Picture a Day

I am still taking a picture(ish) a day(ish), but I am not making as much fuss about it here as I did when I was on this project a couple of years ago.

One of the new additions we got for our garden this year was a very Gothic-looking metal sculpture. It has lots of pointy bits, curves, and even rusty blades that spin in the wind. If I have one complaint about this camera, it is that it does not handle higher ISO settings very gracefully - my newer Canon has much lower noise at the higher sensitivities.


Here is atara debating over whether to buy three tomatoes, or only two. They are very good tomatoes, so in the end we bought three of them. I like the composition of this picture, but for some reason the camera focused on the far tomato rather than the middle, or closest one. That aside, if I decide to go back and revisit this picture at some point, I will remove a level of sharpening from it. It looks OK at full resolution, but in these stepped-down sizes, you can see some artefacts caused by the unsharp mask at the boundaries between the tomatoes and her hands.

Also the clipping on the far tomato where the sun is reflecting off of it bugs me a bit, but there's not much to do for that when you are working with high-contrast images in digital. Fix that and the rest of the image is woefully underexposed.


Here is where I learned that this lens has a very very narrow depth of field when you open it up to f/1.8 - considerably shorter than my 50mm lens at the same f-stop. Looks like I have me some learning to do as I adapt to this new lens. We stopped for sushi after our walk yesterday, and I was reminded of how much better the mapo tofu is at this sushi place than our current regular place.


We spotted this bit of art while we were out on our walk yesterday. I had taken another picture in the same area when we were on our outward leg of the walk, but I did not notice this stump until we were on our way back to The Forks.

Thanks to you, I had a nervous breakthrough.

Well, perhaps the words of Luscious Jackson don't quite fit here, but I definitely had a nervous tic if nothing else.

I did some maintenance today, backing up some music, videos and photographs to the file server down in the basement. I was a little nervous because a lot of my more recent libraries resided only on my desktop - the one on which the redundant raid broke a few years ago, so it has been functioning as a couple of 500GB drives. On the one hand, the additional storage of having two drives was nice, but on the other hand, the lack of redundancy has made me, well, nervous.

After I was done pushing more files down to the server today, I had a quick look at the file statistics for my photo directories:


These are just my pictures - atara has her own library of photographs as well.

Now I'm suddenly nervous about our lack of off-site backup. We have talked about loading up an external HD and stashing it in a safe deposit box, or maybe buying up some cloud space. Given how cloud storage seems to have become a target of certain governments of late, the safe deposit box sounds like the more enticing option to me.