_Mark_
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Below are the 7 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:
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03:11 am
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Continuing adventures
Since our last episode, I've upgraded cameras again - Canon finally came out with a 20x superzoom, and even after using the SP-550UZ and SP-570UZ for over a year, I'm still happier with the Canon UI. Also, Canon's autofocus algorithms work much better for me (I've gotten far more bird-in-tree shots without needing to resort to manual focus... only the catbird, and sometimes the cardinal, linger long enough for that to be worth the trouble :-)
More recently, that's gotten my shots of my first eagle (and eagle kit)  and closer to home, first moorhen and close shots of a tree swallow. (the latter was accessible because I'm still going out in  the Airis Kayak.)
I haven't entirely neglected my traditional hobbies - spent an afternoon touring the  Taza Chocolate factory in Somerville ("over by the junkyards and car shops" :-)
Went to Pycon in Chicago again this spring, but it looks like I didn't get around to posting those pictures; shooting 45 pictures/day (since 1 January - 55/day since 1 April, weather matters though the birdfeeders really helped this winter) it's sometimes difficult to keep up with the tagging - though maybe I have enough data to build a bird-recognizer now. (Working "near" NLP gives me a new appreciation for what computational modelling can do - heck, my camera can identify multiple human faces in a picture, and iPhoto (which I can't actually use) can match them... so it should be at least possible to do at the level of "hmm, you've got 300 heron pictures here, I bet this is another one"...)
Speaking of work, MetaCarta is still around; we've even got an open req (in Marketing, not engineering, sorry) and recent funding (as well as, of course, actual customers :-) Poking around on LinkedIn (while setting up my Google Profile) reminds me that I've been on this project for over 7 years now, which is an unusual level of attention span for me :-)
Tags: birds, chocolate, metacarta, photography, picture, scenery, travel, work
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10:28 pm
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Upgrades
Experience with the little packraft last year convinced me I wanted something that was a little more boat and a little less portable; thus the Airis Sport 11 above, full scale inflatable kayak - weighs as much as a fiberglass one, but fits in it's own custom backpack that fits the back seat of the Mini :-)
On the camera side, I'm still averaging a little under a hundred pictures a day (mostly weekend bursts but starting my weekdays dragonfly-hunting in the front yard helps too) and I've abused the SP-550UZ enough to need to get it repaired twice now; it's due for a third, Canon's photokina announcements disappointed me, so I'm now using the SP-570UZ. A little bulkier, so it has MORE BUTTONS which turned out to make things like manual focus easier to get to - but the 20x lens really provided enough additional "reach" (in terms of, for example, picking up a turtle in this  picture that I didn't notice in person) that I'm happy with the extra size, even if it is always on me.)
I've also settled into a comfortable shooting and captioning workflow with the EEEpc  with kphotoalbum for captioning and tagging, and a handful of python scripts to sort and upload. Yay cheap hard drives :-)
I've also gotten more adventurous about going places with picture taking specifically in mind; aside from the regular trips to local wildlife hotspots, this year I've been to Chicago  , Los Alamos  , the VLA  , and Camden, Maine  . (So also "yay cheap 16G SDHC cards"... everything else is getting more compact and portable/nomad-friendly - but not bandwidth...)
Of course, I haven't gotten any better at writing more often :-)
Current Location: all over the place!
Current Mood: geeky
Current Music: Wicked Soundtrack
Tags: computers, photography, scenery, toys
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02:01 am
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Summertime
Over a year with the SP550UZ and I'm still learning new tricks with it... or at least interesting ways to cheat :-) I'm also still more likely to spend any given Saturday taking 300 pictures than hacking - and yet I've actually built more personal code and tools in the last year than in many previous ones. Maybe I really am getting a bit more organized. A little. Riiiight...
(Yeah, yeah, organized hasn't included posting more than a couple of times a year, either :-)
Tags: photography, picture, weather
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01:31 am
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Hobbies
One of the reasons I've stuck with smaller cameras instead of going DSLR is that I've felt that the really interesting pictures are more a result of opportunity than hardware - and having a camera always on hand has more value than the extremes of shooting range.
This shot demonstrates that :-) This juvenile hawk was under an evergreen bush on my front sidewalk; I was eating breakfast and saw a pair of cardinals come screaming out of a bush, saw some movement below, and realized suddenly "that's not a squirrel..."
(I am looking forward to the actual return of spring, but the birds in my yard seem convinced that it's already here :-)
Tags: birds, photography, picture, spring
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01:12 am
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European Vacation
I'm back and just about over the jetlag... and since I'm now a year behind on Iceland stories, I figure I should at least get some of the Spain stories down now...
Instead of going to EuroPython this year (it's next week, in Vilnius) I arranged my habitual two weeks in Sweden to overlap with Jesse and Kaia's "elopement". That's a fascinating story told elsewhere and a few hundred pictures over on flickr. Barcelona seems to be a nice and well-behaved city; even the less pleasant parts merely reminded me of Brooklyn :-)
Since I don't actually like cities to start with, Laura found a British couple who do casual bird-watching tours of the Ebro Delta. I've only posted about a dozen of the nearly seven hundred pictures I took that day (mmm, eyestrain... and when I was back in the hotel with a cold facerag over my eyes, I *still* saw flapping wings in various configurations :-) The delta has a fascinating collision of ecosystems - on the one hand, you have the Mediterranean and the brackish mixture of that with the mouth of Ebro river; on the other hand, you have vast rice paddies irrigated with fresh water drawn by canal from far upstream on the Ebro. In between, lagoons and marshes, and a range of nature preserves easily reachable over the course of the day. Sightings included night heron, coot, flamingo, swallow (nesting *in* one of the bird-viewing blinds :-) tern nests, bittern, purple heron, avocet (and chicks), various ducks and ducklings, egret, mundane and exotic gulls, and some fish. Plenty of long-lens work, as well as occasional closeups (the night heron seemed pretty fearless, as well as entirely uncamouflaged.)
Also of minor note, I didn't bring a laptop to Spain, just a somewhat-obsolete Archos PMA430 "image tank" with wifi. This served pretty well, running OpenPMA but that wasn't much of a challenge - all that actually needed was USB Host support and rsync, I didn't do any captioning until I was back in Sweden (and much of it I deferred until the flight back to the US.)
Current Location: home at last
Tags: photography, spain, sweden, toys, travel, wedding
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02:55 am
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Birds and Snakes and Airplanes...
    
New toy - Olympus SP-550UZ. 18x zoom. I'm now a lot closer to "if I can see it I can shoot it" while still having a camera that I can have on me most of the time... only two downsides: xD cards are evil and I've been enjoying it so much that I've been spending time with the camera that I probably should be spending on other things... I tried to read the first few chapters of RESTful Web Services, enjoyed the introduction, got a few pages in to chapter one - and then went for a 3 mile hike in the rain, and found it to be a better choice, simply due to finding this and this in the middle of nowhere. This is more than just new-toy-glow, I'm averaging 80 pictures a day and far more of them make it to flickr than before.
It was definitely worth not waiting for the Canon S5-IS (the announcement of which was why I was open to looking at a larger camera.) I've even changed some of my summer plans to be more photo-oriented (not entirely because of this, but it was a real influence.)
Great Meadows NWR turns out to be a pretty good place to watch planes going into Hanscom (BED) while also observing nature; the Piaggio "pusher" above is probably more unusual and distinctive than most of the critters I saw that day :-)
Current Mood: enthusiastic
Current Music: R.E.M.
Tags: photography, picture, toys
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11:13 pm
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Even gloomy days can have adventures...
Last weekend, it was raining... and had been raining for a long time... classic gloomy New England winter-isn't-quite-done spring weather (though the last weekend in April is pretty late in the year for this kind of thing.)
Saturday, stayed inside and hacked. Sunday, decided I'd had enough of this, it wasn't raining all that much and I should at least get out and have lunch. Did my usual trip over to Ice House Pond (got some good reflection pictures, a cloudy sky is interesting for that, but nothing exciting.) Couldn't get up the motivation to do one of the farther-away hikes, so I went over to Great Meadows instead, to see if it was less flooded. Turned out it was, and that meant I got pictures of a Blue Heron and some muskrats up close, along with a nesting goose. I think that was pretty successful, for a visit to an otherwise inaccessible park.
On the way home, I realized that there was still some light, and that it was gloomy and wet enough that the Old North Bridge, the biggest non-shopping tourist destination in Concord, would probably be empty, and that the bridge might be good for getting more wildlife pictures (I've seen ducks and turtles there before.) Sure enough, the parking lot was nearly empty and partly flooded. I waited out a brief "real" downpour, and headed in to the park. Lots of flooding, mostly geese in the river, not that many people around so I got some good angles on the bridge itself.
If you look carefully along the left edge of that picture, you'll see a person standing next to the Minuteman Statue. He saw me taking pictures, and walked over with a camcorder on a tripod, and said roughly "I'm shooting a music video - just a little thing to put up on youtube, I'm an aspiring country singer from Boston - could you take some shots of me with this?"
After pointing out that while I knew the equipment, I didn't actually have any real experience shooting video, I took the camera and did some angles, some zooming, some closeups... listening to the singing and the lyrics (mostly the word "despair" :-) he'd certainly chosen a suitable setting for it. I figured at least he'd be able to use some of the guitar-strumming closeups.
Turns out that, behold the power of modern video editing, a fair bit of it turned out to be useful (it's also up on the artists' own site.) Basically the entire section with him walking onto the bridge, up to the four-frame dancing insert (except for the little reflected-goose interlude) was my shooting.
Conclusions:
- Depressing and gloomy days can still hold adventures
- On days when only crazy people would go out - sometimes you find other interesting crazy people... :-)
- Music videos have gotten a lot easier to produce...
Tags: birds, photography, picture
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eichin's journal
