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Of the last 48 hours

Now you see it – now you don’t

Today was pretty boring – which wasn’t supposed to be the case since I got my powerbook back yesterday. But was pulled out again today.

Apparently when they said they’d do a full diagnostics check – they meant the opposite. I eventually opened up the laptop’s backplate and was staring down at two 512MB DIMMs – which is correct. So why do I mention it? Because the OS is only reporting 512MB of RAM instead of a gig! At least they were commited to replacing the logic board.

Once that’s done, I will now be able to enumerate the stuff that hasn’t been replaced:

  1. Superdrive.
  2. LCD shell (the LCD itself has been replaced)
  3. Keyboard.
  4. All inner-components except for the logic board.
  5. Battery.
  6. RAM DIMMs

Can’t help but wonder if I had just saved all of those, and just asked for a new MacBook or something hehehe – I can dream can’t I? Sobrang na-sulit ko na yung warranty. – and still got a whole year to go! Read More

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Flickr-ized

I decided to maximize the use of Flickr as an image repository specifically for my blog. While it would be nice to just move the entire gallery to Flickr, I really don’t like the idea of not being able to skin it (and that the gallery’s URL will be outside of my domain). I’m not sure if they have an API released that allows a fully blown gallery to be created outside of their servers, but for now it’s not an option for me.

I finally finished editing each and every entry to fix the broken image links after I moved everything to Flickr. And while modifying the posts, I realized some things that may be useful in case you guys didn’t know it yet. One cool thing about Flickr is that stores its images statically, which allows you to do some legitimate hotlinking to [your] images in the Flickr server from virtually anywhere.

The drawback was that you had to do a decent amount of clicking before you can get to the “static URL” field of the file… at least that’s what I experienced until now. This post is just a discussion on how to access and use those static URLs quickly and efficiently for your hotlinking needs. Read More

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What really counts?

I don’t know why, but I’ve heard this phrase a lot in photography… it literally is a mantra nowadays.

It isn’t the equipment but the photographer that counts.

Now this is an uncontested fact. But It kinda irked me a bit today when I read a thread in a forum of a newbie asking an earnest question:

Which is the better camera model?

While I believe in the mantra, I don’t think using it as an answer to what I conceive as unrelated questions helps at all. Why do I think it’s unrelated?

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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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