Fashion Photography
Thanks to Simon, I got to shoot some real fashion shows last week - after lots and lots of snapping, I have some 3000 photos of the Audi Joburg Fashion Week. Wow. It's not easy stuff that - but I did learn lots (I need a better lens for one thing) and had great fun in the process. Still catching up on sleep as I had to juggle work, the fashion shows, and a really cool toy which I could only enjoy for a couple of days (the latter deserves a post of its own). I will be posting more catwalk and backstage stuff on my Flickr photo stream as I get through the piles of files 
MPH’07
So, I went to MPH'07 last night. It was cool to see Jeremy Clarkson live, but I expected a tad more of the actual performance than handbrake turns in GM's latest. There were a few exotics doing some slow turns, and some projected sequences which were a touch cheesy (not to mention a cheap way out of actually doing something on stage). At least the synchronized dancing backhoes were very cool
Five Useless Bits of Information
I thought my blog was way too obscure for this craze to reach me, but Valery tagged me so, in no particular order, here goes:
1. When I was very young, I was daddy's little boy. I used to go to preschool at his place of work just outside of town, a large manufacturer of military and industrial goods which is nowadays known as Arsenal. Usually we'd catch a bus in the morning and walk home in the afternoon. According to the teachers there, I was the only child to cry for his daddy - everyone else wanted their mommies when something went wrong.
2. I love traveling on my own, I find there is something very exciting about it - just yourself, the road, and the sounds of the night. The fear that you might miss your next stop, or catch the wrong train. The feeling of being lost, before the warm comfort of finding your way again.
3. I once worked as a barman at a rave party. I served drinks to people for about 8 or 9 hours straight, all through the night. I don't think I'll ever do anything like that ever again unless I really have to, and always tip other people generously when I am the one being served. Since I didn't really need the money, I went and spent all the cash I made that night on an outrageously expensive Calvin Klein jersey that I'd seen in a shop somewhere. For the record, I bought it because I loved they way it looked, not because of any name tag.
4. I fell in love with a girl over the Internet. It was as awesome as falling in love can be, and yes, I think true love does indeed exist in cyberspace. However being stuck on a different continent to your loved one is very, very painful.
5. I have a very well developed sense of three dimensional space. I can imagine an abstract object in my head, turn it around, figure out how to fit it onto other things, and so on. I can play Blockout about as fast as my fingers can make the right adjustments to the pieces. I did an aptitude test once which also picked this up - I maxed out the "mechanical insight" section. I put this down to playing with many mechanical toys and lots of nurture from my two engineer parents as a kid. On the other hand, I am terrible at drawing, and have the exact opposite of photographic memory.
My turn to nominate successors now! Rather than the usual five blogs, I'll try something different and tag five "offline" people just to see what happens: Ceilidh, jack, stelf, Andrey Barabonkov, and Boyan Krosnov (technically he has got a blog, but seems to have forgotten about it).
A Visit to the Botanical Gardens
Today's my last day of holiday - back to the grind tomorrow. So, we went for a nice walk in the botanical gardens and I snapped a bunch of photos as per usual. Could not get a nice view of the waterfall because the old bridge fell apart but this one is not too terrible I think!
Went to Giovani's afterwards and had my favourite bacon & mushroom pasta - I think the last time I went there was about 4 years ago! The portions are as enormous as ever though.
More photos on Flickr
Pretty
I love duotone images, they have that lovely sense of nostalgia rather than the cold and dry black & white monochrome style. Duotone is what old prints look like - for example Sepia tone, which looked that way because it was the best that the technology (if it could be called that) permitted at the time.
I've recently re-discovered duotone thanks to Adobe Lightroom's excellent Split Toning option (also part of ACR 4.0 as included in the CS3 beta). This allows you to colourize a B&W image with two different hues, and the trick is to be very subtle with the saturation. One of my favorite colour combinations to do it with is to use a pale yellow for the highlights and a cold cyan/blue for the shadows, as in this image. Hope you like it.
The road ahead
So now that I've broken my record for longest time not posting on my blog, let's see if anyone's still visiting I took this picture back in May using Koos's camera but I never had time to do what I wanted with it until a couple of weekends ago:
(Click to see full size)
It is three separate exposures stitched together with Autopano, and then tweaked a bit in Picasa. Taken with a Canon 350D, kit lens, manually exposed for the brightest frame, f/8, manual focus. I converted the raw files with Adobe Camera Raw and created the panorama. From there I applied a digital ND filter to darken the sky a bit, bumped the saturation to make the grass pop a bit and applied a bit of sharpening. Frame was done in Photoshop CS2. Hope someone out there likes it!
New Toys
What is a man without his toys? Err, wait... don't answer that. After a long and agonizing (oh, the drama ) search I bought my first DSLR the weekend before last (24-25 June). It will be an easy date to remember - as it happens to be my brother's birthday. It's a Pentax *istDL (what a strange name) and I've done about 700 shots so far - that's an average of 100/day!
And this weekend, with the help of Dimitre, I finally jumped onto the AMD bandwagon - with an Athlon64 3000+ (2.0GHz clock rate). After a weird RAM issue, we managed to find a combination of DIMM's that the motherboard liked and it's now running happily with 1.5GB (1x1.0GB + 1x512MB). It feels great but I'm still waiting for the new 2x160GB Seagate Barracuda which I'm going to run in a RAID-1 configuration. The real test will be once I've reinstalled onto those drives - all my Java stuff might finally start running reasonably well 
Perhaps I should try load the 64-bit Ubuntu as a secondary OS.
Random Things
I have a new hobby: listening to clever podcasts at work. I find I can do most types of work while listening to people talk. It's quite an interesting process watching yourself do it. Everything that has to do with language - e.g. reading web pages, typing emails - completely overrides the sounds. Interestingly though, coding does not seem very much inhibited by having some extra company inside your head. I should mention that I use a pair of Sennheiser HD-201 headphones at work - excellent isolation from external noise, and surprisingly good with music!
So what have I been listening to with such intent, you might wonder? Bruce Eckel. I've been a fan of his ever since I read the excellent Thinking in Java many years ago (it is one of those books you can benefit from by reading it once every year). Bruce did a bunch of interviews with fellow software luminaries such as Guido van Rossum and Martin Fowler, and the results are, well, very thought provoking.
On another note, I discovered this really cool tool called GParted LiveCD. I knew that someone had written a GUI for parted, but this 30MB download is particularly cool. I just did a non-destructive resize on an NTFS partition with just a few mouse clicks. Those too stingy to fork for a copy of PartitionMagic - this is your answer