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Darlington Sunsets

Darlington Road, The University of Sydney Darlington Campus. Shot on 31 July 2011 @ 4:52pm

  • 1/250 +/-2EV
  • f/3.5
  • 18mm
  • ISO 100
  • Canon EOS 500D
  • Photomatix Pro Mac, Photoshop CS5 Mac
So I saw this shot when I was walking home the other day. Thankfully uni wasn’t on and I could stand in the middle of the road without getting run over. I’ve been trying to get into HDR’s. I don’t do those extreme, crazy, unrealistic HDRs but I simply use it as a tool to overcome the limited dynamic range of modern DSLRs. I just like the extra colours that the HDR effects provide. Yes, I didn’t realise I was at f/3.5, may bad. It’s not quite 100% as to how I imagined it would turn out, but we’ve all got to start somewhere right?
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Shooting by Moonlight – 1

Outside my kitchen, Beragoo Homestead. Shot on 14 July 2011 @ 7:20pm

  • 15″
  • f/4
  • 18mm
  • ISO1600
  • Canon EOS 500D
  • Lightroom 3.4 Mac
Basically I shot using the available moonlight. Nothing else. Gives quite an eerie effect I think. Random car driving down Beragoo Road annoyed me cause I didn’t notice it until I went to process the photo. Ahh well.

 

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iPod of Shinyness

Mah iPod is still uber shiny despite having been bought in 2007! I am amazed 🙂

I mean, it’s good enough to use as a mirror!

Even the front has remained relatively unscathed. All I used was a cheapo silicon cover, none of this invisible shield stuff either.

I guess people look after more expensive stuff better? I can’t believe that an 80GB iPod cost $500, and nothing fancy like the iPod touch either. Just a bog standard music (and this ones does video) player.

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Back to Basics

So I’ve decided to go back to photography in film! I’ve been meaning to get back into it ever since I discovered that USYD has a darkroom but I left my (dad’s… I’m not that old) SLR all the way in Mudgee so for a semester I’ve been digital only. From memory, this camera takes decent photos. Dad had a better Minolta camera before but it got lost somewhere so he picked…

…the X-300 up about 25 years ago in NZ, at least he kept the Rokkor 58mm f/1.4. Speaking of which, I love the Rokkor, (once again) from memory, it was a really sharp lens and f/1.4 made it good in low light too.

I also have a Tokina 28mm f/2.8 and a Tokina 80-200mm f/4 as well (the zoom’s not that great at 200mm to be honest).

It’s a shame that Minolta couldn’t really make the transition into the digital age, they were really quite a pioneering company, they were the first company to make the first integrated 35mm SLR autofocus system. Sure they merged with Konica to form Konica Minolta but all there imaging was sold after their attempts to make it in the DSLR market failed. I guess I can just enjoy the fact that it wasn’t all wasted with Minolta’s imaging technology being the basis for Sony’s Alpha range.

But check this out, as I was looking for some film in Mudgee, I went to the only place that I thought would have any, and I managed to score not only 7 rolls of Fujifilm Neopan 100 36 exp but Brendon kindly gave me a stack of 52 and 55mm filters! I mean, these are Japanese Hoya and Marumi filters! I’m going to have soooo  much fun experimenting with all of these! Expect to see some cool photos on here… as soon as I figure out how to develop B&W film.

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Law and order: 1940 vs 1980

I was just doing some light reading of Business and the Law (2009) and I came across some really interesting facts which astounded me at how far our society has come in just forty years. To be honest, it was quite a bit of a shock.

There was a study (as reported by the Sydney Morning Herald, 1985) done in America which listed the top disciplinary issues as reported by teachers in 1980 and then compared to s similar study done in 1940 and the results, to me, were quite astounding.

1940:

  1. Talking
  2. Chewing gum
  3. Making noise
  4. Running in the halls
  5. Getting out of turn in line
  6. Wearing improper clothing
  7. Not putting paper in wastebaskets

1980:

  1. Rape
  2. Robbery
  3. Assault
  4. Burglary
  5. Arson
  6. Bombings
  7. Murder
  8. Suicide
  9. Absenteeism
  10. Vandalism
  11. Extortion
  12. Drug abuse
  13. Alcohol abuse
  14. Gang warfare
  15. Pregnancy

Now it’s possible to argue that we live in a much more relaxed and “freer” society now than in 1940’s but are the positive changes in our society greater than the negative? Is there a net social benefit? The rapid rate of social degredation to me indicates that something is awry in our society and we’ve gone from one end to the complete other, in just 40 years. What will the top 10 issues be in 2030 and beyond? Will society come back a little? Or have we gone too far, does the influence of corporations, on TV, in video games, all influence the younger generation into doing more and more extreme things? Do we need to protect our children more?

All interesting questions. Maybe I should have done Philosophy 🙂

Up to you. Me, I’m going back to reading the other 7 chapters that I need to have read.

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The result of boredom

In Chrome 8

So I was bored yesterday afternoon and after fixing someone’s website for them, I thought, what they heck, I’m bored and I wanna play with CSS3. So I started the design of my new home page. After 4 hours I’d gotten the majority of the design down pat and I spent the majority of this morning and part of this afternoon adding in the CSS3.

Yep, all that is done with code, no images (except for the slideshow of course)

Stuff I used:

  • jQuery for the slideshow
  • border-radius for that nice rounded edges effect
  • box-shadow for that subtle drop shadow around the border
  • opacity for the semi-transparent black bar
  • @font-face for the custom web fonts (WebKit/FF4 only as .EOT wasn’t working out for me)
  • Google Font Directory for the two fonts (Orbitron, IM English SC)
  • -webkit/-moz-transition for the slow fade in/out darkening on mouse over otherwise it just cuts from grey to black. Obviously this only works in WebKit/Mozilla so FF4+/Safari5+/Chrome
  • text-shadow (admittedly not CSS3, but still cool) for that embossed. Apple-esque copyright footer as well as using RGBa for the shadows on the links.

The hardware that this is hosted on was all free (except the domain)!

Actually, I signed up for this deal (only because it was free!) and I couldn’t really think of what to do with the 2000’s space/bandwidth that they provide considering that the site was 1.5MB in size before I compressed the images some more. But it was still going to result in a site that was 1MB large which would have chewed through the 250MB’s of bandwidth in no time. I had 100MB of space so I was fine on that front.

To get around this, I leveraged Google’s huge network of servers as my own private sort of CDN. Google App Engine provides 1GB bandwidth for free so I uploaded the images (700KB) there (convenient since Google Apps for Domain also provides App Engine). Then I used a minimised version of jQuery (80KB) provided Google API and finally the web fonts (200KB) I pulled from the Google Font Directory basically reducing the bandwidth on the free server to a few KB in CSS and HTML/PHP.

For someone who hasn’t touched CSS and HTML for over a year, I’m pretty proud of that effort (and intensive Googling)

Anyways, check it out here!

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Post-HSC Clean up…

Anyways, since I posted nada in December, first post of the new year!

Yeah, I know, the HSC was over months ago, but I’ve been that lazy and/or busy that I haven’t gotten around to cleaning up fully. I’ve shifted my computer from the office into my room.

Pros: I have privacy and can turn music up loud now! No need to stream stuff to my laptop now.

Cons: I’ve moved from a GbE connection to a 802.11g which tops out around 2-3Mbps (ie: ~250KB/s) which isn’t fun 🙁 took ~30mins to move 370MB of photos. I guess that what happens when you have a few double brick walls over 30m – even with my briilliant attempts to get a better signal, notice my USB-extension-tenna. Might get a 802.11n dongle (should push that up to 30Mbps)

Anyways, I love shiny photos.

Possible this screen is too big for the desk? Thinking of getting a smaller, say 19-22″ screen and setting up laptop with the 24″ (below) when I move out to Sydney.

OS X looks ohh so good on a 24″ screen 😀

Got a review of my Chrissy present (Samsung 2TB hard drive) coming up soon. That’s the black box sitting underneath the cordless phone.

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Well that was a waste of paper…

The HSC is a waste (of paper) I tells you! I’ve accumulated sooo much crap over the course of these last two years I thought I might highlight the fact that many trees probably died to put me through school.

Here! I took some photos and did some really quick stats in a spreadsheet.. data is pretty amazing…

Ludicrous amount of paper... just to revise maths

Textbooks! Yay! Good thing I didn't have to carry these all the time, just some of them..

Read on (otherwise the main page gets too long)!!

Continue reading “Well that was a waste of paper…”