Blog - Page 63

To all the women in my life, especially my fiance Penelope. Every day our romance grows stronger as I fall deeper in love with you. I love you baby! I really enjoy our time together and I especially enjoyed the blogs you posted.

This new movie starring Jack Black looks hilarious. Jack black is the ultimate underdog luchadore, Nacho Libre.

I registered a domain and built a quick website for the Downtown Art Ride. I will be adding more info soon along with a great map that Eric Richardson created at his new job.

I just read this post over at 5thandSpring, and I just wanted to wish Jim and Celia the best in their relationship. I enjoy reading both of their blogs and I think it's great that they hooked up. I haven't been paying close attention, but is this the first blogger relationship in Downtown?

Tonight I ran in to Don Garza who was walking across the street on 6th. I recognized him from the various photos of him around the internet and as an avid reader of his blog I've been meaning to meet him so I ran across the street and introduced myself. Don is a cool guy and we talked about all kinds of stuff about downtown ranging from housing to the drug problem to my transgressions against harmless Furbys. He had just come from the neighborhood walk which I am going to attend someday soon. I'm looking forward to trying some of his tamales that he is going to make this weekend.

LA Foodblogging is giving away a couple of tickets to a wine tasting event next week. In order to win you have to write a Haiku. Here is what I wrote:

One of my caver friends, Tom Gilleland, who co-owns a cave with some of the people from my grotto, also runs a software development company called Beach Ware that specializes in games, stock media and educational software. His software hinges on a tongue-in-cheek algorithm which he calls faith based math [faithBasedMath() ?] and which he defines as:

The act of ignoring logic to come to a conclusion that meets your personal specifications. An illogical dichotomy often used by politicians, businessmen, and other rascals to justify a one-sided, self-weighted deal.

I have a problem. That problem is sensor dust. The Canon EOS 20D is a wonderful camera, but it is also a dust magnet. After owning the camera for about a month I noticed large spots on my images. After cleaning my lens I did some research and found that the sensor attracts dust and the dust shows up on the images when you have the lens stopped down. I found a great way to test this was to take a photo of something bright (the sky) with the lens stopped down all the way, when I did this it was pretty painful to see how much dust was on there. I looked around for a solution and I saw some things that seemed somewhat sketchy to try and also saw the option of taking my camera in to have it serviced which seemed like a waste of money.

I was browsing around on the Adorama website I found some products made by a company called Visible Dust. These brushes, swabs and solutions are made specifically for cleaning CMOS sensors and the company actually started out making products for cleaning lab optics. After reading some 3rd party reviews of their products I ordered the 1.6x brush set and patiently awaited its arrival.

When it came I opened up my 20D, put it on sensor cleaning mode and cleaned the sensor. I turned off the camera, put the lens on and took some pictures stopped down, about 90% of the dust was gone, but there were now a few small streaks where what must have been an oily goo had been smeared by the brushes. So that night I ordered the sensor clean kit, that comes with sterile poly swabs and a non-alcohol cleaning solution. The kit came today and I opened it up and cleaned my sensor. I now have 0 spots on my sensor. Yay!

I am really happy with the results from the new prepared slides I ordered from eBay. I was a little worried about the quality on the cheap Chinese import slides, but they are really well done. Here is the first round of photos I took. Or click below for some flickrs:

For xmas I bought both my fiance and myself a new point and shoot compact camera. I had previously owned a Sony DSC-T1 and I really liked it, but I really love my Canon EOS 20D so I picked up a pair of the SD550s. The camera takes wonderful photos, but when I take pictures of anything close and the flash fires the photo is totally overexposed. This shouldn't be a problem with a $500 digital camera, it certainly wasn't with the DSC-T1. I hope that Canon will come out with a firmware update to regulate the flash properly.

UPDATE Ok so after talking to a salesperson at Samy's Camera where I bought the camera and some experimentation I got the exposure working ok. I turned on Macro mode (even though I'm shooting from a couple feet away) and that helped and then I tried Manual mode with the metering set to center weighted and that fixed the problem. Also using the redeye reduction flash helps too.