Whew! What a month it’s been! The lack of blog activity only hints at how busy I’ve been. My new job is chewing up every free moment, and I love it. If you know me, you know that I’m happiest when I’m busy. The new job is a blast. I have control over lots of things I only wish I had in my previous job. I’m able to make an improvement almost every day. What a great feeling. I am sooo happy to have made the move.
And it’s not just work that’s keeping me busy these days. It’s also my home network, which I’ve been steadily upgrading. The network in my loft now surpasses most small business networks in speed and reliability. This morning I finally got WAN failover working between two networks – my blazing fast fiber connection to Paxio and a slower, but super-reliable DSL connection to Speakeasy. This will ensure that our uptime is as close to 100% as possible. Awesome!
Despite feeling busier than ever, I still manage to squeeze off a shot now and then.
That last shot was taken last night at the fabulous Walk in the Wild fund-raiser at the Oakland Zoo. I was pleasantly surprised to find the fabulous Matt Venutihangin’ under a tree. If you haven’t yet heard the Venusians, I suggest you give them a listen. Very nice!
One of the unfortunate aspects of owning a 30″ monitor is that, aside from thedude.com, there are very few web sites that post images at a resolution any wear near full-screen size. And, if you’re like me, you bought that 30″ monitor because you like images, right? There’s nothing quite like a super sharp image on a nice 30″ monitor. So, when I want to see the best of the best, where do I go? To shorpy.com, of course. The meticulous scans of old 8 x 10 images are custom-made for us large screen users. I check in often, and am always blown away. Check it out!
My workhorse lens is a rather cheap Nikkor 24-85 mm. Although sharpness is acceptable, the lens suffers from complex distortion. At the widest zoom setting, the distortion is like a wave – barrel distortion in the center and pincushion at the corners. This causes very annoying “M” shaped lines near the outer edges of the frame.
One answer to this problem would be to spend a bundle on the excellent Nikkor 24-70 mm lens I’ve been coveting for some time. It’s considered one of Nikon’s best lenses ever and, unfortunately, that is reflected in its price.
The other answer was to whip out the versatile PTLens. This $25 program runs stand-alone or as a PhotoShop plugin. Using it could not be simpler. Just open the image in PTLens and click Apply to completely eliminate distortions introduced by your particular lens. PTLens does this by reading image EXIF data and applying corrections from its extensive lens database. PhotoShop’s built-in Lens Correction tool can not do what PTLens does. It’s amazing.
The jury is still out about moving images on thedude.com.
But there’s no debating the beauty of these renderings.
The animation was done entirely using 3Ds Max and V-Ray render and took about 10 days to complete. Professionally done 3D visualization is the perfect tool to present concepts or new products in a beautiful, photoreal style, while creating a mood with music and conveying a message, through on-screen text or narration.
Yes, Kelly found a stack of old negatives, and I’m back at it. These days, I basically have the scanner running whenever I’m at the computer. I load up the negative carrier, preview scan a bunch of images, and final scan the best ones. The process is time-consuming, but my new computer is fast enough that I can now run the scanner software in the background pretty much no matter what I’m doing, which is sometimes quite a lot. So, in an evening I can now get 6 or 8 scans done – sometimes without even having to reboot. Yay Windows!
So, I have this shot of Dave that is much taller than it is wide, but man, it looks really nice if you happen to have a your 1600×1200 pixel display in portrait orientation. So there ya go.
I upgraded to Windows 7 yesterday. The install from scratch option took less than one hour, and my system is humming along nicely. The move from Vista to Windows 7 may have caused a barely-noticeable performance increase. I’m not sure. I did the upgrade from XP at work last week, and the speed increase from XP to 7 was significant. Of course, any speed increase is most noticeable with all of the Aero crap disabled. Give me font anti-aliasing and thumbnail icons and keep the rest. It’s just annoying! I’d like to see Microsoft sell a stripped-down version that does not include any of the so-called eye-candy. Who needs all that visual noise?
