MikeBrum.com

Today was a diving day. The weather was perfect, the water was warm (as defined by New England standards) and the visibility was pretty good. I got a port for my 100 f2.8 macro lens, so today was a macro/close-up day when it came to the photos. I had about a dozen keepers, which I’m posting here.

Some of these are not the best photos as far as photography goes, but my underwater technique is improving. It’s hard enough to hold yourself perfectly still on land – try to do it while suspended in a water column. Hope you enjoy them regardless.

As alwasy, no cropping. Just resized for the web.

Last night was my first “free” night in a while.

…and I spent it coding.

When I’ve been uploading images, I’ve been doing it all by hand. I’ve also been creating the thumbnails by hand. It’s not difficult to do, but it’s very repetitious and kinda a waste of time. The other problem was that they were never added to my image gallery on my site, which was bugging me.

So what I did was took some pre-existing tools that I had, modularized some of the functionality, modified what was left and built a tool to automate some of the nonsense that I’ve been doing by hand.

I created

1. A script that takes an image as a parameter and generates a thumbnail. Very simple, relatively quick.
2. A script that takes an image as a parameter and adds an entry for it into the image gallery database on my webserver.
3. A shell script wrapper that manages the above two scripts and handles the transferring of the files to the webserver. All you have to do is run it in a directory where there are JPEGs and it will preform the above actions on each file there.

It took me a few hours to get everything working, but this was all while watching TV, feeding the cats and chatting. All-in-all, not that bad. And I also have the two core scripts that I can use if I need to do anything by hand as well. I wanted to make sure the functionality was isolated enough that I could utilize them without unintended results. In other words, the scripts are also useful as stand-alone tools outside of the scope of the ultimate tool that I designed.

This was an exercise in me designing a tool that would fit into my current digital workflow, instead of having to modify my workflow around limitations of tools that were already available. While I’m aware that not everyone is able to write their own tools, I think it’s important to be able to modify those at your disposal to make sure that your workflow is as native to how you feel it “should be”. The more natural your workflow feels, the more productive you’ll be.

For me, this was a good time investment.

I also ran the tool against a ton of image directories and have updated my image gallery on my site. For regular visitors, they’ve probably already seen most of them, but for others, you can find it here.

As mentioned, I went to the zoo today and spent about an hour and a half in the butterfly “tent”. Aside from some really obnoxious people (children and adult alike), it was a good time and I got some good shots. Afterwards, I went to Home Depot and an art store looking for some sheet acrylic. Unfortunately, none was to be had and I returned empty handed.

As always, no cropping. Just resized for the web.

Enjoy the butterflies!

Again, my sensor had some dust or something on it. This is likely due to all the lens swapping that I did yesterday at the wedding and reception. I spent about a half hour on Friday cleaning it, so it’s considerably better than had I not done anything at all. Looks like I’m going to have to give it another pass though.

Corinne’s been gone since Friday morning. I got up early and brought her to the train. She’ll be in Connecticut until Thursday working on a new store opening. I’m here taking care of the kitties.

I helped shoot a wedding yesterday – my first one. That’s not the only honorific that it walks away with though. It was clearly the most disorganized and ghetto ceremony that I’ve been witness too. The bride was between 1.5 and 2 hours late. Whoops. There were no chairs, just people standing around (many of them walking around throughout the entire thing and getting in the way of EVERYTHING) and all the guys were very thug life.

It looked like the groom was on something (many things?) and I think a few of the other guys were drinking (during the ceremony). I know it’s hard to tell when it’s a clear liquid, but when you give a sip to someone’s aunt and they make that “Oh shit, this is strong stuff!” face, it’s probably not flat Sprite.

While coming down the “isle”, the bride was telling people to shut up and part of her vows actually contained the phrase, “my papi”.

From a photography perspective, the ceremony was a pain in the ass. The light was horrible and harsh, people were forever getting in the way and it was very difficult to get many shots due to lack of organization. The reception was a lot nicer (and better planned then the ceremony!) and I enjoyed shooting there more than the ceremony.

All that said, they were very nice to us and I never felt threatened or anything remotely close to that. I just can’t stress how much of a chaotic mess it was and how frustrating it is when you’re trying to do a job and have certain expectations of how things will be. Definitely a learning experience.

As photographic catharsis, I’m going to be going to the zoo today to shoot butterflies. There’s a butterfly tent (like a huge green house) at the zoo that gives you full access to the butterflies, so I’m going to do some macro stuff and see what I can come up with.

Corinne tipped me off to some snails that were creeping around outside a few nights ago, so on Friday I grabbed my macro gear and poked around. I found TONs of slugs and a solitary snail (which was a real treat). I noticed a small spider in the corner of the door frame to the deck, so I snapped a few of him for the short time he was cooperative.

He’s awfully hairy for someone so small
Here’s a small collection of slugs…
How cool is this guy…?
Sneaking in a close-up of Doctor Lovington

I also learned that my camera sensor is in need of some serious cleaning. If I was going to do anything with the spider photo, I’d spend a decent amount of time cloning out the dust spots, but I really can’t be bothered right now.

Yesterday was another diving day. We went to Folly Cove (again) and I took my camera with me. This time, I took my 30D and not my digicam. All-in-all, I took about 250 really bad shots with only a few salvageable ones. I think I know most of what I did wrong, but I wanted to share some of the nicer ones.

I love the face Corinne’s making	I like the composition of this shot
An unhappy lobster	This flouder was practically posing for me
Moon Snail	First horseshoe crab I’ve seen in the wild
The first rule of Snail Fight Club is…

Tomorrow I’ll be receiving some gear to take real underwater macro shots. Hopefully I can get in the water again soon and really test it out. I think with the stuff I learned yesterday (e.g., the mistakes I’ve made), I have a good idea the direction to go in.

There’s about 15 hours left in my on-call rotation. I can’t wait until it’s over. I had one incident that started at about 10:30am on Friday and didn’t get complete until about 10:30pm on Saturday night. Ugh. If it wasn’t for that one grueling issue, this week wouldn’t have been that bad – but it seems like there’s always something.

I’m looking forward diving this weekend. Not sure where we’re going, but it’ll be somewhere in Rockport or Gloucester per usual. I think I’ve decided on how I’m going to house my macro lens underwater. I hope to get the order in this week to get it in the water ASAP.

Other than that, I’m just trying to get to tomorrow and get my sleep schedule back on track. The big issue isn’t the hours of sleep I get. I probably get close to 7ish hours most nights. The issue is that all the sleep I’m getting is broken, so it’s only partially restful. Hopefully tonight will be quiet.

Watch this – it’s great!

I woke up this morning to about 3,000 pieces of main in my inbox. The vast, vast majority of it was spam-related bouncebacks. Seems some spam campaign kicked off last night and is using one of my domains as the reply-to, so I’m getting all of the responses.

In response, I spent a decent amount of time turning off catch-all on the 20something domains that I have. It wasn’t difficult, but it was kind of a pain in the ass. Someone really needs to rewrite the email RFC so we can finally put an end to the current incarnation of spam. I realize that this will put a bunch of anti-spam vendors out of business, but the bandwidth that would be saved on the net would be worth it alone – not to mention the dollars that businesses spend on anti-spam software.

So tonight is D&D night. Tomorrow I’m getting tattooed. Wednesday I go on call, but I’m going to work from home because I’m sure as hell not going to want to sit around at work with my leg all swollen. I think I’m going to need to make a trip to the comic shop, however. If I’m not feeling it, I’ll save it for Thursday.

So, it’ll be a full week, and I’ll be doing fuck-all on the weekend due to being on-call, but that’s the way the game is played. I’m just glad I had a good weekend to carry me through.

Today was a good day. Despite having my shower totally ruined, we had a great day of diving and I had what could possibly be the best french toast in the world. It was really that good.

The water was great – totally calm, good vis and lots of fun things to see. We were a bit cold at depth. I saw 49* and it might have dipped a bit cooler (haven’t checked my computer yet). But that said, it was a great day.

Here’s a few photos from the day’s fun:

My little mermaid

Don’t sit here

This looks a lot like a butthole

Shhh… I’m hiding

A little king of the hill