LOVE THAT CAMERA. Honestly, once you become a parent (especially a parent of 3 grade school aged kids) you realize that you gradually start rating gadgets less by the awesome cutting-edge new features they have, and more by the durability and fuckup-resistance qualities of the product.  The D10 can do everything my trustworthy old SD300 can do, plus a little more on the bells and whistles side of things, but the real selling point for me was the water and drop resistance. Seriously, I’d sell a few pints of blood for one of these. Luckily, we got two for the training inventory at work, so I think I’ll be borrowing one frequently.

Keep an eye on this page tomorrow, I may well set up the Dirk Cam with an old AM radio and live webcast the local radio coverage of the event.

I really need to write more often. Let’s catch up on some happenings since I last posted, shall we?

Wes To The Rescue!

Wes rescued a couple stray kittens recently. They have/had some kind of intestinal infection though. The runt of the litter was adopted by a co-worker of mine, but sadly the intestinal infection got him before the vet could really do anything. One day he was running and playing, and the next he was just done. The second kitten is still in our home and getting better. Once he’s all sorted out, we’ll be looking for a home for this little guy.

Boat Races Coming Up!

The Carolina Cup Regatta is coming back to E-City on the weekend of June 6-7. Hopefully this year won’t be as oppressively hot as last year. I’ll be out there shooting with whatever gear I can check out from work. I think one gear change I’m going to make this time is that instead of a 1D series camera, I’m going to take a Rebel. Yeah, yeah, I know. Blasphemy, right? Why the hell am I going to use the super low-end consumer stuff when I can check out the pro grade equipment for free? Come ask me me that question again whenever you’ve been carting that heavy S.O.B. around your neck all damn day. I’m also gonna see if I can find a better bag for the lenses I check out. Check out the promotional video here on Youtube. If anyone wants to do a cookout thing on Saturday the 6th, let me know. My last attempt at this was rather full of fail, but if we put off the eating until after we go shooting, we might have better luck.

XBOX Party and Cookout!

Tentatively scheduled for June the 13th, I’m planning on having an XBOX 360 LAN Party and Cookout. Hit me up by email for an invite. $5 a head by the Friday before gets you steak and/or pork ribs, a baked potato, salad, deviled eggs, and more. Free coke/pepsi/whatever, BYOB if you want brewskis. I’ll need at least 2 people to bring xboxxen, 3 if we can. I’ll borrow some projectors from work.

Random Hackery

Did you know that if your kids spill even a DROP of soda on an old 2003clear-sided Mac Pro keyboard, right below the “J” key, that it will get in between the membranes and rot out the trace to the letter “M”? Did you also know that Apple used 3 odd sized torx screws and no less than a BILLION tiny screws made from incredibly soft, easy to strip out metal to hold the keyboard together? Neither did I until tonight. I also discovered however, that you can tape down a single hair-thin strand of copper from a thin stranded copper wire as a solderless jumper sandwiched between the top layer and spacing layer of the menbrane to make the key work again. The trick to this kind of repair is using little “W” bends on either end of the jumper wire so that the jumper is crossing the trace several times to ensure good contact, instead of just leaving it straight and crossing the old trace once. The More You Know, right?

Not-So-Restful Vacation

I’m taking a week off this week to work on my never-ending Honey-Do list. I’ll be around the house a bit working on things like cleaning out gutters, cleaning out the shed, cleaning out the attic, and all sorts of otehr fun crap like that. Not exactly a great time, but it has to be done. I’ll be back to work on the 1st of June.

We’re having some interesting weather tonight, so I thought that I might take a break between storms to post these pics and a little info on how to get shots like this. Unlike some folks, I don’t sit at the window with the camera in hand waiting for a lightning bolt and hoping I’m fast enough to catch it. I have a lazy man’s method for getting these that makes it incredibly simple.

For a walk-through of the setup I use, click on through… (more…)

I’m at my parent’s house at the moment, so no lengthy post right now, but here’s a link to the Flickr photoset. Enjoy!

We needed a remote switch for an EOS Rebel XS for some product shots we were doing in the office, but we didn’t have one in the training department inventory. I started digging through some old boxes of cables and stuff looking for something to hack up, and this is the result:

Hell, it's still better than the controls on the new Shuffle...

This one’s pretty simple: Take an old Mac Classic mouse from before the dawn of time (I think it was busterd anyway, it didn’t even work with an ADB-to-USB adapter) and an old ADB serial cable from an old Canon PowerShot A50. Crack open the mouse, rip the adb cable out, cut the PCB traces going to the mouse button’s microswitch, cut the ADB end off the A50’s cable, solder the red and white wires to the C and NO terminals of the microswitch, jam it all back together, and shazam… the iTrigger. I left the majority of the mouse’s guts in place, including the ball. It just gives it a nice heft that makes it feel more like a quality piece of equipment instead of a quick and dirty hack job.

DO WANT.

I still have half a dozen of these damn things.

So, how about that game? Helluva comeback in the last quarter by the Cardinals. Too bad they lost anyway. Speaking of things that suck, how about those “3-D” commercials at the half? And how about all the people that were going to show up at Lance’s party, but didn’t? I went out of my way to get 16 pairs of glasses for Lance’s party, and now I have 3-D glasses out the wazoo. But enough of my bitchin’, what are we going to do with all these damn glasses?

Oooh! I know! Let’s make pictures that work with them! Here’s a Photoshop action that will help you re-use these glasses for your own nefarious purposes (right click, “Save Target As”). Just follow my guide to taking 3-D photos, plug the results into the Photoshop action, and enjoy!

Now, I’m sure “Color Code 3-D” has a ton of patents on the use of their glasses, so let me say this: make sure you don’t use any images you produce for any commercial venture; only use them for personal use, or to evaluate wether or not ColorCode 3-D’s technology is right for your application before you call them up and license the tech. The Photoshop action does not save the image; if you choose to do so, you do so at your own risk and assume all responsibility for the use of the image after that point. If you have any question as to wether your use of ColorCode 3-D’s patented amber/blue 3-D images may be in conflict with their copyrights and patents, call them, not me.

Google Maps Image Cutter is a sweet little Java based app made by the University College London’s Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis for displaying very high resolution pictures interactively on a web page without the need to transfer the entire image at once or have it taking up enormous amounts of memory in the browser’s cache.

In a round-about way, it also allows photographers to display a high resolution image on their page without needing to worry about people stealing it quite as much. Granted, if someone was industrious enough they could quite possibly stitch the original together from the hundreds or thousands of 256×256 tiles, but 99.999% of users out there aren’t going to bother with all that.

Here’s a sample, from a picture I took at the Carolina Cup Regata last year. If you look hard enough, you’ll see Mr. Justin Falls, who is the photographer for the local newspaper, and my next door neighbor. He dumped all his N*kon gear early last year and went whole hog for Canon cameras.

I posted a quickie with a 3-D Anaglyph image of the office/utility room/mud room/random crap room, but I didn’t really go into detail on how I did it. As a service to the Geek community, I’m going to post a short article on how 3-D photography works, and how to make your own stereo images. Read on to get the “whole picture”. (more…)

Ladies and gentlemen, Please put on your 3-D glasses now…

Click for full size. Right eye red, by the way.

The kids manged to get a few pairs of red/green anaglyph glasses, I figured it was finally time to try my hand at this. Turned out pretty good, I thought.

Remember how I said one of the kids dumped an orange soda into my trusty SD300? Well, my options for getting it back up and running were

• Send it in for repair. Of course, the second the guys at the factory service center see the words “liquid damage”, they just call it Beyond Economical Repair, box it back up, and kick it back out the door to me. End result? I’m out by shipping, and still have a busted camera.
• Upgrade. I can take the “Canon Loyalty Program” option, and get one of…
  • A refurb’d SD890 IS for $150 plus $10 shipping
  • A refurb’d G9 for $349 plus $10 shipping
  • A refurb’d EOS Rebel XT with lens for $299 plus $10 shipping

  The rub here is that I have precisely… (counts change in pockets) $10.59 to my name until payday. Maybe I’ll have like… $15 after that.

• Do it myself. Always the most entertaining option, and normally cheapest. I just have to order the parts from the parts desk up in Jamesburg.

The problem is that the DIY route, while cheaper than the upgrade, is still not “cheap.”

Yeah, buddy. That’s comin’ outta someone’s ass. I hope none of the three kids were counting on getting allowance between now and say, their 30th birthday. And the tooth fairy’s gonna start leaving a bill for disposal costs instead of a dollar under the pillow for a while too.

A busy desk is a sign of a busy mind... oh who am I kidding, this is a trainwreck.

Two printers, three computers, two camcorders, three barplugs, two coffee mugs, eleventy billion cables of varying size and function, and no idea where the f*ck my pen is hiding.

SECRET KEYWORD TO GET MY DRINK TICKETS: “Has you seen mah bukkit?”

Update: Lance won the tickets! His iPhone saved the day. Sorry the live feed never worked, There was something funny going on with my web cam, and we had a line of people forming already so I couldn’t work on it. We were SUPPOSED to take pictures from 7:00 pm to 8:30 pm, but it ended up being more like 6:45 pm to 9:15 pm.

I was shooting the 5D Mk II with a 24-70 2.8L on it. I promise I’ll photoshop all the black dots out.   I was shoting the pictures in both large fine JPEG and sRAW1 (11mp raw), if you want the image files, shoot me an email at work. I hope to have things printed before I go on vacation next week. I’ve got a total of 152 shots, that need to be printed in pairs of 5X7’s. That’s 304 prints. I’ll be burning through some serious ink and paper. I may even go so far as to downsize all of them and throw them up on the sample Canon Image Gateway Account I’ll be handing out the credentials to for the Canon Image Gateway labs. I’d post them here, but God only knows what kind of shitstorm that would start.

I know, I know, I haven’t written in a while. I have stretches where I think “Man, I should blog this” but never do. Anyhow, Just wanted to check in with some random bits of news.

• Thanksgiving went well, all both of them. We did Turkeyday at my ‘rents house, then did the Saturday after at Wes’s ‘rents house. Food was delicious at both. Wes and Ashley both came down with a funky stomach bug Sunday, but I’m not sure what they ate that I didn’t; mainly because I ate some of EVERYTHING.
• My Dad’s birthday is coming up, and I still have no freaking clue what to get him. Any suggestions from the peanut gallery for a retiree who likes to chill out in front of the TV most of the day with the Travel Channel and Maury? Maybe I could get him out of that chair once in a while with a Wii, or a refurbed PS2 with DDR…
• I managed to score myself a pretty sweet little set of photographic strobes second hand from The Lance. This, combined with the crazy K-Mart “Focus” tripod with roughly eleventy thousand points of articulation I got at a charity auction at work, and the Yashica Model A Twin-Lens Reflex camera I bought some time ago from Liz, and I almost have a studio. Now I just need some cheap 120 B&W roll film, some developing hardware and chemicals, and I’ll be all set to start screwing around with photography old-school style.
• We put up our Christmas tree. We ended up calling the old artificial tree out of retirement for this year. The kids really had their hearts set on a real tree, but finances dictated otherwise. The base on it was busted all to hell, but some duct tape and a tree stand from the thrift store up the street fixed that. Duct tape: Making your holidays better, one festive silver strip at a time.
• No mass-produced crappy ornaments for the tree this year! With three schoolage kids, we now have more than enough handmade ornaments to cover the whole thing in hand-crafted goodness. This year’s tree includes classic favorites such as “Snow-Bob Square-Man”, “The Scotch Tape Angel”, “Pirate Claus” and “The Christmas Yetis”
• Addy had Wes rolling a couple days ago. She asked Wes if they could have coffee and donuts for breakfast, Wes said “No, why do you want coffee and donuts?” Addy replied in a very matter-of-fact tone “I want to practice being a cop.”
• A while back some friends of ours, Barb and Greg, had to take their kids and nothing but the clothes on their backs and leave their home back due to mold. You might remember me saying something about it. Well, they’re trying to see if ABC’s “Extreme Home Makover” can do anything to help. I’m giving them a hand with the video portion of the application. I also put them in for the FM99 Christmas wish fund. They’ve figured out how to get things right. The bad news, it’s the worst possible outcome. They’re going to have to pay off the entire mortgage and an equity loan before they can even THINK about tearing down the house and rebuilding. The nice thing is that the City of Chesapeake is giving them an exception to tear down and build a new place even though they’re on less than three acres (there’s a zoning law against it) and a contractor they’re friends with is willing to build them a home and only charge them for materials; the labor will be pro bono. But now they’re stuck. The insurance won’t cover anything but two sheets of drywall that were damaged by some rainwater at some point, totalling $500 for materials and labor to repair that. Never mind the rest of the freaking house, right? You can read their whole story (and how to give them some help) at http://www.smitheieio.com
• Wes and I will be handling the portraits at the Canon ITS Holiday Gala this year. She’ll be working crowd control, and I’ll be snapping pictures at a furious pace. I think I might fall back and use the 50D this year, though I am kind of tempted to try and sneak the 5d Mk II out for a night on the town. Don’t count on me shooting my own version of “Reverie” on it though.
• The 2007 Toyota Yaris hatchback has enough room in the back to haul just under a quarter of a cord of firewood if you put the back seats down. She also wallows around corners like a drunken sow and has the stopping distance of a fully loaded coal train with that load.
• Wes still can’t start a fire in the woodstove without the aid of half a phone book worth of paper, a large barrel full of pinecones, and a blowtorch. On the other hand, I finally broke my month long streak of one-match fires today and had to resort to using a second match. I will teach her one day, I swear.

That’s about it for now. Check out some pics of the strobes I got from Lance and the Christmas tree after this link… (more…)

Snapped while out on an errand in Deep Creek. Even Wes was SHOCKED at how corny this joke was. I asked her for her camera phone, and she put up no RESISTANCE.

I love borrowing hardware from work. I took these with an EOS 5D, 50mm 1.2L, pair of Alienbee strobes and some generic backdrop. I had to set it all up in a spare bedroom at my parent’s house, probably 12×14 or so. It was a challenge to set it up, but it worked out, I think. Gallery of all the pics after the break. (more…)

The setup in the picture above costs significantly more than my HOUSE. That’s an XL-H1S, 2x tele-extender, EF-XL adapter, and the 1200mm f/5.6 EF lens. We could read the “NO SOLICITING” sign on a business halfway around Greenbrier Circle with it. The lens shown here is only the second one ever made, out of a total production of about 9 or so. They cost close to $90,000.00 new, and you had to order them and pay up front, and Canon would build it over the next three years and deliver it to you. The front few elements take 7 MONTHS to cure properly in an annealing oven. Sad thing is that this one was loaned out to Sports Illustrated, who apparently dropped it and cracked a chunk out of the edge of the frontmost element, then proceeded to pull a common customer manuver by saying “I dunno WHAT happened, it wasn’t like that when we put it away!” Never mind the dents and flat spots on the lens hod and all, right S.I.? The lens is on loan to us temporarily from our friends up at the home office in New York. Thanks guys!

The camera hanging off the back is an XL-H1s, a $9,000.00 high-definition professional camcorder. It’s none too shabby either.

Peep the gallery with more pics below.

Oh, and yes, that’s a hand-built pre-production sample of the Rebel XS in some of the pictures in the gallery too, probably the only one in Virginia, and likely one of a only dozen or so in the entire US. I love my job. (more…)

I just hacked up my own geotagging software based on my mologogo data from my web site. Not too shabby.

This is how it works.
I have a cheap-@$$ Boost Mobile Phone with the mologogo client software on it.
That client software “phones home” to my blog and saves waypoints to a database there about once a minute.
I take pictures with my camera.
I come home and download my pictures.
I copy the “selects”, the pictures I really like and want to upload somewhere, and copy them to a “postpics” directory on my desktop. This is more for my convenience than anything else.
I run a script I wrote called geotag.sh. It does the following things for me, with no intervention required:

• Grabs a list of all the pictures in the directory. For each picture in the directory, it does the following:
• Use exiftool to extract the shooting date and time.
• Query the database on my blog for the lat and long of the waypoint at that time, or the last known position before that time.
• Take that info, and jam it back into the image’s EXIF data using exiftool again.
• Repeat for each image in the list of images in that directory.

Once it’s done chewing on that, I upload my pictures to Flickr, and boom – pre-mapped for my convenience.

Note that you MUST turn on EXIF GPS data in your account security settings for this to work.

Also note that this is absolutely NOT for the faint of heart, and that I’m doing this with Mac OS and it’s lovely UNIX underbelly, with some seriously not-so-great and completely custom PHP/MySQL programming on the server end. This project was hacked up in a matter of a couple hours or so, starting from me needing to refresh myself on PHP and SQL because I hadn’t programmed them in a bit. No, I’m not ready to release any of this code, and I’m not sure I ever will be. Sorry.