this is nearly two months late, but a bunch of us celebrated nelson’s birthday. paul made dinner and leeya made flan.

happy birthday, nelson!

a few weekends ago i went to the begonia festival in capitola. one of the many things that they had at the festival was a sand castle making contest along the beach. it was pretty cool to check out. many of the sand sculptures were alarmingly close to the water and they had to build sand walls to keep the crashing waves from breaking into their sculptures. some of the sculptures didn’t survive the waves.

maybe next year i will make an entry into the sand sculpture contest. what would i ever make?

jason and iris had dinner at my place the other night. they are back from china for the summer and i wish that i was able to hang out with them more, but it was still good to be able to catch up with them and find out what’s been going on. iris is pregnant!

it seems more and more like they will be staying in china longer and longer. they are committed for another two years, at least. looks like they’ve found their calling. as always, though, it was good to see them, and by this time next year, there will be a baby chen in the family, too!

i forgot to add a link to the tahoe camping pictures that i took while camping in tahoe. it was a lot of fun. i think that i might be camping again later this summer. i wonder if it’ll stay warm.

i went to check out the big blue adventure series sprint in half moon bay this weekend. several of my friends were in the race so i went there to go cheer them on as they ran, kayaked, and biked the race.

it’s amazing to me that people would compete in these kinds of events. it was a labored effort for me to walk around taking pictures of people running around, but to actually run around…i dunno.

i was thinking about stopping by krispy kreme on my way up, but i thought that that might seem excessive compared to all of these people who are working hard early in the morning, so instead i opted to bring a bottle of water instead. i think i would have been happier with the donut.

it was fun to watch people race, though. maybe one of these days i’ll do a race…

for shooting adam and rae’s wedding, they gave me an epson p-2000 image tank. it has been something that i’ve been wanting for a long while, but just couldn’t get myself to get because i never thought that i would need to have an image tank for the normal shoots that i do.

but at his wedding, i shot something like 10GB of images so i borrowed his image tank and i loved it. i really loved how easy it was to use and how useful it was in the field.

after using it for a while, i have decided that i really like the device. there are a few quirks about the device, like the memory cards needing to be inserted backwards from what you would expect them to be inserted, but i love the image tank.

i know there are some image tanks that don’t have displays and it terrifies me about whether or not you have actually copied all of the images on to the image tank if you can’t preview it. i love how you can preview the images on the image tank and the images are gorgeous.

i am a little disappointed at how slow the device displaying one image to another, but i guess part of that is because i’m dealing with 8MP images.

but overall i’m very pleased with the image tank.

i hope this isn’t the effect that i have on most women…

i often tell people that it is not the camera that makes the photo, it is the photographer. i remember a while ago that my friend was complaining to me about how his digital camera is no good and how he needs to get a super fancy digital SLR camera so that he can take good pictures.

though i agree that digital SLRs are absolutely fabulous cameras, i don’t think that you need one to take absolutely fabulous pictures.

these are probably two of my favorite night shots. i love the boldness of the matterhorn and i love the virbant colors of the disneyland castle. i think that they are both just amazing. i love the detail in the matterhorn rocks and the castle and i love how the structures both just pop out of the night sky.

these are probably my two favorite night photos and they were both taken with my $325 throwaway canon s400 elph, not my $2000+ digital SLR. now, could the digital SLR take the same pictures? of course. but the cheap camera did just fine.

i try to educate people who think that getting a really expensive camera will yield better pictures. i don’t think that is automatically true. in fact, when i first got my digital SLR, i would say that most of my pictures were awful. there’s a lot to learn and a digital SLR just gives you way more ways to screw up a picture.

i think that i’m just being unreasonable. a bunch of my friends have bought the same camera that i have, so i don’t feel special anymore. =P

the moon was big and yellow the other night. i rushed home to get my tripod and set up this shot. i wish i had a better zoom lens. maybe that will be my next camera purchase…

after i got home from muir beach, i accidentally formatted my card without copying all of the contents to my hard drive. i nearly died. i probably lost about half of the photos that i took.

so i looked around and asked around and finally i found pc inspector smart recovery which is a program that will undelete/unformat files that you have deleted on your memory card. the program worked beautifully, and i was able to recover my files.

phew.