sometimes you just have to let things go. you have to try not to read more into a situation than there really is. sometimes you just have to take things at its face value and just go with what you know as fact. speculation can only lead to half-truths and assumptions.
all that ails me will be dropped like water off a duck’s back.
that’s what i tell myself whenever i start to get a little to wrapped up in something that is probably more than its worth.
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i placed the order for my optical slave triggers on 4/22/04. they FINALLY shipped it yesterday. all enthusiasm i had for it has dissipated into frustration and impatience. three weeks it took them to ship it! three weeks!
ah, oh well. now i have to go and figure out how i’m going to be mounting these slaves once i get them in the mail.
hmmm, i just read the last sentence again and it didn’t come out quite how i had intended. but i’m currently debating whether or not i need to purchase more light stands or if i could make do with what i’ve got. maybe i can jury-righ something together so that i won’t have to get more bulky equipment.
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ah, just trying to make it over the hump. it’s wednesday and that means that it’s time to push through this day and coast through the rest of the week. i’m trying, anyway. i don’t have anything planned for the weekend, but i think that i’ll probably end up taking some pictures of the JACL volleyball tournament this weekend.
sunday starts up the JACL league. i’m still not totally sure if i’m actually on the roster or not, but i guess i’ll find out sunday when i show up and pathetically ask around, “am i on your team? no? can i play with you?”
sigh.
i’m hoping that today will be a better day than yesterday. it’s not starting out so good, though.
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it’s been one of those days.
quite often i liken myself to characters in tv shows. i think that the more i identify with the characters in a tv show, the more i end up liking that show. today, i think the character that i identify with the most is angel from the tv show angel.
how do i identify with a vampire with a soul, one may ask? is it because i’ve got rugged good looks and unnatural strength? no. is it because i have super healing powers? no, my ankle clearly demonstrates the lack of healing powers i’ve got. is it because i will burst into flames if i go into the sunlight? alas, no.
i am cursed. i’m not sure how to really describe this curse, but the gist of it is that like angel, if i am ever to exerience the beginnings of true happiness, my world begins to fall apart. odd, isn’t it? you’d think that if you were happy that things would be great. but it seems that as things seem to be getting better and better, life just starts to take a turn for the worse.
earlier today, i think that i really started to have a pretty positive outlook on things, but something happened to change my mind. it went from a good day to a dark day. i guess i’ve had all this time to slowly store away the pain of yesterday’s past, but it slowly boiled up to the surface. just when things were starting to look good too.
*sigh*
oh well, life goes on. i guess i’ll try to see where it leads.
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ah, so i got the blessing from anita to post pictures from her shoot. i must say that working with models to take pictures is a completely different experience than the other types of photography that i’ve done. in some ways it is very challenging because models move where as buildings and landscapes are pretty stationary. there are so many little things that you have to look for when doing portrait work, i still have a lot to learn, but as my friend christina once said, “you can’t take a bad picture of naturally attractive people.”
i think the one thing with portrait photography is that it is much more of an engaging photo shoot. it’s quite fun and you get to interact with your subject at a more intimiate level. when i do landscape of building photography, it’s a lot more introspective.
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true to my word, i got a bike computer yesterday. after some research, it seemed that this particular bike computer seemed to be the one to get. a good price/performance combination. it seems like a hardy enough computer, and i think that i did the calibration right. we’ll see, i guess when i compare it with someone else’s bike computer. the only thing that i have a little concern about is whether or not the wire to the sensor might get caught on something. i wonder how you secure it to the bike so that won’t be a problem. the instructions say to use twisty ties, but that looks really, really tacky. i may end up getting some electrical tape and taping it along one of the brake lines.
but it’s pretty cool. i rode a cool 0.25 miles yesterday while testing out the bike computer ranging from 7-15 miles an hour. man…15 miles an hour is a hard pace to keep up. i’m pretty
excited to use it and i’ll probably go out biking today. where shall i go? hmmmmm.
biking is kind of nice because i think that it also gives me an opportunity to think. my mind wanders from topics as trivial as what my favorite britney spears song is to topics as serious as what my favorite britney spears outfit is.
it is a nice time to sort of let all of your other concerns wash away from you for a while as you ride through the trails and just unwind. i think that’s what a large part of sports means to me. it gives me time away from everything else that is usually on my mind.
speaking of which, sunday starts up the JACL volleyball league. originally, i wasn’t going to be playing in this league on account of my gimpy ankle and the fact that it totally eats up your weekend. but with my new schedule at work and the fact that i’m unattached, weekends have a new meaning to me. i’ve been pretty busy on the weekends, i still am trying to figure out what it is that i’ve done during them, but it’s been nice.
but yes, biking. i need to find some trails to go on. anyone know of any good resources for bay area biking?
i don’t understand why coffee and donuts are sold together. i’ve never really liked plain coffee very much. my drink of choice at coffeeshops would have to be the white mocha. ultra sweet and easy to drink for me. i decided to get a donut and a mocha this morning and after eating the donut, the mocha was quite bitter.
but it made me think. maybe the mocha isn’t that bitter, but compared to the donut which is excessively sweet, the mocha just seemed like it was bitter. and it made me think about a friend of mine. maybe my friend wasn’t really unhappy, just compared to everyone else around them, it just seemed like it.
hmmmm.
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i can’t stop thinking about the lenses that other people had at the COBA shoot. i want a new lens…
sigh.
really, i do.
a nice lens.
just one.
or two.
please?
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over the weekend, i went on the COBA photo shoot which was focused with taking pictures from different camera bodies and determining where people will start to see a different when printing images relative to its file size. i think that it is pretty much agreed upon that 8x10s can be printed without a loss of quality with a 3MP camera. but after that, where do the pixels start to matter?
one of the folks at the photo shoot was the inventor of the foveon X3 sensor. the sensor is a very innovative way to approach imaging and when i first heard about it, i thought it would revolutionize the digital imaging world. to an extent it has, but there are some inherent hardware limitations to this sensor currently which make it less attractive to me, particularly its 3MP images…i sort of think it’s cheap how they claim it’s a 10.2MP image sensor, but anyway…
so i was talking to the inventor of the X3 sensor and he was telling me about how RAW images are the only way to compare two cameras because once its off the sensor, how you deal with the image is all software. and software programmers are crazy and their implementations can vary from programmer to programmer. and it is true. how you decide to deal with the RAW images is a big deal and it can vary wildly from program to program. but this is a very hardware-centric view of how to compare two cameras.
the software programmer may come to you and say that the images that come out of a camera are really dependent on the hardware and how bad of an image you start with and how much correction you need to implement on the software side.
personally, i have a consumer emphasis. so for me, i want to know out of the camera, which image comes out the best. which ones requires the least amount of post-processing on my part to get the image to where i want it to go. so whe i compare images, i definitely look at the combined effort of the software and hardware pieces to see where it brings me.
i don’t think it’s fair to blame the software because the sensor is good. the camera is bad if the software is bad. the camera is just as bad if the hardware is bad too. it is interesting to see how different people see the world though.
speaking of which, MAN, these COBA people are hard core. they all wanted to shoot everything RAW. now, i haven’t shot RAW in a long time, but it’s a serious pain in the butt having to process these. i need a faster computer.
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sometimes when i see you around, i don’t know if you are happy or sad. i can’t tell if you are having a good time or if you are questioning to yourself why you are here at all.
sometimes, when i see you hanging out, i wonder if you were wishing that you were somewhere else. that maybe you would be happier if you were anywhere but here.
sometimes i wonder if you are just here, by default, because you have nowhere better to be…and you are discontent with what you’ve got.
sometimes i wonder if i want to know these answers or not.