Class of 2008...Almost

Kindergarten Commencements
Yes, I chose the rainbow belt and clip-on polka dot tie.


UCI 2000

As most of you know, in a couple weeks I'll be finally graduating. I've been busy trying to wrap things up so I haven't taken too many pictures. These are two olden shots of me during graduation. The first one is when I graduated from kindergarten. The second is when I graduated as an undergrad.

The funny thing is I spent around half an hour searching for the picture files thinking I lost my undergrad pictures until I realized...they were in FILM! So I poked around the photo albums and found them. Sheesh I feel old. I tried to spruce them up a little with photoshop but they're just old pictures. What I've noticed with pictures is that the ones you once thought were good aren't really that great when you go back and re-visit them. Sometimes your memory ties them with the good times in your life and you remember them as better than they actually were. So, going by that, never go back and eat the candy you ate when you were a kid. A few years ago,I bought a fun dip and tried to eat it. It was like eating pure sugar - gross. But I loved them as a kid.

Anyway, for my 2008 commencement, I'm going to try to get some awesome pictures. I've already got a few volunteer friends playing paparazzi that day with some nice cameras so hopefully they'll turn out nice. Guys - bring your 200mm lenses and make sure to crank up the ISO since it's going to be indoors :) I'll be gone the later half of the week for a quick out-of-state trip but more pictures and exciting news soon !

Notice Something Different?

I know I said no more Sienna pics for a while but this young lady was scouted by a TriStar rep and has a meeting in a few weeks!! So she needs some more current headshots so I was happy to oblige. Plus it game me a chance to give my new camera a test run. What do you think? The best way I describe the images from the new camera is creamy goodness The colors are just incredible, sharp and the blur is crazy good. Unfortunately, I was trying to save some memory and shoot at jpg normal when I should've shot at fine mode. Regardless, it's safe to say it blows away my old camera.

I'm blogging this on my ooooold PC - all I gotta say is processing a 12 megapixel image in photoshop CS2 on a Pentium III 500Mhz machine is like watching videos using a 56k modem. I'll have a big camera review post coming soon - that's why I don't want to say which camera I got yet.

Wine

This pic was of a wine rack was taken in Atlanta last year. It was the front of a restaurant in the hotel. I've been tasting a buncha wine in the past year just to try to develop my palette. Check out Gary Vay-Ner-Chuk on the link to the right if you've never seen it. This was taken with the D70s and the cheapy kit lens that came with the camera (I wasn't about to bring expensive lenses to a conference for a few days), which you can produce some really nice pictures with if you know what you're doing.

I bought a new camera last week but it had 11 dead pixels in live view mode so I had to send it back for a replacement :( I've just been trying to get familiar with the controls and testing it out indoors and haven't even taken it out for a shoot yet. I'll talk more about it once I actually get it for good. It should be arriving some time next week so I can't wait! I'll have a full review once I give it a good go but so far from what I can tell the controls are very intuitive having only shot with the Nikon D70s/D50 at length. Anyway, stay tuned for that and some more photo tips too.

Transitioning Out of the Nikon D70s

My wedding setup - the D70s, 70-200 2.8 (rented), 50 1.4, and 17-35 2.8.

When I frist considered buying a dSLR camera, the decision was between the Nikon D70s and the Canon D30. Both were good cameras, with the Canon being generally a better camera (bigger LCD, faster) but more expensive. So I went with Nikon knowing that the Nikon system was just as good if I ever want to do something more serious. At the time I was just wanted to take some nice pics in lower light - something a point and shoot little camera can't quite do. I've been pretty content with it until I started taking better pictures and ran into the limitations of the camera:

- Viewfinder is too small (the part where you look into)
- Too few focus points (only 5) which is annoying when I started wanting to focus on things not in the center.
- A little grainy in low light with difficulty focusing.
- Not enough dynamic range (shooting in the bright washes out the details easily)
- And lately, not enough megapixels for a big album (I found this out recently).

However, it was a great camera to learn from. It wasn't watered down in terms of manual controls and with a 50mm 1.8 lens, you can learn everything you need to know about taking pictures. Even though this is classified as an "amateur" camera, as you can see from all the photos from this blog, it can definitely hold it own in terms of cranking out "professional" looking pictures. In fact, I'll take any picture I've shot from this blog with the camera and take the Pepsi challenge. But...with the album requirements and low-light requirements for weddings, I've "maxed" out the utility of this little guy. More soon on transitioning into a new camera.

A Quick Update

When I go too long without updating this blog I'm always afraid it'll fade into Internet oblivion so I try to dig up some old pictures that I find interesting and worth sharing and just to ramble on about something. This terribly underexposed picture taken months ago. They're just stacks of paper that took months to complete for the purpose of __________ .... to be explained at a later date.

On the picture front, lots of news and I'm only giving some crumbs but I'm planning on doing an updated shoot of this guy: