MikeBrum.com

I’ve wanted to do water drop shots for a while and finally had a real go at it tonight. I tried setting up last weekend but couldn’t get a consistent water drop rate or control where the drops fell. The following few images show my first attempt at this sort of photography.

I was having a lot of problems getting the amount of light needed at first (and some of them are still a bit darker than I’d have liked). I think the issue is mostly with the container I used for the shots and I hope to have better luck next time around. I also want to increase depth of field as well as working distance. I’m so used to shooting things as close as possible I forget that not everything is best served with a super close-up shot. Since I almost never crop any of my images, I think I put a bit more emphasis on tight framing than most people.

Either way, I’m happy with this set as a first attempt and will be eager to see what I can come up with going forward.

I’m selling a lens on Craigslist right now. If you’ve ever done something like this, you know the douchebags that try to get you to ship the item somewhere, offer you more money then you’re asking and speak very poor english while doing so.

Here’s a conversation I just had over email with one of these guys – it’s a real gem!

scammer: it on for sell?

me: This lens is still available for sale – yes.

If you’re interested, you can feel free to give me a call at [my phone number]

scammer: Hi Mate,

Thanks for your response ,I’m buying this [item] for my friend’s son as a birthday gift,but he lives oversea.I can offer you $1200 for the item plus an extra $150 due to the cost of international shipping.Let me know ifthis works for you.if you’re ready to go ahead,let me know where i should send the paypal payment so we can proceed,i prefer paypal because it’s fast and secure.

Regards.

**note the use of more-or-less proper english (and compare it to the rest of the responses) and that “[item]” is probably supposed to be replaced with the actual item that’s being sold – this is clearly a form reply

me: I’m willing to sell it in-person only. Sorry if that’s not convenient for your situation.

scammer: ok no problem but i think you assit me do it.

me: I’m not sure what you mean – but if you live in/around the Boston, MA arrea, I’m willing to meet up for a sale and you can arrange the international shipping on your own afterwards.

I’m not willing to ship this item myself.

Thanks

scammer: ok sound id good but i did not in town now ok and i wanna need your assist ok

me: Let me know when and where you want to meet up and we can discuss the details more in person.

Thanks

scammer: i want you to ship to him ok you need to meet ok

me: I’m not able to do that.

I can sell it to you in person, but you’ll have to ship it.

Ok?

scammer: no

I guess you can’t blame a guy for trying – but what REALLY confuses me is the number of people that fall for these sorts of scams. That really boggles my mind!

I pass this intersection every day on my way to work and I’ve been meaning to take some long exposure night shots for well over a year. We have some rain moving in and it was very foggy – which just reflects all the tungsten-heavy light pollution.

Overall I’m pretty happy with them – especially for a first real foray into these sorts of shots. If anyone has any tips or feedback, feel free to comment.

Since winter won’t release its icy grip on New England, there’s no fun bugs and critters to take photos of. I was able to snap a bunch of frames at the random spider that apparently lives in the apartment, but I haven’t seen him since.

I figure I gotta make some opportunities (and need to have fun with it at the same time) – so here’s what I expect to be the beginning of a long line of Lego minifig portraits!

(uncropped, minimal post-processing)

I’m finding that the 200mm focal length simply isn’t cutting it for me anymore. My longest lens is the 70-200 f2.8L IS – which I love… a lot. I’ve known for a while that I need more reach and 400mm – 500mm is what I’m aiming at. When I was shooting on a 30D, it wasn’t as big of a deal since the crop factor helped mitigate the shortness of 200mm. Now that I’m shooting on a 5D2, it’s just not enough. While I know I can crop the hell out of the 21mpx images from the 5D2, I try not to crop except when absolutely necessary.

The 400mm length offers two f5.6 options in the 100-400mm and the 400mm – both very good lenses by all accounts. But if you want to get down to f4.0 (say, to have the option of AF with a 1.4x), you have to go to the 400mm DO – which isn’t so popular and prohibitively expensive for many people.

400mm f5.6 is roughly $1150. The 4.0 DO then jumps to $5500. Awesome. I’m more than happy to take a bit more weight to have a reasonably priced 400mm non-DO f4.0. Too bad I don’t have that option.

500mm is equally frustrating because the only option is f4.0 – which is great for people that can justify spending $5800 on a lens. I would seriously consider sacrificing AF w/ a 1.4x with a sharp 500mm f5.6 option.

Why can’t we get a reasonably priced 400mm f4.0 and 500mm f5.6 from Canon? Given the prices of the above-listed lenses, I don’t see why both of these lenses couldn’t come in at around $2500. If this target could be hit, I know many people in the “prosumer” camp would willingly save up for these lenses. As it stands, a lot of people go third party (Sigma) for affordable 500mm with decent quality – but even that’s a compromise because they’re large zooms.

I don’t know why Canon doesn’t want our money and forces us to either compromise or go to other manufacturers. I spend a good deal on camera gear, but I simply can’t imagine being able to justify $5000 on a lens.

(prices referenced from B&H as of 20090322)

Depending who you ask, it’s spring. I guess there’s some minor debate over its exact start – but whatevs, I’m happier thinking that winter is behind me.

I was up until about 2:30am working. The only reason I stopped then was because a bunch of stuff that was supposedly done before I was given the machines to work with was nowhere close to complete by the group that was supposed to have prepared the environment for me. I started cleaning up after their mess but it just yielded more missing pieces and more work that was never complete. I sent some emails and called it a night.

I’m typically “get the job done and sort out the BS later”, but this project I’m working on has been non-stop uber-fail from the beginning – and I’m more than a little sick of it. So instead of spending most of the weekend working (as I had expected), I’ll be lounging and reading comics.

Seriously – that’s my plan… and I’m more than a little excited about it.

Been working since about 6:30 this morning. I was up and I have a lot to get done… so I might as well start in ASAP.

The ability to log in remotely and start working is such a huge benefit and really aids productivity. If I wasn’t able to log on from home, I probably would have just went back to bed – or at least tried. I wasn’t able to stay awake last night and slept for a while between 8 and 10. I ended up staying up a bit later because I couldn’t get to sleep. Even then, I laid in bed for a solid 45 minutes before falling asleep… and then slept poorly.

Now I’m up early (which is fine – especially since I’ve been productive), but I need to make sure I stay up late because I’ve got late night work tomorrow. If I’m up early tomorrow morning, tomorrow night is going to suck.

Meh… just a pain in the ass. If this is all I have to complain about, I’m not doing that bad.

I saw The Watchmen today.

I am a big fan of the comics and expected a lot. Naturally, my expectations weren’t 100% met – but when do these sorts of adaptions truly deliver 100%? Little things aside, I was thoroughly pleased.

First, the most unexpected aspect that I was happy with was the soundtrack. It seemed to me that extra special care was given to the music selection for particular scenes. The sorts of music played throughout most of the movie wouldn’t make it into my usual rotation, but they were contextually spot-on. For example, has anyone ever played 99 Luftballoons at a more appropriate time? I think not.

Now, it’s true that a lot was left out of the movie. I don’t think the majority of it is critical to the plot. The Black Freighter is being addressed in an “animated comic” DVD that’ll be released on March 24th. I really don’t think they could have properly interlaced it with the current movie in the genre in which it was shot without it feeling painfully disjointed. It’s a great sub-story that perfectly reflects the dialogue that it sits over, but it wouldn’t have easily worked within the structure of a motion picture in my opinion.

Similar to the reason to exclude the Black Freighter sub-plot, the “mars time scene” in which Jon revisits aspects of his past (where the readers are keyed into the nature of how he perceives and exists throughout time) didn’t really work for me in the theater. I think they salvaged a decent creation story for Dr. Manhattan, but the punch and impact of those panels in the comic are unfortunately lost. These pages are definitely my favorite in the series, so I was paying particularly close attention to these scenes.

At the heart of the story, the viewers are asked classic questions about the nature of Good and Evil -

• Is anyone wholly good or evil?
• Is there good and evil in all of us?
• Is it OK for a good person to do something evil if it begets a good outcome?
• Can someone neither good nor evil be capable of either?

The moral ambiguity and conflict are transmitted as clearly on the big screen as it is turning pages of the comic. I’m glad they didn’t sacrifice this for more action or crazy special effects. The movie is just as juicy if you’re receptive to it. It’s also very raw and graphic at times. While many movies use these cheap tricks as a vehicle to keep the viewer interested while there’s no other content to deliver, we see most of the gore and excess used to drive those moral questions and paint the world in the dark tones that are needed to fully explore the characters that we’re watching and properly understand their personal challenges and struggles.

As for the change in the ending, I think it was somewhat “necessary” in terms of selling it to the general public. We’ve seen it happen in many comic adaptations to film and that’s totally fine if it serves a purpose.

This is definitely a movie that I plan on getting on DVD and will likely watch it countless times – enjoying both the breathtaking visuals that modern cinema can produce and meaty content that was written up so expertly in the mid 80′s.

I wanted to share some of the first “real” shots with my MP-E 65 that I took today. With the world starting to wake up around us, we’re getting some little critters to shoot… finally.

This little house spider was hanging out on a door jamb and being rather patient with me while I snapped away. He started out in a really bad spot, so when he got restless, I transplanted him to another door jamb.

The shots are at 3x and 5x, respectively. I’m using the MT-24 EX for light. Like all of my macro shots I post, I didn’t do any cropping and only the most basic RAW-to-JPEG conversion.

Definitely not the easiest thing that I’ve done, and definitely not the best shots either. I can see that the MP-E is going to be a huge learning curve – especially when I’m shooting moving critters mere millimeters from the front of my lens.

… but it’s just the type of technical challenge that I enjoy.

I’ve decided that I want to learn a “speed solving” algorithm for the Rubik’s Cube.

I already know a pretty easy-to-memorize algorithm that takes about a minute to two minutes to solve pending how much work needs to be done at each “step”. For whatever reason, I enjoy solving it – even if it’s very predictable and it’s only a minute’s worth of work. It’s not uncommon for me to randomize and resolve a cube as soon as it’s solved from the previous pass.

Clearly a heavy dose of Geek + OCD going on here.

Since I haven’t been challenged at solving a cube in a while, I want to learn something that’ll make me have to think for a change. I don’t really have the desire to be one of those crazy people that can solve a cube in 10 seconds flat (the current world record is actually less than 10 seconds – which just blows my mind!), I just want to have to think about what I’m doing moreso than I have to now. Plus it’d be pretty neat to be able to solve a cube around 30 seconds – which would be a 50-75% reduction in time given where I’m at now.

And yes – this is what I’ve done with my Saturday evening. I’m that cool.

I think I’m going to finally see Watchmen tomorrow – which I’m rather excited about. Put it off for too long!

With the weather finally becoming bearable, I’m getting motivated to get outside and start taking photos again. Time to stretch and shake off the winter hibernation I’ve been in. Can’t let the slump linger – spring is just a week away!