_Mark_

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Below are the 2 most recent journal entries recorded in the "_Mark_" journal:

June 15th, 2009

03:11 am

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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September 9th, 2008

10:28 pm

[Link]

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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