• Category Archives Photography

  • 167 miles.

    Posted on by beno Comment

    Our mate Robert came over to the really big island from his current digs in Hawaii to spend some time with his friends in San Diego and us in Temecula.
    Robert is a large format film only landscape photographer, so we have a good deal in common. We met him in Australia years and years ago when he came out for a church convention. He fell in love with the country and came back a bunch of times, so we got to see him every year for many a year.
    Once we moved over here however, our paths crossed a lot less, so it was great to catch up with him again.
    Since hes into all things landscape and loves the back country, Freddy and I planed to take him on a bit of a jaunt when he got out here…. The timing could not have been any better with the area getting a record dump of snow the day before.
    We took him out to Indian Springs, one of our favorite places as most of you would know, then over the back to Borrego Springs, also a fave.
    We went on a real short walk up one of the many canyons and saw some beautiful wild flowers. Freddy and I are real excited to go back there as soon as we can and do some more walking.
    From there (and after a beautiful Freddy lunch on the tail gate of the Rangie) we drove up into the back of Julian and saw two things…. The most snow ever, over 2 feet of it, and the longest line of stopped traffic… about 5 miles… people wanting to sight see!!! So glad we went in the back way, we sailed right past it!

    Anyway, had a fantastic day, came home to a good feed and a warm fire to check out Roberts 4” x 5” film camera and feel totally in love with it.

    Thanks for heading over Robert and spending the day with us. Looking forward to catching up again some time soon.

    (You can see the photos from the day on in my photo album).


    Life in the USA Photography Trips

  • What was needed to take this photo?

    Posted on by beno 1 Comment

    Have a look at this photo…….

    View to a launch
    View to a launch

    Take a good look………. I will still be here when you get back…….

    Notice anything? Down there, to the right……. Yeah….. Now there seems to be some debate on the internets as to exactly what that is. Some say its the Space Shuttle, some say its a Delta2 rocket launch.
    My blog is not about exactly what it is, its about how it just stuck me of what technology came together to make this photo possible.

    Just look and think…. We have at least two guys jumping out of a plane.
    Simply doing that and not dieing a horrible death takes some high tech gear. They are at some altitude ( most in the know put them at between 12 and 14 thousand feet). That in self is not to be discounted. Then you have one guy with a digital camera (Ok, Robert, yeah, it might be a large format film camera, but probably not). Think about the quality and size transformation that has taken place just in that field over the past few years.
    Then you have the fact that by all accounts show that they were not there by accident. They planed this jump around the launch time. Having access to any sort of rocket launch times some years ago was purely on a ‘need to know’ basis. Now it becomes a public event.
    The technology of the rocket itself is also amazing. How things have progressed on that front is just astounding (I also cant help to think about the International Space Station and all the launches and tech that has gone into that).
    Lastly of course, you have the internet itself. Without which I never would have seen this photo and perhaps, neither would have you.

    Anyway, thanks for sticking with me through that, perhaps in my old age I look back and think about where we have come from a little more often.

    These days  its all too easy to look at a picture without really looking at it and thinking about what took place for that picture to be in front of your eyes.


    Photography

  • Want more blogs?

    Posted on by beno Comment

    I occurred to me tonight, after going through my 365 Project, that the photo project is a lot like a blog.
    I read my comments and looked at the photos…. Its the first time since I started that I have gone all the way through them…. There is a lot of blog type stuff in there.
    Musings, jokes, thoughts and feelings all mixed in with some photos.
    So, if you want to read some more blog fodder, check out my 365 Project.

    (Don’t panic, I will keep the usual hit and miss blog schedule going to the best of my ability).


    Photography

  • Sometimes a hack is the right tool to use.

    Posted on by beno 2 Comments

    Before we go much further, please take a moment to read (at the very least) the definition of a hacker on this web site here…… (I will wait for you, really I will).

     

    Ok, to answer your question, yes. I consider myself a bit of a hacker…. “Someone who is good at what he does with computers is a hacker”. Like it or not, I fall into that camp.
    The point of this blog is also to talk briefly about how sometimes, using a hacker (me) to write a software hack (what I did in PHP with Google’s help this week) is the right thing to do.

    I am all about using the right tool for the job. Just ask Gary (ok, perhaps not), while he was over here we had extensive, long (pointless and conclusionless) discussions about whether Windows or Linux is best. My stance then, and now, is thus; it’s a matter of using the right tool for the job.
    Zim asked me the other day if my new computer would be a Mac or not.
    You can read my answer by following that link, but I will repeat it here….. I firmly believe in using the right tool for the job. There are some things that Windows is really good at, some things that Linux is really good at and some things that a Mac is really good at. Why in the world would I use a sledgehammer to clean my teeth??? Perhaps you can get a Mac to host a web site, run a weather station, control Opto and host a blog, but, woza, it sounds like a tough way to go about it.

    There are lots of talented engineers here at Opto, all of them real programmers, so why in the world were Google and I mashing together some PHP code to massage some data?
    A few reasons; it had to be done quick. Doing something right is not always fast.
    It only had to demo the concept, not be a bullet proof production version.
    I was already up to speed on the project.
    The engineers are working on things that will make the company money, I am able to spend the time to hack something together for a trial that may or may not make us money.

    So, what in the world has all this got to do with someone sitting in say, Perth Australia? (Hi Gina).
    Well, I picked up this link via Twitter from my friend Jason. Its very short article about finishing projects. It perfectly describes both my programming efforts and some of my 365 Project photos…… Some times you just have to hack something together to get the job done and nothing more.
    We can often get too hung up on our big and small projects, spending time making them perfect, when really, we just need to get them done.

    Sometimes, a hack(er) is the right tool to use.


    Computers Photography