First Shots with Lensbaby
For Christmas this year Tammy got me a fun lens for my camera, the Lensbaby Composer. When I did the Stone/Steel/People workshop I mentioned that my pro friend Layne was obsessed with shooting with his Lensbaby. I thought it would be a fun option to have in my camera bag and Tammy decided it would be a fun present. I haven’t been shooting much but I used it when I was in Grand Marais this last weekend and here are some shots with it. These were all shot on manual at f/4.
Tilt Shift Lens
I recently added a new lens to my camera bag, the Canon TS-E 24mm f/3.5L. This is one of those weird tilt-shift lenses. It’s not the brand new Mark II version of this lens, but the older one that has been out for a while. It is wonderful L-glass with the great red ring.
I’ve just started to learn how to use it. I plan on using it mainly for creative effect and in video shooting. Wish me luck!
First Shots with Tilt-Shift Lens
While I was shooting this weekend in Grand Marais I took an opportunity to try out my new tilt-shift lens. I really didn’t know what I was doing so I just tried playing with it a bit. These two shots really struck me when I was reviewing them.
I think this shot really struck me because of the falling snow. It draws my eye into the center and the snow flakes suspended in the air. I also like the mood of the shot.
I wasn’t expecting much with this shot. It’s just a bunch of trees with some downed trees in the mix. I tried out the tilt and put the slight clearing in focus. I really like the effect on the rest of the frame as it blurs out. For some reason this picture makes me want to walk forward and explore the space.
More experimenting to come, including some video.
Tethering my iPad via my iPhone 4 on the bus. This works very well.
Save the Lead
I tapped on a unsubscribe link today to rid myself of another spam list. This URL quickly flashed through the browser as several redirects were occurring. What does this URL say?
http://your-website-here.com/index.php/leadCapture/save
That certainly reinforced that I didn’t need those emails anymore. I wonder what cookies they dropped on my browser in all those redirects.
My Mobile Data Usage Trends
Now that I’ve upgraded to iOS 4.3 I was itching to enable Personal Hotspot on my iPhone 4. I take the bus to work most of the time and want to use Personal Hotspot to get my MacBook Air and iPad online for the trip. However, both Tammy and I were still grandfathered in to the original iPhone unlimited data plan and AT&T will not let you do unlimited data with the Personal Hotspot feature. I had to move to a metered plan to get the win.
I went on the AT&T website and they now have this great feature that will show you your trends. I consider myself a bit of a data pig and use my phone all the time. The numbers really surprised me.
I’ve never used over 400MB and most of the time fit just around 200MB. That was shocking to me. I am on WiFi at home and work so I guess it makes sense that it’s only my true mobile use, but it still seemed light.
I looked at Tammy’s numbers and they were even lighter.
I was able to move Tammy to a lower plan and save a good amount every month and offset entirely the cost of moving me to a 4GB plan with Personal Hotspot enabled.
The point of this post is to not assume. Look at the numbers. 200MB gets you further than you would think.
How Much Do I Write?
At my last book club meeting one of the guys asked if anyone had plans to write a book. Two of the guys in the club answered affirmative very quickly. I didn’t have a very good answer and reflected that I don’t think I could write a book. My friend Dan thought that was odd since I write regularly on my blog, doesn’t that make me sort of a writer already? He even suggested that I wrote more than anyone else in the group which resulted in quick dismissal from our academic colleagues who regularly write research papers.
So the question left was, how much do I write? Dan even prodded me with an email after the fact which left me with no option but to figure it out. 😀
I was able to find a WordPress plugin called Word Stats that made quick work of giving me a word count by month. I threw the data into a spreadsheet to clean it up slightly and make a quick graph. This only includes my writing on my blog.
I write an average of 2,631 words per month for a total of 226,235 words since February 2004. The highest month was July 2004 when I wrote 9,711 words. There were three months when I didn’t write anything: May 2004, August 2010 and October 2010. That graph really highlights that 2010 was a really quiet year for me. That is a trend I’m reversing in 2011.
I did some quick searches and the average novel has about 100,000 words in it. So, it seems I’ve written 2 novels here in the last 7 years. Pretty cool!
If you wish to play with numbers the CSV file of my stats is available.
On the phone with AT&T getting mobile hot spot enabled. Surprised that I only use around 300MB of data a month on my iPhone.
Tyler Walking
Tyler is an exceptional crawler. He passed his 1 year birthday without feeling the need to work on walking all that much. Why walk when you can crawl super fast! In the past few weeks he has worked on finding his balance and taking steps. He can now walk a good dozen or more steps without falling! He is also now sometimes choosing to walk instead of crawl. I have a feeling he’ll be running around the house in no time.
Great day of photography with Steve LeVahn and Dennys Bisogno on the North Shore!
Nice photography options this morning in the snow at Artist Point in Grand Marais.
Busted For Bad Camera Management
This weekend I am up in the Grand Marais area with my friends Steve and Dennys for a photography weekend. We went out shooting today and the weather wasn’t cooperating. We had a lot of grey and dull everywhere, but we persevered.
We shot a bunch in the morning out at Artists Point in Grand Marais and while I was shooting Steve and Dennys busted me for very bad camera management. Of course they photographed me in the act.
Do you see all of my mistakes? Oh boy.
Let me share to help us all be better camera owners.
In circle 1 you can see that I’m actually tilting my 70-200mm lens upwards allowing the hood to catch as much snow as possible and direct little flakes onto the front to melt.
Circle 2 highlights that I have the entire imaging assembly of my camera open and exposed to the elements.
See circle 3 in my camera bag? Yeah, another lens with no cap on the rear element letting more snow accumulate and screw up future photos.
Consider this a public service announcement for us all. 😀
Dennys grabbed this shot of me shooting in the snow today at Artist’s Point in Grand Marais.
Just got an offer for tickets to see Def Leppard with Heart opening. Thought it was 1988 again.
Lasagna on Big Green Egg
This weekend we had friends over for dinner and I tried something new. I decided to try making my lasagna on the Big Green Egg. The Egg can work as an oven, so why not?
I was also doing a squash for the side dish so I fired up both grills to get cooking.
I made the lasagna exactly as I would have otherwise but instead of putting it in the oven I simply popped it into the Egg.
The squash got some brown sugar and butter with nutmeg and cinnamon.
The lasagna came out pretty good. I learned a couple of things.
- I placed the lasagna directly on the plate setter, with feet down. This was a bad call. The plate setter I suspect was hotter than 350 °F and it caused some burning in the pan. I should have done it feet up with the grid on to keep the pan isolated.
- The lasagna comes out with a smoky flavor. It reminded me of smoked mozzarella. Just a thought, you could cover the lasagna with tinfoil for half of the time to reduce the smokiness. You could pretty much dial it wherever you want.
- I would recommend using a ceramic baking dish. I used an enameled pan, and it was okay but I think a ceramic dish would have provided some needed protection for the pasta in the grill.
I liked the end product and would definitely do lasagna in the Egg again.
Tyler refused his morning nap after swim class this morning. By the time we got to lunch, he was too tired to eat.
iPad 2 (0.34 inch thick) is 0.005 inches thicker than Kindle 2 (0.335 inch thick). I read that as “same”. Impressive.
I gave a talk today at a class at the University of Minnesota. I used it as a trial run for presenting right off of my iPad in Keynote. Worked great! Was liberating to have such a small device to present from.
Digging out some SATA cables and bare drive adapter this afternoon to rescue a Mac. I always find this stuff fun, when it is easy. If you are curious, the funky bare drive adapter I have is the Newer Technology USB 2.0 Drive Adapter.
Was Wrong on OpenID
My friend John asked me to present at a class of his next week at the U of MN. I took an old Keynote presentation I had from a couple of years ago to start with and ran across this slide. I don’t think I could have been more wrong!
I was definitely an OpenID advocate at the time, and for a long time before this talk. Makes me sad though since OpenID was open, and not owned by any one company. Hyperlinks between OpenID’s are such an elegant way of creating connections and is so web friendly.