RandomFusion

Camera Fail

About 2 weeks ago we had an awsome Halloween party here at the new mud hut and all was going well. I made asian style tiny chickens, yes I actually tracked down somewhere that sold tiny chickens, to go along with a whole host of other little goodies. My wife even made up an amazing chocolate mess for desert. Lots of food and drink were had by all lots of catching up with friends and family, and even a spontaneous Mario kart game broke out. All in all I considered it a complete success. All was going very well until about 3/4 of the way though I went to pickup my trusty Sony a200 and the camera strap caught on the counter. Now according to the physics analysis of the slow motion playback (in my head) my hand did not have sufficient coefficient of friction for me to notice and stop pulling up when the strap started pulling down. So the camera successfully wrestled from my grip, now proceeded to make a break for the exit, unfortunately gravity was its only motivation. It didn’t make it very far landing hard on the kitchen floor, where I pounced and trapped it preventing further attempts at escape. Now at first blush it still seemed to be working and I snapped a few more pictures with it at the party. It wasn’t until the next day that I realized it was making some strange noises now. Yep I borked my camera, so far I know the in body image stabilization is gone, but I’m not sure what else has stopped working. It also now makes a very strange noise every time you turn it on. I have investigated repairing it but it seems to be at a minimum 50% the cost of buying a new one, and I’ve come to the realization that I didn’t love this camera enough to make paying that much worth it. So I am exploring other options to take this as an opportunity to upgrade, maybe to something with a titanium body this time.

So for the time being and probably the next few months my primary camera is now my IPhone, so I may now have a new excuse to neglect this blog. But I think I am going to try writing about some proposals I have for new technologies that I thought of while ignoring the new rock DJ drone on incessantly about nothing on the radio during my drive home. So we’ll see whats next.

So Lately I haven’t really been feeling the photo thing. Pretty much all aspects of photography have been eluding me for the past few months and the quality of my shots definitely show it. These two shots in this post are the only shots I liked from a 2 hour photo walk at the Oregon Zoo with Matt. I have never come back with so few decent images from a zoo before.

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This past week I have spent several hours learning my new collection of photography tools. One area that I have been wanting to explore is photo stitching, the art of making amazing panorama images. At several points over the past 8 months I have taken images in a series with the intension to create panoramas but I had never found the right tools to stitch them together. You can imagine my excitement when I came to understand that not only does photoshop do an amazing job of stitching but lightroom makes the process almost magic. read more »

Head on Airplane Engine

Today we went to the Evergreen aviation museum in McMinville Oregon, which is home of the Spruce Goose. While I was kinda disappointed with the museum, it was expensive and really didn’t have that much to offer, it allowed me to get a few very interesting shots of some amazing machines. read more »

I find that I often get caught up in focusing on tools rather what I can do with the tools. Perhaps its the engineer in me but in most aspects of my life when I endeavour to do something I find myself spending a lot of time selecting, and to be honest often buying, the “correct” tool for the job. Now there is nothing wrong with having the best tool for the job you can but focusing on tools can impose artificial limits on your work. If I spend too much time looking at and understanding the use and capability of a given tool I find my self thinking “oh if I had that tool I could do that!”. Where if I just set out with what I had I would think “ok how do I do that with this?”. I find this focus on tools has often limited my creativity when solving a problem.  read more »