This is it, I’m rather excited!
I’ve now gone ‘public’ with this site. That’s right, I’m now a ‘blogger’! Your probably sitting there thinking “Huh? But there are already posts here, is he on drugs?” Well, yes that’s true (even the drugs part, but I don’t think advil counts as mind altering) but these posts were from a Facebook blog I attempted to use in the past. I think what hampered my continued posting was the lack of exposure and the really clunky/buggy interface as you can see by my mild ranting in the previous post. In the past I was a ‘dabbler’ now its time to try on the big boy pants and actually ‘blog’.
As is evident by where your browser is now pointing, I made the decision and took the plunge. I’m quite happy with the choice and I think you will see a definite increase in my postings. I will be tweaking this site as time goes on because … well … that’s just me, nothing is ever 100%. I have more prettying up to do as well as galleries to start populating. The galleries will be filled with some of my personal favorites, not necessarily the best of the best or significantly artistic … just the ones I personally enjoy. There are a few things that are missing on the site which will come with time, so please be patient.
As of this post, for better or worse, I’m now out there! Welcome aboard.
My name is Dean and I approve of this message.
PS: My wife thinks I’m too wordy and wants to edit this post, nay I say! This is me and I’m overly verbose … just sayin.
Posted June 23, 2009 @ 10:36 pm. 3 comments
1 year, 2 months and 3 days later I make my next entry. At least 1 2 3 looks kind of cool.
I’ve not done any flying yet this year as my son is of an age that keeps me pretty busy at all times, he’ll be 6 at the end of August. Between swimming lessons and playdate saturdays as well as family days and pending vacations, things are pretty tight for scheduling. I’ve replaced radio controlled flying with kite flying this year as it’s something the family can do together. Thus my collection of planes sits dormant in the basement so far this season. Maybe I’ll get a chance later in the summer as I do miss it.
Kite flying is actually quite entertaining. We’ve picked up this for Cole (which he loves of course, as any boy his age would) and I’ve been playing with Parafoil kites, this is my largest and I also have a much smaller version. We are all single line flyers right now, but if this continues through the summer I may graduate myself to a 2 line system of some sort. I’m drawn to Parafoils so the 2 line could be that as well.
My photography has also somewhat slowed down for the same reasons. I did manage to get to Granville Island earlier this season though for a photowalk with the guys. Mostly I’ve just been doing kids parties. I do have a studio now set up, and at some point I may actually start using that for some projects, again time permitting.
Facebook itself has now turned into a place to post photos for the most part. I do poke people now and again and periodically post blog entries and by ‘periodic’ I mean annually at best looking at my track record. I think I may have even changed my status one or two times this year as well. For my Social Media fix I’ve now been using Twitter. Twitter holds my interest a lot better than Facebook did as the feedback is near instant. I relate it to MMORPG’s without the stats.
I have yet to figure out what to do with my old ViaTheLens.com site as it’s somewhat irrelevant now, was considering revamping it into a photoblog site. I may actually post a little more bloggytype stuff if I gave myself a dedicated site for it. I like the URL and don’t really want to give it up, so I should use it for something and this FB blog thing isn’t really as feature rich as I’d like to begin with. Maybe fellow bloggers can give me some ideas.
Until next time, excelsior!
Posted June 17, 2009 @ 3:25 pm. 1 comment
A great amalgamation of my two hobbies, something I can definitely appreciate:
Nikolay, one of my flying club members has build himself a Heli for aerial photography. This is not his first, but definitely his coolest as it has an active GPS correction system. Once the coordinates are programmed in, the Heli will maintain that position and self correct if its moved from its target location. You can see a demonstration here.
For a more in depth look into his aerial photography, his website is here.
Posted April 14, 2008 @ 3:23 pm. Add a comment
Well, we’ve been back from Toronto now for about 4 days and Cole is just starting to get readjusted to Pacific Time. It gets to be twice as hard to recover from jet-lag when you have a little guy that wakes up at 5am raring to go. Today is the 1st day of him really sleeping to a human time.
While we were there I got to hone my skills when it comes to taking baby pics as my newest neice was all of 3 weeks old. So much easier working with children who can’t m0ve! We also checked out the Toronto Zoo, or at least as much of it as we could with all the off-season renovations taking place. The habitats here offer better photographic opportunities than the Vancouver Zoo as there is better vantage points with no obstuctions or glass rather than chainlink everywhere. Images of both Gabrielle and the Zoo can be seen here.
Since I last checked in here I did the timelapse experiment. 999 shots at 15 second intervals. With some rounding it comes out to roughly 4 hours of images. I don’t have a lot of interesting subjects to point a camera at from my house but a heavy snowfall day offered a decent opportunity to experiment. When you 1st start watching the video you will think your just watching a really short loop of some trees in the wind but give it time, if memory serves the video is 33 seconds long and can be seen here. Be sure to give it time to load as the movie is about 27 megs (sorry about this folks, I will try to optimize better in the future). I’ll be going away for a few days over xmas, I may be lucky and have better subject manner out of one of my windows at our desintation versus what I get at home.
Happy Holidays!
Posted December 16, 2007 @ 3:19 pm. Add a comment
Another meet was arranged by Dan (though sadly absent … stuck in Powell River) for this last Sunday. This meet included Steve, Sharon and Gabrielle (escorted by her entourage, Amber and Derek). Once again an easy group to hang out with for a few hours of shooting.
Most people were more or less indifferent to being photographed. A few exceptions included a woman who was all but waving her granddaughter in the air to get our attention and a newspaper saleswoman that was quite content to mug for us.
I only ran into one person who didn’t like the photographing and oddly enough it was his lettuce he was rather protective of. Apparently he’s was willing to let me shoot the greens, so long as I owned them first. So I left him and his lettuce alone. Fortunately I did get a shot in before he expressed his concern over the well being of his leafy veggies. You can see him lording over them in my collection of shots here.
I’m not sure when the next time will be that I can join in on another excursion but hopefully I’ll be able to squeeze one in before Christmas.
As a final note, I think I’m going to start experimenting with time lapse photography. I can tether my camera to my PC via USB. The Canon software has a front end allowing me to set up intervals as small as 5 seconds. Coupled with Lightroom’s watch folder this could be a great coupling of utilities. Examples of time lapse can be seen here.
Posted November 19, 2007 @ 3:17 pm. Add a comment
The CAG is hosting an open showing called the Community Art Grid. The idea is that you go down there check out everyone’s work and while your there (if you have something you want to show) you can place a piece into the show.
When you put a peice of your own into the show you get a ticket. This ticket allows you to claim 1 piece of art at the end of the show. You can either get yours back (if its still there) or someone else’s.
There is a lot of great entries down there, I encourage anyone in the area to go down and take a look around. Its right on the corner of Richards and Nelson. I’ll be going back next week to check things out as there wasn’t a lot on display this afternoon being that it was the beginning of the show.
Contemporary Art Gallery
Posted November 9, 2007 @ 3:07 pm. Add a comment
I’ve been cleaning up my Lightroom catalogues. I have 2 different computers with similar date ranges imported into each. Downside is that the both contained completely different subject matter. Now its time to consolidate the two of them and clean them up so that they match and are properly checked for dupes. I’m finding a lot of erroneous duping based on the old system I used for photo organization. Folders of RAW’s, folders of processed JPG’s and sub folders of web sized JPG’s just equals one big mess imported. Time to take it back to the RAW’s only. Once its all done I’ll have to divvy up the libraries a bit more to make them manageable over the network but it will be worth it in the end.
If I can give advice to anyone who’s not yet doing it, get yourself into some sort of Digital Asset Management (DAM) software now. Did I mention now? By “now” I mean yesterday. It took me 6 years to do it, and after getting Lightroom this year I don’t know how I found anything! I’m not advocating that you jump to Lightroom specifically but definately get into some sort of DAM software.
Posted October 28, 2007 @ 3:00 pm. Add a comment
