Last Sunday I shot my first wedding as an official photographer. I stressed for weeks beforehand about it, but in the end everything worked out perfectly. I am super-pleased with the results (and I think the couple is too).

As I mentioned earlier, I rented a Canon 70-200 2.8 IS L lens from lensrentals.com for the shoot. On my 1.6x crop camera, the lens was just a bit too long for a lot of the shots, but when it worked, it worked beautifully.

I really liked renting a lens for the shoot. It let me try a lens I otherwise couldn't afford, and as a result I feel I learned a fair bit more from the shoot than I could have otherwise -- not to mention I think the pictures came out well. I've ordered a Canon 17-55 f2.8 IS EF-S for a month, during which I'll be shooting Christmas at Jen's parent's house and another wedding. I'll report back.

posted: Sat, 15 Dec 2007 03:30 | permanent link to this entry

I wonder what fraction of blog posts are "I haven't posted in forever" type posts? Whatever it is, it has just increased. Posts like this usually spell death for a blog, but I'm gonna try anyway.

Much of my free time in the last few months has been devoted to being sick. I've been to the doctor's office more times than I can count, and they are still not sure what the fuck is wrong with me. I'm due for a "patch test" in which they stick a bunch of allergens on my back and don't let me shower for four days. However, I'm told not to have too high hopes for this test.

I've also spent a lot of time on "research" into November Games. I've been working on this on and off for several years now, and I finally finished enough to publish a version. I'm still working on it, so expect more improvements in the next few years. You can download the paper at:
http://www.nimlabs.org/~nim/nov/report.pdf

Now that November is over, I'm trying to pick up some of my other hobbies that have fallen by the wayside. I'm refreshing my sourdough starter which miraculously isn't dead yet, despite months of neglect in the fridge. Yeasts are hardy critters. I'll probably just bake a few loaves before putting it back in storage, just to remind myself that I can.

Another hobby to pick up is ham radio. I'm pretty sure what I need is an auto-tuner. Although the Buddipole can be hand tuned, I'm not very good at it and the VSWR meter on the FT-817 is pretty shitty. I suspect I'll buy the LDG Z-100 or maybe the Z-11 Pro.

And finally, photography. Since my last post, I've been to a wedding in Boston and gone ballooning in Sonoma. I'll be shooting another wedding (they are dropping like flies!!) in a week, this time as the official photographer! I'm not actually a wedding photographer, I'm just doing this as a favor for a couple of good friends. It does mean I need to clean my sensor (you can see a couple persistent specks in the ballooning photos), and I think I may rent a lens, the Canon 70-200 F2.8 L IS, which is very popular with wedding photographers.

Yet another big time sink has been our TV system. I recently purchased a new 32" LCD HDTV and got rid of our old and hugely shitty 21" CRT. And of course, being the geek I am, I decided now that I had an HD display, I needed to make our MythTV machine record broadcast HD programming. So I bought a pcHDTV 5500 card and stuck it in the machine. Of course, with the new HD workload, the machine wasn't quite performing up to my demaning specifications, so I upgraded the CPU and disks, and spent many hours rebuilding kernels, reconfiguring X, and generally improving performance. Although the machine is now an unmaintainable mess, it seems to perform acceptably. Victory, or something.

Well, thats all for now. Hopefully future posts will be a little more frequent.

posted: Sat, 01 Dec 2007 16:51 | permanent link to this entry