Sarah - a Vector Illustration.

This is my first flash project in a while. It's a little buggy, but OK for what it intended for (just a little fun).

Update after so long....

Ok, so maybe I haven't updated this in a while. Sorry. I have been way to busy with college and work to do anything with this.

Dragonfly soaking up the rays.

Here is a little something I thew together last night. I shot that dragonfly at work with a Nikon FE an d a 210mm Macro I think... Anyway, I thought I'd try it squared, cropped, and on a black matte to see how it would look. Please comment, let me know what you think! Anyway, that's all for now... --Justin

FED-3b

Here is a pic of my FED-3b that I bought on eBay for 25.00 + shipping from Ukraine. It's got the Industar 61 L/D lens on it, which is a very sharp & slightly radioactive 52mm/2.8 lens made as a Soviet replacement for the German made Leitz Tessar type lenses. The Soviets banned camera imports from Germany (understandably) during World War II and started producing their own natively made derivatives. After the war, Soviet Camera makers had become well established, and started coming out with their own designs. The FED-3 is a result of this newfound industry's strides into the world of Lieca type rangefinder cameras. I think it's a pretty good cam, with the one outstanding exception being it's rediculously dim, small viewfinder, which has sharp ridges around it which scratch your glasses. It's a good thing it features diopter correction, so they aren't needed anyway. I like the blue color, it's pretty unique for a Sov-cam to have this bright a shade of blue. It almost looks modern. I have even been asked questions like "Is that digital?". Pretty good for being nearly a 40 year old design.

Dad and Cam

I shot this pic of my Dad with the FED-3b and it's Industar 61 L/D lens @ f/2.8. He was playing with his Canon S2 IS Digicam. It was just after sunset. I'll post pics of the FED-3b later

Another great photo shoot.

Last night my Dad and I went for a ride in the Hudson Valley of New York where we live, and were looking for some good views to photograph. We ended up coming across this field on the side of the road where you could see across the Hudson river and all the way to the Catskill Mountains. We had just experienced a cold front, so that caused some great cloud formations as the clouds blew over the mountains from the west and fanned out after they cleared the peaks. The sun shown through the clouds, changing them from grey to pink to orange and then finally to purple as it went down. I shot almost two rolls of Fuji Velvia slidefilm on the views, so I'll be posting the shots to my Flickr account (www.flickr.com/photos/justintosh) whenever I get them developed, scannend and published. We also climbed a steep hill near the Rip Van Winkle bridge after sunset and took some shots with long exposure times and a tripod of the traffic crossing the streetlight-laden suspension bridge with the ominous mountains lurking in the background. Should be interesting to see how they come out.

Kicking off the new Photoblog - The future of this thing.

Ok, it's been awhile since I've said anything on here. A long, long time... So, what's new? I've been really getting a lot more into photography, and have been using Flickr more than anything else, hence the lack of updates here. The reason I'm posting this now is simple. I love flickr, but I figure it's about time to set up a photoblog so that I have more control over my pictures and how much I can say about them. I'll still upload to Flickr, but I think I'll post many of my shots here so that I can write more than just a very brief paragraph about them. Anyhoo, here's a pic I took of a girl named Gabrielle to kick off the new photoblogging idea. Enjoy.

TIGER TIGER TIGER !!!!

Awesome. Apple finally let that ever-so-sweet-yet-incredibly-fierce kitty out of the bag. This will be the best Operating System to ever grace the face of any electronic device anywhere. Period.

Metadata. Automation. Dashboard. RSS. H.264 AVC. CoreImage. CoreVideo. Full 64-bit OS.
Perfect.
It'll run great on one of those nice new Mac Minis for $499 too...

A Brief Review of the PSP

Overall, the PSP is a great portable gaming system, with some multimedia features that will be more useful to some than others. It has a lot of room for improvement, but it is also starting from a great place. Here is what I thought of the various features:

Screen

The PSP’s most prominent feature is, of course, it’s stunning 4.3 inch 16:9 wide-screen display. The display has three brightness modes, which can be toggled through via the display button.

Rating: 5 out of 5

Controls

What good would a portable gaming/multimedia device be without a good set of controls? The PSP fares fairly well in this area, and the controls are comfortable and easy to use. The flattened analog joystick-type control on the bottom left is not much use, at least when compared to it’s close relative found on the PS 2 controllers. it moves only in 2D space, and it’s difficult to distinguish between different directions, as it only has 4 possible directions, with 360 degrees of movement.

Rating: 4 out of 5

Battery Life

This one has been a pretty big issue lately. The PSP gets between 3 and 7.5 hours of battery life, depending on what it is being used for. This, in my personal experience is fine, especially when compared to the battery life of say, a laptop being used for similar purposes. The shortcomings people are complaining about are mainly the result of comparing the PSP’s battery life to that of the iPod, which gets about 12 hours, or the iPod mini, which gets about 18 hours of nonstop play. The DS from Nintendo gets something on the order of 12-16 hours if I recall correctly. let me set something straight. The PSP is not a DS. It is also most definitely not an iPod. If anything, it is similar to a laptop in design and use. Now, compare the PSP to the competition. The best laptops ( Apple PowerBooks and iBooks) get around 5 hours of life, tops. The PSP, clocking in at 6 or 7 hours beats them. Also, the PSP can play graphics-intensive games off an optical drive for that long! Even a very good laptop would not get more than 2 hours of life while performing similar tasks.

Rating: 3.5 out of 5

Removable Media

This is one area where the PSP currently falls short. In it’s typical fashion, Sony only includes Memory Stick Duo and UMD drives, both of which are proprietary media formats. As if that weren’t bad enough, Sony has the relative audacity to charge $220.00 USD for a Gig of storage in Memory Stick Duo format. Fortunately, SanDisk will sell you one for just $150.00. Neither price is all that encouraging, especially considering that it’s just a memory card for a gaming system. I think it’s very likely that Memory Sticks will drop in price, fairly rapidly in the near future. Even so, Sony would have been smart to include an internal hard drive, ala the iPod Mini. They could also have released UMD burners to the consumer market, which they have not done thus far. I have heard rumors that Sony is considering building a future PSP model with an internal 50 Gig hard drive. Nice. Sony, please fix this.

Rating: 2 out of 5

Games

Need for Speed: Underground Rivals was the only Game I could afford to buy after going nearly bankrupt from the initial purchase of the PSP. It’s a great game, though I may somewhat biased from a long history of playing the previous NFS games. Here’s a tip: you can download save files from www.pspsaves.net that will unlock most or all of the cars in the game.

Video Project Update

I've pretty much finished editing and shooting video now. My video premiered on grand opening day of the new auditorium of First Baptist Church. About 8,000 people watched it on the 2 IMAG screens and 60 plasma screens. They also recieved copies of the accompanying DVD afterwords. Pastors' School opening night also saw another showing of the video, also to a group of about 8,000, though this time a different group. They also recieved copies of the DVD. All in all, I'd consider it a success, but I'm glad it's over. :) --Justin