Technology never ceases to amaze me. It’s been a long time since I attempted to stitch images together; last time was probably five years ago and the results were.. mediocre. While I was in the process of writing the post about eliminating the smoke odor in our new 2009 Mercury Sable, I wanted to toss a picture of the car up.. but I was being lazy and just had my 50mm lens mounted on the camera, and didn’t feel like changing it. This resulted in a suboptimal picture (the one at the top of that post), but I also did something that I forgot about until later..

As anyone who has used a 50mm lens on a DSLR with an APS sized sensor knows, that lens isn’t exactly ideal for taking a photo of a car sitting in your driveway from your garage (unless your driveway is, well, long), but I figured why not? I ended up with the picture that you see on that post, but on a whim, I had also taken pictures to try to stitch together and see what it looked like. I completely forgot about those photos until I happened to be browsing through Lightroom a few days ago.. I saw them, and went huh, wonder what it’d take to stitch them. Having no idea how to do this with modern software, I highlighted them, and went to right-click to say edit in Photoshop. Much to my surprise, there is now an option to let Photoshop automatically stitch the images in that context menu.. I thought I might as well give it a shot, and here’s the result (click image for a larger version):

I was quite surprised to see how well Photoshop handles this now, especially with handheld shots that were not rotating around the correct axis, etc. Since I took the pictures and have the originals, I can see where it was stitched, but it still looks pretty darn good to me – what do you think?

I will have to play with stitching more often.. it is certainly much better now than it used to be!

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Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black singing; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during Skillet’s ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

More Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black. Again, they rock — buy their album.

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1. Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black performing during Skillet’s Awake and Alive tour
2. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums
3. Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog

Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during Skillet’s ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

This is Sarah Anthony of the band The Letter Black. I had never heard of this band before Skillet’s Awake and Alive tour, but they are awesome. Remind me a lot of Evanescence, but different. Highly recommend you pick up their album, Breaking the Silence – it’s not expensive. I’m also looking forward to their next one, and seeing them live in concert again!

I should note that they were significantly easier to photograph than Skillet.. no pyro and no fog == happy photographer. ;)

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1. Sarah Anthony of The Letter Black (aka Rock Photography is Fun Part 8)
2. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums
3. Ben Kasica of the band Skillet with pyrotechnics in the background

This is Lucky Ehrlich – a black and tan Cavalier King Charles spaniel who stayed with us for a few days while their son was being born.

He’s a little sweetheart! Our friend’s parents adopted one of Lucky’s brothers, who was a Ruby Cavalier King Charles. Both of them are great dogs. If you are looking for a small to medium size dog, they are awesome, and cute.. he gets along very well with our husky and lab malamute too. And did I mention cute?

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John Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Non-silhouette shot of John Cooper of the band Skillet playing his bass in front of the pyro. Skillet’s use of pyro is great – not overly distracting, and very well timed to the music. You can also see some of his ‘Forgiven’ tattoo on his left forearm.. at some point I’d like to get a similar one. ;) If anyone knows what kind of guitar his bass is, I’d love to know – it’s gorgeous!

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1. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics
2. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums
3. Close-up of Korey Cooper of the band Skillet singing with fog in the background

Silhouette of Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Once again, Skillet loves pyro. Here’s a shot of their lead guitarist, Ben Kasica, with fire in the background.

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1. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics
2. Close-up of Korey Cooper of the band Skillet singing with fog in the background
3. Ben Kasica of Skillet during a guitar solo in front of fog

Korey Cooper of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Korey is Skillet’s keyboardist, backup guitarist, and backing vocalist. In other words, she stays busy on the stage! She’s very hard to get pictures of, as she never stays still for more than about a second! I was able to get a few decent shots though.

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1. Ben Kasica of the band Skillet with pyrotechnics in the background
2. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums
3. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics

Jen Ledger of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

Jen is Skillet’s drummer, and also performs vocals on many of their new tracks (Hero, Awake and Alive, etc.) It’s quite impressive to see a drummer singing while they play – I can’t imagine that’s easy! She also does a vocal solo in ‘Yours to Hold’ in the Awake and Alive tour, like she did on the Comatose tour.

It was difficult to get pictures of Jen, as the drumset is near the back of the stage, and generally covered with fog and smoke. Managed to get a few usable shots though!

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1. Close-up of Korey Cooper of the band Skillet singing with fog in the background
2. John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics
3. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics

Ben Kasica of the band Skillet; shot at the Minneapolis Convention Center on November 14, 2009 during the ‘Awake and Alive’ concert tour.

OK, so I enjoyed the Skillet concert a little too much, and decided to post some more of the pictures. ;) This is a shot of Ben Kasica (Skillet’s lead guitar player) during his guitar solo – quite impressive. At some point I’d really like to learn to play.. on my list of things to do! He was in front of a nice backdrop of fog.. I like how it turned out.

One thing I found with rock photography is that I didn’t have much time to compose my shots. For example, in this picture, I would really have liked to have the head of the guitar included. Can’t have everything, I suppose..

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1. Ben Kasica of the band Skillet with pyrotechnics in the background
2. John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics
3. Jen Ledger of the band Skillet singing and playing the drums

NOTE: Wallpaper-sized copies of this available here. Make this your background!

For once, I brought a real camera (my trusty Nikon D200) with a real lens (Nikon 70-200 f/2.8 VR) to a concert. And I had good seats (second row, just off center.) And it was a lot of fun to photograph! This is one of my favorite shots.. they had lots of pyro during the show, which made for great effects, but also made it difficult to get good shots. And the entire auditorium was filled with smoke by the end of the show. This is one of the ones that I was really happy with; a lot of them had lots of fog and smoke in them. In any case, it was a great show — I may decide to post more pictures later too.

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1. John Cooper of Skillet playing his bass, singing, and lit up by pyrotechnics
2. Ben Kasica of the band Skillet with pyrotechnics in the background
3. Close-up of Korey Cooper of the band Skillet singing with fog in the background

So, I’ve decided it’s finally time to buy a real tripod. I’ve read (and advocated for) Thom Hogan’s page on how to buy a tripod, but with the new baby, my budget is rather limited right now, so $1000 was too much to spend. I also wanted a tilt column on it, to make it easier to get better versions of pictures like this:

The tilt column violates Thom’s guidelines, but I wanted it. ;)

Here’s what I ended up with, all from our good friend eBay, and include shipping:
Open-box Gitzo G2220 “Explorer” (Aluminum): $219.94
Cheap Giottos mini-ballhead: $39.99
Cheap Arca Swiss-compatible clamp: $29.97
Kirk L-Plate for the Nikon D200: $72.95
Kirk plate for the Nikon 70-200 F2.8: $40

..for a grand total of $402.85.

Here’s what the tripod ended up looking like:

..close-up of the camera with the L-Plate in the clamp:

..since the tripod isn’t exactly stable with the column fully extended, here’s what I use for counterweight:

What do you think? I think I did fairly well for the price. Only component I’ll probably replace soonish is the ball-head — it works, but I have to crank on it too tight for stability with a heavy lens. I’m watching for an inexpensive used ball-head on eBay already. ;)

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This weekend, I ran into my three-ring binder full of 35mm film and slides from our wedding and honeymoon. I was surprised that I had a sense of nostalgia for the “old days” of photography with film. Back before digital cameras existed (and before I could afford one after they existed), there was a small thrill every time I’d bring a roll of film into the lab for processing, and a big thrill when I picked up the order and got to see how my hard work turned out. In my later years of 35mm, my dad introduced me to a real lab — Color Unlimited in Minneapolis. The lab was amazing — their prices were quite reasonable, their film processing was amazing (for years, I had been dealing with scratched film from labs like Proex which were not visible on 4×6 prints, but were quite obvious when scanning to a high-res image), and the people were the best in the business. They were more than willing to offer advice to improve my photographic skills, and to just chat about the art in general.

I’m sad to see that they have now gone out of business.. I guess it’s kind of inevitable with the “digital revolution” that the old-school film shops are going to go under. The best replacement I’ve found is photo.net, where you can ask for critiques and such, but it’s just not the same.

I love digital photography, but have started to realize how much of what got me interested in photography in the beginning is just no longer relevant. My kids will probably never have the experience of developing their own film in a darkroom, of rolling bulk film into 35mm cartridges, or even having to figure out what speed film to load to get the best use out of the film.

Rest in peace, 35mm photography!

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In my last post, I detailed the New York City portion of our trip. Once we were done in the city, we got our rental car out of it’s happy parking spot (no, it wasn’t broken into or anything silly like that), and got on the road to Niagara Falls. For details on the trip, read more!

Tiff wasn’t quite as scared on the way out of NYC as she was on the way in, but I still quite enjoyed it! We had a pleasant drive across the state, and didn’t have any issues crossing the border to the Canadian side. However, when we arrived at the Holiday Inn by the Falls, we found out that they had given away our room (which was guaranteed for late arrival) to another guest, and that the hotel was entirely full. The staff was quite rude, and basically said there was nothing they could do to help us, besides getting us a room at some crummy hotel next door. We said thanks but no thanks, and left. (This is the last time I’ve stepped into a Holiday Inn – I know that they are individually run, but if a reservation does not mean they reserve a room for you, I will not stay there any more.) We drove up the road to the Niagara Falls Fallsview Hilton. This hotel actually had a competent person staffing the front desk; the night manager was understanding about our situation, and found a room for us. It wasn’t a great room (dual beds, overlooking construction of their new tower), but it was at least a place to stay. However, he was also able to book us into one of their best rooms for the remainder of our stay – all at very reasonable prices. The view from the nice room was unbelievable; it was actually the best vantage point we found for both the US and Canadian falls.

We did a lot of exploring around the area; we gave the bellman at the Hilton a few fairly hefty tips, and he gave us some excellent suggestions on where to go. One of the highlights of the trip was the Whirlpool Jet Tour. The boats are essentially Jet-Skis on steroids – they fit a bunch of people, can do fun stunts like a 360-degree turn on the nose of the boat, and have plenty of power to be able to explore the river immediately downstream from the whirlpool formed where the river turns. You can pick from either a covered boat (you stay dry) or a uncovered one (you get soaked). We picked the covered boats, since I wanted to take some pictures. Turns out the picture-taking opportunities in the boat weren’t that great.. I was able to get lots of pictures of water splashing over the boat, but that’s about it. If I were to do it again, I would have gone with the uncovered boat. In any case, we had a blast! We walked down to the river afterwards (word to the wise – if you decide to take that stroll, bring water — I didn’t, and almost passed out on the way back up), and we took some pictures of the boats playing in the river.

We also had dinner one night at the restaurant in the Hilton, and found a curious thing called ‘Ice Wine’ which we had never tried before. We tried it out, and it was, well, impressive. We took a look at the bottle, and noticed that it was from a winery in the area – Konzelmann Estates. We decided to take a trip up there, and took a tour of the winery. It was quite impressive.. they were also a little overly-generous with the wine tastings (we paid for 3, and got to try every kind of wine they offered); it certainly worked on us, because we ended up bringing 17 bottles back home with us!

Eventually, we made our way back across the border, turned in our rental car in Buffalo, NY, and flew home. It was a great trip, ad one we’ll remember for a long time (especially as we sip the Konzelmann wine — we only bring it out for special occasions!)

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1. new york and niagara falls trip: new york
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3. Lots of rain in a short period of time != good roads

Tiff and I haven taken an anniversary trip every summer since we were married in 2003. In 2007, we took a trip to New York City and Niagara Falls. Our initial inspiration was that Laura Osnes, who’s mother attends our church, had won the part of Sandy in the Broadway production of Grease, and we figured we’d go see her in action. We decided that while we were in the area, we might as well take in a few more shows, then drive up to Niagara Falls for a few days. If you are interested in seeing some photos from the trip, read more!

We flew into the Newark airport, as rental car prices were about half the price there as they were in New York City. (We really did not want a car while in the city, but it ended up being cheaper to rent a car in Newark, drive to our hotel in New York City, and park it for a few days than it would have been to rent a car in the city when we were ready to drive to Niagara – crazy!) After a drive into the city (which I quite enjoyed, but Tiff was scared out of her mind), we successfully found our hotel — The Michelangelo.

One of my coworkers had recommended the hotel, and helped me find a great rate — it was quite a nice hotel (and apparently the room was quite large for NYC), and the rate was, well, unbelievable.

While in New York, we went on a boat tour of the harbor, and took in a few shows — Grease, Wicked, and Avenue Q. All the shows were great; however, if you’re easily offended, Avenue Q is not the show for you!

On our last day in the city, we checked out Central Park and the Central Park Zoo. Compared to the zoos I’m use to here in Minnesota, it was rather small, but the exhibits they had were great quality, and you could actually get reasonable close to the animals. If you’re ever in the city, highly recommend it!

Next post – the Niagara Falls portion of our trip.

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For the last few years, I’ve been doing my best to make sure that each laptop and desktop monitor I purchase has an excellent quality high-resolution display panel. In general, resolution-wise this means 1920×1200 (WUXGA); however, with the advent of 1080p HDTV’s, I am also seeing some displays at 1920×1080. There are also the ultra-high-end displays (which are quite out of my price range) like the Dell 30″ displays (IE, the 3007WFP) which have a massive native resolution of 2560×1600. With my first 1920×1200 display (a Dell Inspiron 6000), I had lots of issues finding nice wallpapers available at that resolution. Since then, I’ve started using multiple monitors at 1920×1200, and need multi-display wallpapers. I’ve put together a list of sites I have found that offer free high-res backgrounds, and am also starting to post some of my own pictures as wallpapers; I hope you enjoy these and find them helpful! Please feel free to comment with any additional sites, or if there are any specific subjects you’d like to see available as a wallpaper.

As of 2009/Nov/20, I’ve also decided to start offering some of my own backgrounds – I hope you enjoy! Please let me know if you’d like to see other resolutions available.

Background #1: John Cooper of Skillet in front of Pyro (blog post):

1680×1050: Single display at 1680×1050
1920×1200: Single display at 1920×1200
3360×1050: Dual displays at 1680×1050 each
3840×1200: Dual displays at 1920×1200 each

• http://www.mandolux.com: A nice variety of wallpapers, including dual-screen and tri-screen wallpapers. Each is available at a crazy number of resolutions, from wussy (1024×768) to extreme (2560×1600). A few of my favorites:
  • Cisco/California: A nice shot of Cisco PCB’s
  • Scanner/Busted: Assortment of film strips
  • Master: A Master Lock doing it’s job. Unfortunately, the door did not.
  • STAR: Abstract sprinkler
  • Slowness: Fire! Fire! Fire!
  • Letter Opener: This is my kind of letter opener
  • New Year’s Eve: A beautiful cork
  • Axed: No comment!
• http://www.rpeterclark.com/Wallpapers.asp: MacOS and Windows-centric, but still kind of neat.
• http://www.plasmadesign.co.uk/widescreenabstract.htm: Abstract stuff, not my cup of tea, but you might like it!
• http://www.interfacelift.com/wallpaper: One of my favorite wallpaper sites – lets you sort by resolution, which is handy!
• http://www.graffitiwallpaper.com: Nature type stuff, pretty nice.
• http://www.veer.com/ideas/wallpaper/: Lots of various wallpapers, all available in 1920×1200.
• http://1920-1200-wallpaper.blogspot.com/: This is a blog where the author adds things on a regular basis.. nice!
• http://blogs.msdn.com/mswanson/articles/wallpaper.aspx: Tons of macro photos. Beautiful!

If you know of any other great wallpaper sites, please comment!

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1. John Cooper of the band Skillet with his fist up in the air and silhouetted by pyrotechnics

Thought I’d post some more pictures on my last full day here in Vancouver.. this is following up on this post. :)

Yesterday afternoon, after the talks, I decided to wander the waterfront a bit.. here’s a few pictures from down there:

Just a shot of the waterfront.

Concession staff wearing a shirt saying “Vancouver’s Sexiest Staff” — does it really matter? Really, I just want food!

Even the new buildings here are cool.

Then, after the lights went out, I decided to wander and take some shots.

My attempt at the Granville Street Bridge. Mostly failed, but still kind of cool!

First angle of the Lion’s Gate Bridge.

The Lion’s Gate Bridge and the city of Vancouver BC from Cypress Mountain at night

I think I’ll have to go practice some more late-night photography tonight.. it’s fun!

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I am currently in Vancouver for the USENIX Security ‘06 conference. The trip and conference have been pretty good so far.. here’s a basic summary:

Day 1 – Saturday, July 29, 2006:

Tiff dropped me off at the airport, dropped my luggage off and got through security without any snags. Since I upgraded my ticket to first class, I got to hand out at the Worldclubs lounge before the flight.. very nice; free drinks, free internet, comfortable chairs, and most importantly, quiet. About 15 minutes before my flight was supposed to board, I wandered down to the gate, and boarded soon after. I was sitting by a guy who’s working in Taiwan right now, and had some interesting pre-flight conversations.. then we pretty much stayed to ourselves during the actual flight. I gotta say, I much prefer first class.. there’s actually enough room to feel comfortable, and you get pretty good service. When I arrived in Vancouver, I went through customs (pain-free again; just a 15-minute wait.. not bad), and then waited another half hour or so for my luggage to show up. Then, I headed down to the parking ramp to pick up my car.. ended up with a Chrysler 300; I’d never driven one of the recent models before, and I’m actually quite impressed! Here’s a shot of the car:

I drove through the nasty Vancouver traffic to the hotel.. and didn’t know where I was supposed to turn to get into it, and ended up driving by it. I had to go up about 4 blocks before I could turn around, and it took me another 15-20 minutes to find the silly hotel ramp.. that wasn’t much fun. After I got to the hotel, I ended up crashing for the rest of the day.. I guess I was tired!

Day 2 – Sunday, July 30, 2006:

On Sunday, I decided to head over to the Capilano Suspension Bridge, since I had heard impressive things about it. I was rather disappointed.. it was an interesting experience, but you really couldn’t do much “nature”-ish stuff.. you were basically limited to a small set of trails they had set up for you. Ah well, it was still fun.

After that, I thought I’d head up to Whistler, and try to go on a Gondola ride to the peak of a mountain. Unfortunately, there was construction all the way up Highway 99, so I arrived too late to do that, so I just wandered the city for awhile – looks like a nice town! Then, I headed back to the hotel to crash again.

Day 3 – Monday, July 31, 2006:

Monday was the first day of the conference. I attended the “DDoS for Fun and Profit” session; it was interesting, but nothing I didn’t already know. I didn’t really do anything afterwards.. just hung out in the hotel room, watched some TV, and did some work.

Day 4 – Tuesday, August 1, 2006:

Tuesday was my “Security Without Firewalls” session. Much more interesting; they basically reinforced a bunch of stuff I already knew. One thing they did is a basic tutorial on cfengine, which is a configuration management utility. I’ve always meant to dig into it, but hadn’t had the time.. they boiled it down enough that I’m gonna have to play with it when I get back home. Once again, after the sessions were done, I went to my room and crashed.

Day 5 – Wednesday, August 2, 2006:

Wednesday was the first day of talks and such instead of sessions. I went to a few talks in the morning and afternoon; a bunch of interesting stuff, but nothing that really applied to what I’m doing at work. It was still fun to hear about what people really in the security research field are up to, however. After the talks, I decided to head out to the Lynn Headwaters Regional Park. I was much more impressed with this park than with Capilano – even the suspension bridge was cooler. :) Here are few pictures of the park and bridge:

I was going to hike down to the falls, but my ankle started giving me trouble, so I decided to head back to the hotel. I hung out for a couple hours, had dinner in my room (it actually ends up costing less than going down to the restaraunt, interestingly.. I still haven’t found any inexpensive restaraunts in the area – bummer), and then decided to go explore Vancouver at night (around midnight), looking for interesting picture opportunities. I didn’t find anything really interesting, except for a park full of kids making out in cars – I guess every city’s gotta have one. Maybe I’ll go exploring some more tonight – I’ll have to see. I was inspired by this shot — I will have to head over to that area.

Oh, and the hotel’s good at a good presentation for dinner, even if you order room service:

Day 6 – Thursday, August 3, 2006:

This is today, which obviously isn’t done yet. :) I’ve gone to two talks so far — one regarding software’s security improving with age, and then another regarding how wiretaps are done, and vulnerabilities in the system. Both were quite interesting, and worth going to. I’m haven’t yet decided which other sessions I want to go to today.

Well, I’ll post more later!

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2. new york and niagara falls trip: new york
3. new york and niagara falls trip: niagara falls