It was a great game at Shiloh High this weekend.
It was great to get out and take my first sports photos of the year. I have a lot of open days left on my schedule, if you have an event you would like photographed please let me know.
The rain did put a damper on things, but it was a great weekend with a lot of vintage motorcycles, racing, stunting, and talking.
The Gallery is at http://photo.davenelson.com/DragonCon/DragonCon-2009/.
Here are some quick highlights
Here are some cool searches
Please do not let this happen to you. If you have the time and stubbornness please push the issue of Photographer’s rights as far as you can.
Trey Ratcliff of Stuck in Customs was harassed recently in Atlanta’s Centennial Olympic Park trying to take photos of the World of Coca-Cola museum and told that he was not allowed to take photos of the building.
I will be getting in contact with management of the museum and see if I can find out what their policy actually is.
Here is a link to Trey’s blog post: http://www.stuckincustoms.com/2009/08/09/nearly-getting-arrested-in-downtown-atlanta/
Price: EUR 19.99
Web Site: http://www.macility.com/products/typinator/
This is a great application that watches as you type and can fix your spelling mistakes in any application. It is a real life saver for me and my terrible typing/spelling. You can also set up shortcuts so that you can type a short bit of text and it gets replaced with much more text. I like to use “dt “, that is a “d” and a “t” followed by a space to insert the date, fantastic. And it will do this in any application, even the finder.
Over the next couple of weeks I am going to write about the software I have found for the Mac OS to make my transition from the world of Windows complete.
I am finally comfortable spending all of my computer time inside of the Mac OS. I still have WindowsXP in Bootcamp for playing games on Steam, and a couple virtual machines using VMWare and Parallels for the occasional Microsoft Outlook need or using Garmin Mapsource to upload maps and waypoints to my GPS, but I rarely miss Windows or proprietary applications that only run on Windows.
First up is BBEdit.
Price: $125
Web Site: http://www.barebones.com/products/bbedit/
The only real negative thing I can say about BBEdit is the price, $125 for a text editor just seems excessive. UltraEdit, which is still my favorite text editor is only $49.95, but on the Mac OS BBEdit is hands down the best text editor available in my opinion. I tried all of the free solutions and most of the payed solutions that have trials available and they all fall well short of BBEdit.
On Thursday April 9th I participated in a “Painting with Light Workshop” at Oakland Cemetery in Atlanta, GA. Judith Pishnery of Pisconeri Studio & Workshops brought us together for a night of photography and learning.
We began the night around 7pm filling out releases and donning nametags on the porch of the visitor’s center. After an introduction by Judith and some words from the cemetery staff we were left to wander the cemetery to get acquainted and take some pre-nightfall photos.
Around 8:30 Judith gave a presentation explaining how to paint with light. Although I had done some small experiments with a handheld speedlight and have written my name in the air with a flashlight before I had never “painted with light” to create a “real” photograph and I was looking forward to giving it a try.
Right away I learned that using a camera flash handheld really doesn’t put out as much light as I thought it did. Multiple flashes, 5 or 6, produced very little extra light even though each flash felt blindingly bright to me. A 6-volt camping flashlight slowly passed over a subject produces a much brighter image than a flash.
I was also surprised by the results of a small but very bright LED flashlight, which to my eyes appears very bright even if it is on the blue side of the spectrum, but to the camera’s sensor it was very dim indeed. The camping flashlight with its old-school style bulb was brighter and whiter than either LED flashlight I tried.
My best results were with using the 6-volt lantern panning it slowly first horizontally and then vertically to ensure total coverage of the subject(s) while the camera’s shutter was held open in bulb mode for as short as 20 seconds and as long as 3 minutes. Then in Lightroom I did some quick tweaking only spending some real effort on two of the photos to knock down some distracting lights.
This workshop was a lot of fun and I look forward to using what I learned in the future.
Links:
Awhile back I got a flat rear tire caused by a damaged wheel, I must have hit a pot hole a lot harder than I remember, and it took me a couple months to get the wheel repaired and a new tire. Last weekend I took the bike out for a couple shake down runs checking the torque of the bolts keeping the tire on and brake caliper in place. After a two hour ride in the bitter cold I got home and gave the bike a good once over.
This Saturday the forecast was for a perfect riding day reaching the low seventies and I spent all week day-dreaming about riding up to Suches Georgia and break in that new tire.
After a week that felt more like a year Saturday finally came along and I got out of the house around Noon. There was still a bite to the air with the temperature somewhere in the low sixties, at eighty miles an hour the wind cut through my jeans and long-johns leaving my knees achingly cold.
By the time I get to Dahlonega though I am feeling great and can feel my face stuck in a big grin. Once I get to Porter Springs there is no traffic in front of me and it is surprisingly free riding for the next hour. Riding from Porter springs to Two Wheels Only, Vogel State Park, Turners Corner, Porter Springs, and back up to T.W.O. for lunch.
By this point I am pretty tired, but it is a very good feeling. In a couple of months a 120 mile ride like this will not tire me out so much and hopefully I will be more comfortable pushing it a little harder, leaning a little farther and getting those chicken strips off of my rear tire.
At T.W.O I eat a BBQ sandwich that fills me up for the ride home and gives me the opportunity to read an old motorcycle magazine in the dining room and a chance to sit out on the porch in a rocking chair for a bit. After eating I take a walk around the grounds to stretch my legs and take a look at the bikes parked out front. This day most of the bikes are Harleys but there are also a handful of BMWs and a couple Ducatis. As I walk up a Ducati fires up with a musical growl and I stand transfixed and just enjoy the sound for a bit. I smile large as he pulls up onto the road and away.
The ride home is uneventful; I spend much of it behind cagers putting down the road. I take the time to smell some roses and watch some of the beautiful Georgia mountain scenery roll by. The temperature is great, some of the trees are in bloom, and the traffic is lighter than expected.
All in all it is a great beginning to the riding season with many more rides to look forward to. I hope to see you out there.
I first wrote about using Lightroom on September 7th, 2008 after using it to process photos for DragonCon. Since then I have read Scott Kelby’s book “The Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Book for Digital Photographers” and used Lightroom to process all of my images. I am still amazed at how fast I am able to process photos that of a more consistent and higher quality than ever before.
I recently shot a youth basketball game where I took around 300 pictures and using Lightroom culled that down to 97 good shots with meta-data, color correction, noise reduction, rotating and cropping all in under 2 hours.
I no longer use stars or labels to sort through images and rely on “P” for Pick and “X” for Reject to sort through images and delete rejects. Now that I have plenty of hard drive space available with the Drobo I am keeping more images than ever.
On January 2nd, 2009 I wrote about My Mac Experience So Far. Three months later and I am still enjoying the iMac. I have found more MacOS applications to replace Windows applications and in most cases am very happy with them.
I reformatted the Bootcamp partition and have set it to be solely used for gaming; I am currently playing Left4Dead a lot. All other windows use is relegated to VMWare and one of 4 virtual machines I have set up for specific purposes.
I have added an HP 22” widescreen monitor in a vertical orientation, which has really boosted my production in web development and photo processing.
January 11th, 2009 I shared my Drobo First Impressions with the world. The device is still running great and serving its purpose. I have only had a couple of minor issues with it.
The fan noise while I am sitting at the computer working is not really noticeable to me, but after I turn the computer off the fan in the Drobo continues to run for a very long time. With everything else in the room turned off the Drobo seems really loud. I am glad that the Drobo is not in our bedroom or even close to it.
Another issue is that GarageBand does not read the free space on the Drobo correctly and always thinks the drive is full. As I use GarageBand more, this may become a real issue for me as I try not to put anything on the internal hard drive.
Then on January 14th, 2009 I wrote about Getting Organized with a Franklin Covey planner. After three months of using the planner almost every day I have to say that it has made a real difference with how organized I feel. Having a date based notebook where I am able to make notes to read in the future and having notes from the past that I can refer to has been a great help.
For the first couple of months I was planning my days one at a time in the morning, but I have been reading the “7 Habits” book and the quotes in the planner and am beginning to look at a week at a time with some real planning on Monday mornings. I still spend 15 minutes each morning planning that day, but because of the 30 minutes I spend on Monday looking at the week the daily planning goes very quickly and usually doesn’t contain any surprises.
If you love motorcycles you will love this museum.
My wife was kind enough last year to give me a gift certificate for a weekend at the Barber Vintage Motorsports Museum. I finally got to cash in on that gift this January and spent a Saturday touring the museum. I have always loved motorcycles, a Honda Shadow, while in the Navy and now ride my BMW R850R every chance I get.
According to an employee Barber Museum is currently home to around 1200 motorcycles with around 750 of them on display at any given time and they are acquiring more all the time. Located just outside of Birmingham Alabama, the museum is located on the grounds of the Barber Motorsports Park, which hosts both motorcycle and auto racing.
On display are bikes going back to the earliest days when they resembled bicycles with tiny motors attached up to the latest sportbikes and recent model racing bikes. I especially enjoyed seeing the scramblers and enduros from the late 70’s along with the 2 stroke motoGP bikes.
1923 Scott Sprint Special. This was my favorite bike in the museum. It smelled of leather, oil, and gasoline. Just wonderful!
