shine

I've decided to name my new car Stitch, after the blue Disney character.

He's blue and has a big smile.

Saturday was quite a day!  First of all I was approaching 1000 miles on the odometer, so I took Stitch out for a nice long drive through some of my favorite roads.  Here is the odometer just as I was about to break 1000 miles.

The moment of truth.

It was very hard for me to keep the motor under 4000 RPM during the break-in period.  But once I passed the magical 1000 mark, it was finally time to let 'er rip!  I took it down Palomares Rd, which I think of as my own personal backyard test track, and then out past the wine country vineyards of Livermore, to Mines Rd.  Mines Rd is one of my most enjoyable driving routes.  It goes out to the middle of nowhere and then runs up Mt. Hamilton to the Lick Observatory above San Jose.  If you're an Initial D fan, Mt. Hamilton is like Bay Area's version of Akina.  It's a beautiful mountain road but an incredibly twisty and challenging drive.  Pretty unforgiving too -- if you make a mistake and go off the edge of the road, you're going off a cliff and down a long ways.  So you have to keep it safe and sane here.  I didn't switch the traction control all the way off, but did go to VSC Sport mode to have a little more fun.

And oh man, what fun it was!  This was my first real opportunity to see what this car is all about, rev it like it was meant to be driven, and push it a little in the corners to see just how crappy the tires are.  To my surprise, they gripped the road fairly well.  I like to drive with the windows down so I can hear the tires and they gave very good audible feedback.  A little scrubbing sound as you start to turn in, gradually increasing in sound as you push it harder.  On a few tight hairpins I got on the gas a little more aggressively at exit and got some wheelspin but as everyone has noted, nothing too dramatic and very easy to modulate.  The whole package was very confidence-inspiring and I was able to drive the car harder than I did the first few times I drove my MR2 there.  With an MR-layout you really have to watch for snap-oversteer if you get too aggressive, but the BRZ's FR layout is much more forgiving and predictable.  The suspension soaked up most bumps very well and I found it much more comfortable to drive than my fairly harsh-riding MR2.  And it offers fairly comparable levels of responsiveness and balance.  I was very pleased with the performance of the car, bone stock -- so I'm not sure I even need to do much upgrading for now, if my main usage of the car is for the mountain twisties I don't want to ruin the comfort and balance it currently has.  If I start heading to the track frequently, then that is another story.

On the way to Mt. Hamilton I stopped by a popular rest point for bikers and cyclists -- The Junction.  Got a few compliments from bikers as I rolled through, but I didn't stay long.  I was having too much fun driving!  When I got to the Observatory at the top of the mountain, there were no other cars there, just a few bicyclists.  The view up there is fantastic on a clear day.  Again, after a brief stop to take a few pictures, it was time to head back down and tear up the roads some more...

That wasn't the end of my day though.  I also had to take Stitch in to get smogged, so I could register it at the DMV this week.  So I stopped by my local smog test place, the guy there is cool and we talked about the car for a while and he even snapped a pic of it after the test.  Of course, Stitch passed with flying colors!

Then it was back home and time to give Stitch a much-deserved bath.  My wife was nice enough to help me clean the interior while I dried the exterior.

Then I spent the rest of the evening applying the 3-stage Meguiar's Deep Crystal Shine system.  Paint cleaner, polish, then wax.  My back is a little sore and my arms a little tired, but man the shine on the car is so impressive, like a mirror.  Maybe in the morning I will take the car out and get some more shots of it in its oh-so-clean glory.  

wondrous

Check out this awesome time-lapse photography video.  Watch it fullscreen, on a big monitor or TV if you can.  It's just breathtaking sometimes, when you see how beautiful nature can be.


Landscapes: Volume Two from Dustin Farrell on Vimeo.



Got a few minutes or a few hours to kill, and trying to attain a childlike state of amazement and wonder?  Search for "time lapse nature" on vimeo.  You're welcome.

importation

We're about to move to our new place up in the hills but we have a few more days to go.  My vacation has begun though so that means ... Time to update the blog!

I know at least some of you have been wondering whether an iPad would make sense for their needs instead of a laptop.  So I plan to have several posts about using the iPad for different tasks that I've been doing, and how it has been better or worse than what I was using before, which was a laptop docked to a monitor, keyboard and mouse (essentially your typical PC). For this update I will focus on one of the functions for the iPad that I mentioned before:  managing and working with photos.  I have to say, that so far the abilities of the iPad are a little disappointing for me for this function.

Before I get into the details let me talk about what my typical photo workflow is in the context of the previous setup, using my laptop.  I take photos with my Nikon D5000, and I want to offload them from my memory card.  I use a USB card reader, and plugging in the SD card kicks open Google's Picasa image management software (which is free).  From there I can copy the images over to the laptop's drive, and back them up to      an external drive.  Then Picasa lets me review my images, delete the ones I don't like, and tag (star) the ones I like.  I can also adjust basic things like brightness, contrast, white balance, as well as rotate and crop the photos all within Picasa.  

Typically that's all I need to do with my photos, but if I need to, I'll open the photo up in PhotoShop if I want to do anything more advanced like touching up the photo, removing items from the picture, stuff like that.  If I want to use multiple photos together (for instance in my San Francisco series) to build a panorama I use Autostitch, another free app.  Save the file, and then it's back to Picasa.

From Picasa I can organize the photos into folders, and upload them to Picasa online so that I can share the photos with everyone.  I also have accounts with Photobucket and Flickr, but for those I just upload through the web browser.  And then I may publish the photos or links to them on this Blog or on Facebook.  That's about it, 99% of the time.  I very rarely print my photos but if I do I will pick them out using the Picasa viewer and export them to send to the printer.   

Ok, so let's move over to the iPad workflow.  I pop the SD card out of the camera just like before, and use the Apple Camera Connection Kit for the iPad.  Plugging it in automatically launches the iPad's Photos app, and it lets you select which photos to copy over from the card.  Like Picasa the app tells you if your images are duplicates of what's already on the iPad.  You can select everything with one button or tap individually on each photo to select it, and then start the copy process.  However in Photos you can't import the photos into a folder or name the folder.  They just all go into the Photos area.

Once they're imported you view them in Photos as well.  But you only have a few limited ways to sort or view them.  You can't actually move them into another folder or album on the iPad.  There are three views.  

1.  Photos view shows you everything you've got stored on the iPad, unsorted or grouped.  If you have 500+ photos loaded on your iPad, that's a lot of scrolling around through the thumbnails to find the photo you want.  
2.  The Albums view is misleading for me, because you can't actually organize your photos in this view or create any new Albums on the iPad.  It shows you any albums that you've created on your PC or Mac and then copied over to your iPad using the synch feature in iTunes.  In this view all your photos that you've imported through the Camera Connection Kit are    all lumped into an "all imported" album, and there's a separate album called "last imported" for the most recent set you imported.  Then there's a separate album called "saved photos" which contains all other non-imported photos, such as ones you save from the web while browsing, or images that are saved from other apps, whether they are drawings from a 3rd party doodle app or edited photos from a 3rd party editing app.
3.  The last view is Events which basically as far as I can tell, groups the photos you've imported based on what date you imported them.  Even photos taken on the same date, if imported to the iPad on different days, will go into separate Events in this view.

What else can you do in the Photos app?  Not a whole lot.  You can view and delete a photo, and you can email it, or copy it to the iPad clipboard.  You can upload a photo to your MobileMe gallery if you have an account.  No renaming files, no sorting into albums and no tagging.  And to back up the photos to another drive, you have to connect the iPad to your PC or Mac and do a backup through iTunes.  You can't connect the iPad to an external drive to back up the photos directly.  
    
Did you catch all of that?  To me it doesn't make much sense. The organizational function of the Photos app is very weak and I find it frustrating to work with.  It seems like the answer is to sort and organize on your PC or Mac and then synch over to the iPad but that kind of defeats the purpose of having the Camera Connection kit.   I guess if a good 3rd party app was out there that could take the place of the Photos app and add better functionality, that could solve this.  Or I hope that Apple improves the app with future updates.  

Well, let's take a look at the rest of the tasks I wanted to do.  I've been using Adobe's PS Express and Zagg Photo Pad for my photo editing needs. Both are very good for free apps.  The touch interface is kind of neat for adjustment sliders and for cropping photos, but sometimes lacks the precision of a mouse.  I also bought the IOS version of Autostitch ($2.99) for making panoramas.  These are all very cool but I do feel they fall a bit short of their PC counterparts.
  
I can't believe there isn't Picasa for iPad yet but I got the 3rd party app Web Albums which is ok for uploading pics.  There's also a Photobucket app which is pretty good for both viewing and uploading on the Photobucket site.    The closed nature of the iPad's file system prevents you from simply uploading a file through the web browser to sites like Picasa, Photobucket or Flickr.  You need to either have an app that supports uploading to the site or use tricks like emailing in a file if the site has that option.  Once you've got the images up there, linking to them in Blogger or Facebook is a little trickier on the iPad than on PC due to the wonky copy and paste functions, but it can be done. 

So most of the same abilities are there on the iPad, but there is that one glaring issue for me.  What I really want is a way to manage the photo albums on the iPad without going back to the PC.  Maybe this limitation is there by Apple's design, because the storage on the iPad is very finite and they may be trying to make the case for more cloud-based storage and sharing.  That's where the apps like Web Albums and Photobucket come in.  But coming from the PC world I can't help but think that so far, in this particular arena, the iPad falls short of the PC's power.          

clarity

Probably my last SF shots for a while... As we will be moving soon and no more Bay Bridge commute for me. Yay! Maybe I will return when the holiday lights are up around the City.

iterative

From City by the Bay

Quick posting for today -- one of my most recent panoramas of the SF Skyline. It's a stitch of 4 images taken with my kit lens, at 55mm, shot from Treasure Island. I think aside from the one with the crescent moon and the GG Bridge with the blue sky gradient, this is the best one I've taken so far.  Although I think the sky isn't as pretty here, this one is much sharper than the previous one.  This might be the one I send to the printers to make a nice framed print for decorating our house!  Which by the way, we will be getting the keys to the new place in two weeks!  Woot!  Exciting times ...

visions

This post will just be a quick photo update...

Some fireworks photos from July 4th:


Also because I've been taking the Bay Bridge home after work now, I have had a few opportunities to stop by Treasure Island and take some nighttime skyline shots of San Francisco:

From City by the Bay

this one's kind of massive, and features a 3-image stitch I made with Autostitch, Photoshop and Picasa (click to enlarge):


the vista point on Treasure Island is super windy and cold at night so it's a bit of a challenge to capture some of these images; they're still not as sharp as I would like even with a tripod and various photog tricks people have suggested to me. I'll keep trying though, hopefully I will come up with some really nice shots that I would be proud to hang on a wall in our new place.

riparian

We've just come back from a 2-day trip to Yosemite Valley. The landscapes and scenery were pretty awe-inspiring. Here are some of the photos. I probably took over 700 photos in all but many of them didn't turn out the way I wanted them to. That's the great thing about a DSLR like the Nikon D5000, you can just keep clicking away and not worry about wasting film, and then go back and pick the best shots. Anyways we had a good time enjoying the natural beauty of Yosemite, and I had fun trying to capture some of that beauty with my camera. Oh and by the way the wide angle shots were done with a Nikkor 10-24mm lens I rented from http://www.borrowlenses.com/. It's a great way to get access to otherwise expensive equipment like this lens, which retails for like $1000.