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I had my first photo shoot on the weekend. I was taking senior photos of Gavin, a son of a friend. We went down to Minnehaha falls. It went really well. We found some good locations (I scouted the day before) that provided reasonable backgrounds. Gavin was pretty good to work with, and we got some good poses.

I was not entirely happy with the sharpness of the photos. I shot with a tripod, but they are not tack sharp. I had some prints made to check them out, and the prints are pretty good, but on screen, they look like they could be better. I need play with my lens/camera a bit to see if the focus is off, or if there is something else I need to do. Usually I hand hold my shots (except sunsets/night) and they come out fairly sharp, so I was a little disappointed, but the pictures are still quite usable.

Yippee. I mentioned quite awhile ago that I needed to upgrade to 2.6.2. Well, I finally did it. Looks a whole lot of the same. Yippee.

I backup my photos from an iMac to a Ubuntu linux box with a simple rsync command.

rsync --exclude=".*" -ave ssh /my/masters userId@x.x.x.y:/media/pictures

This will copy everything new from /my/masters to the backup machine at /media/pictures without copying any “dot” files. This also does not delete anything from the new machine.

Anyway, I was doing the rsync, but ran out of space on the backup box. A ctrl-z, and now I need to make more space. I am running ext3, so it should be just a few commands. First I unmounted (umount) the filesystems just to be sure. Then :

lvextend -L +40G /dev/vg/pictures

This will grow the logical volume by 40 gig. Next we need to resize the filesystem to fill up the space.

resize2fs /dev/vg/pictures

I have done this before, but this time I got a message to run e2fsck first.

e2fsck -f /dev/vg/pictures

This finished without issue, and I then ran the resize2fs command and it finished after a couple of minutes. Remount the filesystem, a “df” and it confirms that there is more space available.

I removed the last file copied to make sure it wasn’t wrecked somehow, and then kicked off the rsync again. It just picked up where it left off.

Went to LA this last weekend for a wedding. I got down to a couple of beaches to take some pictures a couple of times too, which was nice. I got a few good surfing shots despite not having the greatest of telephoto lenses. Here is a composite that I made. This exported version does not seem all that clear, but the originals are quite sharp.

Support for RAW out of the D90 is starting to trickle in. Adobe now has support in Camera Raw. That is great, but Apple just released a OS and a RAW update that does not. Apple does not tend to release these that often, so it could be awhile yet until we see one.

In the course of investigating some alternative web frameworks (other than Struts2, which I do like) I decided to take a look at Wicket. This is a vastly different way of creating web projects, and I am really starting to like it. The big difference is that you don’t need a lot of configuration, and you do a lot of coding that looks like real Java classes. You get to add components and listeners to a class that acts as your page. There is a html file that goes with each page, but it is just html. Only the wicket:id element to the span (or other html) tags indicates that there is anything different. You link to other html pages, and wicket does the rest.

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I realize that you get one heck of a lot of reach with the Sigma 150-500mm lens, but would you really want to buy a lens with a minimum of 5.0 aperture? I keep thinking that I want to get lenses that are a constant 2.8, or maybe I could be convinced to get a long lens with something like a constant 4 or so, but 5.0 to 6.3? This lens is reviewed by Pop Photo, if you can call a one page a review. There is not a single negative thing about this lens aparently, and no mention of the aperture restriction. They also tell you that it is compatable with their teleconverters without mentioning that it would further limit the light entering this lens. Not really sure why someone would buy this lens, even less why someone would trust a “review”¬† by Pop Photo.

Digital Review.ca has posted some pictures taken at ISO 1600 and 3200 and even 6400 on the D90. I am impressed. I keep wanting to get around to posting a comparison of shots taken on the D40 at various ISO’s but never seem to get to it. These look very impressive.

I got around to going through the Lester Beach pictures. I don’t have the ones of the kids up yet, but I did process the sunset ones.

I had talked to the guy that owns this bike, and was going to send him the picture, but he still hasn’t contacted me.

I found an interesting post from back in February on the Photopreneur site. It is an interesting concept. Some of the things to photograph I have seen, like northern lights, icebergs, and sand dunes, but never took a picture of. Others like getting to Africa to capture the migrating wildebeests will probably never happen. I guess I will just have to concentrate on getting a perfect portrait (which would mean I would need to take them) and catching a moment on film that changes the world.