I just realized I spent far too much time rummaging through people’s photostreams on flickr. My appetite isn’t really quenched either, I’m going from person to person, looking at streams…it’s fun, but borderline psychotic.

I am strongly considering making flickr my new art site, and abandoning deviantArt. It is pretty impressive the amount of crap that is on DA. If you love bad anime drawings, you will find a home at deviantArt. If you simply adore those drawings of cat/women/people things (again, anime - cat-people!!!!!1), deviantArt is your place.

I do know some cool folks on DA, so I won’t completely abandon them, but…submitting a photo is just too damn painful on that site.

And not in that good way. Like nearly all SLR owners (minus those that never change lenses ), I have acquired a few dust specks on my CMOS. I can hear you now asking “What is a CMOS?” and “How do you get dust on it?” or “How did you get to be SO FREAKING COOL?”. Basically, the CMOS is the chip inside SLRs (and now some SLR-Like cameras such as the new Sony shudder R1). It absorbs all the photo information and then passes it along to either the memory card (RAW mode) or a JPEG compression thinger. I could be wrong, of course, as I don’t know every ounce of silicon and solder that went into making my camera.

So, how do you get dust on it? It’s quite easy. You simply change out the lens. Now, you can change out the lens and not get dust trapped inside (hooray for you), or you can be like me and…get dust inside (boo for me). Most people eventually get dust inside, as air typically has crap floating around. If you set your F-stop high enough, and take a picture of a uniformly colored object (ex: wall) you’ll see lovely specks in your images! JOY! Luckily Photoshop can take care of them to a certain degree.

Last nite I gathered the courage to clean the CMOS myself. So I in the bathroom (of all the places in my apartment, the least dusty), took off the 28-105mm and snagged my blower. I then proceeded to blow off my CMOS in the bathroom (cue the perverted comments…). Well, this didn’t really work. Granted, I didn’t put more dust on, like some have done, but the specks are still there. They are only apparent @ an f-stop of say…22 or so, which I’d only use for macros and bright landscape shots. Ah well. No biggie. I may pick up a CMOS cleaning kit if I can’t get the crap off my CMOS…grr.

Denver, Baby!

We are headin to Denver next Thursday for a long weekend with some friends. The plan is to hang out, drink a gallon or two of wine, and hopefully see my best friend’s wife who’s hanging out @ Ft. Carson while he is serving our country in Iraq. I also plan on taking roughly a million pictures..give or take 10. Can’t say they will all be from the rebel, as I’m sure my S60 will come in handy. I was tempted to snag a wide angle lens, but honestly…there isn’t ‘much point.

Very excited about Denver. The weather here hasn’t been bad, but I’m just looking to get away :D, Woo!

Gallery Updated

Took more shots this past weekend and last weekend - 1..2..3 GO!
aaand back to work

I’ve been told by 3 people now that my site is slow. This is encouraging because it means that people are actually looking at the crap I throw up there. It is discouraging because it is indeed a slow site. I have looked at Serendipity’s forum and I have “hidden” some sidebar plugins (including my favorite which displays stuff from my gallery). I’m working on trying to make the site quicker and there are a few plugins that have been developed to do so. A drawback to one of them is it eliminates dynamic content, not that I have a ton.

I’m also looking at Wordpress, and optimizing my CSS

…and it is called, Owning an SLR..itis. Don’t get me wrong, it’s a fine illness to have, as my Rebel is treating me well. The problem now is lenses and accessories. Two things that can get expensive quickly. I have a nice zoom, a fantastic macro (see pictures below) and now all I want is more lenses . The next item on my list, however, is a new tabletop tripod. My current one was given to me by my dad awhile ago and it really can’t hold the Rebel with Macro lens very well. The camera kept tipping.

I took some macros last nite with the new macro lens, and my remote. The remote made it so easy to snap shots. Sometimes I had the aperture up to 32 which gave me exposure times of 20s or more. Below are some samples from my flickr photostream -

I’m pretty happy with them. I’m also very happy with flickr. Very cool site. It makes everything so easy. DevArt makes photo submission a pain.

Lastly, I’ve heard that this site is slow at times. This really doesn’t concern me as I’m pretty certain that no one visits this blog. If you are experiencing slow load times, lemme know.

I. Love. This. Camera.

I think this past weekend about 200 photos were snapped w/my new Rebel XT I’ve come to the conclusion that this camera refuses to take bad pictures. Granted, many of my photos are now deleted as many were just f-stop or shutter adjustments. The fact that you can set the ISO to 800 and not see a ton of noise is fantastic. I haven’t messed with ISO as much as aperture and shutter.

Given the rebate thing canon has going, I ordered a macro lens yesterday. It isn’t’ the best macro lens, as the Min. Focusing is about 0.8ft, but for the price it has been said to be a great lens for both macro and portrait. I wouldn’t mind the 100mm USM macro..but…I also wouldn’t mind an Enzo Ferrari . I also picked up a cheap Canon wireless remote for $25 or so (Rowe had a wireless remote for $600 - pssh!). Sadly, I had to snag a filter set, but got a good deal.

Keep checking the Gallery for updated images. I added a gallery this morning and plan on dumping random shots up there. As my friend and I have been discussing, posting using my deviantart account is kinda painful - and the site seems to be slowing down due to increased traffic . Ah well.

I’ve looked into flickr as well, but the 20mb per month upload qouta is….eh.

Ok, must go medicate to rid myself of evil cold. I plan on taking some long exposures of my gas burners on my stove. I took a few w/my S60, but the noise was bugging me. So i’ll reattempt with the Rebel .