Monday, September 22, 2014

Goodbye Summer, 2014... the affair is officially over

Summer officially ended in North America (Sep 21, 2014). I can't say that I'll miss it, in part because of the amount of overtime I put in at work, and also in part because it's not my favorite season. Yeah, I'm not a fan of the combination of heat and humidity. On the other hand, I do enjoy photography, and I do think summer has the inside track on being the easiest season to take pictures- after all, its the season when everything is green or blooming and wildlife is plentiful. For photographers, its a win-win. Spring and Autumn, of close, are close seconds when it comes to photographic topics.


As we're pretty much "officially" out of panic mode at work, I had this past Saturday off. This was really nice, as strong thunderstorms had been predicted for our area. We were thankfully spared from getting hit by the storms and had a quiet night. Sunday ended up being a "heavy" day- the humidity seemed to be off the scale, and we moped around for the better part of the day. I turned the television on around 1330, hoping to catch a part of the Chicago Bears' game. I mentioned in a previous blog that I enjoy watching the Bears. At noon on Sunday. Last week they played @1900; this week they're playing on Monday night. I work on Monday night- at this rate, I may not ever get to see a game this entire season. I could care less.

The photo above was taken with my Samsung Galaxy SIII; it shows my Nikon D3200  with dual battery grip, tripod, wired shutter release, 40mm Micro Nikkor lens and hotshoe mounted tri-axis level. It's a nice combination of equipment- I shot ~120 frames in 90 minutes. In a previous blog, I had introduced Darth Anna, Defiler of Planets. This past Friday I had brought my camera in to show her the battery grip. She seemed to be a bit puzzled about the need for two batteries, and I didn't try to explain my reasoning for the battery grip; suffice it to say that I shot for ninety minutes this afternoon without doing anything except for swapping a lens.

It turned out to be a glorious late afternoon photoshoot. There were definitely some photos that just did not happen because l had "lost the light"... that's one of those stock phrases that is SOOOOOO true; it's especially important in my subject area- railroads, where browns and reds predominate. Before this gets too boring, I want to pop in a photo that is important to me right here and right now- the very first image I captured with a DSLR (earlier this year).



No data to report, but one number: 2489. Not even a prime number... I thought it might be, but the internet said otherwise. It's the number of photo files I moved over to Adobe Lightroom. I had hoped to do a bit more than move files, but Adobe wanted updates, so I did the updates instead of real work. I have a few thousand more files on another couple of harddrives that also need to be moved over for renaming and archiving as well. One of those drives also has my music library, which is in serious need of deduping. I STILL need to replace the motherboard in Jennifer's computer. And, last but not least on my I.T. laundry list.... Mr. T. has apparently given up on his dream of building a computer with DDR4. It is his considered opinion that this new memory will not be reasonably priced in the foreseeable future. Last night, he said he had seen a 4GB stick for around 100USD; I laughed and told him that our first Windows computer had a pair of 4MB sticks that cost 78USD- and that was cheap!

In any event, Mr. T. has suggested that he can build a DDR3 PC pretty inexpensively. His plan is to wait for the Black Friday sales. In the interim, he'll be researching options... for building a dual graphics card box. I'm not seeing the "inexpensive" here.

As always, I am hochspeyer, blogging data analysis and management so you don't have to. 






































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