I processed this shot as taken under a bright blue sky, black and white and settled on the ever nostalgic sepia. I also added excessive blur because the original shot was out of focus. Somehow, massive fuzziness works better than slightly out of focus.

This shot is for ewee for her enthusiasm for all things creative, sketchy (both drawings and otherwise), and doggle related. Cheers!

My biggest beef here is the lack of primary focal point. Shooting with one of the sharpest lenses on the market, the fuzziness of the beer foam in the foreground is a technical failure. A reminder to 1) finally set my vision impaired compensation settings on my camera, or 2) wear my frakkin’ glasses when focusing. Lame.

Secondary annoyance is the way blown out window in the background. I tried adjusting in PS, but there’s only so much I can do.

On the upside, I like the curves in the foreground and the skewed reflections in the coffee beer.

I tried Postie first because the installation instructions are easier and it came bundled with a cron job plug-in (sumthin’ that checks for email updates regularly.) But despite my diligent configurmatation, I kept getting an error message about an unauthorized post attempt:

Connecting to XXXXXXXX.com:110 (pop3))
Mission complete, message 1 deleted.
memory at start of e-mail processing:16131876
Confirming Access For my.mail@goes.here
Invalid sender: my.mail@goes.here! Not adding email!
A copy of the message has been forwarded to the administrator.

Ignoring email – not authorized.
memory at end of e-mail processing:16158964

Apparently this is a known error. Being known is nice, but it does me no good if It Doesn’t Work, so I turned to PostMaster. Like other tutorials advise, I’m all for setting up a spam evading email account. Using this plug-in (and Postie) requires running the wp-mail.php script to check email and update/load the post. I used u-cronto schedule regular check-ins with the mail account and it seems to be working.

I’m still playing around with maintaining aspect ratio when resizing vertical images, but for the most part everything is working.

So, my vote for posting images by email on WordPress goes to Post Master at least until Postie upgrades and fixes the “minor” unauthorized post thang.

Anyhow, I thought I’d link to the long promised “sample shots” from the Nikon 35mm, f/1.8 lens.

In my humble experience, this lens works as advertised: fast, warm, light and captures well in low light and indoor settings.

A fixed focal length/prime lens demands nominal physical movement: moving in and out, round and about, up and down to capture optimal light and perspective on a subject. It’s occasionally frustrating, but mostly a rewarding challenge. Since it’s no fun to ask your friends and family to freeze indefinitely as you twiddle with manual settings, until you figure things out, I do suggest carrying back-up point and shoot to capture quick Must-Have moments.

As for the much anticipated focal length/”cool depth of field”/bokeh factor of this lens, it’s good times all the way. The lens delivers on shallow DOF for portraits and street shots. That said, methinks f/1.8 is too shallow for portraits and most landscape/cityscape pictures, but nice for macro-esque shots. The sweet spot is a slightly bigger aperture and of course, a subject willing to hold a smile or suspend blur inducing motions.

I was too cheap to shoot with anything other than the stock Nikon D70 DSLR lens for nearly 6 years and invested in a 18mm-250mmlens about 2.5 years ago. If the Older and Wiser Lunamania could say one thing it’d be…frakkin’ drop the ~$200 for this lens.

I’m curious to know if others have found the tones to lean a bit towards the warm side? The orange and red tones in tungsten light are quite saturated. Then again, that could be about the processor/camera?

As always, I recommend photo gear purchases from reliable vendors like: B&H and Adorama.

Methinks the universe demands I get the new PS3 slim.

The big Kanto region stations are available: Fuji, Asahi, Tokyo and Nippon. 84.7 FM Yokohama is also online.
Simple set-up, just download KeyHoleTV (Windows and Mac available) and install.

Given the demographics of twitter users and the 140 word limit, notable twitter trends lean towards the tech heavy (#Amazon Fail) or just trendy (#Susan Boyle). And most times, hoards atwitter about a topic don’t generate any new information per se, but only indicate that lots of users are thinking/reading about that topic (#Swine Flu). In fact, the 140 character limit poses a hard barrier to developing and sharing analytical thoughts.

This all makes me wonder if people will eventually seek out more robust techniques to share their ideas, articles, artwork, etc. If so, I agree with Andrew Davis that Twitter is Done. Tumblr is Next. Tumblr has been around for a while, but until now, it felt a bit like an in-between platform. It was the dead simplest way to start a fairly content rich and personalized blog/tumblelog. That said, at the time it was released, if you had the geek factor to be interested in blogging, WordPress and blogger were just as easy and offered more customization. I set up my Tumblr account mostly to take advantage of Tumblr’s one-click publishing capacity and stream various articles that caught my eye into this blog.

Now that more people are sharing and creating online content, I think Andrew’s article is onto something. Maybe twitter has primed more people to create richer online identities. The caveat is the premise that people actually want to engage in a deeper, more substantive way with each other. On my up days, I imagine an informed cyberworld where respectful, passionate and analytical discussions take place and shape real world events and relationships. But most days are spent contemplating the sheer number of dumb asses twittering about how much porn they watch at work. It’ll be interesting to see how all this evolves.

In the meantime, I’m trying to sort out how to manage and integrate multiple social media accounts. I’m interested in hearing your ideas.