So for those of you who don’t know, we recently picked out a dachshund puppy, who came to live with us today. We’ll try not to be those people who take way too many pictures of the puppy, but to be honest, right now he’s too cute not to take pictures of. So without further ado…
We spent this weekend in San Antonio for John’s graduation, and our morning entertainment was to head to the Botanical Gardens for a quick walkaround. It was the first time I’d had the macro lens out in quite a while (not counting our trip to the bluebonnets, not posted), and I was perhaps a bit rusty. All in all I was surprisingly pleased with the general facility – while it doesn’t have the size of the Dallas Arboretum, it’s close to being in the same league in terms of landscaping and plant variety. There are, of course, the general staples (pansies, lilies), but also some more unique things (a desert section, and some nice orchids). Definitely worth dropping by if you get a chance.
Full gallery available here.
One of the louder and more annoying cars of the weekend…
The Baja Bug was one of the cars we could pass on the track.
Pace car? Try pace bus.
A 2002 Mini Cooper for $500 bucks? The judges didn’t think so either, and gave them 1355 penalty laps.
The Gremlin, in one of its rare track appearances.
This guy didn’t make it until the drop of the green flag before breaking down.
This guy didn’t even make it on the track.
Leading in the corner. Yeah, that roll is normal.
Look at it go!
Plenty of questionable driving during the weekend. I’ll be honest – this guy locked up the breaks every lap.
Don’t laugh at the old BMW. It was fast. Really fast.
Watching the cars come down the front straight.
See that motion blur?
Yeah… who says these cars are slow?
Fueling and driver changes.
Might give you an idea of how much the car is worth…
The Gremlin was black flagged for being too slow…
You do not want to see a puddle under your car.
You don’t want to see grass in your grill either.
What have we here?
Hot.
Really hot.
Yeah… I want one.
Towing is earth friendly? Really?
Sexy.
William pop riveted some decorations onto the car…
We paid $150 yesterday to run about 3 laps. Given what we fixed, money well spent.
You know you want one.
Everyone loves our Cosmic wheels. Too bad we only have 3.
This was my contribution.
The office.
The Gremlin next to us went all German… Should have done that on the engine…
This is the symbol for teams who bribe the judges. We’re probably the only team with a zero-lap penalty who doesn’t have one of these.
Team WT Motorsports.
Pit row. You can hot pit here (if you take yourself too seriously) or you can bring it back to the camping area and be a bit more relaxed.
Philip getting in the car.
A view from the inside.
Headed out to the track…
At the front of the pack on a blue Texas morning…
So for those of you who haven’t heard, my D90 is having issues. Specifically, it seems to be deleting my pictures on the camera with a mind of its own. Over the past week or so, I’ve shot a variety of pictures trying to determine if my camera has an issue, and today I sent it off to Nikon for repairs. Sigh. I’ll just have to shoot the D300 for a while, which really isn’t the worst thing one could say.
Anyway, a few shots from the random clickfest.
For those of you who don’t know, I spent almost two weeks in Colorado recently, and am just now getting around to putting pictures up. A group of five of us spent 9 wonderful days on the trail, treking through some of the most remote and beautiful parts of Colorado in the Weminuche Wilderness. For those interested in the details of our route, just ask and I can break it down step by step, but many parts of it will be clear from the comments on the full gallery of pictures.
For those interested, I took the D90 with a Tamron 17-50 2.8, and Seth graciously loaned me his Nikon 55-200 VR. In addition I took my gorillapod and three batteries – the whole rig contributing about 4 pounds to my pack. In retrospect, I would probably swap out the 17-50 for a lighter 18-55, even though the quality likely wouldn’t be as good – the weight would be hard to argue with, though. Additionally, I did suffer a near-catastrophic failure of my memory card, though with some good recovery software I was able to get a few of the images off. Not quite sure about the reason for the failure yet.
A full gallery, along with subtitles, is available here.
View from our campsite on the first night.
A Rocky Mountain Columbine
The first part of our trip was hiking up the Vallecito Creek, shown here.
Lots of lily-like flowers along the trail.
The Guardian, as seen from our third camp.
One of many mountain waterfalls.
Leviathan Lake, pretty much the most beautiful place ever, even in this HDR-ish shot.
A view of the lake in the morning, with the water still.
Needed a new Facebook profile picture.
We were joined by two goats – in this case Buddy.
Yes, had to do a long exposure even in the mountains. Why else would I take 3 batteries?
Looking back to the west over the whole of the lake in the morning.
Jagged Mountain. Note that Buddy (and Mable) decided to follow us over the pass.
This is Floyd, our friendly neighborhood marmot.
Brent, fishing on the Animas.
I’ve had this video for a while, but I finally got a chance to put it together a few days ago. More D90 with Nikon 200, but this time of some lizards and frogs instead of just butterflies. I’ve also got a compilation of this video and the previous one that I’ll post in a couple of days.
One of the more interesting things about this editing process was learning just how fast my new computer is at rendering video – specifically that it will do it almost in real time. This 2:45 video rendered in almost exactly 3 minutes. On my laptop that probably would have taken 20-30. Gotta love technology.
While walking past an amaryllis, I noticed a green tumor inside one of them. Intrigued, I found inside a rather tired green frog. Also got some cool video, but that’ll take a bit longer to process.
Had a few spare moments this morning and went to shoot out at HG. Looks like they’re replanting everything, so hopefully some more variety in the next few weeks.
The Amaryllis at the HG are incredible right now – truly an amazing site. If you’re in the area and get a chance, you should definitely go take a look at them. Mixture of D90 with Sigma 150 and D300 with Nikon 200.
Some pictures from random outings in the past couple of weeks. The gardens are a beautiful place right now.
Spent a couple of the past afternoons out at the holistic gardens. Some fun stuff out there, though I really didn’t get as much as I’d like. Possibly more to come.
For those of you who are interested, here’s some video (quickly) put together with the D90. More to come, hopefully.
D90 Macro Video from Jeff Wischkaemper on Vimeo.
A bit more D90 shooting under the belt, and today I took my tripod to do some video work. It’s possible that I’ll have some videos up sometime, but frankly it takes a lot more time to do decent video work than decent photo work (at least in the processing), and while I’ve done enough video projects to know what to do, I’m much faster at processing photos. So for now these will have to do.
One other issue that I might have with the camera is that it seems to self-protect (heating) after extended live view / video work. I’m not sure if this was just an isolated incident caused by something random I was doing, or if it’s really how the camera functions.
I’ll hopefully have some video up soon – going to edit it as soon as I can.
Headed out with James yesterday for some more D90 action, followed by some D300 action today with Katie using the D90.
My first impressions with the 90 are positive, at least so far as image quality is concerned. The biggest failing to me at this point is the AF system. The D90, for those of you who care, retains the focus system of the D80/D200 – an 11 point AF sensor with one high precision point in the center, while the D300 has the same focus system found in the D3, which has 51 points and 15 high precision points. While both the D90 and D300 use a 3d tracking system between the points, the bottom line is it works considerably better on the D300, which isn’t really surprising given that there are over 4 times as many points for it to track between. In addition, the focus speed (whether on screw drive or AF-S lenses) is noticeably slower, though for most situations this isn’t going to be a dealbreaker.
My biggest issue, though, is the D90′s stubbornness when it comes to taking a picture if it is even slightly out of focus. The D300 seems to be much more forgiving in this regard, which at first glance might seem like a negative thing, but at least when taking macro shots, you often rely on being close and using a large depth of field in order to get sharpness and focus in the image. There were several shots I had lined up yesterday that the camera point blank refused to take. I think in general photographic terms this might not be the biggest issue, but certainly I have concerns about the performance of the AF system for what I do.
That said, the D90 is certainly capable of taking great pictures, and if anything my comments reflect the excellence of the D300′s focus system more than anything lacking in the D90.
Shots from yesterday:
