From my aunt's ranch in Sonoma, CA on a foggy morning.

Took my new 18-200mm VR lens out for a spin on Saturday evening at the Palace of Fine Art in San Francisco and the photos are now online. This was really the perfect situation for the VR lens and to be honest it was even better than I had been imagining. The lens alone is great and has produced some great quality images, but then add in the VR technology and you've got a seriously awesome lens. I took plenty of shots using shutter speeds less than 1/50 sec and for the most part they turned out clear and crisp. Now I'm just bummed I didn't have it for my Asia trip, but oh well.

omg, omg, omg! i finally got my VR lens. whoot!

seriously though, it's been tough to find these lenses and after months of looking i've finally succeeded. unfortunately i haven't had much of a chance to play with it since it was night time before i got home today but after messing around with it a bit i am very satisfied. i plan to do an experimentation series to really test out the VR technology and see well it works, but if you click through to flickr and check the properties from the image above you'll see that it was shot at iso 200, 1.3 sec shutter and it turned out pretty darn good.

anyways, i'll have something more interesting to look at after the weekend ;)

I finally finished processing all the photos from my Indochine Trip back in December/January, so they are up on Flickr now.

I have to say that I am amazed at how much work it is to process a large batch of photos like this one (2500+ in this case). I knew it would be a fair amount of work, but I definintely underestimated how much. Makes me really appreciate good photo processing software.

weeklyshot.org is probably one of the best photography sites I've found in a while. You get lots of beautiful pics from a talented group of photographers, constantly being updated, and all the photos follow a specific theme so you get to know what the photographer was going for with each shot. Careful though, it's easy to spend hours trolling through all their photos =)

Just got the photos uploaded from the big Super Bowl pig roast.

For those meat lovers out there, remember, try not to drool over your keyboard.

I can't believe it's already been almost a couple months since I last posted. yikes. I was in southeast asia for about half the time and since then i've just been busy with work and trying to process the 2500 photos that I took, so I haven't taken any new shots this month :/

Anyways, I've been working on my photo processing pretty much every day since I got back and thus I've been spending a lot of time with the Lightroom beta. After last weeks announcement about the Lightroom 1.0 release I have to admit that I am drooling with anticipation. I've been reading through a more thorough review of the 1.0 release and I have to say that the improvements sound amazing.

The new folder based image management that will replace shoots sounds cool, even though I didn't mind the way the shoots worked. One of coolest looking new additions is the new flags and color labels rating tools. As I've been working through the 2500 photos from my asia trip I have been constantly sorting and organizing the photos into various batches and states, which has been a bit cumbersome. The additional rating tools sound like exactly what I need.

The develop module also appears to be getting some nice boosts and the new spot cloning and healing tools are going to be wonderful because I have some images from my trip with spots on them and I am not looking forward to having to switch to CS2 in order to deal with them :/ I am also pretty jazzed to try out that new TAT for the tone adjustments, I never would have conceived of such a thing but it sounds nifto.

Now I just wish the damn thing was available now, when I really need it. I want to be done processing my photos before Feb 19th :(

I was quite happy yesterday when I figured out some features of my SD600's manual mode which I had not seen thus far ... spot metering mode. After figuring this out I looked for a subject to test it out on and Voila!

I see this baby parked around my neighborhood all the time. Schweet ride.

Added another batch of photos in the Aquarium Set

I like this shot because it reminds me how simple and easy it can be to find interesting things to shoot. I just liked the pattern of this grate and focused the shot on that and it turned out to be fairly interesting, which I wasn't really expecting when I took the shot.

This oughta prove how lazy I truly am at post processing my photos. It's now been about a month since I went to the Monterey Bay Aquarium and snapped off my largest photo shoot to date, 426 photos, and I ma just now working on processing them. I haven't posted any of the photos until now because 1) I'm busy *cough* lazy *cough* 2) it's such a large shoot that the thought of processing it was daunting and 3) I wanted to at least try and setup a better processing workflow before hand.

In any case, I have lapsed on posting anything to the photo journal for the past couple of days so that I could focus on figuring out my post processing situation. This photo along with a couple others are up in the photo gallery.

I have been meaning to spend some "quality time" getting a better feel for Lightroom for the past month or so and finally got around to it tonight. My first couple experiences with Lightroom had been only so-so. I had been a bit turned off by it's performance with raw files and some of the library management stuff, but I really loved the look of the interface and wanted to give it a another try.

The thing that finally put me over the edge was some Lightroom tutorials that I found thanks to Photojojo. After watching a the tutorials I was eager to put my knew knowledge to use and give it another try. After a good hour and half of playing around tonight I must say I am very happy.

So far my favorite new features are the side by side before and after layout and the new tonal curve develop section. As a post processing newb I find the tonal curve to be just flat out intimidating, but after watching a couple tutorials on how to make adjustments in Lightroom I found that it actually wasn't that hard to work with. Lightroom gives you a lot of help with the curve and combined with the before & after layout option you can really see how your changes are affecting your photo. Pretty damn sweet.

I didn't actually work on any raw photos this time around, but hopefully when I give those another try I'll find that the performance is better than I remember from last time.

Preparing one of the two birds for the evening on the rotisserie.

Relaxing after the first thanksgiving dinner of the season.

A shot looking down at the floor in the bar Fluid, San Francisco.

Hmmm ... wine =)

Snapped this one off @ Mr. Smiths as part of the Beaujolais Nouveau wine festival that they hosted. What can I say, I love a good excuse to consume a bottle of wine.

Went to this new restaurant (and I really mean new as in 2 weeks old) with my roommates and was able to compose this shot from our table. It was a pretty cool little venue and the food was decent too.

Well, this is it, the first entry from the photo journal which I am starting now and *hopefully* going to continue indefinitely. Quite simply, the goal is to take at least a handful of photographs per day and post the best of 'em here. Lets hope this lasts ;)

Oddly enough this shot kind of fell into my lap while I was driving to work one morning. There was a bad accident on the freeway so traffic was moving slow and since I had my camera with me and the sky was looking nifty I pulled it out and started snapping away from the drivers seat. Then, nicely enough, this big truck rolled right in front of me and provided something nice to silhouette in the foreground against the sky.

My main criticism with this shot is that I wish I would have changed the composition a bit and got less truck and more sky, but what can I say, I was kind of rushed since the truck was moving. In the end I think it turned out alright.

Nothing fancy or interesting to say. I just like beer and even photos of beer =)

added a few new pics from the weekend.

i'm trying to get a better handle on exposure now that i've had my D70s for a little while and feel reasonably comfortable playing around with it. i've basically gotten to that point where i realized that i'm not really happy with the outcome of my pics when i just use the automagic settings, but i haven't quite figured out how to reliably shoot the exposure that i really want :|

Got some more photos processed from one day I went to the park with my roommates to play croquet. This one's kinda cool.

Photos from my Ireland trip at the beginning of July.

'been a while since I posted any photos mainly because I've been lazy (lame, i know) and because I've been trying to figure out my DP workflow. There is a little bit of a learning curve when you start working in camera raw.

anyways, I've got a couple batches processed, starting with a small set of photos from the night we watched Raiders of the Lost Arc at Dolores Park.

New photos in the album from this past weekend.

I have been doing some more experimenting with my P&S over the weekend trying to get more understanding of how to control my depth of field.

I started out having the same problem as before where I couldn't get my A70 to auto focus on the subject when it was close to the lens. examples ..

example1
example2

Eventually I found a manual focus control which finally let me get the subject properly focused while having my lens stopped down to its lowest setting of f2.8.

I still have some experimenting left to do to figure out if my focusing problem is the auto focus on my A70, which admittedly is a fairly old camera now, or if the problem is with my choice of zoom/aperture/camera position.

One thing that has me confused is the fact that my camera only allows an open aperture of f2.8 when my lens is zoomed completely out to its widest angle. This seems strange to me because my understanding is that typically a wide angle lens is used for open and expansive shots when you would likely want a smaller aperture. So why can I only get my narrowest DOF with my widest lens?

I decided to take my little P&S Canon A70 camera out for a short photo session this weekend to do a bit of experimenting. Most of it turned out pretty crappy and out of focus, but I learned some good things.

Originally uploaded by alleng4.

Ick! stuck in traffic :-(

Originally uploaded by jorb.

haha. i love these photos that seem like the most bizarre candid camera shots. i saw this one and thought ... "damn, how did he just take a photo of some guy in the can."

Originally uploaded by jperkinson.

classic :)