I remember learning my times tables as a kid, and the sevens were the easiest. It was all football scores. Well, as long as you're not the Bengals, who missed an extra point last week. What they didn't teach us was the crazy calculus that goes in to figuring out what must take place for the Giants to make the playoffs.

Get out your slide rule, Dexter...

Continue reading "Math and Football"

The other day I started a post, but never got around to adding the links. So here it goes...

Continue reading "Thirty-three, continued..."

I've got a few links to put up, but I think I'll have some lunch first. Check back later.

I bought a few movies off the net a week or two ago. First up, The Devil & Daniel Webster (1941). Now I know for every great movie from that era, there was probably a thousand crappy ones. It just seems as if there's something missing from films these days. I enjoyed it start to finish. You should watch it to hear Daniel Webster's speech to the jury of the damned at the end.

Continue reading "The Devil and Daniel Webster"

Photo of a friend [by another photographer]. Idea for the iPod theme here.

There are two types of photos of star trails: those that are taken by Dan Heller, and those that aren't. Check out the photo from the top of Kilimanjaro.

...his photos of lightning are amazing, too...

When I head out to take night time photos, I want either a full moon [to illuminate the landscape] or no moon at all. The moon is full tonight, but it's going to be cloudy. I'll have to wait until next month.

Maybe mid-month there will be some aurora to photograph. I haven't tried that yet. Of course, we're just exiting the solar minimum, so we'll see how that goes.

Some more astro-photography here. A pair of tutorials here and here.

Now that I've got a decent new scanner, I'm re-scanning some old photos. This one was originally in black & white. The hardest part was zapping the little specks of dust on the white background. No matter what I tried, they wouldn't go away.

Continue reading "Caucasian"

Another photo of the PBY Catalina. Not the greatest photo. I was only testing out a new camera body. I figure by the end of the winter, I'll have a few decent shots of this aircraft.

Eli Manning. Two-minute drill.

Why don't they do this more often?

Just messing around with photo editing software.

The new camera body seems to work alright.

Photographing a bottle is difficult. The glass reflects everything in the room. A flash of red from something in one corner of the room; a tint of green from something else that I still haven't figured out.

I was trying to shine the light directly on the bottle, and that wasn't working for me, so I gave up on that.

Instead, I put all the lights on the background; what you're seeing is the light coming through the bottle.Which is guess is the way to go when photographing glass. After all, you wouldn't shine a light at a stained glass window, would you? Rather, you'd shine a light through it.

I have a cousin that told me the toughest thing she ever tried to draw was a glass of ice cubes. Trying to replicate the true color of the ice, and all the subtle reflections of color, was driving her mad.

And don't even get me started on the wobbly table that is nowhere near level. Trying to compensate with a cheap tripod wasn't much help. So the photo is probably a bit crooked. One of these days, I'll get a sturdier table, and a decent tripod.

I'm glad I shot this one in digital, though. If I had burnt a roll of black & white film on this mini-project, I'd have really been frustrated. Some good news, though: I did get some film developed today, and it looks like my new Minolta X-700 body is workin' just fine. I'll have to scan a few of the photos and upload them. Right now, I think I'm going to head down the street for a snapple.