Adventures of a Quantum Cowboy

In Sacramento this weekend, so there won’t be any updates at least until Monday. I don’t have all the photos from the second LA trip done yet, but I think all the Olvera St. pics are finished so I may post just those. Also awaiting processing are photos from San Buenaventura Beach, CA-128, and Bouquet Canyon Road. To add even further to my backlog, I’m planning on stopping in the mountains near Tehachapi for some shots on the way back down to SoCal. So there’s a preview of what’s coming up this week! Stay tuned…

Sorry about the delay in posting new shots. I just got Corel Paint Shop Pro Photo XI, and have been playing with it. The first batch of photos to pass through it will be Darin’s hangliding trip (which was awesome), which I expect to post tomorrow evening. I will also be redoing some of Danielle’s shots. This weekend will see another trip to LA and also some more hangliding, though this time at a different location.

Some photos may not appear for the next hour or so, I’ve made some further color corrections to my monitor and will be uploading re-rendered images.

Also, I know I promised LA photos last week but apparently I took 190 of them and its taking a while to get through them all! Hopefully they will be up soon.

Back! The trips were good, expect some random backlogged shots to show up probably tonight and later this week, as well as a day-long exploration (and public transit test) of Los Angeles on Saturday.

I’ll be in Sacramento this weekend and Phoenix next weekend, so the earliest opportunity for a hike or dedicated photo shoot will be the weekend of the 28th. I have some miscellaneous shots that have been accumulating in the camera however, so some of these may make an appearance. Barring that, it will likely be a couple of weeks before a major new post. Take care in the meantime!

Whew, that sucked… redeveloping everything. Anyway, I may still take a few wierd or bad pictures, but if something looks egregiously off from now on, please let me know. Hopefully that monitor setting tweak did the trick.

By the way, if anyone has the same configuration or similar (HP zv5000 w/ NVIDIA GeForce4 440 Go 64M) the (pretty darn close) correct settings are in the screenshot below:

Right click on desktop, click “Properties”, click “Settings” tab, click “Advanced”, click “GeForce4 440 Go 64M”, click “Color Correction” at left.

Previously uploaded photos from the new Canon will be temporarily unavailable. Apparently my laptop’s graphics driver settings turned out to be significantly off visually from that of most monitors and prints. This of course means that my sunrise and sunset photos were significantly off in terms of exposure level and color balance. If they showed up as looking severely under-exposed and way more red than they needed to be, well that was why. Using a printout from one of my photos I have manually retuned my monitor to settings that are much closer to reality. I will post a notification when the photos have been re-developed and re-uploaded. Sorry for the inconvenience and the crappy images.

With all the hiking and photography I’ve started doing lately, I thought it was time to move all such related stuff to their own blog, reserving my main site for more bland things like personal updates and rather uninteresting political rants.

All posts before this date were transferred from my main blog, and were from hikes and travel using my old Fujifilm point-and-shoot; many of the photos below are not even mine (as indicated in the captions). From now on, I aim to display only original work done with my new Canon EOS 400D, and maybe post some interesting travel essays to go with them.

I’m very much an amateur, and do photography as a side hobby only. I have much to learn about this amazing art, of which I have only recently begun to scratch the surface. Feedback, comments, and constructive criticism are welcome.

Enjoy!

There she is, the Canon Rebel XT Digital SLR Camera. With easy to use advanced features, over 60 optical lens attachments, and a (relatively) low cost, this fine piece of engineering is much-loved standard in the amateur photography world. And boy I certainly can’t wait to get one. I can’t afford it now, but I’m saving…

The base camera is about $800.00, and with an additional telescopic lens, an additional macro lens, tripod, extra battery, and case I’m probably looking at at least $1,500.00 to $2,000.00. Oof. But I figure I’ve really liked photography for awhile and have been meaning to get more into it, and besides it will go well with the hiking I plan on doing. I’ve ordered “101 Hikes in Southern California” as well as “Backpacking California” from Amazon, and they should arrive sometime soon. I’m planning on doing a day hike through Placerita Canyon this Saturday, so be on the lookout for an essay/review and some photos this weekend.

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At August 25, 2006 4:25 PM, –Valente said…

Dude, very nice camera!

I picked up a Canon EOS 20D last December, and I absolutely love it. I’m sure you’ll be very pleased with the quality that these cameras provide.

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At August 25, 2006 5:15 PM, Nalin said…

Yeah my dad until recently worked for HP, which does a lot of collaborative work with Canon (seamless digital camera to High Quality photo print), so he was able to list a number of reasons that Canon was the best. I’m glad to hear that its not entirely company loyalty! There’s a couple of guys at work who are really into backpacking, which I would like to get into. I think Em is interested too… if you want to try out that new camera on some gorgeous California mountains and backcountry, let me know!

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At August 26, 2006 7:35 PM, –Valente said…

Oh hells yeah, I’m down for some backpacking sometime.

Definitely going to have to get together when the work/school schedule isn’t killing us all.

Having a car is wonderful. Back in the college days at ASU, I was one of those poor souls without a vehicle, trapped within walking distance of campus unless I lucked out and got a ride from someone. With the exception of Honeywell, the airport, one camping trip in Globe, and a few parties, in four years of living in Arizona I really only saw a four mile square block of Tempe and the immediately surrounding cities. Now that I live in California, I drive way more than I ever thought I would, and not all of it is the commute. Between the move down from Idaho, seeing old friends who fly into town, and taking day trips around my new home state with new collegues at the office, my 2006 Nissan Sentra has put on 6400 miles through five states in the two months since I got it. With all this travel and my love of amatuer photography (though I’m not that good at it), I thought I’d start a new series on the blog about it. I’ll be doing some backdated posts to get in some highways that I’ve previously driven.

So… let’s get on the road!

By the way, if you’ve got suggestions for a roadtrip to take, or have additional photographs from roads I’ve written about that you don’t mind publishing, then just send me an email!

N.

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At August 20, 2006 5:38 PM, Nalin said…

On the queue:

US-395 (California)
US-101 (Reseda <-> Santa Barbara)
CA-1 (Santa Monica <-> Santa Barbara)
CA-14 (Palmdale <-> Santa Clarita, Soledad Canyon/Bouquet Canyon)
CA-23 (Fillmore <-> CA-1)
CA-58 (Bakersfield <-> Mojave, Tehachapi)
CA-99 (Bakersfield <-> Sacramento)
CA-126 (Santa Clarita <-> Ventura)
ID-55 (Boise <-> McCall)