Monopod Use #392

So, I'm back from ICRA and I'm still trying to get my act together and organized. Posting at this location will be slow, but I need to decide between Lightroom and Bibble ASAP so I can get all my baseball shots processed before the end of the season. I'll try to keep a trickle of short posts going even though I'm massively busy; today, I'll tell you about a non-obvious use for a monopod.

At the last conference I went to in Korea, the cheap hotel (still $150 a night) had a break in. Apparently, the robber (likely an insider at the hotel) had key cards and crept into about ten rooms while the occupants were sleeping to steal wallets and other valuables. Luckily, I was in the expensive hotel which had sliding chains on the doors so we had no such problems.

I'm not paranoid by nature, but when I got to Pasadena and didn't find a mechanical lock inside the door, I got a little nervous. Then, I remembered the old chair under the doorknob trick used in monster movies to keep the monster from opening the door (the fact that said monster usually just crashes through a window or cuts the door with a chainsaw I won't mention).

Of course, the chair the hotel provided was on wheels.

But I did have a handy adjustable post with me:

Sadly, this was the only use my monopod got all trip.

Although, my monopod also doubles as a nice club, so I'll never leave home without it!

Muir Woods

I haven't updated in a while, and I suspect I won't be updating that much in the coming months. Mostly that is because I added a third job to our already busy lives. Actually, the funny thing is, I've spent the day at Job #1 (Grad Student) yet primarily worked on Job #3 (editing textbooks) and a little of Job #2 (tutoring... today was organization stuff, not the tutoring part). Job #3 has really fried my brain today, so excuse any grammar mistakes.

If anybody has a seed for a money tree, let me know!

Anyway, I wanted to get a short little post up with some photos. Last week my parents visited and on Sunday we took a trip to Muir Woods which is a beautiful, magical place... even if so many tourists are there you have to park half a mile away. It is hard not getting beautiful shots with the monster trees all around.

On the flip side, Muir Woods is a great demonstration of large dynamic range. Even shooting RAW I had a lot of shots with blown shadows and highlights.

BTW, I'm starting to play with Lightroom now -- why is it so hard to output the edited photos? Although, I love LR's highlight recovery feature!

Anyway, I'll leave you with a cute shot of my daughter...

Tour of California Prologue

It is a little known fact that I was into bicycling when I was in high school. I never did any racing, but I was a bit of a fanatic and completed a century around Cayuga Lake when I was in my teens. In college, I did a little bit of mountain biking, but sadly my knee got funky so I haven't been doing much biking anymore (other than transportation).

Anyway, there's no real point of the story above, except I don't follow cycling at all now. But when the Amgen Tour of California rolled through Stanford (or, more precisely, began with the Palo Alto-Stanford Prologue), I figured I might as well go take some pictures. Especially since the lab (where I've been spending a ton of time lately working on two papers) is two blocks away from the finish line.

When I got there, there were a ton of people around the oval. As always, click to see the images larger.


Since my goal was just to get a work break and exercise my shutter finger I didn't bother elbowing my way to the railing around the course. I got a few decent shots of the riders but quickly got bored. If I followed racing, I'm sure I'd be a lot more interested in shooting each rider as they came through.


I definitely have a lot of respect for sports shooters. A ton of waiting, and then only a few moments to get the shot you want. The prologue wasn't too bad because each rider comes at you all alone and it is easy to get a clean shot. But they move fast. A little slow on the shutter and you'll miss it. I was definitely glad I had 5 fps on my 20D.


The one below is notable because it is a 100% crop from an image with my Canon EF 70-200mm f/4L USM. I've been using the Sigma 600mm f/8 so much I've forgotten how sharp a good lens is. Awesome deal, and the lens can make a pile of sh...eep look like a pile of sheep with amazing contrast, sharpness, and color.


Of course, I got bored pretty quick. Only so many "rider speeds around a turn with fans watching" pictures I can take before I need to move on. I did see a VTU (Very Tall Unicycle) though:


And then I decided to do some motion panning on the riders. I like how these came out, although there is a lot of luck involved in timing the rider to be framed in the gaps in spectators. I found an area where the far side of the course was in shadow and the near side spectators were facing the sun which helped.



Of course, I wasn't the only one shooting the race. I've NEVER seen so many expensive lenses in one place before, with everyone and their grandma toting around L-glass (or the Nikon equivalent). I saw monopods, tripods, rifle-grips, monster lenses, fill flash, you name it, and that's just the amateurs. You could spot the pros (at least the ones who got official clearance) by their vests:


That's it, I need to get back to finishing this $^%^&^* paper.

Here's the finish line (or maybe, more appropriately, some spectators looking in the general direction of the finish line):

Korean Wasp

Found this little guy while I was walking near the beach one morning (actually, I saw his type a few times). Of course, he's actually not that little -- maybe an inch and a half long (about double the size of an American wasp). So I wasn't exactly going to put my hands near him to give a sense of scale.


He was so big that he couldn't fly very well -- which made it easier for me to photograph him.

Beach Walk (still Korea)

Wow. I lined up the pictures for two entries assuming I'd finish them up when I had a chance. A week later I'm finally posting one of them. Yikes, I must be busier (or lazier) than I thought. On the other hand, I'm still posting pictures from my Korea trip two months ago...

Anyway, the following three pictures are from the walk down to Jungmun beach (scarily, my blog is the first page that pops up when I enter Jungmung beach! Wait, that's because I mispelled (err, misspelled) it... fixed now). It had a long set of steps down a sharp, rain-forest like cliff. Here's from an overlook towards the top:


This is a shot of the stairs about half-way down. It was a very lush, fertile, wet area.


And here is the view from the bottom when you look up. I love the tunnel of vines effect!


The thing I really couldn't wrap my head around when I was there was that it sometimes snows during the Jeju winter. Crazy!

Seonimgyo Bridge

[Yes, really, two posts in two days! Still dumping Korea pictures...]

One of the attractions near Jungmun Tourism Complex is the Seonimgyo bridge (apologies I never got a picture of it from far away so you could see how it is located):


Here it is in the background of a Korean Gatorade I bought:


And here it is before I crossed back over to head to the hotel.


This image was a bit nasty to post-process because it had the interlacing problem from my flaky 20D sensor (a problem that hasn't re-occurred since I've returned to the States). Using the interlace option in PSP XI (on the rotated image) took care of most of the problem, and then I had to spot-edit some areas of a very saturated blue in the dark areas. There were still some remaining artifacts but they aren't evident in these web-resolution images.

I was playing with the exposure of the bridge and I really liked the sun's effect in the sky and the shadowed (almost a silhouette) bridge.

Lost in Translation

[Still pushing out some entries from my trip to Jeju, Korea. Which is good, because I haven't taken many pictures lately.]

I strongly suspect that English is not a required language in South Korean schools. My first hint was when I called my hotel to make arrangements, asked for someone who could speak English, and after ten minutes the only person they could find had a ton of trouble understanding me. And this is a large, Western-style hotel in an area of international tourism.

I suspect, even in Japan, you'll find a lot more people that can speak decent English.

I stayed at The Suites which was an excellent hotel if you can get past the high prices. They had an awesome breakfast buffet with both Korean and western foods, including little omelettes. The hotel, as well as the whole area (Jungmun Tourism Complex, near Seogwipo) was a strange mix of Korean and Western style.


For instance, a few blocks from the hotel was the Hooters Plaza, which, as far as I could tell, didn't even include a Hooters. Given a choice of all the American restaurant chains, why would they choose Hooters? Nevertheless, on my third day there I found out about it and got excited (not because of Hooters, but because there were other american eateries there like Cinnabun. Of course, they were all closed and deserted... maybe Korea isn't as excited about tight t-shirts and cinnamon pastries as some planner thought?


Right next to The Suites, there is the Hotel Hana, the discount hotel in the area. Of course, I screwed up and didn't get a room there before it sold out (which might have been a blessing, since 10 rooms were invaded one night and a lot of stuff was stolen). They did have a mediocre Korean/American lunch buffet (12,000 won, or about $14) which was one of the best deals in the area:

Every time I passed that sign I had to smile because it always looked like it said Born again as a reasonably clean hotel. Good to know the hotel found God though.

The best (worst?) sign I found is below. Click to see it larger if you have trouble reading it.


Why, oh why, didn't they get someone who knows English to proofread it? It has a good message though:

Do not make regretful things that your family and friends feel sad by accidental mistakes.

Jeju Sunrise

This is the first of a series of photos from the trip to Jeju, South Korea. More properly, I guess it would be Jungmun resort or Seogwipo City.

Jungmun beach was beautiful with coarse multi-colored sand (a lot of lava bits in it) and lava cliffs. The water itself was quite warm; warm enough that it felt like a swimming pool, nothing like the Pacific that embraces northern California.

Yet another camera problem...

[I meant to finish this post up in Korea, but I neglected to do it. So here it is. I have a follow-up to it which I'll get up in a few days.]

When I was going through some of my pictures on Tuesday, I noticed that about 10 of the images from the end of the session have vertical lines through them like you see in the 100% crop above.

The whole trip I was shooting JPEG, so it is unlikely it is a CF problem or file problem. Most likely, I believe it is a sensor problem. I expect it would be relatively easy to fix the images using PSP XI, but the bigger question is whether I'll need to get the camera fixed (thank goodness for the SquareTrade warranty). It hasn't happened again though, so it could have just been a random malfunction in the Jeju humidity.

I did a quick Google search on the issue and turned up a few good links. Consensus seems to be that this sort of problem indicates a sensor connection issue although most links weren't exactly the same problem I'm having. Apparently these types of issues are relatively common on the 20D.

Did I mention I was glad for the SquareTrade warranty? More and more, I think it is well-worth it to warranty cameras because of their inherent complexity and chances of breaking in a very expensive way. Especially used/refurbished cameras. Lenses aren't as important to warranty, in my opinion, since they are much simpler pieces of equipment and don't break as easily.

Helpful Hints From Jeju, South Korea...

Wow, over two weeks has elapsed since my last post. Luckily, I'm in Jeju, South Korea for a conference and I've had lots to point my camera at. Expect a bunch of pictures in the near future.

For now, some helpful hints for the next time you are on the Hawaii of Korea:

Helpful Hint #1: In a warm and humid climate, your lens will fog up when you leave an air-conditioned room and go outside. This morning it took half an hour for my camera lens to defog when I went to the beach, and I missed a bunch of photos.

Helpful Hint #2: Sometimes it is just better to go to the hotel restaurant and point to what you want when ordering room service instead of getting nowhere on the phone. Edit: The ox-tail soup I ordered is pictured at left.

Helpful Hint #3: Bring an umbrella. And lots of clean underwear and shirts. Coming from the desert that is the Bay Area, I was shocked how quickly I could soak a shirt with sweat, even when it wasn't raining.

Back to the Future

Here's a memory for you:

I'm cruising to school in my decade-old stickshift, blasting Pearl Jam on the radio with the windows down, wind whipping around me... Sure, the car was a piece of crap, but I could still get that thrill of speed as I moved through the gears, rev'd it up a bit, and enjoyed that special freedom which came with MY OWN CAR.

Of course, I'm actually talking about last Wednesday.

You know, most guys with a mid-life crisis get to sleep with younger women, drive a fast sports car, or start doing all the daring stuff they wanted to do when they were younger but didn't have the resources. Me, I have a mid-life regression. I'm still in school, I'm around high school kids constantly, I'm still married, and now I'm driving a car with so many problems I can remember them all. But I'm enjoying life :)

Although the fantasy burst when I realized I couldn't get the piece of %&*# radio to eject the CD. I swear, the dealer must of sent in a few UPC symbols from a cereal box to get the thing; I didn't technology this bad was still out there. Reliving my youth is cool (and I still like Pearl Jam), but always driving around in a '98 Honda listening to Pearl Jam?

Definitely uncool.


Speaking of cool, since my Honda isn't much to look at, the images in this post are all of cars that... aren't mine. I took them at the Palo Alto Concours D'Elegance in late June. In order of appearance:

1. A DeLorean, the only production car with stainless steel body panels. Apparently the DMC isn't dead though.
2. A 2001 Lamborghini Diablo 6.0 from the last year of the Diablo. Yeah, a $250,000+ car. Really.
3. A 2007 Tesla Roadster Roadster, the first electric supercar. A woman in my lab is doing an internship with them, I'm pretty jealous. For the low, low price of $98,000, you too can pre-order a car that can go toe-to-toe with a Lamborghini Murcielago in acceleration (0-60 in 4 seconds), hit 130+ mph, go 200 miles on a single charge, yet get an equivalent of 135 mpg. I'm not a car guy, but I love what the Tesla stands for: more efficient, yet better performance. I really hope electric/hybrid cars go in this direction.
   
4. No idea what this is, but it looks really cool.

One last picture of Lake Tahoe...

Snowy hillside...

Sledding #2...

Sledding #1...

On Thursday we went sledding on an impossibly steep hill that was very difficult to climb up. This picture was taken at the top of it and my son is the one with the orange sled (and yes, I know you can't see his face, that is by design).

After the snow...

This is the view outside of a friend's cabin in Lake Tahoe -- after the snow.

Lake Tahoe

This was taken on our first day in South Lake Tahoe, Wednesday. The snow came on Thursday...

Motion Panned MUNI

MUNI

Plumber Man!

Saw this on the side of a (plumbing) truck when I was driving up.