I’ve been pretty busy lately, these past two days I have been at the Hyatt downtown taking photos for a User Group for work. On Sunday, however, we went out to Fredericksburg and visited Wild Seed Farms. they have a nice butterfly house, and lots and lots of flowers to take photos of. It’s a great place to try out a new lens! (Unfortunately, I was just using my old lenses) Anyways, here’s a pic, and you can see a few more on my Flickr photostream.

The new Sony dSLR lineup looks pretty nice, with live-view and tiltable lcd. I still love my 7D and won’t upgrade from it just yet, but I like the direction Sony is going! The Alpha 700 is pretty sweet, though. I checked it out at Yodobashi and also at Precision Camera here in Austin.

And by “Baby”, I mean my camera. It’s been gone too long at the repair center. Awaiting parts.

Shoot! My Konica-Minolta 7D went in for service this week, but it has been delayed! Part are on order. Can’t wait to get my baby returned to me. 

I have always liked the widescreen and panoramic aspect ratios in films and photos. I think the format is so much more interesting that the 4:3 aspect ratio (for most landscape images). So, I finally got around to making some Photoshop CS2 presets to make it easier to crop to these ratios. I made three presets for both the rectangular marquee and the cropping tools. The cropping tool will bring the image down to 72dpi, at either 16:9, 2.35:1/800 x 340px (Star Wars Cinemascope), or 2.66:1/800 x 301px (extra-wide Cinemascope). The rectangular marquee tool presets will create selections at those same aspect ratios.

Now the trick will be to frame the image in the camera with these widescreen formats in mind. Perhaps I can find a different focusing screen? My old α507si film camera has a “panorama” switch that would mask off the top and bottom in the viewfinder (and also the film) which would be nice to have on my dSLR for framing wide shots. My current focusing screen does have a couple marks that I could use to get a general idea of the framing, but it shouldn’t be too hard to eyeball it.

You can download the custom Photoshop tools here. You should be able to just load them in the Preset Manager.

Last night there was a birthday party at our house for myself and my friend Také. There was lots of good food, some amazing cakes, and a good time was had by all. Click the pic to see more photos at Flickr.

I moved my bike from the balcony closet to the garage last night. I figured I would take a picture of it while it was in the livingroom. Before I took it to the garage, I went for a little spin around the neighborhood. I learned a couple things… first, the bike is not big enough to trip the parking gates. I had to wait for a car to come along and open them. Second, the light for the speedometer is out. It probably just needs a bulb.

When I came back to the parking lot, I met a fellow tenant who was getting off of his Yamaha YZF-R6. We chatted a bit about our bikes and he took a photo of my C70 with his camera phone. It turns out that he had never ridden a motorcycle before he bought his, just a few months ago. He said his friend had one, so he got one too. He didn’t take the MSF class, and failed his written test, so he has to go back tomorrow to retake it. Speaking of the MSF class, I am going to take it in a month or so. It should be really fun.