Posts from — February 2008

Happy Leap Day!

My son’s class had another recital at the school’s assembly this morning.  Here they are under the flag, reciting a poem called, fittingly, “The Flag”

My wife got tickets to the Loyola - UWM basketball game through the Loyola Alumni Association.  This was my first college basketball game ever.  Here is my weak attempt at being a sport shooter.  Of all the “action” shots I attempted, this was the only one worth sharing.  I’d even write a proper caption for this if I knew who the players were, or remembered the score.

I’m just not cut out to be a sports shooter - I know I could have had better result with better equipment (I had my slowest lens with me), but it really doesn’t excite me. I’d rather just watch the game.

More bounce flash with my new toy.  I know I shouldn’t get to used to having this thing on my camera, but it’s been fun.

If you’re a fan of WMSE and been frustrated that you haven’t been able to download archives of you favorite shows, I’ve got good news for you, the Archives are fixed! (Said with my fingers crossed.) 

Ever since the launch of the new site, the station had been getting sporadic reports of errors on the archive page. None of the station staff could reproduce the error and neither could I. If you know anything about software development, it is short of impossible to fix a bug if you can’t reproduce it.

The constant stream of emails to the station told us the problem was very real. Then the school informed us they were going to be upgrading to PHP5 on the server, they setup a new environment and told us to test. Sure enough the archives didn’t work under PHP5. At least now I could reproduce a problem and I hoped solving it would solve the other problem.

Since maintaining the site is not my day job, I have do any work after my kids go to bed. I spend most of the night last Monday re-writing the page from scratch, and ultimately got it to work. I wish I could say I knew exactly what it was, but my grasp of PHP is very small. The only thing I saw out of the ordinary was a call to a Postgres database being made using some deprecated API calls. Given the actual code was several years old, I wasn’t too surprised.

Even with that fixed, I really can’t wait to get the site onto a proper CMS. The staff at the station have a ton of ideas for the site and while the new site looks great, it still isn’t flexible enough to take them where they want to go. We’ll get there eventually, but at least for now you can get at all the great shows in the archive.

I finally broke down and bought a flash I can actually use on camera - a 580EXII.  I’ve wanted one for times I want to just shoot TTL and not think about lighting too much.  Here I’m bouncing off the ceiling in our basement.

My only regret on this picture is that I was at ISO 1600 and it is pretty noisy. I was shooting in the indoor soccer complex where my oldest practices and the light isn’t that great. I wanted to get some action shots, but none really turned out.

It really was a toss up today, I had three photos I could have gone with. I ultimately chose this one for its composition.  Here are the other two - click through for larger versions:

I also solved my white balance problem.  There are a lot of white walls at the place - I shot one so it filled the frame, and set my custom white balance off of that frame.  This is basically what an Expodisc does for you - at it is doing is giving you something white (though I’m sure it’s more complicated then that).

In an effort to cure some cabin fever, we took the boys to the Mitchell Domes.  The model train show was in full effect.

Architecturally, I love this place.  The entryway is so mid-20th century, and I love the big glass domes.

My mom got my son a “Silly Snacks” cookbook for valentines day, and he has been tearing through it.  This was his latest culinary creation,”Grubs and Bugs”

If you can’t tell, they are little cocktail wieners wrapped in crescent roll dough.  The “bugs” have pretzel legs, and the grubs don’t.

This was my first real attempt at any sort of food photography.  My neighbor actually works at Taste of Home magazine, she used to be a food stylist, I think she manages the test kitchen now, or something.  I should have invited her over to dress this up a bit more.  My hasty attempt at putting the bugs in a natural habitat looks, ok.

This is the  bottom of a one story icicle hanging outside of the Mexican restaurant we usually go to for lunch.  I saw it at lunch and came back later when I dropped off something at the UPS store I sold on eBay.

Going for a product shot again.  This is my shaving kit.  The brush was my grandfathers.  I don’t know if a shaving brush qualifies as an heirloom, but I like it and it’s badger (which are expensive new).  The shaving cream I use is the wonderful Italian Proraso.  If you’re a man, you owe it to yourself to ditch that can of crap you use now and go buy a tube of this.  I think I paid $10 for this at Target and one tube lasts me about a year.

If you’re not a man, do your’s a favor and go buy him one (and a shaving brush if he doesn’t have one)  He’ll thank you for it.

[Yes, I'm way behind on cross posting these - I should come up with some sort of automatic way to do this.]