It was an interesting experience, mostly because I was always reacting instead of being proactive. The entire ceremony was in french, and I have a vary basic understanding of the language. What a stressful hour and a half! Overall the photos look great considering the rooms we had to work with, but I have blinking in some pictures that I didn’t catch yesterday on the camera’s lcd screen.
I’m going to see if I can make magic happen with Photoshop once I’m done processing the RAWs into TIFFs for the final work flow.
I was hired on an hourly basis, so I felt that I was obligated to get as many common “wedding” photos as possible that were applicable even though I went over my bank of time by nearly an hour. I’m going to blame the hotel room lighting and design on that issue. I spent nearly 20 minutes going through various light setups, trying to find something that’d light the room up how I wanted without causing reflections in nearly every surface in frame. It was stressful! The lack of time meant imperfection was likely, which is not something I want to give to a client.
I’m budgeting about 2-3hr on post processing today, with delivery of the final product tomorrow; just before we leave for Jamaica and my first destination wedding!
With Christmas having come and gone, and New Years just around the corner; development has slowed to a crawl on Spiral due to a lack of time for this project. It should pick up again in January, after I return from Jamaica where I’m shooting a wedding.
I’m hoping to have a beta up and running on the in-house dev server soon!
This year was pretty easy going. The drive to Sudbury was a little longer than expected thanks to an emergency closure between Arnprior and Cobden on Hwy. 17 that took us on a little detour through farm country. There wasn’t much snow, so there wasn’t many issues regarding traveling.
We arrived a little later than we expected, and headed to Evan & Terry-Lyn’s house (Jen’s cousins) for dinner & drink. I was very impressed with Evan’s man-cave; he had pinball! The next day we visited Jen’s grand-parents on her mother’s side for Christmas dinner. The food was great and so was the company. Jen’s grand-mother has a small dog named Daisy that gets hyper when people arrive. At first the dog was annoying, but as the night went on and it calmed down the behavior changed and it turned out to be a pretty nice dog.
The next day we visited some friends. First we went to Tasha’s; a high school friend of Jen’s who had just moved into a new house with her long term boyfriend. After spending a bit of time with them, we left to go see Chris & Shauny and watch the Montreal-Toronto game. The Habs won of course, 3-2 one minute into overtime! Toronto can’t finish. We were leaving as Michael (Chris’ brother) & his girlfriend Melissa were arriving. A handshake and a “Merry Christmas!” later we were driving back to Jen’s parents house for the night.
We drove home on Sunday and made great time thanks to a relatively empty highway. Halo was waiting at the door when we entered, and meowed like she hadn’t seen us in ages (4 days!). The reef seemed to do well without us for a few days, so I’m sure it’ll be fine while we’re gone to Jamaica and my friend Brent will be taking over the feeding duties.
Jen and I are heading to our “home town” to visit friends and family during the holiday weekend. I’m looking forward to the trip. I haven’t seen my Grandma since the summer, and I owe her a bunch of hugs.
I love the bokeh produced by Pentax lenses. Snapped this last night with my 50mm wide open at f1.4, focus at infinity and about 8′ from the tree.
Still awesome at 11.
I’m using it for the first time with Spiral, and it’s slowing down my planned rapid development cycle. It’s definitely worth learning, and I’m sure it’s going to be worth while based on Spiral’s schema. I’m not sure if I’m a fan of CUD (CRUD?) though, because it complicates things and complains about FK relations sometimes.
Based on this Microsoft TechNet article I’ve refactored the Views used to access Spiral’s data via sproc . This is one of many changes which have allowed for a much broader role for the applicable. Spiral will be released as a community portal.
The database will be deployed as SQLExpress and be cluster ready if you attach it to SQL Server 2005 or newer.
Yesterday I noticed a Monoprice wall post on Facebook about their house brand tablets being in a “Top 12″ list by a reputable tech review site.
After a little reading I decided to check out the price of these tablets, and what I found was shocking. Every model is about 1/10th the price of a Wacom with seemingly comparable specs and “good drivers” (based on user reviews). The largest tablet was just under $40, so I decided to make an impulse purchase and re-invest a portion of the revenue from a short photo session at the end of this month.
I haven’t used a tablet since I was taking “Drafting” through secondary school, so I’m very excited to see how this newer tech is different than what I’m used to.
Development of aw:Mail is being put on hold. Development of Spiral, a .Net MVC2 based blog is going forward.