Sunday 28 October 2007

Poggin'

Spent all of yesterday sorting, scanning and filing pogs. In the afternoon eveneux went to grandad's for the bonfire night, so I was left at home looking after granny.

Today, I filed pogs, and eveneux got back from grandad's about 11am (the clocks went back last night so would have been about 12pm yesterday). Unfortunately, I didn't order enough folders for all my pogs so I had to order some more. I ordered 20, which should be quite a few more than I need, but since you have to pay about £15 for postage however many you order, the cost per folder is cheaper the more you order. Total cost was about £53 for 20.

I have also just about run out of the Ultra Pro pog pages, so I ordered another 100 of those from the same ebay seller I bought them from before, total cost about £16.

Being a pog maniac is expensive! My credit card bill came in & it was over £1000 and dead long with nearly all paypal transactions!

Friday 26 October 2007

Jimminy villnar!

Spent the last couple of days processing panos, got a few done. Never did get that phonecall from work - they emailed me to say they could probably do it without me, so I stayed in for ages for no reason. Not that it actually matters since I probably would have stayed in processing panos anyway, and if I had gone out I may have ended up with even more photos to process.

Today, I spent this morning preparing some images for upload to Photoshelter, a stock website. It took a long time to get the images ready, I had to tag them, convert to uncompressed TIFF (Minimum file size is 10MB?!?), and convert to Adobe RGB 1998 colorspace. And of course I first to had to find images that I thought were good and showed a different range of things. I chose 3 landscapes (1 of which was a pano I had to redo because DXO had given it a watercolor style), 2 bugs and 2 flowers.

All that was probably a waste of time since its unlikely I'll get accepted - my images probably aren't good enough and also they say that you shouldn't do any sharpening or much PP - but quite a few of the images I submitted were from my FZ5 which automatically sharpens the photos and saves as JPEG, also the images have a bit of noise. Having no sharpening as well is quite strange - the D200 produces quite soft images without sharpening, and I would've thought that sharpening for the screen is the minimum sharpening an image would ever need.

In the afternoon and evening I filled up my folders with the pages full of pogs, although it seems I didn't buy enough folders doh! I'll have to buy some more but its annoying because postage is £10 even if you only order a few, so it works out cheaper to buy lots at once.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: ½ Plain chocolate digestive biscuit; coffee.
Lunch: Peppered ham with mustard and salad sandwich; Pilgrims choice Mature everyday cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; clementine; grannies cake; cup o' tea.

Tuesday 23 October 2007

Panos

Managed to process about 5 panos yesterday! But only managed 2 today :(.

Work are now going to send me the thing to check on Wednesday, which meant I could go out today while it was nice weather. So I just went on a short walk with Ben.

That's all!

Food
Breakfast: Jordan's Country crisp; cup o' tea.
Tenses: Hot Chocolate; choc chip cookie.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; McCoy's roast ham & mustard flava crisps; some grapes (a couple were mouldy); clementine (or sumat similar); yummy swiss roll with vanilla cream stoef inside; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; home grown green beans; carrots; jimminy vilnar gravy; potatoes. Pudding was stuff that they put in urinals but it was nae from a urinal, it was from Geri Halliwell minus the spice if she came from the same place as Uncle John. Coffee

Saturday 20 October 2007

Rutland

This morning went on my comp and finished off a pano and sorted out a few photos I'd taken recently.

After lunch we went to Rutland Water, which was very nice, although it's quite a long way away. It was nice and peaceful watching the birds, but they were too far away for me to photograph. I bought a season ticket and Moohar said we might go again next Wednesday as Ben is on half term next week. When we were driving home there was a really nice red sunset, it would have been nice to stop somewhere and take some photos, but you don't see the places to stop until you've gone past them.

When we got home it was dinner time. After dinner I watched some line rider videos.

Food
Breakfast: Toasted teacake with butter; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; some Flame Grilled Beef McCoy's crisps; some Barbeque Chicken McCoy's crisps; grapes; granny cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Sausages; mash; baked beans; tom ketch. Pudding was 2x apple pies with custard. Coffee.

Thursday 18 October 2007

Even nicer day but stuck inside

Well, today the weather is even nicer, although cold, but there is very little wind and sunny with blue sky and the odd cloud. Unfortunately work still haven't contacted me yet so I have to stay in until they do and I get the job done. Probably it will be nice weather tomorrow as well and they will contact me at 4.50pm, then it will rain or just be cloudy all weekend.

Anyway, today the rest of my pog folders eventually arrived, I only had to chase the courier 3 days in a row to get them to deliver them! At least the driver didn't nick them.

I spent the morning finishing off the pano I was working on yesterday, whilst going on the pinternet a bit. After lunch I deleted lots of the converted TIFF files and then did a backup. Then I started work on another pano, but even though I used a tripod it seems the images don't match up, so after working quite a bit on it I decided to try generating both exposures of the pno at the same time in PTGUI using it's HDR function. I downloaded the latest version (7.3) and funnily this didn't ask whether the photos were taken on a tripod or not, that option seemed to have been removed.

The first PSD I generated using the HDR function had a slanting sea (it looked okay in the preview) so I added horizontal contol points on the sea and generated again. Unfortunately, PTGUI somehow forgot that it was meant to be in HDR mode, so the resulting new PSD was rubbish. So I set it up for HDR mode again and generated another PSD. Each time it takes ages to generate the PSD. Version 7.3 is meant to be faster than older versions, but it seems the same as 7.1, if anything a bit slower. Just went on the internet while PTGUI was working.

After dinner started editing the new file, and found that I could use just the 0ev exposure, thus avoiding the problems of blending exposures with moving people. There were also a few stitching errors that would have made exposure blending difficult. Finished that, then converted the last pano pics from Brighton 05-08-07 to TIFFs. They had lens flare all over them and the sky was very wierd and blue when corrected for white balance. I think I will edit the pano tomorrow but will just leave it if its too hard to fix.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese with Italian style salad sandwich; apple; satsuma; slice of cherry madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 2.5x Sausage rolls; potatoes; baked beans. Pudding was strawberries & kiwi fruit with squirty cream. Coffee; Ginger Biscuit; 3x pieces Sainsbury's caramel filled chocolate.

Wednesday 17 October 2007

Nice day but stuck inside

Well, its actual-a-squish a nice day today but as unluck would have it I have to stay in today, tomorrow and Friday as work asked me to make sure I'm around to check some email links work okay or sumat when they send them to me.

Edited a pano and went on the pinternet all day.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Beef, cocktail tomatoes, Italian style salad and mustard sandwich; apple; satsuma; slice of cherry madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pepperoni Deep pan pizza; salad; chips. Pudding was Fruit (Christmas) cake.

Tuesday 16 October 2007

Headache

Woke up with a bit of a headache, so just went on the pinternet in the morning and did some easy work work. I looked on the google and flickr to see if there's anything interesting to photograph in market harborough and it seems there isn't.

By lunch my headache had got quite a bit worse, after lunch I just went on the pinternet a bit more awaiting an email back from work with more details about something they wanted me to do. I had a look at what makes a good photo and it seems it involves one or more of the following:
  • An interesting subject - don't have any of those round here that I or any Flickr users know of
  • Good light e.g. sunset - tends to always be overcast plain grey cloud or rain round here
  • A model - don't have any of those aqnd my brothers don't like having their photo taken, although we did have fun messing around in the garden last night.
So in other words, there's not much chance of me being able to take any decent photos. Hopefully one day the weather will be nice and we'll be able to go to rutland then maybe I can get some nice waterscape/wildlife pics.

By about 3pm my headache was too bad so I went to bed. I got up about 6pm for dinner and after dinner I felt quite a bit better.

Spent the evening going through my pogs I received recently to check they were all there (some were missing) and leaving feedback for them.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea; 2x paracetamol.
Lunch: 2x Cheese on toast; apple; slice of cherry cake; cup o' tea; 2x paracetamol.
Afternoon snack: cup o' tea; 3x paracetamol.
Dinner: Shepherds pie; grated cheese; carrots; home grown green beans. Pudding was chocolate whip with strawberries.
Supper: Cold chocolate flavoured milk

Monday 15 October 2007

Civ2

Today did a little bit of work work and played on Civ2. I launched my spaceship in 1989 and it arrived at Alpha Centauri in 1998. I was known by my people as Frederick the Fork beard. I just had a few cities but made them all be totally good.

In the evening me, yumpt and ben tried to take photos of each other jumping and yumpt always had a dead gokos face.

Food
Breakfast: Golden Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken, mayonaise and iceberg lettuce sandwich; ham & mustard flavoured mccoys crisps; banana; iced lemon madeira cake; pink & white; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Pasta; cheese sauce; mixed vegetables; bacon; black pepper. Pudding was fruit cake with squirty cream. Coffee.

Friday 12 October 2007

Yesterday & today

Went out on a walk with dad yesterday, then in the afternoon processed the pics I took. One pic looked like it had dust on it, but it wasn't very obvious and the rest looked okay so looks like I have sorted the dust problem for the moment.


Today, I went on Wii Fitness for about ½hr until about 9am, then I did some work work for about ½hr. After that I cleaned up stuff from my desktop and backed up my pictures. I finished off a pano that I didn't finish processing on Wednesday, while moving videos to DVDR and browsing the pinternet. My hard drive is getting filled up quickly, so I think I am going to need another one soon, I'm watching a couple on ebay.


After lunch I went on the pinternet a bit and copied some more videos to DVD. I started work on processing another pano and then about 2.30pm mum cut my hair for me. About 3.00pm I carried on with the pano, and after doing a bit of work realised I'd forgot to level the pano, Doh! So I had to level the pano and start again.


Food

Golden Grahams - Yes they still exist!!! From Netto!!! Cup o' tea.

10am snack: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.

Lunch: Ham with red onion chutney and iceberg lettuce sandwich; prawn cocktail crisps; satsuma; flapjack.

Wednesday 10 October 2007

Headache

In the morning I started work on processing a pano, but after a while I had got a headache and the weather didn't look like it was going to rain (but it was still cloudy) so I went to Alliance & Leicester to pay in my expenses and Portman-Nationwide merger cheques.

By lunch I had got a really bad headache so after lunch I went to bed.

I got up again probably about 2.45pm and started working on the pano again. There weren't many stitching errors, but it took all the rest of the day to finish editing it because there was lots of moving cars/people and I also had to -1.7ev, 0ev and +1ev panos to make the final pano, which involved a lot of work with the layer masks.

Luckily I didn't have any work work to do.

Food
Breakfast: Cinnamon Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; apple; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Egg fried rice; fried vegetables; ham quiche. Pudding was jamaica ginger cake with golden syrup and custard. Coffee.
Supper: Cold chocolate flavoured milk; small bit of flapjack; plain chocolate digestive.

Tuesday 9 October 2007

2 panos

Processed 2 panos from Brighton today and also did a bit of work work. That's about it!

Food
Breakfast: Cinnamon Grahams; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese sandwich with sweet & crunchy salad; apple; banana; chocolate teacake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Roast beef; gravy; mustard; home grown green beans; carrots; potatoes; parnsips; yorkshire pudding. Pudding was ice cream with strawberry sauce. Coffee.

Sunday 7 October 2007

Mainly going on strobist

Got up, had breakfast wth Ben and went on wii fitness. Went on strobist for quite a while, just reading the old articles, then had to go to Church.

Got back home and went on strobist and ebay again. Ate dinner, then went on strobist again. After a while of going on strobist I went on sxc for a bit, then I took a couple of stock photos, then remembered that I had a million panos to process and started process a pano of St. Peter's church in Brighton.

Just processed that 1 pano, which had about a million stitching errors and bought some stuff on ebay for the rest of the day.

Breakfast: Strawberry Crisp; cup o' tea.
10 o'clock snack: Coffee; choc chip cookie; custard cream.
Dinner: Chicken Curry; rice; 2x chicken nuggets. Pudding was ice cream with strawberry sauce. Apple; 2x 2 cream crackers sandwiched together with butter & cheddar cheese; Coffee.
Tea: Ham with mustard and salad sandwich; slice of bread maker bread with strawberry jam on; small slice of all butter madeira cake; cup o' tea.

Saturday 6 October 2007

Dust bunny

Well, I was hoping to go to Rutland Water today, but the weather has been rubbish and cloudy so we didn't go.

I spent the morning finishing off processing the pictures from yesterday. All of them have a nasty 'dust bunny' on them, so after lunch I spent quite a while with first a rocket blower, and then an arctic butterfly trying to get rid of the offending dust spot from the camera's sensor. I think I've got rid of it now, but it's hard to tell. If the weather was like yesterday I'd shoot the blue sky again and if the dust was still there it'd show up clearly. It's the first time I've noticed dust bunnies in the pictures, and the first time I've cleaned the sensor since I bought the camera in January. I'm just praying that the dust is gone and I won't have to clean the sensor again for a long time since it could be quite expensive if something goes wrong while cleaning.

Also, another problem with yesterday's photos is that they don't seem to have geo-coded correctly. I messed around with this for quite a bit, but couldn't work out what the problem is. The camera was about 12s out of synch with the gps, so I added a 12s offset, but the co-ordinates were still off. It seems like both robogeo and GPicSync just geocode to the nearest trackpoint, rather than working out where the image should be geocoded between 2 trackpoints. Bit annoying, but at least it still gives the general location, ±15m or so.

After that, sorted out my icecube dropping into a glass of water pics and submitted a couple to sxc. Then went on the pinternet, mainly deviantart and backed up my pictures.

In the evening I just went on strobist and ebay.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry crisp; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheese on toast; peppered ham with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; satsuma; slice of all butter madeira cake; breakaway; cup o' tea.
Dinner: 3x cumberland sausages; potatoes; baked beans; tinned plum tomato. Pudding was sumat I can't remember jimmy. Piece of Sainsbury's caramel filled chocolate; coffee.

Friday 5 October 2007

Nice day again

Got up had a shower etc, and had breakfast with Ben, then went on wii fitness with Ben. Ben went to school and I did punch bag training (on the wii obv.) but I couldnae even get to 40!

After that, checked my ebay, work email and deviantart. Then went on a nice walk with rad, it was a clear blue sky and nice and sunny with very little wind.

Went on the pinternet for a bit, looking at week in pictures stuff on MSN, then had lunch. After lunch went on the pinternet for quite a long time, just on photography websites while DXO converted my raw files to jpegs. After that sorted through the photos.

Had dinner, and then carried on sorting / processing photos from the walk today. Also went on the pinternet quite a bit.

Food
Breakfast: Grapfruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Peppered ham sandwich; prawn cocktail flavour crisps; satsuma; apple; slice of all butter madeira cake; breakaway; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Battered fish with vinegar & black pepper; mashed potato; peas. Pudding was bread pudding, which I used up the last of the spleen-vap on. Coffee. Cappuchino chocolate biscuit.

Thursday 4 October 2007

Playing with camera & flash

Got up quite late, about 8am so I missed Ben as he went off to school before I had finished in the bathroom. Had breakfast, went on my comp and checked my emails, ebay, deviantart, and read strobist for a bit.

Went on a walk about 10am, just up to East Farnham and then back the same way. The sun was shining quite warm but the air was cold and it was quite windy. After a while I got too hot in my thick coat though.

A few days ago when I came back from a trip with dad I got my backpack out the boot of the car, but the backpack wasn't done up so my D200 fell on the floor. It had a 67-77mm step up ring on the front because I had been using it earlier with my 77mm B+W polariser, but had taken the polariser off because the sun had gone in, but left the ring on. When the D200 fell on the floor it damaged the 67-77mm ring so I couldn't screw the 77mm filter into it anymore. So today I used my FZ5 as my main camera since I can still use the polariser on that with a 55-77mm step up ring. I've ordered a new 67-77mm ring on ebay, but it will take quite a while to arrive since its from the US and also there's a postal strike in UK at the moment.

Anyway, the walk was nice, some of the trees are in Autumn colours, some have lost their leaves, and lots are still green. Hopefully we will get a nice display of Autumn colours before the wind blows all the leaves off the trees. Hopefully we'll get more sunny weather like today as well.

When I got home I copied all the pics to my PC and processed the ones from the D200 (nearly all of which were from yesterday). I went on strobist a bit more as well. Then I had lunch with granny as moohar and farthner had gone out for lunch.

After lunch I had to do a bit of work work, then I sorted out the photos and went on strobist a bit more. I tried taking photos of water droplets splashing into a cup but I think the dropper I have makes too small drops. Then it was dinner.

After dinner me, ben and yumpt made some phrases with his total film film quote magnets, which are famous film quotes, with one word on each magnet, so you can just put the words in whatever order you like to make up your own phrases. They give you quite a lot of them so you can make lots of stupid phrases as well as the proper ones if you want. Then I did the washing up, after that I tried taking photos of an ice cube dropping into a glass, which I did for the rest of the evening.

I used the D200 with on camera flash set to commander mode, power --, and an SB-800 near the glass in remote mode, set to TTL. First I tried taking photos with the glass in front of the bathroom window, and the window open as much as possible. Unfortunately, the window still was quite a lot in the shots. After doing this for ages I tried taking shots outdoors. That was better in the background was cleaner and black, but I couldn't see whether the focus was correct or not, I have to manual focus the lens since I am using the 18-70mm with an M-CON35 as the lens doesn't focus close enough normally.

I did have a break from doing this for a bit, and went on wii fitness and golf target practice with ben. I also put my ghillie suit on and stood on the stairs when granny came out the living room to go to the loo, but she didn't see me. Then I crouched down in the downstairs hall and Ben sat on me so granny could see when she came out of the loo. Whn she came out she just said how Ben had one sock on and one sock off and that his feet must be chilly. Moohar asked her if she thought ben's seat was wierd, and she said it looked like a dog, so I said woof and I think she realised that it was a person, so I got up slowly and she wasn't scared which was good.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Peppered ham with sweet & crunchy salad sandwich; 2x cocktail tomatoes; satsuma; plum; slice of all butter madeira cake; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken nuggets; macaroni cheese with black pepper on top; broccoli; corn on the cob. Pudding was a slice of swiss roll and I also had a breakaway. Coffee. Cappuchino chocolate biscuit.

Yesterday
Made up some ikea shelves to put all my pog stuff on instead of it being all over my floor. Unfortunately we only had 2 spare big shelves, and while we had quite a few smaller shelves, we only seem to have enough of the steel bits for 4 shelves (so I put up 2 big shelves and 2 small shelves). Putting up the shelves took quite a while since I had to drill holes in one of the shelf supports. Then I spent most of the rest of the day tidying my room and putting the pogs stuff away.

My photography backdrop stand arrived by DHL, so I unpacked that and put it up. One of the screws was totally hard to undo and also it didn't come with any instructions. Also, some paint on one the joins broke off. Eventually I managed to put it together. Probably still quite good for £50, since a lot of other sellers would charge about £40 just for the postage.

I also put my ghillie suit on and showed moohar and farthner.

When Ben came home from school I tried taking photos of some flies and Ben helped me take some photos of flowers.

I went on strobist a bit, and in the evening I tried adding a rim light to some boxes in my room, which didn't work very well because the light from the flash spilled out too much. Also, the flash from the camera did flash even though it was set to -- which is meant to be off. Using an SB800 as master, and pointing the head into the air solved this problem, although I don't know if this would work outside since the infra red light probably just bounced off the ceiling. You can get an IR filter for the D200's built in flash so that only the IR signal gets out, I don't think you can get one for SB800, and I don't know if you can buy it in UK anyway.

Then I went to bed

Food
Can't remember what I ate yesterday.

Tuesday 2 October 2007

Had a lie in until 7.30am. Had a shower etc, and ate breakfast. Checked my email and ebay then did more pog filing.

I had to take lots of pogs out I had already filed and put them in a different type of plastic pocket. This is because the ones I had already filed were using the pockets designed for 35mm slides, and so are quite large and can accommodate slammers or multiple caps in one hole. The other sheets I have (Ultra Pro platinum for pogs), that I ordered 500 of from the US are much tighter, so pogs don't fall out, but this means you can only fit 1 pog in each hole and slammers don't fit in at all. So I had to remove the sets of pogs that didn't contain more than 1 variation of each cap from the 35mm slide pockets and put them in the ultra pro pog pockets. Then I put slammers and sets with variations of each cap in the 35mm slide pockets. Doing this took all day.

Also, the Ultra Pro pog pockets are designed for US style 3 ring binders, which I didn't realise when I bought them. So I have loads of UK lever arch files and ring binders that I can't use. I went down town the other day to try and buy some 3 ring binders but they didn't have any in WHSmith, Partners or Wilkos. I checked on the pinternet and there don't seem to be many UK companies who sell them, postage would be too expensive to buy from the US. I found a ringbinder manufacturer in the UK who does reasonable prices for 2 and 4 ring binders (about £2.50 each + VAT + £10P&P). This is cheaper than any other 3 ring binder in UK I have found on the internet. I have emailed them for a quote for thirty 3 ring binders, hopefully cost will be similar to their 4 and 2 ring versions.

No pogs arrived today, but my ghillie suit did.

Food
Breakfast: Strawberry Jam toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Elevenses: Coffee; ginger biscuit; choc chip cookie; 2x paracetamol.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with old sweet and crunchy salad sandwich; satsuma; apple; grapes; cup o' tea.
Afternoon snack: Coffee; custard cream; ginger biscuit; choc chip cookie.
Dinner: Pepperoni Pizza; deep fried potatoes; peas. Pudding was strawberry cheesecake - only been waiting about 3 months since rad said we would have cheesecake for pudding till we actually had it! Coffee.

Monday 1 October 2007

Poggin' & workin'

Got up, had a shower etc. Ate breakfast with Ben. Went on Wii Fitness, I got age 20 but then it fell off and I was actually 21. Then Ben went to school so I started scanning in a pog book. After doing that for a bit I had a phonecall from work and had to do a bit of work work.

Then Clare & Brian went out, I probably went on the pinternet for a bit and also filed a few pogs. Some new pogs came in the post so I sorted them out in as much as making sure what was meant to be there was, then left feedback for them on ebay.

Then I had lunch with granny.

After that I did some work work. Then I went on the pinternet for a bit and Brian & Clare came back about 2.50pm.

When Ben came back from school he sorted my new pogs for me and I had to do more work work. Then we ate dinner. After dinner I did washing up as normal. Then I did a bit more work work and after that scanned pogs, then finished scanning the pog book in.

After that I just went on photography websites then went to bed.

Food
Breakfast: Toast sandwich with Grapefruit marmalade; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Cheddar cheese with salad sandwich; grapes; plum; pear; cup o' tea.
Dinner: Chicken pie; carrots; potatoes; green beans; vegetable gravy. Pudding was peach slices with yoghurt. Coffee. A piece of Sainsbury's caramel filled chocolate.