BADMOTIVATOR

In the cabinet and on the slide

ben — Thu, 21 Aug 2008 07:41:54 +0000

The first picture here was taken in Scott and Catherine’s new house. Their cabinets and countertops had recently been installed, and a bunch of us went to go check them out after the Whiteaker Block Party.

The second was taken in the little park across the street from the Berkeley Hills Quadys.

Cheryl on Siuslaw River Road

ben — Sun, 20 Jul 2008 05:14:23 +0000

Cheryl and I took another long motorcycle ride this evening. The temperature was perfect and the road we went on was a ton of fun. We took a little break at one point to give our butts a rest. Here’s Cheryl looking cute in leather, standing on a little bridge over the Siuslaw River.

Elliot in a hoodie, pensive, and on the Butte

ben — Mon, 14 Jul 2008 05:04:15 +0000

20 seconds of adorable

ben — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:49:04 +0000

A five-minute ride on Fox Hollow

ben — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 22:45:09 +0000

Big enough for gloves, small enough for the basket

ben — Tue, 24 Jun 2008 22:52:06 +0000

The cardboard box house

ben — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:53:03 +0000

The Bubble Wrap Stomp

ben — Fri, 20 Jun 2008 07:32:27 +0000

Click the picture for 8MB of giggles.

I am guilty of using my son as a prop for a cute picture.

ben — Sat, 07 Jun 2008 06:37:02 +0000

Today’s Elliot shots

ben — Sun, 25 May 2008 21:28:42 +0000

I wish I had some pithy words about these, but I don’t. Hopefully they speak for themselves.

Back stairs before and after

ben — Tue, 20 May 2008 01:49:33 +0000

Here is the old concrete stair coming off of the back of the house. It was small, sunken, and ugly, so I thought I’d play around with some brick and mortar and try to build something nicer.

And here is the result of my tinkering:

At work in the back yard

ben — Wed, 07 May 2008 06:20:23 +0000

Elliot helped me prepare the ground for a masonry project, and then took a nice dip in the new pool.

Back Yard, Cheryl’s Vest, and the Porch Swing

ben — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:40:37 +0000

Elliot and Cheryl

ben — Thu, 24 Apr 2008 16:38:21 +0000

Elliot with hat, Elliot with pokey tool, Elliot with Cheryl. Lovely.

Two more miniature adventures

ben — Wed, 16 Apr 2008 16:41:40 +0000

The first picture is in the strawberry patch in our back yard.

The second and third pictures are down by the Willamette River near where we live. There is a large area heavily populated by spoiled ducks and geese. Elliot was so excited he walked right into the river, and was pretty upset that I kept thwarting his efforts to go grab a bird.

A sample of today’s crop of photos

ben — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:40:20 +0000

Here a couple of today’s photos. As always, click the picture to enlarge it. Thanks. Seriously.

Crazy for the new camera!

ben — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 06:35:33 +0000

It was a pretty nice day in Eugene, and I had some time to fiddle with the Nikon D40 some more. I took lots of pictures, and after weeding out the badly exposed or blurry or superfluous shots ended up with a 125-picture gain.

It’s funny to think about the marginal cost of digital photos. If I had to buy hard drive space to store those photos and make two backups of them as well, the cost of those 125 pictures would be about 15 cents. Astonishing. The big hardship now is the time it takes to cull the flubs and tag them with keywords.

The 50mm lens is going to be difficult to use. The D40 requires motorized lenses for autofocus, and this lens is not motorized. It opens up to f1.8, which means a depth of field of like 20 angstroms. And getting the focus right, manually, under low-light conditions, in which I am likely to open up that iris all the way, is nearly impossible. I might have to do a continuous shutter thing while scrubbing the focus through a plausible range, and then discard all of the blurry shots.

I am still looking forward to the arrival of the cute little bounce flash.

First day with the Nikon D40

ben — Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:38:52 +0000

Our camera arrived today, and I took it out for a spin. I think we’ll have a lot of fun with this camera. Already we are seeing pictures of much higher quality than we ever got from our smaller snappies. I can’t wait to get the little bounce flash and the 50mm lens!
Here are a few of the shots I took today:

We’re done with the little digicams!

ben — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:59:42 +0000

Cheryl and I have sported a succession of cute little digicams over the years. My first was a Pentax Optio S40 in 2004. Its lens extension motor failed. Since then we have taken around 13,500 pictures and movies with that camera, and then a Kodak V550 (whose lens motor failed), and then a Leica D-Lux 3 (whose lens motor failed after an unexpected trip to the floor) and a Kodak V1253 (which was returned to Costco after it was discovered that it took shitty pictures). We’re sure tired of blown-out photos, blurry photos, noisy photos in low light, etc…

We really liked the small form factor and the video features of each of these cameras. We have 1,500 little videos. And the quality has made amazing progress; we started out at crappy, blocky 320 X 240 and ended up with much smoother 1280 X 720.

But it’s time to get some really good pictures, for a change. It’s time to get a more serious camera. So we’re expecting a Nikon D40 in the mail soon, along with a bounce flash and a normal, prime lens. I think we can expect the quality of the pictures to go up significantly soon.

We will have to look into a little solid-state video cam soon. The Aiptek HD one I tested out last summer worked surprisingly well and took snapshots as well, so it might be a good option. I think that the technology in this area is going to jump really fast right now, so it might be a good idea to buy something on the low end of the market and wait a year or two for things to settle down a bit. We’ll see.

Ready To Rake!

ben — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 19:34:30 +0000

Elliot found this cute little rake in the shop and wanted to try it out. I tried to explain to him the difference between Spring and Fall, but to no avail.