Cartoony HDR NEEDS to stop.

That is all. Also hipster crap. Just because there’s light leaks and crappy color rendition of your blurry, misfocused, improperly exposed, and poorly composed shot of a fire hydrant doesn’t mean it’s art.

Video update later: Unboxing GT5 Collector’s Edition.

I know the game came out two weeks ago, but I haven’t been able to edit and post the video I recorded.

It is decided. I am really awful at blogging.

Yo,

See title. Look at post history for explanation.

I have a lot of ideas for things to blog about though! I just never seem to have time to get it done. I’m only posting now because I seem to have gotten lucky: all my psets have been pushed back to next week. I did some work on two of them just so I can get a jump ahead, but I have a feeling that won’t be enough, haha.

My spare time is spent looking up photography/warhammer/housing stuff. I’m trying to actually buy a house (parents as co-signer, I don’t have that much money by myself) and rent it out to fellow grad students. Figured it’d be better than living in apartments all the time and would make me some money (hopefully). Apparently, the landlord experience is good to have too…although everyone has told me what a bad idea it is…we’ll see.

I haven’t even really had time to go through my photos. I’ve successfully caught up with “facebook” quality photos…but that means I need to go back and edit for something that matches my definition of quality.

Lately, I’ve been using the enblend plugin with Lightroom to make quasi-HDR (high dynamic range) photos. Personally, I hate most HDR photos because they tend to make everything look cartoonish (almost like a hyper-high dynamic range), but enblend does a much better job of approximating what the human eye sees. Apparently, we can have a 90 dB range in eyesight but Taya can only capture 11.9 stops. That’s a huge difference, and can make it difficult to capture what you actually see. HDR/enblend take multiple exposures of the same object and try to combine all the visual information to show more data.

The problem is that I’m getting tired of this technique, haha. Last time I was in Ithaca, I took ~130 pictures of the waterfall near Gun Hill. On a good day, I think 1/10 of the shots I take are keepers (on a great day, more like 1/6). Since doing enblend requires many shots of the same scene, it cuts significantly into my actual number of photos taken. After editing for facebook and making blended photos, I really only liked maybe 2-3 photos. That is shitty productivity. And it ate into my hard drive a lot.

I miss taking photos of people. I miss taking photos of events. There isn’t really a whole lot of that going on here in Amherst. I miss photo challenges, I guess. We had a department bbq and I forced myself to only use my 50mm prime lens. It was fantastic and I felt like it brought back a lot of the things that I had missed. My ratio still wasn’t as good as normal (shitty light), but I was surprised that I was mentally calculating what would be needed in each situation to get the shot I actually wanted every time I looked through the lens. This wasn’t always “oh man, I wish I had xx lens”, it was mixed with “my tele at 135mm would be really nice here” or “if I had set up a flash here, a reflector there, maybe another flash here, the shot would’ve been perfect”…lots of more “critical” photographic thinking in measurements, apertures, exposure levels, etc. Math, haha.

I had been thinking for a while to keep myself to “themes” every week (Digital Photography School does this and I liked the idea) to keep myself challenged, but I seem to be lost without having actual challenges to do. I know near Columbus Day, I’ll be on a nature theme (colors change, rented lenses!), but I need more, haha.

Kim, when you have themes, let me know, I’ll try to follow them. Also, I liked your description of this blog (Aaron’s new yet still defunct blog).

I’ll try to make more regular posts to this and the “ChemE blog”. There may be some shared content. I’m passing the mantle of Stan to someone new, so that blog may see some updates too

One thing I wanted to try was videos! I have two webcams (laptop and desktop) and Taya, figured I’d give it a shot, right?

I guess stay tuned while I test things and figure out how to embed video and such.

In the mean time, here is a pic of me and my super-long hair.

OH WAIT, no i have to try a collage…no nevermind, i can’t get the timing down in PhotoBooth

Pic of me and my long hair

Yeah. Actually that isn’t too bad, lemme try again.

I’m in my cube/office right now. This place is freezing.

And I end with a lolcat.

20090816 Cincinnati

Hey guys,

First, GO SEE DISTRICT 9. I believe that movie-goers need to reward more creative thinking and skill that has been lacking in movies as of late (notice the constant string of remakes, sequels, and book adaptations?) District 9 is easily one of the best movies I’ve seen in a few years, probably the best since City of God.

So,  lots of stuff has been happening…I’m getting ready to leave Cincinnati, where I’ve technically only spent like half my summer. I didn’t get to do a lot of what I wanted to do…the key ones being:

1. Sleep more
2. Paint my Warhammer dudes
3. Lose weight

I blame my unusual schedule. I thought I’d be here the entire summer, I didn’t know I’d be traveling so often. My schedule has been:

June 1-14: Cincinnati, moving in, working, preparing for trip out
June 15-18: St Louis
June 22-25: St Louis
June 29-July 1: Recover from St Louis, Pack
July 2-July 6: San Francisco
July 7-10: Recover, make up for being out of town
July 15: Prepare for travel
July 20-24: St Louis
August 3-7: Kansas City
August 17: Final Presentation, start moving out

I managed to get some working out in, but nowhere as good as last summer (which was basically every weekday). Plus all the traveling meant eating out every day…large portions leads to larger Aaron. Definitely haven’t slept enough, that one hour time zone change screws you over way more than I thought.

How have I felt about the summer? Work was ok. Some not so bright people, some annoying people, sometimes not as productive as I wanted it to be, but I was expecting that…it’s still P&G after all, and I did already Co-Op for them. Probably the most useful thing to happen out of the entire summer was going up to the Engineering R&D division and, by complete chance, meeting with the guy that’s currently in charge of Ph D recruiting for that division. He showed me around and told me about what they do, and it’s pretty much exactly what I wanted THIS internship so I could actually judge the company in terms of career potential. The division is very unique; they do everything from work on technologies that may or may not be used 10-20 years down the road for the company to almost “technical consulting” for the other branches in the company. One problem.

Still based in Cincinnati.

I pretty much hate this place. There isn’t too much to do around here…have to make things to do with other people. Food here is terrible. Sometimes I can’t even call it food. I mean, it suffers from Midwestern perceptions/availability to good food, so there’s a lot of chains and almost cookie-cutter kinds of developments (St Louis and Kansas City have this problem as well, except they have some better choices). Cincy is a bit worse on some things though…Locals here LOVE La Rosa’s Pizza, Skyline Chili, and Montgomery Inn BBQ.

My review of those? Congrats, Cincy, you’ve managed to love pizza that is only a half-step above Dominos, you’ve ruined chili by making it watery, sweet, and suffocating it under pounds of cheese, and Montgomery Inn. Seriously? That’s what you call BBQ? Get outta here.

Weather here is absolutely awful. It’s almost a physical Pit of Despair. Cincy is completely recessed on all sides, almost like a bucket. So, all weather patterns, pollen, and what have you tends to go into the Cincy area and stay. My allergist said that people who don’t have allergies tend to develop them after they’ve lived in Cincy.

My neighborhood is terrible. I live near TWO DISTINCT ghettos/slums. How do you do that? Over-the-Rhine (like 3 minutes away by car), called “historic” by WikiTravels, is a high crime area…Clifton (where I live) isn’t much better. Someone who goes to school at University of Cincinnati told me his landlord said the people in Clifton most likely won’t hurt you or sell you drugs, but they may try to rob your house.

Traffic here is terrible. No one here knows how to drive. Lanes seem more like suggestions, as do the lines telling you where to stop your car at a stop sign or intersection. People don’t understand that a cop taking care of an accident is too busy to come get you for going 5-10 mph over the speed limit…so they slam on their brakes and go from 75 to 45-50 in only a hundred feet or so.

I guess it has been balanced though…I got paid for the summer, hung out with my brother a lot, got to go to California…all the fun stuff I’ve done has been very fun.

That being said…I don’t think I want to live around here.

Anyway, past week hasn’t really been ideal for me. Lots of crap to take care of outside of work, lots of stuff not working while at home (new hard drives being the most important). I haven’t gone out to take pictures in like…weeks? I can’t tell because I don’t have enough space on my current hard drives to put any more photos on my computer…hence the new hard drives…

Sucks too, I bought the Composer lens from Lensbabies, as well as a new flash and a macro lens will be ordered once it comes back in stock (rumor has it that Canon depleted stock because a new model is coming soon).

I’d have liked to put photos or video in this post but alas…

Let me just try to settle this cigar ordering fiasco, and we’ll fix the rest from there, I guess.

More posting later. Holy shit this was a long post.

To cheer you up (and because this summer has been fun for movies), and to honor Inglourious Basterds (which I’ll be going to see!), here’s an awesome youtube video:

Inglourious Plummers