:: My Divided Soul ::

I finally did it. I finally got a new digital camera. I have been wanting a digital SLR camera for two years. Now that I make a decent salary for the summer, I could actually justify purchasing it. Two weeks ago, my Canon 30D, Canon 24-105 f4 L IS lens, and Canon 28mm f1.8 lens arrived.

How can I describe this camera and the lenses I got in one word? WOW! I knew the change from a G3 was going to be big, but I didn’t realize it was going to be this big. Here are some observations I’ve made:

1. The auto focus is extremely fast. When I was using my G3, the main cue for me that the camera had finished focusing was when it stopped making noise. The first few shots with the 30D and my 24-105mm lens, I was waiting for the same cue. I waited five or more seconds. Then I realized the problem: the camera had focused so quickly that I didn’t even realize it had finished! It used to be that the camera was the limiting factor in how fast I could take pictures. Now the limit is me. That is going to take some getting used to.
2. Focus in low light is actually possible. My G3 would hunt like mad in low light and I would be lucky to be able to auto focus at all. With a 28mm f/1.8 lens, it is no problem.
3. I don’t miss live LCD preview. The optical viewfinder seems to offer many advantages, including the ability to gauge DOF and focus more accurately than on a screen.
4. The camera is heavy. I don’t necessarily mean that in a bad way, either. In fact, it feels good to hold it in my hands as I walk. Around the neck for any length of time is a little difficult, though.
5. DOF is quite a bit shallower at a given f-stop than it is on a G3. I knew this was going to happen and I have to say I find it useful. It opens up a wealth of artistic possibilities.
6. The pictures just look sharper, clearer, and more detailed. My G3 certainly produced some nice pictures and I thank it for its many years of service. However, the 30D and the 24-105mm make for a killer combination. Seeing pictures from many of you on this forum was what made me think I could get better quality photos with a dSLR in the first place and the camera has not disappointed.
7. Image stabilization is an awesome technology. For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, image stabilization (IS) detects camera shake and shifts the lenses to compensate. Handheld shots at 1/5s? Not a problem. Not only does this help with low-light photograph of stationary objects, but I think it will open up some creative opportunities when photographing moving targets.

Overall, I do not regret the move to the 30D one bit. My G3 was and still is a nice camera that prepared me well for the move to better equipment. I feel somewhat overwhelmed with the new choices I have, but I see it as a challenge that I’m eager to take on. If you want to see some photos taken with my new camera, check out some shots around Palo Alto and my trip to San Francisco with Ganesh.

The other thing I have discovered is post-processing photos shot in the RAW format. Basically, when taking a picture, the data stored on the card is taken directly from the CMOS sensor without and compression and in-camera processing. Then, one can adjust contrast, color balance, white balance, sharpness, and a bunch of other things on the computer later. I’ve been using Adobe Lightroom, which is currently in beta for Mac and soon for Windows.

There was a time when I thought such post-processing was cheating. I mean, isn’t changing such things being untrue to the picture as taken? However, I then realized the truth: the camera isn’t capable of capturing a scene exactly as it was. Post-processing allows one to change properties of the photo to bring it closer to the reality of the situation. Moreover, it has the potential to make photos more visually stunning.

As an example, consider this photo, taken in Palo Alto:

With a little adjustment of the exposure, contrast, and color balance, the picture can become this:

I’d say that is quite an improvement. Post-processing also allows one some creative freedom. One effect I’ve seen that I’ve always wanted to try was with flowers. Consider a typical flower picture like this one:

Move all of the colors to gray with the exception of magenta and one gets this:

You can see larger versions of the post-processed pictures in the photo gallery. Commenting is a lot easier in the gallery, so if you see something that strikes you, feel free to write something! Needless to say, I am extremely happy with my new toys and eager to explore their capabilities.

As of Wednesday night, I am now a Palo Alto, CA resident. I flew out so I can start my internship at Intel on Monday. The trip itself was pretty uneventful, thankfully. I find travel–particularly to a new and unknown place in which I will be living–extremely stressful. My single-serving friend for the flight from Philadelphia to San Francisco was Andrzej, who works for an environmental conservation group and also places some cool folk/world/rock/country music. We chatted on the plane about our work and about music. Turns out he’d like to jam with a drummer, so I’m hoping I might be able to feed the drumming bug a bit out here, as I do not have my drumset with me.

I’m living near downtown Palo Alto with Polly, who I first met at Cornell (and who does not have a web page to which I can link…you need to work on that, Polly). This puts me in walking distance of many fine places to eat and shop, although about 14 miles from work.

Normally, this would not be a big deal as I have always had a car to get me places. I decided, however, that I would spend this summer without a car. I could have drove my car out here, although I’m not sure I want to try to get my car across the country and back. I certainly do someday want to drive across this great land, but I want to take the full two or three weeks one should really spend doing it. My other option would have been to rent a car; but, the $2300 it would have cost for the summer was not that appealing.

The train makes getting to work relatively easy, as I’m less than a mile from the train station. Intel also offers a shuttle from the train station on the other side to their campus. However, I am strongly considering the possibility of a bicycle to manage that last 3.4 miles. It would be good exercise and provide the more flexibility than the Intel shuttle.

Getting items for day-to-day living, however, has proven to be interesting. I did not want to spend much time sleeping on the floor, so I needed to acquire a mattress. I went to the Ikea about two miles away to do some shopping. I was hoping to get a mattress, small desk, and chair and have them delivered the next day. As I was standing there looking at mattresses, I realized something: I could get the mattress, small desk, and chair and have them all delivered for $79. This would require spending $79 on the delivery of furniture that barely cost that and also require sleeping on the floor for another night. Instead, it made much more sense for me to carry the mattress home so that I could have it the same night and then just get the desk and chair when Polly, who has a car, gets back from Europe. So I walked for two miles carrying a thin twin mattress rolled up into an 18-inch cylinder. It is nice to put my semester of work in the gym to good use. I’m sure that I was quite an amusing thing to see for those driving by.

Getting groceries also proved to be an exercise in carrying. I could have gone to the Whole Foods Market down the street, but they are all…organic….and….expensive…or so I assume. Instead, I went to the Safeway about two miles down the road and carried six bags of groceries back. I think my second shopping trip will be to the Whole Foods Market.

So to summarize my first day in Palo Alto: eight miles of walking, two of which were with a mattress, two of which were with groceries. Overall, I would call it a productive day. In general, I’m finding Palo Alto to be a very nice place. The weather is simply beautiful. As I understand it, the temperature stays in the 70s for most of the summer with the humidity pretty low. It is raining right now, but that’s probably not a bad thing, as it helps to keep the green plants alive and well. And there certainly are a lot of green plants.

The people here are also very friendly. I met a few people on the shuttle bus from the airport to here and they were quite chatty, as were the people at the checkout counters at Ikea and Safeway. People also smile and say “hi” when walking down the street, even more so than in Ithaca. My new neighbors, Scott and Lana, introduced themselves my first evening here. Overall, my first impressions of the area are very positive. You can see some pictures around Palo Alto that I took my first couple of days here. I’ll add to this album as I take more.

I’ve only met a couple people out here so far. Mr. “I Know Every Person Ever Born” has already informed me that several of his friends are out here, including Justin, Nitu, and Martin. The first two I knew when I was at Cornell. Martin was gracious enough to invite me to the Stanford CS department TGIF, so I got to meet several grad students in that department. I also took the time to steal all of Stanford’s computer science secrets and will be taking them back with me to Cornell.

Yesterday, rather than go completely stir crazy, I decided to take the train to San Francisco and walk around. It is one awesome city that I plan to explore much more during my time here. You can see pictures from my walking around, where there is much more commentary on my day.

So far, the trip out west has treated me very well. I’m eager to start work on Monday and actually do something.

My sister was graduated from Penn State this weekend. I am extremely proud of Hannah and everything she has done. She received two B.A.s, one with honors in Journalism and another in Political Science. Both were with highest distinction (that means her GPA was really, really good). Now, she is off to Philadelphia to intern at the Inquirer. You better believe you will see my sister in a good position at a very good paper in the near future. Until then, you can see pictures of graduation festivities. Congratulations, Hannah!

In fact I have not abandoned my camera, even if it has been since Christmas that I have posted pictures. You can now see all the happenings of Slope Day 2006. Take a little end of classes, add in some music, a dash of alcohol, and a lot of friends and you have Slope Day.

The ground is currently covered with a healthy layer of white stuff. The weather folk haven’t done the best job of predicting the snow, though. This is the second storm in as many weeks that they have claimed would bring plentiful snowfall, only to get little snow. Well, if you can call 3-4 inches a “little snow.” Instead of the 7-11 inches predicted, we got a bit of rain and freezing rain. I think the temperatures turned out to be a little higher than expected.

Nevertheless, I took advantage of the wet, heavy layer of snow resulting from the 33-degree temperature today to make a new friend:

He waves at those who pass by the house. He would have been closer to the road, but that big snowball on the bottom did not want to budge from its current location. It’s cool, though, because he gets to rest against the house.

Anyone have a good name for him?

I have added pictures from the CS Holiday Party this year. I’d say it was about what one would expect. As is the case now, you will need to register to get to the pictures.

Due to the increasing use of my pictures in unauthorized, inappropriate, and insulting ways, I have restricted access to my photo gallery. If you would like to view the pictures, please register. Note that all registration requests go through me.

For those of you who came from Google Images or something like that in the hope of finding some great picture to put on your web page, may I recommend you read this enlightening page regarding the theft of pictures.

I liked the idea of having my pictures out there for people to see. I liked getting comments in the gallery where people said they enjoyed my pictures. But that enjoyment has been scarred by the way I have seen my pictures used.

It seems that a number of people take the pictures I have in my image gallery and place them on their own websites. Some of these people simply hotlink to my gallery, meaning they load the image from my server, thus using my bandwidth without the image being viewed in the context I intend it. I don’t mind my pictures being viewed by others, of course, but what I do mind is people seeming to take credit for the pictures when they are mine. I take great pride in having taken some nice pictures. It brings a smile to my face when I download an image from my camera and find it has captured the scene exactly as I envisioned it. To have them appear on someone else’s site without my permission–or at the very least some acknowledgment–is frustrating. When one does this in a paper, it is called plagiarism and it can get people in a lot of trouble. So far, I know of two such cases:

• A sunset picture I took in New Zealand appears in this person’s personal weblog where the person mentions a love of sunsets. No credit is given to me.
• In what I perhaps find to be the worst example, some guy posts a picture of my drumset lit with Christmas lights with the message “its christmas time so light up ur drums.” He makes no attempt to mention the fact that the person in the photo is not him. It is obviously misleading some people, as one of the comments even says, “is that you??”

You will notice that on those pages, a copyright message appears on my images. This is thanks to the photo library program I use; it allows me to place a watermark on images that are hotlinked. However, I wonder, how many people have downloaded my pictures and placed them on their own websites for use without credit or permission? These are cases I cannot discover by looking through my access logs. Can I stop them from stealing my pictures? From what I can tell, I have a couple options:

1. Use Javascript to prevent right clicks on images. First of all, I hate websites that do this, so I don’t think I’m about to do it myself. Secondly, any user can get around this by disabling Javascript
2. Watermark all my pictures in the gallery. I find that watermarks on images can be very distracting and take away from a nice picture. Plus, I don’t want to “punish” all of those who view my pictures because of a few people who don’t care about my copyright. Ideally, I’d be able to watermark an image only when it is downloaded, but the software can’t do that.

There was a time when I was the kind of person who would just use any image I found on the web freely, figuring that anything I found through Google must be in the public domain. Now, I think I understand the frustration of people who want to share their art with the world, but find that using the internet to spread that art to a wider audience comes with a price. People can use my images whenever they want; all I am after is a mention of my name or a link to my website, indicating where the image came from. Am I overreacting here? Should I just be happy that people like my pictures enough to use them?

I have added pictures from Terese and I going to Robert H. Treman State Park. There are a couple lovely pictures of waterfalls, one of my favorite things to photograph.

You may also notice that the photo gallery itself has changed. This is because I have upgraded to the 2.0 release of Gallery. I’m still tweaking the installation a bit, but so far I’m finding I like some of the new features. One of those features being the ability to put a random image in the sidebar in my weblog, as you now see on the right.

Monday was my birthday. The day itself was pretty crappy. First, I woke up at 4:30am spitting, as I had a dream that I swallowed paint thinner. I was unable to get back to sleep. Later, Economics homework decided to be unpleasant. To top it all off, I found out that my car has a $500 fuel leak. This is after having gone through transmission fluid, oil, and windshield washer fluid leaks. Needless to say, it wasn’t the best birthday.

However, I had an awesome birthday celebration on Thursday with Terese, Ganesh, Milind, Eric, Gus, and Meredith. Terese and Ganesh were gracious enough to make a triple-chocolate cake, Eric brought a lovely bottle of wine, and Meredith and Gus brought a key lime pie, a candle and new playing cards. And Emma gave me a call, too!

Thanks to everyone for making it a pretty awesome night! You can see pictures of the festivities, if you’d like.