Oct 23 2006

Sunday was much nicer

Saturday wasn’t all that fun, and if you want to know about those events, you can read the entry below this one. However, today was much nicer. I was in good company, ate a nice meal, and went on a long photo shoot.

First, I met up with Deb and we went over to a nice restaurant for fried chicken. It was a family meal where you don’t actually order anything off of a menu. Instead, the waitress brought out five pieces of chicken, mashed potatoes, corn, green beans, and rolls. The chicken was pretty good as was the corn, which had little diced up pieces of bell peppers. The mashed potatoes were good as well, but they were a little on the salty side. After the main meal, we each got a slice of chocolate cake with pecans (pronounced “peek-ans”) on top.

One of the funniest things was that when we walked in, these two waitresses were talking about me. The one said “did you see him?” and the other responded with “no; was he cute?” The first one corrected her, saying “no, he was HOT.” It was entertaining. After that, our waitress came by the table quite frequently to quote-unquote “see how we were doing.” While it was flattering, it was more amusing than anything else.

Second, we went to the park and I shot some pictures of roses and a couple other things. Nothing too interesting. Later on, after the sun went down (which you couldn’t tell all that well because of the clouds), we went to the freeway to shoot some long exposures. I got a few neat shots of cars passing by, and since I had the shutter speed between 15 and 30 seconds their headlights and taillights formed fluid lines in the photo. After those highway shots, we went to this other park and I took a really interesting shot of a bridge. Again, since it was a long exposure, the water looked like a smooth oil-painting. It’s probably the only one of the night that I’ll end up printing, although some of the others were good.

So, today turned out to be a lot better than yesterday. I hope that this week goes by just as smoothly and quickly as did today. The only regret I have about today is that it couldn’t have lasted longer. 🙂

|:| Zach |:|

Oct 21 2006

The events of Saturday

Saturday turned out to be quite an uneventful day. It started out with some nice sunshine, but that changed to overcast nastiness by the middle of the afternoon. I went car shopping with my Mom and Dad around 13:00. We went to lunch at this oriental buffet that wasn’t all that great, but at least it was tolerable. Interestingly, out of all the cars we looked at today, the first one proved to be the best deal. It was a 2001 Nissan Maxima. The only thing that was really wrong with it was that one of the seats has some very visible tears, which the dealer said he would fix before sale.

After car shopping, I just sat at home and did random homework assignments. I finished Give a Boy a Gun by Todd Strasser. I personally found the book to be poorly written and overly dull. It was a fictionalised continuation of the Columbine school shootings. It really didn’t have a whole lot of substance and was written in a very choppy and sometimes incoherent manner. The other aspect of the book that I found really annoying was the listing of supposed statistics at the bottom of a good number of the pages. These “stats” were sometimes from unscientific sources like Rolling Stone, or were completely uncited. I found them to be more distracting than helpful.

After I meandered around for a while and finished that book, I started translating a Russian article about the movie Сволочи, which is pronounced “Svolochi” and means “bastards.” I ordered the movie and can’t wait to see it. I usually don’t like war movies, but this one does seem interesting because it talks about how it was often the youth (far younger than the draft age in most countries) in Russia that were forced to serve in the army.

Now I’m just planning on reading a couple more books, maybe writing a paper, and going to bed later on.

|:| Zach |:|

Oct 20 2006

Bogen qualms

After days of consideration, I still have a couple qualms with the equipment that I’m looking at buying for my camera. The shutter release poses no problem whatsoever. I’m going with the Canon name because it seems to get better reviews than the generic ones. The tripod legs aren’t causing me much confusion. I decided against the Manfrotto carbon fibre (CF) legs because they were just too expensive. The 3011 legs are the way to go for me (as of right now, that is). The only decision I have to make about the 3011 legs are whether to get them in the original aluminum finish or the black finish. Here are the pictures of both:

Black: Aluminum:

That, however is a rather small decision to make. The colour of the legs doesn’t really matter that much to me.

Now, the big decision that I have to make is on the head. I really want to get the Manfrotto 3265 Grip-action ball head:

because it seems to be the easiest to use and have the widest free range. However, the one thing that concerns me is its maximum weight capacity, which is only about 2540 g. My camera body weighs 685 g, and my heaviest lens (the EF 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS USM) weighs 1380 g. Doing the math, 685 + 1380 = 2065 g, which is quite close to the maximum weight capacity. The weight differential allots for a mere 475 g buffer.

At first I worried about the weight when I would potentially invert the tripod center column–in order to take pictures of subjects low to the ground–that the force of gravity would pull on the camera body and lens, surpassing the 475 g buffer. That would result in the unfortunate destruction of the camera body and the L lens. However, upon further thinking, I realized that I would probably never use the 100-400mm L upside-down, but rather I would use my EF 100mm f/2.8 Macro USM instead. That lens only weighs 600 g; significantly less than the 100-400mm L. That means that the combined weight of the body (685 g) and the macro lens (600) would be 1285 g; allowing for a 1255 g buffer. I believe that type of buffer should be sufficient for inverting the center column.

The other possibility would be to get a pan-tilt head which supports a higher maximum weight (3991 g). The problem with that type of head is it requires more adjustment to get to the right position. While that isn’t necessarily a big deal, I like the free movement of the grip-action ball head.

As of right now, I’m thinking about going with the grip-action and trying it out. Later on down the road, I will purchase different types of heads (including a pan-tilt) to support larger maximum weights.

Enough technical rambling for now.

|:| Zach |:|

NOTE: all images were taken from bogenimaging.us