The De-Evolution of Dred242
The infrequent ramblings of a tech-centric wanna-be blogger. Watch as I post myself into a hole....then try and blog my way out of it with fancy words and and well structured sentences.
The latest addition to my small collection of vintage cameras. It’s the Yashica ELECTRO 35 GT.
The “GT” was promoted by Yashica as the “Gold Mechanica”. This is because all of the electrical contact points inside were gold plated to increase efficiency of the electrical current flow.This camera was a hit back in the 70’s due to it’s ease of use. With it’s 1/500second automatic all electronic step-less shutter, the camera was fast and quite. The ELECTRO 35 GT also featured auto exposure by way of automatically setting the shutter speed after you select the aperture. This camera lacks a useful hot-shoe but does sport a PC sync-port on the side. One of my favorite things about this camera is the super-fast “Color Yashinon” F/1.7 45mm lens. My goal is to use this camera outdoors (street photography) mostly, which is something I have yet to really dive into. I can’t wait to get this camera cleaned up in order to see what it can do.
This is the old focus screen from my Bronica ETRSi medium format camera. It’s got several scratches on the outer edges and overall not a very bright screen. It also has several grid lines to help compose shots which I never used.
I installed a NEW split-image focus screen which offers a brighter image in the view finder….I’m much happier than before. I also just picked up a sweet Waist Level Finder so I no longer have to SMASH my face against the rear of this medium format beast.
Here I am only a few weeks in and I already wanna ditch Facebook. The main reason is the lack of solid content aggregation. I’m attempting to create a consistent flow of information from all of my online social networks mainly photos from flickr and TheBestCamera.com and have them post on my Facebook wall. Some of it gets picked up (some of the time) but other info never gets pulled in at all. The application setting in Facebook looks pretty straight forward and I’m sure I have everything set correctly because it works…sometimes! Perhaps I need to flush everything out or just delete all feeds and applications and let FriendFeed do all the work. Wait, is FriendFeed still in business? Anyway, I’ll give the Facebooks application settings few more tweaks but after that I may have to cut it all loose and go to a more plain brown paper bag version of Facebook.
I gave up after several attemps to embed my YouTube video on this blog and have it play back in my iPhone’s Safari browser. I went through this once befor about a year ago but it looks like I still didn’t learn a thing. I guess I got cocky being that I was able to embed a few YouTube videos, some of which were my own, but today proved to be most troubling. The Brightkite video posted below refused to play or even display a thumbnail. Odd because after uploading it to YouTube it did play….but only once followed by a broken video thumbnail. I uploaded it several more times in an attemp to shake something loose but it was a no-go. I also re-encoded the video from scratch but that was of no help.
I ended up posting the video to an outside source - twitvid.com. The video quality is awesome over at twitvid.com, much better than YouTube. But the embedded link provided by twitvid still remains a useless boken video link in the eye of my iPhone browser when posted to my blog. Some how others are able to record, upload, embed, post, and play back video without issue from their iPhones. With me it’s hit or miss and lately it’s been mostly….miss!
If the iPhone is unable to correctly encode it’s own video in a format that YouTube understands then I may have to pick up a copy of QuickTime Pro. I don’t wanna - but I gotta because I’m itching to post more video but I want it posted to my blog, not another 3rd party site.
I can’t wait for the day when high-speed recording comes standard on any average hand held camcorder. I might be wrong but I bet it’s just a matter of swapping out the shutter, and tweaking the firmware….right? Maybe a hi-capacity battery. Oh wait…better lens too. Well, maybe a completely different image stabilization feature. And maybe go from a plastic frame housing to metal…..
…..ok maybe we won’t see high-speed video capture anytime soon.
Just used an awesome iPhone app called Layers. It let’s you draw on different layers just like in Photoshop. I was blown away at how easy it was to create a complete drawing from scratch. Here’s a link to the actual image I made.
My daughter is on day 3 of being infected with strep throat. She picked it up from one of her cast members while performing in a play last week. She got all the med’s, soups, pills, and other concoctions to help her get through.
Strep throat can be passed from person to person. When a person who has strep throat breathes, coughs, or sneezes, tiny droplets with the strep bacteria go into the air. These droplets can be breathed in by other people. If you come into contact with strep, it will take 2 to 5 days before you start to have symptoms.
I’ve kept my distance by hanging out in a completely different part of the house, but as far as my wife and son….well I’d better keep Kaiser on speed dial.
Talking with my coworker “Leilani” about some of the pitfalls of using Facebook. I have 2 Facebook accounts - one geared more towards photography the other for everything else. I’m growing the friends/contacts list of both organically. That is to say that if I don’t actually know you, we need to at least share something in common….like photography.
I was just looking at a few photos from central Chile just after the massive 8.8mag earthquake. From what I can see, the place is a wreck….laid waisted, what a shame. I have this iPhone app called Earthquake which shows the location and magnitude of of earthquakes around the world real time. Throughout yesterday and today Chile was suffering through aftershocks that ranged in magnitude from 5.2 to 6.9.
It took 4 attempts over 3 days - but I finally got my co-workers NEW Comcast Hi-Speed Internet working. It really sucks that the Comcast installer only installed the modem and bailed without even giving the slightest instruction on how to set it up the everything else. The average home user would NEVER know to clone the Mac Address of a laptop and transfer that info to a Linksys WRT54G Wifi Router….now would they. Or better yet, how about the fact that the Arris TM402P Cable Modem log’s, locks, then sends the Mac Address info (of the first device attached) off to some distant Comcast server thus preventing any other device from connecting without first completely resetting and powering off the Arris modem…..bogus! Any way - lesson’s learned all around and the wifi bubble once again surrounds my co-workers home.
Can’t wait to get my hands on the NEW Photoshop Lightroom 3. I’m still running Lightroom v1.4.1 and feeling very behind in my photo editing skills. There’s still Lightroom 3 beta that I could download and use but I’m saving myself for the real deal coming this summer….or sooner I hope.
Here’s a comment I made after @ljphoto22 comment on one of my iPhone photos posted to flickr.
@ljphoto22
Yep! It went like this:
1st. Default iPhone Camera
2nd. Adj. exposure w/PhotoShop Mobile
3rd. Add AE TTV DeSaturated w/Lo-Mob (save @ 600X800)
4th. Add Jewel w/BestCamera
5th. Add extra vignette w/Photoshop Mobile
6th. Upload to flickr w/MobileFotos (yep, Fotos with an “F”)
I know this looks like a lot of work but it’s really not.
NOTE: I use one of two apps to capture an image. Either the default iPhone camera or an app called 1X1 Camera which captures in 1X1 Square Format….my new favorite. But recently I’ve been posting iPhone images to my photoblog (www.BokehImage.com) where I always try to include EXIF Data with each posting.
As you know, I capture, edit, process, and post all images directly from the iPhone. Most if not all image editing apps will strip the EXIF data from images once saved…..I need that data.
I found an app called PhotoInfo ($2.99 in the Apps Store) which can display ( or email ) all the EXIF data but only for images captured with the iPhone default camera…..for now. The amount of EXIF data stored in these images is unbelievable…….you’ve gotta see it! Anyway, that’s why I’m trying to use the iPhone default camera more or at least for images headed for my photoblog.
