Goodbye, Sam
New photo posted on my Flickr Blog!
Way cool Rube Goldberg Machine Commercial
Ok this is just awesome! “The Cog” by Honda…. (found while scanning the blogosphere at http://www.ryanablock.com/)
Million Micro March
Well, the Ontario Geocaching Association is holding a contest through June 21, 2007 – to see who can place the most geocaches in Ontario. This will lead to many more finds, but it will be interesting to see how the quality vs quantity argument plays out with local cachers. Will Hamilton become another Erie, Pennsylvania with micros in every parking lot? Will the OGA Executive’s argument that it’s membership is above such things hold true? This will be interesting to see.
The upshot of this, either way, is more geocaches and that means our weekly caching night will have plenty of spots to visit before we run out of caches to find. If you are a geocacher in Ontario, and have an idea for a cache, this might be the time to place it.
Take That, Large Record Labels!
Well, this is interesting: http://bumrushthecharts.blogspot.com/. It seems the podcasting world intends to show the major recording labels who’s boss. It will be interesting to see how successful they are at doing this.
Of course, the cynic in me also thinks this could just be a method of getting large revenue for one specific independant artist…..
Fun with Nikon Capture NX
So, I’m playing around with Nikon Capture, a great little program to keep handy if you use a Nikon type digital SLR camera. I always shoot in RAW format, which has better image reproduction than JPEG does – the files are 12bit colour channels instead of 8 bit, leaves for some wiggle room in post-processing. Nifty things I’ve found so far are the various colour controls – set the white point, set a black point and pow! watch your dynamic range come alive in the photograph. You can set controls for various colours to achieve effects like enhancing a blue sky, or bring out the white in a wedding dress. I’m having so much fun in there that I’ve set my camera to default to Adobe II for the colour mode – best suited for post processing applications.
One thing to note, however – Nikon Capture is one program that doesn’t handle Windows XP’s “Data Execution Prevention” mode very well – I had to put exceptions in to handle it, or every file I opened rendered instead an error message “Unable to open file xxxxxxx”. Apparently, Photoshop CS2 is another program that doesn’t like DEP either, but I haven’t seen the ill effects of that yet.
Up to speed now
UpOriginally uploaded by Gregory Pleau.
Got my good news call from Nikon on Thursday. Seems they repaired my flash. Friday night was geocaching night – and I tried to play with the coloured gels on my flash unit. Well, I learned one thing already — don’t trust them on a windy night. Got to chase that little gel around a bit, as it doesn’t stay in the flash very well.
We visited a few caches on Friday – the best one had to be “Big Echo“, a 7 stage multi up and down Little Etobicoke Creek. Some of the more clever micros that I’ve seen in a while. Especially the one on the hydro tower. We also visited Mini-Multi – which has a downright evil second stage – and Little Echo.
Golf Depot was placed a little close to someone’s fence for my liking, and Anne/Margaret had us drive around the block a few times looking for parking – eventually we stashed the car in a church parking lot.
The photo comes from Etobicoke’s Secret Green – this is a cache that’s been on our todo list for a while now, having gleaned the co-ordinates from a 20+ stage multicache, we didn’t have time that night to come by and visit this one. The writing was created simply by moving a flashlight (aimed at the camera) during the 30 second exposure. Fun fun fun!
Ain’t technology wonderful?
So, here I am – like usual – with a partial SLR system on the go. I bought a nice SB-600 flash unit for my Nikon D70s camera back in September. The flash allows me to do wonderful things with my camera, and has allowed me to completely rediscover flash photography.
I’ve spent the last few years shooting mainly with a tripod or by cranking up the ISO (or even standing really still) because I generally don’t like the effect of using an on camera flash at night – having my subject overexposed while the mood of the shot is ruined by blowing out the background isn’t my idea of a good photo.
My D70s has a feature called “commander mode”, though that changes everything. I can use the flash off the camera, and it will be synchronised to the camera. I use the flash more during the day than I do at night! Put the flash behind a leaf and get all the veins in intricate detail. Put the flash on the ground and use it to remove those racoon eyes that a midday sun casts on human subjects. The possibilities are endless for creativity … only ..
Only the thing stopped working before I changed the first set of batteries! I changed several batteries – Alkalines – and took the flash into Nikon in mid-October. The lack of functionality cost me some Thanksgiving photos indoors (bounce flash is so much better than on camera). The service guy at Nikon swapped batteries and the darned thing started working again! Feeling like some sort of idiot I continued to use the flash until a geocaching trip in December.
When I tried to use my flash there, I got nothing. It worked the day before, but I guess the car ride proved too much – this is inside it’s protective case and stored securely in the car.
I swapped batteries to some fresh NiMH ones … didn’t work. So I switched to alkaline ones …. same result. Even brand new Lithium batteries didn’t bring this thing to life! This time I knew it was good and dead. It’s now just over a week before Christmas — the time that I’m most interested in having bounce flash capabilities.
So, I called up the place that I bought it – Black’s Camera. Note, I’ve had the flash for just under three months at this point. Blacks refused to do anything with the warranty service and instead directed me to ship it to Nikon for the manufacturer’s warranty. Good thing that Nikon is just down the road from where I work.
Normally, if I have a piece of electronics that dies outright in under 90 days, I’d expect an immediate straight exchange on the product. Apparently, the camera industry works another way. Nikon is suggesting they *might* fix it, or replace it, but they won’t know what they’re going to do until mid next week sometime. Five weeks after I dropped it off, for the second time. So far I’ve been able to use the flash for about 60% of the time that I’ve owned it.
If you decide to get one of these flash units, I’d suggest you get two. One for active use, while the other one is in the repair shop. From what I’ve been reading online, it appears these things are designed very fragile inside.
Here’s hoping that I get good news when it comes. I’ve got a nice set of gels for the flash that I want to get busy with!
The View from Downstream
I visited a couple geocaches on Friday. As I routinely go caching with a few friends, there are caches that I just never got around to visiting – yet these spots are within a few kilometres of my home!
When I set out, the forecast called for chilly temperatures, high winds and loads of rain. Fortunately for me, those conditions stayed away until I was about 200 metres from the car, on the way back from the two geocaches I visited.
The waterfall pictured is located just north of Terra Cotta conservation area, along the Bruce Trail. I dragged my tripod 2 kilometres to get it here, up a couple hills to boot. Good thing I brought it, as flowing water is perfect for long exposure shots. I used my brand new 8X Neutral Density filter and set about taking various exposures ranging from 1 second to 8 seconds. I’ve also been playing with some of the RGB/sRGB colour spaces on the camera. This was taken in Mode IIIa, but I instructed Nikon Capture to render it in Mode II instead. Didn’t really have to make any other modifications to the photo – so it’s pretty much posted as I shot it.
The moss along this trail was almost fluorescent green. The weatherman says it’ll be covered in snow at this time tomorrow, so I think it’s a good thing I made it here when I did. I’m actually looking forward to a good winter blast – I’ll head down to the Barber Mill and the Credit Valley Footpath once it hits to see if I can get some good “winter” shots this year after all.
More APRS Fun
Took the next logical step in my APRS development, and now I’ve got a map server that will show APRS stations on a wonderful map. At the moment, the map is showing North America, but I’m going to switch it to a Golden Horseshoe map instead.
The APRS server is running at https://www.gregorypleau.com/aprs
VA3GDP APRS Server
New project this week. I’ve obtained the aprsd software from sourceforge and it’s listening to one of the IGate servers out there. Some of the cool things I can use this software for?
– I can send a message to my server and have it do something/respond to my callsign. APRS being what it is, the responses will be kept short and sweet. This isn’t meant to replace packet radio after all. The messages will be iGated back out to RF if I’ve beaconed recently
– All stations within 400km of my home are being monitored via TCP/IP (I don’t have an APRS base station at this time), and I can have programs act on this data. For example, I can watch for weather alerts or update a web page with APRS stations on it.
– One interesting thought…. watch for EMERGENCY messages and send them out over SMS to a cell phone. May be useful for ARES type activities.
We’ll see what transpires, but for now the daemon software is running – and all access to it is restricted to my internal network, for now. Not sure how much I trust software that appears to be dormant for three years in the development cycle.