Category Archives: Photography

Posts that have something to do with our interest in photography, including technology, techniques, locations, and images.

2013_10_04 (F) Craftsmen & Gamesmen

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I read a book years ago titled “The Gamesman.”  It was one of those pop social/psychology works that probably isn’t particularly scientific but none-the-less provides an interesting and even useful framework for looking at and possibly understanding the world, especially the world of work.  My take away from that book, which still rings true 30+ years later, was that I am a craftsman at heart who kept finding myself drawn into the gamesmanship of the workplace for which, in spite of not liking it, I seemed to have some aptitude.  Today was one of those days were a lot actually got done but I didn’t seem to be the one doing it, i.e., not a craftsman kind of day.  At least I made a partial recovery when we got home from Lowe’s and I had things I could install: light bulbs, a curtain rod, and salt for the water softener.  Such days leave me tired but not in a satisfied way.  Some days are like that, but so far I haven’t had very many of them in retirement.

I fixed two of our toilets on Thursday, but one of them apparently isn’t completely fixed yet.  I awoke this morning to sound of water running.  The flap had not sealed, causing the tank to not fill and the water to continue to run.  I have no idea how much water ran into the septic tank, but it was more than should have.  To make matters worse, I wanted to start a load of laundry early this morning only to discover that we had zero (0) gallons of water softener capacity remaining.  The softener indicated that it was going to recharge today, which meant around midnight based on how it is programmed, so I decided to start the regeneration cycle manually.  That was at 7:45 AM.  The cycle finished around 12:45 PM.  Yup, 5 hours during which I could not do the laundry, or dishes, or much else other than flush the toilets.  That’s why it’s set to run at night.  More thumb twiddling.

I checked my e-mail to see what the latest chatter was regarding the RV rally / photo workshop we are scheduled to attend.  With the federal government shut down we won’t have access to Smoky Mountain National Park (or any other federal facilities) and there was some thought of cancelling the workshop.  The problem is that the RV park where all of us are staying doesn’t give refunds and our deposit is 50% of the total camping fee for the week.  Since SMNP is closed the RV park was willing to let us re-book for any time during the next 12 months (that they had openings) for only an additional $25.  I wish I had to way to make money for doing nothing.

Our specific interest in this workshop is to learn to more fully use our digital camera (Sony Alpha 100) and to learn something about digital image post-processing software.  From that point of view, being in the Smoky Mountains in the fall was simply a bonus.  While we like nature, and I have always liked doing nature photography, our objectives for the workshop don’t require any specific subject matter in front of the lens.

We also made plans (and reservations) to meet up with Linda’s sister, brother, and his wife after the rally/workshop for a few days of camping, so we were committed to going whether there was a workshop or not.  It turned out that some of the other participants had done the same thing, and the final consensus was that the rally/workshop would go on as scheduled, national park or no national park.  That was a relief, but everything was up in the air for about 48 hours while this got sorted out.

Keith came by today to cut/trim the lawn.  He usually comes every other Tuesday, and normally would have come next week, but we asked him to pull ahead to the end of this week so the yard would look nice for the open house /warming.  He saves Fridays for “make up” work in case he gets rained out during the week.  That’s happened to him a lot this summer, but he was here as promised and in spite of the threat of rain.  It spritzed a little right after he arrived around 11 AM and then stopped, allowing him to get the whole yard done.  He always does a good job, and took the extra time today to get his blower out and blow off the driveways and the deck; a nice touch, and much appreciated.  But this was work Keith did, not me, so it was his craftsmanship, not mine.

Keith was done about the same time the water softener finished regenerating, so I finally got my load of laundry in the machine and we headed for Lowe’s and Meijer’s for last minute household items and food.  We are trying to prep this event so that the only thing we have to get on Sunday morning is ice for beverages.  We stopped at Teeko’s coffee shop before heading home.  (At Latson Road and Grand River Avenue, between Brighton and Howell, we have a Lowe’s, Walmart, Staples, Meijer’s, O’Reilly’s Auto, Teeko’s, and lots of other small stores.)  Teeko’s has become one of our favorite places to get coffee.  They stock “green” (dried but unroasted) beans and roast them at time of purchase.  They have a very nifty air-roaster that can produce anything from a very light to a very dark roast, but never burns the beans.  They have a nice variety of beans from Africa, Central/South America, and islands like Sumatra and Hawaii.  They even keep some 100% Kona on hand (we have some at home).  This time we picked up a pound each of a Costa Rica Decaf and Organic Guatemalan Nueva.

Linda made a really nice dish for dinner:  Fresh beets roasted with balsamic vinegar, grape seed oil, and a touch of sugar and served over fresh kale, wilted and mixed with couscous.  I’m sure there were some other seasonings in there, but those were the main ingredients.  Roasted beets are a real treat.

Linda has been monitoring the weather forecast leading up to/through Sunday.  The rain never materialized today, but it was very cloudy and humid and the high hit 81.  Not Michigan’s October best, but nothing to be done about it other than turn on the air conditioning.  Thunderstorms are forecast for overnight, and based on the radar it looks like we will finally get the promised rain.  Tomorrow will be a big day, with final house cleaning and lots of food preparation.  She has some tasty things planned for Sunday.

 

2013_10_01 (T) Nets, Decks, & Weeds

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Today was deck day 1 of 2.  Jim Pipoly has done a lot of painting for us over the last few years.  He painted our old house, inside and out, including the garage and the addition over it.  He painted the main floor of our new house a couple of weeks after we closed, and six weeks before we moved in.  He repainted some walls in the old house after we moved out to make it look better when we listed it for sale.  He was here on the 21st and 22nd of September cleaning and stripping the deck along the back side of our new house and now he’s back staining and painting it.  Today he stained the deck boards using Benjamin Moore TWP116 transparent stain in a “rustic” color.  It gave the boards a reddish-brown patina while allowing all of the grain to show through, preserving the look of the wood.  Tomorrow he will do the railings using Benjamin Moore ArborCoat, a solid stain (more like a paint) in Marine White, which is very close to the color of the paint used on the Hardy Board house siding.

Meghan (our daughter) came over mid-morning to help Linda weed the planting beds around the house and spread around the remaining bags of red rubber mulch that the previous owners left us.  The house didn’t look bad, but it looks better now.

In the ham shack/office I relocated a computer and printer.  I also relocated the Netgear 8-port Network Switch (8pNS) and the Linksys Wireless Access Point (WAP).  I then brought another printer and Network Attached Storage (NAS) device down from Linda’s desk.  I how had everything in the office along one wall except the WAP, and I had the new 100’ Cat 6 network cable running to same wall.  This allowed me to reconnect all of the hardwired equipment without any network cables running across the floor, eliminating a potential trip hazard or major equipment catastrophe.  I put the WAP on top of a cabinet and used the old 50’ Cat 6 network cable to connect it back to the AT&T Gateway by Linda’s desk.  Everything checked out, and the only things left on Linda’s desk are her laptop computer and adding machine (it’s an accounting thing).  That will give her more room to work at her desk.

Linda made an ad hoc dish for dinner with beans, rice, and tomatoes and the usual assortment of seasonings.  She used the Italian Seasoning she bought some time ago from Milford Spices at the Howell Farmers Market.  This blend includes just the right amount of red pepper flakes to add slight bit of “heat” to a dish.  She used this seasoning last week when she made the marinara sauce that I liked so much.

Jim finished up as it was getting dark.  We took Linda’s laptop to the basement and connected it to the TV/monitor using an HDMI cable.  We selected that port as the input and voila, her computer screen was now on the TV.  She navigated to her photo directory, started a slide show, and we sat and watched pictures of our summer trip at the rate of 20 per minute (3 seconds each).  It sounds fast, but it’s actually a pretty good speed.  We are going to set this up for the open house.  Linda may try to edit the pictures down to 200 – 300 as that would allow visitors to see all of them in 10 – 15 minutes.

 

2013_09_07 (Sat) Wi-Fi & Wall Art

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Our day started with the surprise discovery that we did not have our usual domestic hot water.  The HVAC guys were here yesterday working on the hydronic heating system, which includes the water heater, and I had a moment of concern (and annoyance, I admit).  I knew the “boiler” was working because they tested some of the heating loops yesterday before they left.  I also knew it was a zoned system with five loops and more than a dozen valves, so it was possible a valve was left in the wrong position.  Sure enough, the valves for the Florida room (library) loop and the domestic hot water loop were both closed.  I opened them, but unfortunately the hot water tank did not return to its normal temperature in time for either of us to get the hot showers we had planned on taking when we got up.  But we left for our usual Saturday morning ham radio breakfast in South Lyon knowing that we would have our usual hot water when we returned.

There was a good turnout for breakfast and we chatted for a couple of hours.  (BTW: the extended group breakfast chat is one of the hallmarks of retirement, and often occurs on a workday.  It just so happens that Saturdays work best for the members who like to attend the SLAARC breakfast.)

Following breakfast we headed to the recycling center in Howell.  We do not have curbside recycling, so we have to take our recyclables to Recycle Livingston on Wednesdays and Saturdays.  Recycle Livingston runs a very efficient operation and always seems to have lots of workers.  We presume are (mostly) volunteers.  Besides our normal recyclables, we have been accumulating corrugated cardboard as we continue to unpack moving boxes.

When we got back to the house we set up the Wi-Fi enabled main thermostat, a Honeywell Focus Pro TH6320WF that TOMTEK installed yesterday.  This thermostat is located at the start of the main floor hallway and controls the heating loop for the living room / dining room / kitchen zone and the air-conditioning for the whole main floor.  When properly configured it allows us to monitor and control these two parts of the HVAC system.

The TH6320WF was fairly easy to set up, in part because it is a very clever device, and in part because the directions are very clearly written.  When power was first applied it came up in Wi-Fi Setup mode and behaved like a wireless host (router or access point), broadcasting its own name/ SSID .  When I opened my iPad2 and scanned for available Wi-Fi networks it was on the list and I selected it.  I then opened my browser (Safari) and pointed it to the thermostat’s home page.  From there, I activated the thermostat’s wireless client mode and connected it to our primary home wireless network.  At that point the thermostat had an IP address from the AT&T gateway and was able to communicate with a website whose purpose is remote monitoring and control of this type of equipment.  Before that could happen, however, I had to create an account on the website.  The account creation process sent us an e-mail.  Following the instructions in the e-mail we completed the registration and activation process.  We are now able to remotely monitor and control this thermostat using a smartphone, iPad, or computer.

The rest of the afternoon was spent selecting and hanging wall art.  While the hanging part can be tedious, deciding what to hang and where to hang it takes time, judgment, and patience.  It was heavily overcast and starting to rain by the time we got started.  The living room tends to be a bit dark on this kind of day so we decided to hang photographs in the recreation room.  We hung 40 objects in the last three days and have at least two dozen more to install.  Getting the “objects d’art” on the “walls d’house” has dramatically transformed the look and feel of the interior and made a significant dent in the “clutter d’move”.

By 6:00 PM we were tired and a bit hungry.  Since Linda had not had time to prepare our evening meal we decided to try the El Patron Mexican restaurant in Howell.  The vegetarian fajitas worked well for us, they had Dos Equis amber on draft, the wait staff was pleasant and efficient, and our waiter had a subtle sense of humor.  Nuf said.

 

2013_09_05 (Thu) A Picture Perfect Day

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Today was a picture perfect day in more ways than one.  We are in the middle of one of those weather spells that makes Michigan the perfect place to be; highs approaching 70, lows around 50, light breezes, and clear, blue skies.  It was also the day we decided to start putting paintings and photographs back up on the walls of our new-to-us house.  It’s an easy job to put off because it is slightly tedious work requiring careful measuring, trips up and down ladders, putting pencil marks on walls we paid someone to patch and paint just 7 months ago, poking holes in them with screws and nails, getting the piece actually hung, and hoping it ended up were you intended for it to be.  We got 13 paintings hung, and a number of others positioned where we think they are going to hang.  Not only does it make the house start to feel a lot more like home, it finally started clearing the art clutter out of the library, opening up the possibility of finishing other unpacking and shelving projects that the stacked artwork was blocking.

Today was also a day for delving a little deeper into digital image processing software.  Although our website only has a few pages, and I have only been doing this blog since early June (2013), I was surprised to find out from Scott at QTH.com that our WordPress installation had already expanded to 1 Gb of disk space.  While I don’t necessarily consider 1 Gb to be a lot of data, web-hosting companies do keep an eye how much resource you use, and will put caps on it and/or raise the monthly price.  Any company that tells you they will give you unlimited everything for $2 /month is probably practicing the virtual reality version of bait-and-switch.  Getting to that level in only 2 months seemed to indicate that I needed to do something different going forward, besides simply paying for more disk space.

The culprit, of course, was all of the photographs I have uploaded as part of the blog entries.  I tend to shoot high resolution JPEGs, as they are usable for a variety of things just as they come from the camera.  The images are 3,872 x 2,592 pixels (10 Mpixel sensor) and roughly 10 Mb files in raw mode.  The JPEG files are typically between 2.5 – 3.5 Mb each.  That’s a substantial compression compared to raw format, but 300 of those and you’ve got yourself a gigabyte of photo data.  Hmmm, that sounds familiar.  While 300 photos may sound like a lot, it’s only five per day for two months.  I haven’t gone back to check, but I would not be surprised if that is what I have averaged.

What I find interesting is that WordPress sizes these images to 300 x 200 pixels when I insert them into a blog.  That’s a reduction factor of approximately 167, suggesting a file size of approximately 20 Kb.  Kate de Fuccio, who I mentioned in a recent blog post, told me that she can click on the images in the blog and get the full resolution photos.  But if my intent is to only make them big enough to view in the blog, it doesn’t serve any purpose to have the hi-res files available.  So, what to do?  Resize before uploading, of course.  The two default Microsoft programs for manipulating images on a Windows XP Pro / Office 2007 platform are Microsoft Image Composer and Paint.  They can do a lot of things, but resizing images easily (or at all) is not one of them.

Lou Petkus, K9LU, of the SKP Photographers BOF had mentioned at a BOF meeting back in July that he generally shoots in raw mode and uses a couple of different free programs for a variety of post-processing tasks.  We are attending a SKP Photographers BOF photography workshop/rally in October, organized by Lou, and the schedule of events indicates that there will be a session on post-processing software for digital images.  I contacted Lou to find out what programs he will be discussing and to ask about re-sizing my photos prior to uploading them to WordPress.  The programs he will be discussing are Faststone Image Viewer and Photoscape.  He suggested I use Faststone to re-size and then sharpen the images (in that order) before uploading them.  I downloaded the programs successfully and have explored Faststone Image Viewer a little bit.  I will see how well it works the next time I post images.