MikeBrum.com

I have a Windows XP host that’s been serving network storage via a RAID array serviced by a Promise FastTrak RAID card. This has been the way of things for a bunch of years now and it’s been pretty good for a while. There’s been the usual Windows issues, but it hasn’t been “bad”.

I try to be a responsible admin and installed Windows updates this morning. Unfortunately, after the requisite reboot, the host never came back up. Since it’s headless — no monitor, keyboard or mouse — I had to get all that hooked up and figure out WTF was going on. Turns out that the box was just hanging at the loading screen.

Long story short, even with various repair options nothing is going to work.

And since I’m running out of space on my array anyway, I decided that I’m just going to upgrade to a NAS. I planned on doing this anyway (and retiring this box when I did so) but I just couldn’t justify throwing it out when it was working. At least now I’ll have a dedicated NAS that is more efficient, has a smaller footprint and consumes less power than a dedicated PC that’s just serving up files.

My Amazon order was placed this morning (along with a Gig-E switch) and hopefully it won’t be too long until they’re on my doorstep.

Since my RAID array is just type 1 (a mirror), I’ll just take one drive out of the pair and put it in a USB enclosure and copy over files that way. Pretty straight forward and painless. I’ll then take the drives from the array and use them as backup disks (my Time Machine disk will get a healthy upgrade and the disk that was backing up Corinne’s laptop failed a little while ago and will get replaced).

It’s not horrible, but I would have just preferred to save the money. At least I planned on making the purchase in the first place — just not this soon.

Here’s a pano I took this afternoon from my visit to Bald Head Island in North Carolina.

Naturally, click for larger.

I’m happier with the results than the last two panos that I posted.

I’m in North Carolina visiting my mother. Weather is pretty hot with high humidity. We’re talking low to mid 90’s. This evening we had some thunderstorms roll through. They were over fairly quickly, but they were definitely pretty heavy for a bit.

The video doesn’t really show the rain (though you can see it hitting a bit on the rail), but you can hear the thunder and see some lightning flashes. I still don’t really know much about the video setting on my camera — or about properly converting higher-res video to lower res at a decent file size and quality — but this is what you get.

I have work to do tomorrow starting at 7:00am. That’ll last a couple of hours and I should be free for the day. Then Sunday early (sometime between 3:00-5:00am), I should get a call to do another piece of the work that needs to wait on a bunch of other things to happen. The hours kinda suck, but it shouldn’t be too bad… I hope.

It’s been raining a lot this Spring. It’s as if it’s been perpetual April — which isn’t fun.

Trying to turn that frown upside down, I went out and shot a bunch of snails when I got home from work. The rain had just started to subside, so I put the MP-E 65 on the 5D2,  along with the MT-24 EX and snail hunting was on.

I ended up with a lot of shots that I REALLY like, and 16 have been uploaded to the Macro Gallery. Head over and check them out.

Corinne and I took a day trip up to the Kancamagus Highway today. While thoroughly exhausted, it was a great time.

I took a bunch of photo gear with me, but didn’t end up doing a lot of shooting. While the weather was nice, there were tons of clouds that ruined a lot of otherwise great scenery. I took a wide lens (well, wide for me) – 35mm f/1.4 and a long lens – 70-200 f2.8 IS and used the 35 most. I think I would have shot more had I brought my 100 macro with me. Next time.

Of course, if I’d taken that instead of the 70-200, there’d be moose, deer, bears and every other creature to photograph at a distance. That’s the way these things work I think.

I think the critter list consists of

• goslings (in Boston while leaving)
• a deer that ran across I-93 about 100 years ahead of us
• a pug on a motorcycle – wearing a helmet and goggles
• a random chipmunk at a distance
• tons of toads on various trails

Nothing too spectacular (and half of it was seen while in the car!), but fun regardless.

We did some hiking, picnicking and general relaxing. All said and done, we only got to about 1/2 of the Kancamagus, so we’ll likely be going back — hopefully on a day with some more agreeable weather.

I’m going to process my images and see if there’s anything worth posting. At the very least, the Singh-Ray Vari-ND worked REALLY well.

Some people had questions about the Singh-Ray Vari-ND Filter and I wanted to put together a quick set of images for those interested.

First, how the test was done:

All images were shot on a 5D mark II with the 35mm f1.4 lens. I have a 72mm-77mm step-up ring to attach the vari-nd to the lens. Since I have some lenses with a 77mm front end, this is in no way a problem for me since I could find myself in situations in which I might need to shoot with the vari-nd on them. I didn’t experience vignetting with this configuration. 35mm isn’t all that wide (even on full frame) and I didn’t expect any problems even with the extra space the step-up ring added. If you have to go really wide, it might be worthwhile to get the 82mm filter.

The camera was set to manual and I kept a constant f16 @ ISO 100 for all shots. I did *not* use a cable release or mirror lock-up because I didn’t really care about sharpness, just exposure and the effect on image quality at higher densities. Given some light clouds, the base exposure (without the filter) was 1/25s. I wanted to make sure I wasn’t blowing out all of the sky and mostly exposed for the highlights there and let the rest of the light levels fall where they may. After taking a shot, I’d dial down the shutter a full stop (3 clicks) and then dial the filter until I was at the right exposure level as given by the meter. Since the vari-nd doesn’t actually mark the light loss (there’s a basic scale, but this is just for reference – the dots don’t actually mean anything in particular), this was the only real way to go about this.

All images were shot RAW and opened in ACR. I set them all to the same white balance and made no other changes to processing. AWB did have some slight variation between the different shots but it was very minor. There was a larger swing between the first image (without the vari-nd) and those with it. This should be obvious to most when looking at the images.

(click for larger)

Here’s what I found:

1) There appears to be a warming or polarization effect with the vari-nd. I don’t dislike it, but it’s there and worth noting.

2) Singh-Ray states

“The Vari-ND is capable of densities of more than 8 stops. Results at these densities, however, may be unpredictable.”

- and they’re absolutely correct. At >8 stops, the ND effect was not even throughout the frame. Minor adjustments over the 8 stop mark “moved” this effect around. This likely has something to do with the way the different polarization layers interact at their highest level, but I don’t know the specifics. Either way, it’s pretty easy to spot and you know once you get to the “Max” mark on the filter that you should probably dial back a bit.

3) At higher densities (somewhere between +6 and +7), it looks like you start to lose a bit of contrast. While you can likely recover a lot of this in post, it’s again worth noting.

4) You can NOT use the vari-nd with a CPL. Well, you “can”, but the results are undesirable in all but the weirdest circumstances. The following shots were made with the vari-nd at its lowest setting and I had exposures on both at ISO 100, f/16, 5s (not a typo – a full 5 seconds). I also set the vari-nd + CPL shots to the same white balance that I processed the original shots with and did no additional processing.

If a CPL usually costs at most 2 stops and the vari-nd is 2 stops at its lowest setting, then we would expect about a 4 stop light loss (in the shooting conditions of this test, this would be close to ISO 100, f/16, .6s. Clearly there’s some magic with how a CPL and the vari-nd interact that’s not only giving the crazy colors but a ton of additional light loss. It’s also worth noting that the different colors were achieved by spinning the front element of the CPL.

You can also notice that with the step-up ring, vari-nd and the CPL that the 35mm f1.4 is getting the CPL in the corners. Easy to crop out, but again worth noting if you’re considering stacking filters.

All the weirdness above said, the images between +2 to +8 stops look really good to me and this is a great item to keep in my bag. While on the expensive side, this one filter can take the place of multiple ND filters and quickly justifies the price tag.

I would definitely recommend this to anyone interested in the sort of shooting that ND filters lend themselves to.

Took some photos of Corinne earlier.

Here’s one of the favorites.

Did a couple of laps around Leverett Pond this afternoon with Corinne. I brought along my Canon 300mm f2.8L IS to continue to break it in, along with my new pair of hiking shoes.

Despite being a bit on the heavy side, I’ll say this — the 300mm is an absolutely JOY to shoot with. Totally in love with it.

Head over to the Fauna Gallery to see more.

I added some photos to the Underwater and Landscape galleries.

These are from the last Hawaii trip in 2007 (Maui & Lanai).

They’re not super special since they were taken on my old PowerShot A710 IS, but I’m still a fan.

I got out for a bit on Saturday before the wind picked up and shot some dandelions with the Canon MP-E 65. I also found some tiny spiders to shoot, but wasn’t happy with any of the results for a number of reasons.

The images were shot at a variety of magnifications from 1x to 5x — the full range of the MP-E 65.

All of these shots are of the same dandelion in its “parachute” phase. The last shot is at about 5x life size. Shooting through the parachute canopy gives the hazy, ethereal appearance.