UWI Carnival '10

As with my usual tradition I was at the UWI Mona ring road Carnival event today. Unlike the other years things have changed though. First of all I actually belonged there, I stepped out class around 4:30pm and things were just getting kicked off. I heard them advertise it a few times on the radio leading up to this so I came prepared with my EOS body, 50mm and 135mm M42 lenses, this is the other change. I would usually try to capture all the action shots but my intentions with these lenses was to capture wonderfully focused portraits drowned in poor man's bokeh. These manual focus lenses with such a shallow depth of focus is the amateur photographers arch-nemesis to action scenes such as what I was facing, young college coeds gyrating their waists like they were on fire.

I was pretty casual, only sitting down on the grass waiting for someone to stop long enough for me to snap them. I am sure the thousands of viewers that google pours in to this site yearly will be disappointed that there are no scantily clad 18 year olds here anymore. Don't worry though I got an eye full for all y'all as they worked themselves up into a frenzy.

I wish had more old M42 lenses, most of my favorite shots of my daughter was taken with 50mm lens, my money goes elsewhere now.

Some of the simple things

I often walk around with my camera but I do not often feel the urge to take pictures. It is kind of a horrible waste given my camera+lens weighs like 1+ lbs to drag it on the road and drag it back home with nothing new. What is even worst is even if I take shots they sit on the memory card or on my computer never to see the light of day again. I have a 6" digital photo frame in my room but that also goes unused, maybe when I move I'll start to use it more. Anyway here are a few photos I took recently(relatively) that will not fall to the same fate as many others before.

The simple things in life are free. This badly built paper dinosaur that I freed from his over priced cereal box prison set me back around $400.

My skin tingles all over, this can not be good but let's hope it is just sun burnt and not any form of infection. It was low tide and I spent the better half of last Saturday combing the beach for anything different, the sun wasn't out in full force so I didn't bother reapply more sun block after coming out of the water. The waves battered me against the exposed reef a few times but it was worth it to get a glimpse of the sea life on the other side. I only walked away with a few bruises on a finger, lets hope nothing poisonous poked me. Am I the only one mortally scared of sea urchins? The reef had hundreds of them just waiting to stick someone up.

Give blood, save a life. Simple concept eh? I am not a believer though, someone please explain how this works and I would also like to see some statistics on how many people die in Jamaica annually due to lack of supply of blood or its components. Even though I am a critic I still do give blood and as of yesterday have given an equivalent of all the blood in my body. The mad scientists at the blood bank can now bring the Frankenstein Adrian to life.. or use it to save someones life.. which ever is the most likely story.

Have I said how much I ♥ Disney world before? I'm surprised I haven't posted any of the 1000's of pictures I took while I was there last month. This photo was taken at the end of the day after I spent the previous 10 hours exploring the park. About 30 minutes later as I was preparing to leave the park I realized I lost my canon 72mm lens cap. I searched all my pockets, it was gone and my heart sank. As I was about to catch the bus to the animal kingdom the following day I decided to stop by the lost and found to see if by some miracle they found it. After some digging in the back the guy found my lens cap and commented it was the largest of the bunch. I was all smiles, they have 27,000 acres of theme parks and they could somehow manage to have a lost and found that works. I have yet to see one of these work in Jamaica on any scale.

The bane of my existence

For the past week I have been messing around with electronics with hope to build a timer based remote shutter trigger for my camera to make time lapse movies. I did my research, I had most of the requisite parts I only needed to find a 555 timer chip which I found locally at systems and innovations for what would work out to 0.50 USD. Normally these local people rip you off if you can even find a store that has items in stock.

So everything was a go and I plugged up my breadboard based on some schematics I found online that was supposed to achieve my stated goal.. fail. Nothing happened, well the green led did come on but the timer wasn't oscillating, so it was back to the drawing board. I read the 555 tutorial with a new goal of understanding the timer and made a new circuit of my own design that got it putting out a pulse, a step in the right direction.

I had given up from the start on doing this in the few hours I spend at home before I fall asleep at night so I carried my bits and bobs to the corporate office and was working in my cubicle *sigh*. Most of the people who noticed I was doing something other than hacking away at my keyboard made some comment of me making a device to blow them up. lol really? is this the first thing that comes to peoples mind when they see tiny wires and batteries?

After several days of failure I eventually settled on a design that gave me an adjustable pulse train with the right duty cycle I hooked it up to my camera, it works! With sparse subjects for time lapse photography I selected myself to star my first recording. I have long had interest in seeing what I did in my sleep so I left my camera snapping away as I apparently to tossed and turned but never slept on my stomach but I'm sure these details will bore you along with the rest of this post so I'll spare my readers any more and also spare y'all the HD[1080p] video of me sleeping too lol.

Also in news last week, my car battery gave up the ghost and decided to leave me stranded at home one morning. I went over to my neighbour and knocked on his window to ask him for a jump start. He was so fast asleep which I knew he would be and I felt bad but I needed to leave and wasn't about to fork out what ever taxis charge these days to get on my way. Of course he didn't have any jumper cables but us being resourceful men I fashioned two cables capable of carrying 30-45A that should be sufficient to turn over my small engine. It worked and all was well but this was the first time in 5 years of me owning my car that I turned the key and it didn't start. It was different, made me want to be more prepared, time to get a new[less old] car.. too bad I can't afford it now.

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.