Fisher Times-Post-Dispatch-Courier

An Angry Bird.

He got really angry.

I got one of him really really angry, but it was fuzzy and unusable.

How about some happy elephants?

They have very shiny heads, strangely enough.

An artsy fartsy photo:

And finally, a portion of the new horrendously ugly industrial sculpture outside the zoo.  Built out of rusted steel.

An intentionally fuzzy picture with a fast shutter speed but with a wide aperture.  Keeps the tower out of focus, making for an abstract sunset scene.

The Water Tower.

The statue next to the water tower.  If I could have kept the trees out of the frame, this would have made a perfect silhouette.  The trees kept me from really emphasizing contrast.

So, here it is - the camera and everything that came with it.

And, the first picture captured by this camera.

So it was a wasted weekend.  Work killed my travel plans.

So, I consoled myself by buying new toys.  A pair of new/used lenses for the camera: a Vivitar 50mm f1.7 and a Takumar 135mm f2.0 (I think…could be 2.8).  Both are older manual focus lenses, but with some adjustments to the camera settings, both work beautifully in manual mode.  In fact, I’m actually learning how to use aperture and shutter speed to compose and expose photos.  AND the lenses still talk to the camera to an extent, so if the camera is in autofocus mode I can’t take a shot without the subject being in focus, and in either mode pointing the camera at the subject and working the focus ring results in the camera flashing a light at me when the subject is in focus.

So, I spent Saturday at the zoo, exploring depths of zoom I had been missing and the new clarity of shot produced by the dedicated focal length lenses.  Sunday saw me all over the place, getting shots of architecture around town before zipping off to a state park to get some exercise and nature shots.  My hobby is turning into quite the obsession, but it keeps me occupied and happy.  Again, shots to come, just as soon as my computer finishes loading the frames.  Should be sometime next week.  Sigh.

Oh, I spoke too soon.  They ran off without me, and left me behind without any work to do.  Not that big a deal, except I have things I could be doing over the weekend that don’t involve sitting by a phone waiting for a call.  Heavens knows that call probably won’t come.

Come Tuesday, I will be very bitter.

So I’ve got a couple of books and I’ve been reading the web on good photography technique.  Yesterday I took the evening to shoot a new location - Reservoir Park.  Really not that impressive of a park, but there are two very distinctive features that I wanted to shoot.  First is the watertower, which is a unique structure that is easily the most phallic object in St. Louis.  You’ll understand when you see pictures.  The second is the reservoir itself, which stands on a small hill and contained within a 10-foot high wall.  I had seen steps leading up to the wall and thought it would be a great photo to shoot across the reservoir.  Unfortunately the steps only lead up to the base of the wall.  No reservoir shots.  In their place, I got some Romanesque-fountain shots and some of an oddly-placed statue.  Pics to come.

Speaking of pics, there is a small problem generated by a 6 megapixel camera and a laptop computer.  This problem was really brought home when I purchased a 1-gig SD flash memory card for the camera - my camera now has more flash memory than my laptop has RAM. 4 times as much, to be exact.  Not really a problem when you’re browsing, editing, and saving 1 or 2 megapixel photos that run, at their highest, 600 or 700 kilobytes.  It begins to be a problem when merely browsing (forget editing and saving - real headaches) 6 mexapixel photos that run about 2.2 megabytes each.  I had a single folder of photos that was nearly a gigabyte.  That was just JPGs.  This camera also takes RAW photos, which I really want to start using, which run in the neighborhood of 12-13 megabytes.  Each.  See, a JPG is the result of the camera doing post-processing and compressing the image produced by the photo-sensor.  A RAW file has no compression and no post-processing (and is totally proprietary so only a couple of photo programs can handle a certain camera’s RAW files, unlike JPGs which are fairly eponymous these days), so they are perfect for taking a photo and manipulating it to make it exactly what the artist wants, pixel by pixel.  But they’re huge, and there’s no way that 256 meg of RAM is going to let me do it.  *Sigh*

So far, so good.  Work is interesting and busy, busy, busy.  They really keep me occupied for the entire work day, sometimes longer.  But, the type of law is very engaging and interesting and (gasp) fun, so my days rarely drag.  Plus, it’s nice to be working on projects with real-world import, rather than theoretical or made-up or academic projects that are hard to get passionate about.  Mmm.  Work.

Ducks.

More Ducks.

Did I mention ducks?

Michael Fisher - unemployed law clerk for Sedey Harper.

Still waiting for that bus.  It’s late - but, then again, it is a bus!

Things couldn’t have gone better today.  Virtually hired on the spot.  I say virtually because they took an hour or so to call my old professor, call me with some extra questions, and *gasp* apparently they did some actual work before getting back to me.

I start Monday.

Congrats to papa bear for the new camera, though I will say that for his purposes I think the H1 might be more than he needs.  But, hey, with prices down where they are, why not?  When I first read the comment, I was worried that he’d dropped way too much money, but then I realized he was talking about the H1, NOT the R1 (a new new Sony camera selling for about a grand right now.)  For those who are interested, my favorite digicam website dpreview.com rates the H1 as highly recommended.

More notes on my new camera: it’s a Pentax DSLR, though I’m not sure what body it is yet (Vegas has odds set at 8-3 for the *ist DL, 2-1 for the *ist DL2, 25-1 the new K110D, and 50-1 the new K100D).  There’s a lens included, and an external flash, and a gear bag filled with goodies (hopefully including a big data card.)  The cool thing about Pentax is their DSLRs use AA batteries rather than proprietary battery packs.  They also use SD format data cards, which my computer’s card reader theoretically will read.  If not, all the Pentax bodies use USB 2.0, so data transfer won’t be too slow either way.

I only really fear that having a DSLR will set me on the road to addiction.  Folks in the forums frequently refer to their LBA: lens buying addiction.  All I really want is a decent wide angle prime, and a portrait prime, and a medium tele prime, and a telephoto prime, and a zoom walkaround lens, and…