Broome Tioga - Round #2 2013-14 Winter Series

....  so I had anticipated on going to the races and shooting them for the better part of the day today.  I did go and I did shoot.  For a while.  I just wasn't "feeling it".  Shooting just felt kind of repetitious . . . I don't know...   Weather wasn't bad.  It was a bit on the cool side but when the sun was out it was very tolerable - and the sun was out quite a bit.  I hung around for a couple of hours but took off around 12:30 - 1:00pm... I went home and grabbed my dogs, had them jump into the back of the car and off we went to go for a good run.  {shrug shoulders}

Anyway - some grabs from the (brief) period of time that I was up there ...  I'll have these and the rest of the keepers posted up to the galleries in a day or so.  I think I'm in my usual winter "funk" where I just don't feel like shooting, or doing much of anything for that matter.  Hmmmmmm . . . .  March can't get here soon enough - that's "the last corner" of the yearly lap around the calendar.  We come out of that corner and then ease onto the gas going into the home stretch - Springtime and then Summer!

SDR's 2013-14 Winter Series Begins

From Motorsport Racing

The 2013-14 winter mud & snow scrambles race series at the Square Deal Riders (Belden Hill as it is apparently more commonly known to old timers... ) kicked off today under generally decent weather temperature-wise.  It was an "ugly" day with heavily overcast skies, but not terribly cold.  The race had an overall small'ish turnout but there were still probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 150 or so competitors that showed up to get in some racing.  It is hunting season and we are just coming off of the Thanksgiving holiday...  these could be contributing factors to the turnout.

From Motorsport Racing

In any case - the racing was pretty good, and I was out there catching some of it with my "throw back" camera kit.  I don't know why but I decided to "go old school" and just brought a very simple kit with me today.  I used my older D300 body and a little fixed focal length 24mm lens.  I also decided that I was going to use my old lighting kit that consists of my old SB28's and Paul Buff Cybersyncs.  No "fancy schmancy" TTL SB-600's and pocket wizards today.  As it turned out - I shot the better part of the day not using the flashes at all.  ( I was lazy and didn't feel like setting up the flashes ....  )  I did eventually pull them out later in the day though as the already gloomy skies began to get even gloomier and light was beginning to taper off.  I'd already decided that I was going to be restricting myself to a max 1/320th of a second shutter speed (manual flashes - no high speed sync / TTL voodoo) so I also shot in shutter priority some today too.  Basically I spent the day playing...    I tossed quite a few shots -- 1/250th and below is really not quite fast enough (without any flash) to score a good number of keepers...  that old D300 just doesn't grab focus nearly as fast as the D700 does either.  But -- thats ok -- I still managed to pull of some keepers and they'll be going up to the galleries in a day or so.

Anyway - SDR Round 1 is down, next Saturday the 7th is Round 2 of Broome Tioga's winter series.

More later...

Still Learning...

... this google-sphere web way of "living" that I've decided to take on.  As you may have noticed by now - I'm posting from a new blog.  It is one of the *.blogspot.com addresses (blogger) that google owns.  I'm also making more use of (or attempting to / learning) my picasa web albums that also comes with ones google account.  They (google) offer up a ton of neat and useful toys all for the really nice price of ...  ta da .. basically free.

From Weekend Shooter

Turkey Day / Computer Re-Build

 As mentioned in a previous post regarding how surprised I was (am) at how well windows 8.1 actually seems to be, I did go ahead and pull the trigger and re-build the machine. I started around 8:00pm last night (Wed, 27 Nov) and am more or less finalizing the rebuild of it now.  I obviously began the evening looking over / through both of the drives that live inside of the machine and pushing anything that I felt may be of some value to me to an external for backup.  I then popped in my pair of backup drives for my photo's and libraries and ran the backup for those too.

When "bombs" are good . . .

... I know I'm old and nerdy, and not entirely on top of pop culture but when I saw a link just now re: some celebrity "photobombing" a wedding shoot in NYC I figured I'd follow the link to see what the prima-donna attention whore did. Turns out "photobombing" is a "good" thing?? Apparently it means that - well - I dunno . . .  I guess that because "Joe Actor" wound up in a photo that it became "the bomb!"? ( scratching my old bald head.... lol! ) I read "bomb" in anything and take that to be, generally, a bad thing. Bombs blow things up. But I guess "bombing" in this instance is good because the photo went "viral" in internet speak and kabillions of folks saw it.

Well huh!  Whatddyaknow...   :)

( I wouldn't have had a clue who that guy was had I been editing the photo and may very well have cloned him out of it... lol! )

Hard to believe that I'm actually saying this but ...

I'm actually thinking about installing this thing on my workstation machine at home.  Yeah -- I find it hard to believe but ...  I kinda like it.  It's not nearly as bad as I thought it was going to be - principally because it does allow you to use a more win 7 like desktop as opposed to that damned tiles interface.

Readers digest:  The company that I work for has an enterprise class license for Microsoft products.  I work in the I.T. department and as such am able to "play" with new stuff on test / guinea pig machines.  I installed it on this laptop that I'm using right now a day or two ago and as I learn my way around it, I find that I'm actually somewhat surprised at how well it seems to be performing so far.  I'm gonna give it a week or so of use at work and see what the verdict is . . .   but so far I have to say that I am genuinely surprised at how well it is running.  I've installed a number of applications and utilities on it and have yet to come across anything that I haven't been able to get to run.

We'll see how it goes... 

First Post

Hi - it's me.  I've been kicking around the idea of consolidating my multiple presence(s) on the web into a more or less singular entity, or source if that works better.  I've basically decided to go whole hog with services (free) that google provides.  They've got mail, apps, voice, g+ for photo sharing, etc ....  and now I discover (although I had already suspected) that they have blogging too.

I'm also entertaining some cost cutting.  I have my own domain (jdanvers.com) which is hosted via Bluehost and while that is fine and dandy - it costs me money every year or two and .... I don't know if what I'm spending on it is being justified in what I'm actually seeing in return.  I may keep the domain name as it is nice in a vanity license plate kind of way . . .   we'll see.

When I first started shooting again a few years ago, I was directed to flickr by a friend.  Flickr was (and still is) a great resource and I learned a lot the first few years via the forums that they have in there.  The forums in Flickr are, in my opinion, one of the best kept secrets about that setup.  There are a number of really skilled shooters that post images there obviously, but there are also a good number of surprisingly knowledgeable people who readily share expertise on a wide range of photography subjects.  The photo's that many people post are quite a source of learning themselves in that exif data is available for many of them.  "How'd he shoot that?  What settings did he use"  Look at the exif data - it's all there.  Great stuff.  I've been a "Pro" member of the flickr community for the last 3 or 4 years - it was worth it and relatively inexpensive at $20-$25 bucks a year.  ( I forget exactly how much it was - but not much really) Essentially unlimited file storage, and again, a really great resource in those forums.  Sometime during the last year or so though they (Yahoo / Flickr) changed up their setup though where now *everyone* apparently gets upwards of a terabyte of storage - for free!   Thats great - I don't even come close to that...  why am I spending $25 then?  I've opted to let my flickr account die - I just downloaded nearly 900 images that I had out there via a very handy little utility called "MyFlickrBackup" (google it) and I'm going to start making use of the galleries available on G+ / Picasa.

More later ...