gonewest

I’ve been bad this weekend. Well, not really bad, just your garden variety jumped-the-gun bad. I bought a Sony A100 DSLR on impulse yesterday while wandering about downtown. I had planned to buy a good DSLR this summer anyway, but the intention was to buy one after I move to the new apartment and start saving a lot of money on rent, not before I move.

By the way, did I mention that I am moving again? Seattle is a great city and I like the apartment that I’ve been in for the last year, but living in Queen Anne is more expensive than I am willing to deal with right now and none of the Seattle suburbs appealed to me (I’m just not a suburb kind of guy). I moved up to Washington so that I could seriously work on buying a boat — hopefully one to live on — not just to live in a big urban area (I was doing that just fine down in San Diego). I will be moving up to Bellingham for a while to cut the rent by a big margin and to see how I like the area (there is also a good marina nearby for when I do buy that boat).

I took a few shots with the new camera today. They came out rather lack luster, but then this was not a good day for playing photog. One of the shots is below; note how the bit of the boat in the foreground is slightly blurred to de-emphazise it, this is one of the effects that is much easier to do with a DSLR and one of many new techniques that I will need to learn. You can find more of today’s trial shots here (they are the files begining with “DSC”).

Oh yeah, I sign the lease next weekend so, if the weather is good, I’ll take a shot out the window (killer view) and maybe one or two of the place and post them here.

I thought that I would take a few shots of the neighborhood after the recent snow storm came through, but it appears that the memory card in my Powershot is on the fritz again. I could use this as an excuse to buy that nice Canon or Nikon DSLR that I’ve been thinking about, but just buying another CF card would be much cheaper and I need to be thinking about possible moving expenses at the moment.

Oh well, maybe I’ll buy the new camera toy next month…

The test photos were really crappy, but the fireworks they lit off for the New Year’s celebration at the Space Needle gave off enough light to produce some rather good pictures; you can find the rest of them here.

Definitely worth the measly ten minute walk to the Seattle Center and definitely one of the things I will miss when I move away from such a large metropolitan area (assuming that I do make that decision). Now I need to get to bed as I have a road trip to make tomorrow if I can drag myself out of bed early enough.

Abandoned pier on Lake Union with Queen Anne hill in the background.

Got out for an early morning walk and took this shot looking east from
Queen Anne hill at around sunrise. This is, unfortunately, as good as the
weather will get today as another storm is rolling in and most of the day
will be solid rain again. :-(

They are expecting about a foot of snow today in the mountain areas, so
I guess I should be thankful that I don’t live in the mountains.

I did an upgrade of the gallery software that I use for my photo albums yesterday morning and didn’t have a chance to check up on it later in the day. Apparently, the images have not been accessible since because I had to take some manual steps to complete the upgrade, and the image links to the source images have broken as well.

That last part is probably just a change in the URL format to reference a given image; I’ll try to get it fixed sometime this weekend.

On the plus side, I finally got around to fixing the db access problem I was having so Dad now has a photo album for uploading some of his pictures.