My self-assignment for tonight was to try to take some sunset pictures. I went up to Mt. Bonnell and filled up the ole' memory card.

Sadly, the results kind of sucked. Some thoughts on why:

• Focus wasn't really right when i had it all zoomed out. Since I was trying to y'know not burn out my eyes I wasn't really on the ball in getting things crisp.
• The contrasting silhouette was also relatively far away, and so it ended up being pretty boring.
• I was hoping to get some interesting water reflections, but the water was too far away from the horizon, so it really didn't pan out. Now I'm wondering if there might have been some interesting reflections a half an hour or so earlier.

I also decided to experiment with the Canon RAW format (CRW), to see if the ability to correct exposure after the fact would be helpful. Things I learned:

• The Canon "EOS Viewer Utility" is slow, and doesn't seem to show the focus very clearly. It's also not clear if it's using the downsampled thumbnail for the previews, which might be the real reason for the weird blurry imagery.
• I also tried out the trail of C1 SE, which advertises itself as "RAW workflow" software. It seems promising (including an ability to convert a whole bunch of RAW images to JPEGs in batch, and pretty fast responsiveness) but it seemed to be hard to scale the output to fit the dimensions I wanted (400x267).

So it was more of a "this stuff didn't work" session, but practice is practice :).  11:31:57 PM  (comments [])   

Here's something weird I learned last week: I can do better closeup shots of small objects with my 200mm telephoto lens then I can with my 50mm prime lens. So I wrote a little story on what I found out, including a bigger version of this handy chart:

  6:28:47 PM  (comments [])   

Photography humor: Uses and Applications of 35mm Lenses [via PhotographyBLOG]

Choice quotes: "Covers all the telephoto range most photographers ever need, at least until they become afflicted by the terrible urge to photograph birds." "Sometimes used to remove interchangeability feature from interchangeable-lens cameras." And, "Also, especially when aspherical elements are involved, an effective way to vaporize excess cash for almost no good reason."  11:20:56 AM  (comments [])   

A brief review of Psi Ops: The Mindgate Conspiracy, which I got from the House of Beck for my birthday.

Pros: incredibly satisfying gameplay. The psi powers are well balanced and well integrated. The run & gun portions also work well. The telekinesis (and to a lesser extent, the mind control) powers add a certain degree of non-linear puzzle solving: for example, I realized I needed to get up to the upper portion of a room, and stacked a bunch of boxes to do it. Only later did I realize that there was another entry I'd missed that would have led me directly up there.

Cons: Too much black; it's hard to see in some areas. Sometimes enemies respawn incessantly (although I now think this might have been related to an alarm that got tripped). Some puzzle chokepoints are just irritating (either because of respawning baddies or a time limit, as you try to find the one button you have to press in the darkness). The cutscene dialogue is just bad, bad, bad.

But again: the powers are incredible, and they're well integrated into the fast paced gameplay. Story, schmory: I just want to fling around meat puppets and steal their brainsssss. Woo!  11:17:57 AM  (comments [])