by ·0 Comments

I finished processing and uploading my pictures from Dragon*con and set about notifying people the people in those photos. At the event, if someone in costume liked their picture, I’d get their email address and contact them when it was posted. Normally, there was a 1-to-1 relationship between a given costume and a wearer except for Thor. I photographed four Thors, all of which wanted their pictures. I wasn’t sure which was which but a bit of Googling helped me identifying two of them. What to do with the remaining two?

There I found myself with the strangest email salutation I’ve ever written: “Dear Thors,”.

by ·0 Comments

During Saturday retreat I took a pano of the staff both at parade rest and saluting the flag and was rewarded with my planning a gap into attending units I got these:

20100703-1523-StaffPano

2010 Camp Staff

I then decided to a print of the above which turned into a 13″ x 82″ print.  I started the print around 1:00 AM and finished around 4:00 AM.  The actual print time was about 15 minutes, so why the delay?  The Epson R2880 is a spectacular printer which has generated prints I feel that I was only tangentially involved in taking.  The problem I kept running into was that every time there was a printer error like forgetting to tell the printer to use the fed roll stock and in all cases the printer would clear… all 82″ which would have to be rerolled… by hand.

In the end, the print came out splendidly except that there are few good ways to view or display an 82″ print.  So, I set two records: one for largest print I ever produced at home and another for having wasted the most ink.

by ·0 Comments

The Titan Missile Silo my host and I previously visited was the sister museum of the Pima Air and Space Museum. I’ve never been a plane person, or at least, was never impressed by the fastest/deadliest but their roster of planes simply put included a metric f#ck ton of planes. Normally, this is where I’d link to a pile of them, but I somehow managed to erase the first half of the day completely from my camera. The second part of the trip was a visit to the UN Air Force’s “Boneyard”, a long-term storage area for retired, decommissioned, and for sale aircraft (about a 1/4 of planes there will be eventually sold to a friendly foreign government). The planes were in various states as the Flickr album shows (there’s too many to reasonably post in line) but most went through a USAF version of winterizing whereby the glass and sensitive bits would be covered with black and then white latex to protect the vessel from heat and the elements. The one part I really wanted to see was the chopped up spy planes and nukes that we leave out for the Russians to see as part of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty but they’d just cleaned out a pile of some 40 formerly nuclear-armed bombers.  Nonetheless, some of the views were impressive:

20100525-2947-InterroLoop

USAF-provided valet parking.

The whole facility’s worth of planes would sell for about $32 billion and is the only office of the armed forces that actually makes money.
Back at the museum proper I learned that the museum had a sense of humor:

20100525-3451-InterroLoop

Stealth Cactus

Also, they have another outdoor section that includes another ridiculous set of planes and a WWII bomber museum.
The day ended with a trip to a Tucson diner. I was glad that this was a diner proper down being open 24-hours a day and unattractive weight staff. They didn’t server fries, just tater tots which blew my mind. I’d aways associated fries with being fried and served in restaurants with tater tots being the closest one could muster from home. The existence of fried tater tots was something I had theorized about as a child but not until the age of 26 did I discover that they both exist, and are awesome.

by ·0 Comments

Sometimes I review my photos and say “there’s nothing here” and think that I really blow. Then I see someone else’s pictures and my self-image improves immeasurably, today was such a day.

A person at the Pinewood Derby took pictures with his nice little DSLR.  He looked like he knew what he was doing until I reviewed the shots.  Picture after picture the plane of focus was completely off from the target.  The foreground that should be the winning kid holding his car looks like it was taken through a glass privacy wall but the furniture is tack sharp.  Either this guy is spying for Ikea or needs to be alerted to the fact that his camera has ADHD when it comes to focusing.

by ·0 Comments

I visited Tyler today to do my pre-Klondike walkthrough.  Only one of the parking lots was and the Webelos area was replaced with a glacier.  The killer was probably the snow trail depth which varied from 18″ to well over 36″.  I would have taken a picture of me disappearing into a drift due to a mis-step but it was… cold.  So, here’s a placeholder:

February 12, 2010-12-Tylerinsnow

After talking with the park supervisor we decided that holding the event would be impractical and unsafe so I made two stitched together panos.  The first is the cornfield at the top of the Nature Trail:

February 12, 2010-34-Tylerinsnow The second is taken from the main bridge.  I recommend you blow it up as much as your computer can manage.  I think it came out well and should have a copy of it all my wall at work on Tuesday.

February 12, 2010-2-Tylerinsnowpano I performed no white-balance adjust which may make it appear bluer than some people like.

by ·0 Comments

I returned to CVS to pick up my passport photos and in the meantime I’d found a 2 dollar off coupon on my phone while in line.  I hit the register and I informed the clerk I had a coupon and presented the barcode that was clearly visible on my phone screen to which he responded quizzically.  He summoned his 20-something manager with spiked bleach-blonde hair and a sweet tribal tat on his arm who told him “scan it”.  It scanned and the manager did his little “damn it worked” dance and then looked me in the eye saying

Him: We can’t take it, all our coupons have to be submitted to the manufacturer.  We can’t submit your screen.
Me: But it’s a service coupon.  The manufacturer is CVS, so you.
Him: We need a physical coupon.

I thought for a second and came up with a plan; I’d take a screen cap of the coupon, email the screen cap from my phone to the CVS automatic printing processor, wait a few minutes, collect my print, pay for it, and get a hard copy of the coupon on beautiful photopaper to save me $2.00 on my passport photos. Hazaa!

iPhone: $299, CVS express remote printing service: $1.70, delaying the whole line to save 30 cents through an egregious application of technology: priceless.