This Old Blog

You're looking at a photograph taken by English wedding photographer Kevin Mullens while he was in Tokyo trying out the new Fujifilm XF23mm F1.4 lens . Mr. Mullens is, according to his site, is an award-winning photographer who uses the Fujifilm X-Pro1 as one of his tools. Kevin Mullens is a globe-spanning photographer; according to his basic review of the lens he traveled from Rome to Tokyo to review the lens before heading back home to London. I found out about this excellent review from a link via The Online Photographer . What got me started writing this piece was this sentence written by Mike Johnston in the post: Some samples here ( all the blown highlights appear to be the photographer's style, not evidence of some technical problem ). emphasis mine When I read that sentence, it was as if a switch toggled in my mind. I'd read one off-handed criticism too many, and I decided to do something about it: criticise the critic, in this case Mike Johnston. You...

I had to change the theme of my blog because the prior Blogger theme, named Dynamic Views, heavily dependent upon HTLM5, Javascript, and CSS, was failing to properly load all the time, especially with ... the latest version of Chrome. That's right, the latest version of Chrome wouldn't properly render Blogger's most sophisticated blog theme at all, or at least, not on any of my versions of Chrome. And I'm talking about Chrome running on Windows 8 and several Linux distributions. I don't know what was up with that, but when one part of Google (the part in charge of Blogger) isn't paying attention what another part of Google is doing (the part in charge of Chrome), such that one (Blogger) can't work properly with the other (Chrome), then it's time to make some changes on my end. Such as picking a less web-technology-challenging (read: buggy) blog theme. I remember when I picked Dynamic Views. It was cool and had all sorts of cool effects. It was too ...

Heading north into Seattle on I-5 with lots of locals Today I headed north from Dupont to Seattle. The goal was a Flicker meetup with some of the locals, notably with Paula Thomas, a.k.a. gapey on Flickr . But before I met up with them I traveled into the heart of Seattle (or a bit into Seattle) to just look around a smidge. I've never been to Seattle, and I don't know when I'll be back. For today's very brief sojourn into Seattle I got off on 1st Avenue South via the West Seattle bridge, found a spot to park, and then got out and walked about. Before I finally parked I drove north up 1st Avenue to check out what was there, and was amazed and tempted to stop multiple times with my camera by all that I saw. In particular I drove past the Seattle Art Museum (SAM) and then turned south at Pike Fish Market. I'm headed back downtown early tomorrow morning to visit SAM and to walk more of 1st Avenue, and possibly down around the harbor. In driving around, espeical...

I was out with my camera and the 40-150mm R II mounted, and came across these three sandhill cranes rummaging in the shallows for something to eat. Temperatures have been in the upper 70s to  low 80s since the last week of January, and it's the dry season here in Florida, so that water level has dropped several feet in the artificial overflow flood pond that's next to my office building. The plastic baggie behind the cranes was one of several that were on the shore, along with other trash. This was taken at lunch after hearing and reading a trio of uplifting stores. NPR has a story about how the Marine Stewardship Council, or MSC, had essentially greenwashed the fact that Canada's long-line swordfish boats pull tens of thousands of blue sharks up out of the water along with the swordfish. The Canadian fishers let them go, the only problem being that 35% of the sharks caught eventually die right on the hook or days after release. The findings suggested that Canadian sw...