I was attacked by a snake out at Scottish Woods today. ‘Attacked’ might be too strong a word. It was more sort of him trying to hide under a rock while I laid next to it waiting for him to come up for air so I could snap his picture. Some anonymous guy pointed him out to me (thanks anonymous guy!), but I was only able to get two pictures that were even halfway decent. They’re in the newest gallery, at the end. There’s also some pics from downtown, a picture of a soft shell turtle that was one of many that this guy with a facemask and snorkel caught by hand (I gotta try that next time I’m out there). Some stuff from downtown, too. I’m starting to wonder if my camera’s fucked up, as some shots that I know were in focus in the viewfinder didn’t end up that way, and there is some vignetting at the corners at full telephoto. I’ll have to have it looked at or something. 
Archive for the ‘Pictures’ Category
Snake Attack!
Sunday, July 31st, 2005Some random pics from lately…
Wednesday, July 27th, 2005I gathered together some of the better of the sorry lot from lately and posted them here. Some of them are kind of interesting, I suppose.
4th of July Fireworks pics
Thursday, July 7th, 2005I took some pictures of teh fireworks from Zilker park on the 4th. The didn’t come out great, but, considering it was my first time, a couple of ‘em aren’t too bad.
Flowers. Yep, more flowers. Also some geese, and a bunch of other stuff.
Sunday, July 3rd, 2005Today I took the E-10 down the hike and bike trail around Town Lake, to Zilker and the Botanical Gardens. Man, that place is hard to take pictures of, at least the bits in the Japanese gardens. The problem is that you’ve got a really high dynamic range–white rocks sitting in the sun, right next to shady bits with hardly any light at all.Still, I got some pretty good pictures.
A lot of the pictures are of flowers. Flowers and bees. I feel kind of bad taking so many picture of flowers, because it’s kind of cheating–it’s hard to take an ugly picture of a flower, and pretty easy to take a good looking one. Still, my newer ones are better. And I like flowers a lot, so there.
There’s also some pictures of these hard core geese that tried to shake me down for my bread crumbs underneath a bridge. They honked and they hissed, but I held firm, and so my belly is full now, and they’re hungry.
I got a few pictures of the gardens itself, a dragonfly, and some random other stuff. More worth checking out than the last coupla sets, that’s for sure.
Downtownio
Thursday, June 30th, 2005Got a few pretty pictures downtown the other day. Also a pic of myself I’m gonna use temporarily on Hi5 whenever I get around to listening to all the people who keep telling me to join.
Man, this would have been a crap weekend if it wasn’t so much fun.
Monday, June 27th, 2005Sunday I decided I was going to go hike the Greenbelt again, as I hadn’t done it in quite some time, and not at all since I got my E-10. I started out at Westgate again, and this time, having a better sense of location, discovered that there is in fact a trail that takes you all the way to the greenbelt proper in about 18 minutes.
I then hiked around a bit and after quite a bit of hemmng and hawing decided to head upstream to Scottish Woods trail and see if I could find any water. As you can tell from the pictures, it took a good long while to find any. Sculpture falls has, at long last, pretty much dried up. Even the most upstream of the falls at Scottish Woods wasn’t flowing, although the next one downstream was, and had a pool of incredibly refreshing water behind it. I had to get out as soon as I got in, though, to go meet various TAMU alumni for a trip out to lake Travis, and proceeded to make a hellacious uphill hike where I managed to give my camera a nasty knock that resulted in it acting a bit goofy ever since.
This made me very, very, very, very, very, very sad, especially as I was at the time under the impression that it had simply stopped working. I found out later that I can get it to work again by tilting it 30 degrees to the right and giving it a sharp whack on the right side of the case.
Despite my unhappiness over this, I had a helluva time out on the lake, but then was helping to load up my buddy Dave’s boat slipped and fell into the water with my brand new cell phone in my pocket, rendering it inoperable as well.
This also did not really improve my mood. It’s all seemed to work out in the end, though, as after a day of drying out, my cell phone is back in working order, and my camera was in working enough order that I was able to get some pretty nice pictures from the UT campus after work today.
And, to be fair, I did have a good time all around, so I guess it’s a wash.
More news: I can’t post all the pictures I want to this site that convey a story of the places I visited and things I saw, without diluting the quality of the pictures in terms of charting my progress in the act of taking them. So, I’m going to break out my best pics to another site, il.lusion.org, just about my photography. Height of arrogance, I know, but I’m an arrogant bastard, so there it is.
I’m working on some gallery-making software to make this possible and easy. It’s pretty early on, but I’m calling it, completely inappropriately, Galleria. I’ll give it a site when I get it at least semi-finished.
Skinny boy at sunset.
Thursday, June 23rd, 2005Check out my bro and the yet-to-be-named ride.
Various new E-10 pics
Wednesday, June 22nd, 2005I’m still more miss than hit with my new camera. The autofocus is fast, but not always accurate, and the autoexposure is inconsistent. I keep forgetting to clear modes (macro, manual focus, exposure compensation) that I’d set for special situations. All of this is exacerbated by the fact that the LCD review function is so slow, and having auto-review turned on slows your picture save time and eats your batteries. Also, you can’t use the remote with the monitor on, for some reason, and if you turn the monitor on, then the drive mode that you can use the remote with is cleared. All of this is very frustrating to me.
Still, the E-10 is about a hundred times better than my Powershot A20, and I’m learning to work around the annoying bits and take advantage of the good stuff it offers. I got some pretty cool pics after work, a couple on South Congress, a few more around sunset and at night last night on Town Lake and Downtown, and even a couple portraits of the Kitty Cats. I’m slowly learning to post only one pic that tells the same story, instead of all the pics that I think look good, and I think that if I only ever post my really good pics, then nobody will know that I take bad ones.
I also got some pics that aren’t too bad at a Travis County park at Windy Point on Sunday. These are here not so much for artistic value as for my friends, and I didn’t take all of them.
I also got a Polarizing filter that I forsee vastly improving my nature shots. Click “Read More” below to see some explanation and samples.
This filter can add some saturation to sky that is washed out, and remove glare from water, and, more importanty, foliage. This will help a lot with the overexposure and washout problems I had, for instance, at the botanical gardens the other day. Here are some comparison pics. The polarizing filter is on all of them, but on the left tuned to its least effective angle, on the right to its most effective:
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As you can see, it sometimes has a pretty dramatic effect, and sometimes completely alters the autoexposure behavior for the better.
Blunn Creek Nature Preserve and McKinney Falls State Park
Sunday, June 19th, 2005Man, this picture takin’ thing is hard. I got off work yesterday at 5:45, which left enough time to hit up Blunn Creek Nature Preserve down the street from my place, where I met up with Jay and we went out to McKinney Falls state park, on Onion creek out toward the airport.
McKinney Falls is a pretty nice park, seems to be popular with fishermen. I got some pictures from the hikes, but they serve more as an object lesson to for what not to do. I put the less offensive ones up here.
Basically, I did a lot of walking around and snapping pics with no stabilization in fairly low light conditions, occasionally not even stopping. The E-10 lets in a lot more light than my old camera, but it don’t work no miracles. I couldn’t really get to the other side of the creek, which would have been best for taking pictures at sunset, and really need to get a polarizing filter so that my skies don’t suck so much.
I got it I got it I got it!
Saturday, June 18th, 2005I finally got my E-10. I got up with the sun this morning to take it outside and give it a go. The results came out pretty good. Most of these pics have only minimal cropping to make them 5×7, although a couple of the cat pics have more extensive cropping for compositional reasons. They’re all still higher-res than the 1024 width/height they’re reproduced at here. These are practically the first pics that I’ve taken with this camera, and quite a few of them came out awesome. I used manual focus and aperature priority when shooting these to play with selective focus and a small depth of field. I love this camera already. I took it to work with me to try to get some other pics, but they took it away at the front desk. Bastards. I’ll get it back later.
On a note about a crappier camera, I got a new phone yesterday, a Sanyo PM-8200, basically a newer version of my old phone. It really hurts to have to buy a new phone right now. Oh well, at least I’ve got a new toy. The camera on it kind of sucks, but it does have a small flash, and some of the pics come out kind of interesting:
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