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Random thoughts

Finally had time to blog! Topics covered in this post:

  • Charlie and the Chocolate Factory
  • Photos
  • Recording
  • Some other stuff
  • Grand Theft Auto San Andreas
  • Intel and Apple stuff

Pretty long post, so just skip to the parts that interest you (if any)

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I’m glad I ain’t a woman

Being a DIY (Do It Yourself) type of person, I took the cue of following and article describing the process of cleaning your dSLR sensor without having to spend more than $100 (the price of one of the best cleaning kits available for the task).

The gist of the article is that the natural property of Visible Dusts’ famous cleaning kit, the Sensor Brush, can be attained by using a regular, synthetic nylon cosmetics brush.

Suffice to say that the article was convincing enough to make me a believer. Today, I went with my mom to the department store in search of this so called “mask brush.”

And the trouble we had to go through for a brush really made me glad I wasn’t a woman.

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Transparent backgrounds

One of the fads nowadays is taking “transparent” desktop shots of your computers. Don’t know what I mean? Check this gallery out: http://www.flickr.com/groups/transparentscreens/pool/

I thought I’d have a go, and since a lot of the stuff I see there are hard to top creatively, I went on trying to add some difficulty to the shot so people can appreciate it.

Basically what I wanted to do was:

  • Take a shot with me in it (pardon the pantulog clothing)
  • Try it without a tripod (handheld)
  • Capture decent ambient light so the cathode lamp of my Athlon rig can be seen.
  • Shoot at an angle (meaning not straight on, which is what I see most of the time)
  • Get a somewhat challenging DOP (depth of field), since I wanted to take as much of the background as much as possible with minimal blur.

At frist I shot it at f22 with FEC 2 stops up to allow a real fast shutter. It worked, but it would drown out the Athlons CCFL light and Powerbooks Monitor (which would kill the final shot). So I had to settle for a big-ish f8.0 – which resulted in a significantly shallower DOP.

I though it was simple enough but boy was I wrong! Read More

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Have the terrorists won?

Having some inclination to photography, one will obviously hear or read about issues that deal with security. Particularly how photographers are usually denied the rights to taking photographs of certain places. Of course normal people would find it unfortunate, but ultimately couldn’t really care less about the plights of these photographers.

Photographers see these incidents as a big deal and never take them lightly, which is understandable – especially if they depended on it for a living.

However, when taking everything in the context of terrorism in the US, I can’t help but think that indeed, the terrorists have won. Fear has crippled the nation so much that it is becoming ridiculous… or is it?

What I’ve noticed is that though indeed there might have been unconstitutional to arbitrarily decide on which rights are allowed to photographers on specific places, I can’t help but think that sometimes any specialized group tends to merely think in the context of their own little worlds… in this case it’s the photographers. But in no way am I attacking them, since I too, like taking pictures. And I certainly want to be able to take pictures anytime and anywhere I want.

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