Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

As much as I regretted missing Balticon (all the more so knowing that Urban Tapestry was performing), I did have stuff to distract myself with at home over the weekend. A new toy uh, extremely important new used piece of equipment that will extend my capabilities in one of my crafts. Okay, that description applies to the near future; over the weekend it was Fun New Toy. And of course I really had to play with it in order to learn how to get the most out of it (not that the lack of such an excuse would have made any difference). Thanks to the kindness of another person on a mailing list I'm on, who made a very nice offer and a time frame for payment that I ought to actually be able to manage, I've finally got a DSLR.

So as a side effect of spending so much time playing ah, experimenting with the camera, I've spent a lot of time in GIMP the last few days, tweaking what I've shot. And finding out which of my odd ideas confuse the camera, and trying to figure out how to de-confuse it when I want to do those things. (Like using a pinhole lens.)

Perrine, photographed through a not-very-good homemade pinhole lens.

Using the DSLR feels very different from using the digital point&shoot. Not only because it has more controls and different features, but because it feels so much more familiar since most of the film I've shot has been done using SLRs. It does have a "PHD" mode ("push here, dummy") of course, and fancy modes beyond any of my film cameras (mostly -- with one exception -- due solely to the age of my film cameras, not the fact that they use film) ... I don't know of anybody marketing a fully manual digital camera, so I don't think there's a digital equivalent of the legendary K1000 ... but one thing I've already noticed is that instead of making my old manual-camera skills obsolete, this system just makes applying those skills faster and easier.

Despite the limitations of the p&s and the increased versatility of the DSLR, there are a couple of things that a point&shoot or rangefinder-style digital camera does more conveniently: two that come to mind are using the LCD instead of the viewfinder when putting one's eye to the viewfinder would be geometrically challenging or uncomfortable, and using the LCD as a viewfinder that can be artificially brightened via the exposure-compensation setting, in poor light. (The p&s is also smaller and lighter.) In an SLR the mirror blocks the sensor until the shutter button is pressed, so it can't use the sensor and the LCD to preview a shot, only to review a shot already taken. (Presumably this could be done when mirror lock-up is used, I suppose -- do any DSLRs do it that way? The camera would have to close the shutter and drain the charge on the sensor before firing, I guess, but I don't know what major obstacles there might be.)

In addition to playing with pinholes and macro, I spent a while hunting dirt bikes and birds. Catching birds in flight with a long lens (but not really birdwatching length, just long by normal standards) is a lower-stress activity when I know I can just zap the missed shots and messed-up shots and reclaim the space, instead of each near-miss costing me a frame of film. But I'm going to need a lot more practice with birds before the next time that I try going after bats. I'm not sure what the small birds in Baltimore that move in not-quite-bat-like ways are. (That is, they're gobbling insects out of the air, AFAICT, which means they're solving the same problem insectovore bats are, though anatomical differences result in flight path differences.) I'm guessing they're swifts, assuming Baltimore has swifts, 'cause swallows have a more distinctive tail, don't they? There are a few other species visible along -- or over -- my street as well. The robins make short, low-altitude flights across the street and back, not staying in the air long enough for me to get them; pigeons mostly make short flights like that too, but they're slower and sometimes fly above rooftop height, so they're easier. The others mostly stay up where they're silhouetted against the sky -- once in a while I manage to catch one with the underside of its wing illuminated by the setting sun.

Any of y'all good at identifying birds from their silhouettes?

( 1024x1024 version @ Flickr)

That covers much of my weekend. But other things happened as well:

B brought over a scavenged rackmount computer. Unlike the other rackmount computer I've got, the graphics card in this one gets along nicely with Ubuntu Linux. Two older machines are starting to fail, so migration will be a double win (the more stuff I stuff into the rack, the more floor/desk space I get back).

And when I got stabbed in the back with eight of these...
... I decided it was time to wield these:

And finally, links to a few more of the photos I shot over the weekend:

• Perrine (with an ordinary glass lens this time, not a pinhole)
• Dirt bike
• Dirt bike vs. fire truck
• Looking toward downtown from my house
• Arabber heading home at the end of the day

Most of these photos (all but the claw scissors) are in my Flickr 'photostream', along with a few I didn't list here.