Arctangential

I’ve finally gotten around to uploading the pictures I took over the past few months. I don’t know why it takes me so long to get them up; it’s really only about a minute or two of work per picture, what with color correction, rotation, cropping, writing a description and setting a geotag. I really should just take the half hour and do it right after each photography outing, but it somehow never quite happens. Anyways.

I uploaded a few new pictures to my “at home” set, including some weird candy and some Korean items that I found upon moving into my new apartment:

http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/sets/72157600900104620/

I uploaded a bunch of new pictures to my Seattle Zoo set:

http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/sets/72157600901180609/

And I went to find some local roadside attractions, pictures of which I put in my “Around Town” set:

http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/sets/72157600929873009/

That is all.

For Martin Luther King Jr. weekend, Marika and I took a road trip down to Portland. Before we left, I printed out a bunch of spots from Roadside America and we took the kind of “long way around” to see some of them. They didn’t all work out; some were too hard to stop for, others we couldn’t find, some we found but they were lame. However, it was a really nice drive, and we did see some interesting things.

First, we drove down past Tacoma and drove past the Metal Cows, but we didn’t bother to stop and take pictures. Then it was on the Raymond, WA and the Town of Metal People:

Next we hit Long Beach, WA, home of both the World's Largest Frying Pan and the Marsh Free Museum:

We had lunch at a little place on the main drag there. I had been generally apprehensive about the quality of food we’d be able to acquire on this road trip, but this place was really good. I had one of the best hamburgers I’ve eaten, which came with a wonderful cold pasta salad.

Next it was down to Portland, via the Astoria Bridge, which goes across the mouth of the Columbia River and is for sure the longest bridge I’ve ever driven on. It was really pretty scary. Once in Portland, we had dinner at a place called Calypso, a really wonderful pirate-themed Caribbean place. I would absolutely recommend it for anyone living in or visiting Portland.

The next morning, we began with a breakfast at Zell’s. This place is small but very popular; we had to wait outside for about 10 minutes, then inside for another 10 minutes after some space on the indoor waiting bench opened up. By the time we were seated, there were probably 20 people waiting around outside. Considering the temperature out there, I think this speaks volumes about the quality of the food there. I had a “Reuben Scramble”, which was corned beef and cheese scrambled with eggs and served on rye toast with a horseradish sauce, with coleslaw and country potatoes next to it. It was wonderful. Exemplary. Marika had a mushroom and gorgonzola omelet which was also quite tasty.

We then drove around Portland a little bit, finding some roadside attractions and not finding others. We did find the Strip Club Shaped Like a Jug, the World's Smallest Park and the Chocolate Waterfall. We did not find the Velvet Museum nor the Grave of the Wonder Dog. On the drive back to Seattle, we failed to find the Jefferson Davis Highway Marker, but we did find the Squirrel Bridge:

We then had a bite to eat in a diner near said bridge. The food at the diner was… American. Not bad, neither good, but very simple, very homey. Maybe it was a little bit bad. But not terrible. While we ate, we overheard the waitress talking tot he people at the table behind us, explaining that the nice crust on whatever they were eating was because the cook had just discovered the broiler in the oven. She went on to say how he’d been cooking with hat oven for years and had only now realized it had a broiler. He was, I guess, really happy with it.

On the drive back to Seattle, we passed the very strange Gospodor Monument Park. And that was all.

I don’t know why this took me more than a month to write.

I’ve been taking more and more pictures lately. I’m sure you’re all both sick of hearing about it. I don’t care.

I like to take pictures of flowers, because they’re pretty and easy to get mediocre results from. The thing is, I don’t know a lot about flowers, so I have a bunch of pictures of flowers that I don’t know what they are. I am asking for your help.

http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/tags/unidentified/

Please help!

Some history: apart from having the occasional crappy 35mm camera as a child, I was not really into photography for a long time. I’ve always had a good memory and never really saw the value in taking photos. A few years ago, when I first started getting back into Lego, I decided to take pictures of all my Lego sets, and for that I needed a camera. I picked up a total piece of shit camera at Best Buy, from the opened item cage, for, I think, $100 or less. At some level, it worked, so I can’t complain too much. Its autofocus was terrible though, and with no manual focus capability, pictures of my small Lego sets turned out a lot like this: (click for bigger)

I got kind of tired of this whole situation, and so started looking around for a new camera. I’d finally decided on the Sony F717 when my boss at the time, a man who was independently wealthy from a dotcom stock sale, sent email to our group asking if anybody wanted a free Sony F707. I, of course, jumped up out of my chair and ran to his office to claim the prize. That was a good camera; it served me well for many years and took quite good pictures. It even had some pretty fancy features, like a neat laser-grid autofocus system for getting quality autofocus in low-light conditions.

However, the camera got old, the battery stopped being quite as nice, and I felt the yearning for new technology. I was hoping to upgrade to the next revision in Sony’s L-shaped semi-SLR line, which had continued after the F717 to the F828, only to find that the line had been discontinued and essentially replaced by Sony’s new DSLR, the Alpha. At first I was a little annoyed, because I didn’t really want to get into the whole SLR thing, but then I decided that it would be worth the investment, and I took the plunge.

And now I’m entirely into the whole SLR thing. I’m constantly reading about which kind of lenses, filters, flashes, tripods and even carrying cases I should be using. I’ve already spent more on extra lenses for my camera than the kit cost me in the first place, and just the other day I bought some more books to help me learn how to really get the most out of the thing. I think it’d been worth it though, I’ve taken some pretty decent pictures lately and I’m having a lot more fun with it.

This summer, the Pike Place Market Association here in Seattle put 100 pig statues all around the city. Other cities have done similar things; Chicago did cows, San Francisco did hearts and Toronto did moose. Even Seattle did pigs back in 2004, and they did them again. As a method to get myself outside a little bit, and to get me taking more photographs, and o help satisfy my unending urge to collect. I only found 97 of them; two had been vandalized and removed and the third was lost somewhere in a Macy’s which I did not feel the desire to fully explore.

All of the photos are here: http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/sets/72157601694170020/

Let me know what you think. Also, if anybody out there has a flickr account, please feel free to add me as a friend on there, and let me know so I can do the same.

Thanks!

Only 3 months late, I have finally uploaded the pictures I took on my trip to Albany back in May. They’re all taken on the train; I only brought my 70-210mm lens with me, and it turned out to really not be useful for taking pictures indoors. It did provide me with some good shots from out my train window though, so that’s fun. I didn’t keep very good track of where I took everything, so a lot of them have questionable geotagging, but with judicious use of Google Maps, I was able to identify a few of the locations.

The pictures are all here.

Up until recently, I hosted most of my photos on skrewtape.com, a website hosted for me with great generosity by my friend Conrad. A few weeks ago, I tried to transfer that hosting to my own account, and dreamhost, for whatever reason, has decided that I can’t do this. In the ensuing events, the site was lost. I could set it up again with Conrad, and I’m sure he’d be glad to, but all I ever did with the site was to host images, and I’ve decided to do that all in flickr now, so I’m letting the site die.

I just spent the past 2 weeks uploading every to flickr, adding descriptions, tags and geolocations to everything. Then I spent the past 2 days going through all my old LJ posts and updating the image tags and links to go to flickr now instead of skrewtape.com. They should be all updated, but please let me know if you notice anything broken. (Not that anybody reads my old posts, but hey.)

So now my complete photographic record is here: http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/sets/

Let me know what you think.

Edit:

All of the pictures I liked to before are broken now. I didn’t feel like going through and updating all of the links, so I just removed them. However, I’ve replaced the images with hosting at Flickr, and you can see them all here:

http://flickr.com/photos/skrewtape/collections/72157600912737160/

So good luck!

Original post:

I feel like I will be writing about this trip for another month. For now, I will just post pictures. These are all taken with my new camera, and I think they turned out pretty OK, although I had a bunch of trouble with the light being blown out in a lot of shots, and I have a combination problem of not having the eye to tell when my camera is cooked when I’m taking a picture and not having the patience / skill with GIMP to fix it after the fact. So, I’m not super happy with them but they are alright, so I am posting them onto the internet. All of the pictures are click-for-bigger.

These pictures I took of Alcatraz from the end of Pier 39. The first is taken with my 70-210 lens at 210mm, the second with my 200-500 at 500mm. The third is a digital zoom & crop of the second from the original high-rez source, showing just how much detail I got out of that lens. Seeing as how this is the only picture I’ve taken with that lens so far, I have to get my mileage out of it.

These are some pictures from our visit to Alcatraz itself. It wasn’t really very interesting, visually, so I mostly tried to take “artsy” pictures. Tried and, generally, failed. The first is the second and third level of cells in one of the cell blocks; the place is surprisingly large, considering that they never had more than, I think, 200 inmates at a time. The second is a similar shot of a row of windows; I liked how they put a big grate around them so they could still open to allow in air, but there’s no way a person could get out. Next is a picture of the city from the southern tip of the island, with the 200mm lens again. Next is a guard tower; the guards were actually locked into the towers overnight and couldn’t get out even if they wanted to — a good example of the kind of security they employed. After that is a picture of the island’s water tower, I assume now unused. I give “mad props” to whomever climbed up there to add the graffiti. There were similar epithets about India all over the island, I’m still not sure what they mean. The next is actually a picture I took on the dock while waiting for the boat to take us to the island. I thought I had some sand in my lens and I was fooling around to make sure it was OK. I just happen to like how this picture turned out. Finally, we have a picture of one of the many run-down and destroyed parts of the facility. I don’t think they have a ton of money to fix the place up, and getting construction equipment and material out there must be absurdly expensive, so the place is mostly a ruin. It’s kind of unfortunate.

These are some pictures I took of the Rodin sculpture “The Gates of Hell” at the Stanford Art Museum. First is a (badly crooked) shot of the whole piece. It was very bright when I took this picture; you can see that the wall behind the camera is entirely blown out. I was sure this picture wouldn’t turn out properly, but my camera did a truly magnificent job of making up for my mistake. The next 3 pictures are all detail shots of various parts of the sculpture, which is incredibly detailed — you could probably take 100 pictures of it and still miss small aspects of it.

Next we come to the sea lion pictures. If you don’t know the story, this is a group of sea lions that took over a part of pier 39 on the SF waterfront. For reasons I am not entirely sure of, instead of driving the seals off, they just built them a bunch of floating platforms, put up a fence to keep the people away, and let them hang around. They’re extremely loud, but quite cute. Not all of these pictures turned out incredibly well, but here they are anyways.

And finally, we come to the obligatory zoo pictures. The animals were very uncooperative this day; I would see one sitting in a spot that would make a good picture, and by the time I got my camera out, it would get up and move. Also, I was having too much fun actually being at the zoo, so about halfway through our visit I just gave up on the whole camera thing. Still, I like how most of these came out.

The first is of a giraffe which had been drinking; I like that you can see a drop of water falling, and the glinting off his whiskers. The second is a baby giraffe, eating leaves near its parents. The third is a small little deer-like creature called a Günther's Dik-dik and the next two are of a bird called a Waldrapp Ibis; an ugly bastard to be sure, but I liked its head plumage. Next we have a “François’ Langur“, who was just sitting around, looking at everybody walking past him. The next two are chimps and then two of flamingos.

And, that’s it. This turned out pretty long; sorry about that.

I took a few more pictures with my new camera, thought I would post them up:

This is just some stuff I had lying around on my desk. Taking pictures of something from straight above is pretty tough, especially when it’s pretty high up, so I don’t really like the angle these are at, and the framing is a little bit messed up because I had to crop out some other stuff to rotate them a little bit. I still kind of like the picture though.

This is the first real “art” picture I’ve tried to take. I think it turned out pretty good, apart from a few things. I think if I had it to do again, I’d put a smoother and lighter backing behind the lamp, like some very slightly off-white pasteboard or something like that. I also wish it was lined up a little better. Part of the problem is that the shade is a little bit crooked, and then it’s very tough to hold the camera just steady enough to line everything up perfectly. Maybe others wouldn’t notice, but it bugs me each time I look at it. I’m also not sure it’s perfectly centered. I’m going to have to work a little harder on precision in the future. However, I like the way it turned out in general, and I think I got the exposure just right.

I got a new camera this weekend. I’m not entirely sure why, but it sounded like a good idea at the time. I recently bought some 18″ bolt cutter for the same reason, but I’m not going to talk about them right now. Instead I want to talk about my camera.

Actually, I don’t want to talk about it too much, since there’s not a lot to say, apart from it’s a pretty fancy camera, and I like it, but it is going to take me some time to learn what all I can get out of it. This is the one I got.

Here is a picture of it, and is also the last picture I will take with my old camera:

The fact that I had an inordinate amount of trouble getting my old camera to focus the way I wanted is part of the reason I got a new camera.

Here is a picture of my old camera, which is also the first picture I took with my new camera:

And here is a picture of a plant, which I think turned out pretty well: