On Halloween, Rae and I went up to the City to the Rotten Tomatoes Halloween party at the 26 Mix Club.

No time to write a recap, so I’ll leave you with some photos from the evening.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stanford hosted the Nelson Invitational this weekend at the Stanford Golf Course. Alex King and I went to take some photographs of the tournament on Sunday morning. We followed two groups of Stanford golfers, Pat Phillips and Brandon Lawson and Matt Savage and Scott MacDonald, through the front nine before calling it a day. I figured that there would be crowds of people following the matches, so I was surprised to see that it was just the two of us for much of the morning.

There are rules to photographing at golf tournaments. You shouldn’t trip the shutter while the golfer is preparing to hit the ball nor doing his swinging/putting motion. If you’ve watched any tournaments on TV, you’ve likely seen the wrath of a golfer when a photographer does not follow the rules. Alex, being an avid golfer, gave me a number of tips for shooting golf. I had rented a 2x converter for my 70-200 lens, but I wish that I hadn’t. Image quality suffers noticeably with the extender. I probably should have rented the 1.4x or not used one at all. Alex was shooting with his 10D and a 75-300mm lens and his results were very nice. There were noticeable differences between the color balance of the 1D and the 10D. I preferred his colors out of the camera a lot better than mine and the extra resolution is nice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Sophia celebrated her birthday Saturday night with friends at her new place in Mountain View. After spending four years in Fremont, she’s made the move over to my side of the Bay. In a way, her move mirrors my own from Mountain View to Cupertino after four years. The furniture that I loaned to her a year ago now make their home over at Javier’s place in Sunnyvale.

Aside from Sophia and her boyfriend Mike, Wendy was the only other person that I had met previously. A number of her friends had some connection to either MIT or Oracle. I invited the group to come to our post-Halloween party. I’ve got a feeling that there will be a lot of people at Clubertino Saturday night!

Read the rest of this entry »

From 8:00 pm to midnight on Friday, October 24, 2003, the Apple Faithful descended upon Apple Stores across the nation to christen the Night of the Panther. The third major update to Mac OS X brings a number of innovative features and functionality to the Unix-based operating system, including Exposé, Xcode, and FileVault. With so many windows open at any one time, I’m especially looking forward to using Exposé, which allows one to — with a press of a key — minimize all windows so they fit on your screen without overlapping one another. XCode looks like it’s going to be a big improvement over Project Builder, the previous IDE for OS X. Finally, FileVault will secure my data in the event it gets stolen. Finger… or paw-licking good! Can you tell that Night of the Panther was a total geek fest?

Read the rest of this entry »

The United Nations Association Film Festival kicked off today at Stanford University. Robert Capa: In Love and War by Anne Makepeace takes us through the life of the celebrated photojournalist Robert Capa. His photos captured the brutal essence of the Spanish Civil War and World War II. You’ve probably seen Death of a Loyalist militiaman or American landing on Omaha Beach in your history books. The former is touted as the greatest war photograph ever taken.

As a photographer, I was very interested in learning the details of Capa’s life. War photographer, founder of Magnum (with Henri Cartier-Bresson and others). Let me tell you, this man had some major cajones in doing his job. It’s sad that he met his end stepping on a landmine in Indochina in 1954. The film did a good job of mixing his photographs with found footage of the time, along with interviews with his friends and colleagues. I was surprised to see Henri Cartier-Bresson interviewed in the documentary, as I have read that he is not fond of giving interviews.

Rae and I both enjoyed watching the films. We’ll be back on Friday for a couple more films. The festival runs from October 22-26. For more information on film listings and directions, visit the web site!

Read the rest of this entry »

DVF Fellow, Michelle Aden, arranged for the group to have a tour of Sun Executive Briefing Center in Menlo Park on Tuesday. The first thing I thought of when I walked through their briefing showroom was, “Man, they spent a lot designing this place!” Demos and prototypes of various technologies and projects adorned the room. We had fun playing with the RFID technology being incorporated into the packaging of various consumer products. These small radio tags can be scanned by sensors more efficiently than can be done using bar code scanners since line-of-sight is no longer needed. Raphael was especially interested in the demo, as his project involves using RFID tags to track livestock in Kenya.

The Sun Ray terminals are rather interesting. I like the idea of being able to plug a card into a terminal and have your entire desktop appear before your eyes. Unfortunately, the technology requires at least DSL speeds. This certainly wouldn’t work with a 1.5 Kb connection that Edgardo will be using for his project!

Read the rest of this entry »

Following Mirrielees Reunion at Stanford, I headed up to the Stork Club in Oakland to see Rae, and Susan. Three bands were playing that night, Model A, Copper Ocean, and Astral. Through the magic known as Friendster, I knew the lead singer and guitarist for Astral, Dave Han, through Susan through Mike. When I arrived at the club, I immediately picked out Dave — he was the only one with this Robert Smith haircut!

Sadly, there weren’t that many people at the club — on a Saturday night! Rae tells me that she’s been to the Stork Club when it was packed. I guess it was just an off-day for the Oakland nightlife. We ended up taking a bunch of photographs in the pool room, where the lighting was nice and dramatic. The lighting where the bands played was dark — typical of the kind of environments I frequently find myself in. There’s a thread (here and here) happening on Digital Photography Review that’s worth reading if you’re interested in debating photographic equipment versus photographic technique. There are a number of people who post frequently on these newsgroups with great equipment but whose skills are lacking. I’ll be the first to tell you that good equipment helps, but it’s the mind and eye which are the most important things in photography. If you lack the eye, you’re not going to take good photos, even with the best equipment. That eye can be developed by studying from those photographers that came before and through practice, practice, and more practice.

Read the rest of this entry »

Stanford Reunion was this past weekend. I attended my fifth-year reunion last year and had a blast. This year, the only event that I attended was Garry Grundy’s Mirrielees Reunion party at Mirrielees. Garry and I go way back to my time studying abroad in Paris, France. I was a junior, while Garry was a sophomore. I always remember him wearing his faded Arizona/Phoenix Cardinals football cap, along with this brown leather jacket. I also remember going to Chicago Meat Packers for some late night grub in Paris with Garry and the gang. Yes, fun times indeed were had in Paris. Today, Garry’s in his second year at Harvard Law. Like at Stanford, I bet everyone on campus knows the name, Garry Grundy!

Osvaldo was bringing the tunes to the party, with the help of Mark and Daniel. We’ll be hosting another party at Clubertino in a couple of weeks, where I’ll return to my role as the Miami Vice-roy.

Read the rest of this entry »

I reviewed the new Adobe Creative Suite software collection at the November 12, 2003 meeting of the Camera Owners of the Bay Area. I centered my talk on the new version of Photoshop, which 24 people out of the 26 in the meeting use as their image processing application. I covered features such as integrated Camera RAW support, 16-bit support, the histogram palette, match color, Shadow/Highlight correction, lens blur effects, photo filters effects, auto crop and straighten, and Photomerge panorama tools.

I have been shooting RAW more and more, but I have not made the switch to shooting RAW exclusively. One benefit of having RAW images is that the images keep getting better with each new iteration of RAW image processing software (i.e. Adobe Camera RAW or CaptureOne). With JPEG images, what you see is pretty much what you get.

Read the rest of this entry »

Ann celebrated her belated birthday party at Clubertino this past weekend. Randy and Joon-Mo broke out the BBQ Grill, cooking up delectable carne asada, chicken, and salmon for the guests, which included Ann’s cousin, Jen and her husband Kurt, Hollin, Annie and Cam, Dave and Judy, Rae, Joon-Mo, Felix, and Susan. Randy provided some heat with a portable fireplace that he picked up from Home Depot earlier in the day.

We had some literature from the recent recall lying around, so we decided to play, “Pretend You’re A Politician” with the ads. Rae attached Arnold’s face to a headline from last week’s Stanford Daily, “Gropings Continue.” Is he the serial groper? Only time will tell!

Happy Birthday, Ann!

Read the rest of this entry »