Sunday, March 29, 2009

UWI Carnival '09


So it's that time of the year again and I found myself at the UWI Mona campus to capture some of the coeds bump and wining themselves into a frenzy last weekend. I was looking at last year's photos and was wondering if I should bother put up any for 2009 after all it's essentially the same theme but then I looked at my stats and of course there is a boost as the search engines push people my way. Why not give the people what they want? so here goes.


We arrived on the campus at the usual start time, 2pm, and aside from the one or two scantily clad girls walking about there was no sign of carnival. I wasn't bothered much though as I was sure I didn't get the dates mixed up and there was another event, Fun In the Sun, going on in the Mona bowl and I could kill some time down there. A few hours passed quickly and it was 4pm when things were just about starting.



The bands weren't as nice as last year, you could definitely tell that something was up.. recession but the kids never minded much as long as they could chip along like conjoined twins joined at the hip. There was less costumes, less trucks, less give aways, these surely are hard times.




As usual everybody got action, the young, the fat, the uninterested and the dorm room railing.



After making a full circle along the ring road they stopped in front of the library and had the competition between the bands which is the worst pronunciation of dry hump session in the dirt. It looks like time was running out so they hurried back around the ring road and debuted Allison Hinds.



By the time they got around to the maintenance section of campus they took out the water trucks and was spraying everybody. I stood from a distance and took a few shots but it was getting dark and I don't particularly fancy the built in flash on my camera so I just made my way back to the Fun in the Sun concert back at the bowl.

See you again next year UWI carnival, hopefully I'll be a student again then.

Sunday, March 22, 2009

pad status: debatchelorized

I sold my pool table.

It was probably the biggest and heaviest item in my apartment, it defined my place. It was a dead give away when my friends visited me for the first time, they would come through the door and question in amazement you have a pool table? lol or ask if it came furnished with one.

I didn't really use it much for 8 ball, I just used to put stuff on since it was so big.. and tabley. So after I went to my attorney to sign the transfer of title for my new place I made my way down to the gleaner[local paper] and put an ad in their classifieds for it to be sold. It didn't really make much sense to move with it since I don't use it and it took up so much space.

It sold the same day the ad ran.. maybe I under priced it :( Two days later the guy came with a truck and a football team[literally] and they took it. My living room looks so empty without it now. I have to stop myself from buying furniture to fill the space since I know I will be moving sometime soon. I now realize I don't really have much to move with that table out of the way but I still have a few large items I need to sell or dump before I move. Somehow I don't think they will be as well received as the pool table though.. I got calls for 6 days straight after that ad ran.

Sunday, March 15, 2009

fuzzy life

I have gone vintage.


lol well not as old as Asahi Pentax but almost there. Last month for my birthday I ordered my second[the last one got lost somewhere in the mail between Japan and Jamaica last year] Pentax 42mm screw mount adapter for my canon camera and I got it a two weeks ago. I screwed on my Tomioka 55mm f1.4 lens and the rest has been *click* *click* *click* history.

I am still getting used to manually focusing and other luxuries modern lenses but I have a new found appreciation for fuzzy life. I used to aim to have everything in the frame be in focus as much as possible but now I only want what I desire to be in focus. This lens is pretty hard to focus when it's wide open though, I will probably take a few more weeks to fully get used to it but so far I am loving the blast from the past.

With my new found interest in photography again, I decided to try my hand at photo stitching. So I installed Hugin, enblend, enfuse and autopano-sift-c[all free and opensource] got to making panoramas.


I was off for last week so of cruised on up to Castleton to try my stitching skills and swim of course and these photos are some of the end results. The water was crystal clear almost perfect but a bit shallow.



The photos came out nice for such an old lens eh? If y'all want to see a larger picture of the rocks, check my panoramio page here.