Rannie Turingan is a completely kick-ass photographer in Toronto. He was one of the Zap Your PRAM crew, and spent a whole lot of time chasing down the other attendees and taking our pictures. He’s now finished up processing and posting the formal portraits on his website: Zap Your PRAM portraits. It’s a really nice record of the event, so @Rannie: many thanks for taking the time to do this. You rock.

Rob and I went for a mini road-trip out to Balaclava, ON today. As we tend to do, we took a bunch of pictures. My set is here. Rob’s are over here.

A couple of weeks ago I took a whole week off (a whole week!) and visited my folks. Dad and I spent some time out taking pictures, some of the results of which are here.

Rob, Kev, and I went out to shoot at the Experimental Farm for a few hours yesterday afternoon. Gorgeous, unseasonably warm October afternoon. A few of my pictures are here.

This was my first trip out with the new Nikon 10.5mm fisheye lens — I absolutely love it and can’t wait to go shooting with it again soon.

Rob and I took an extended Victoria Day Weekend and booted down to Watkins Glen, NY for a quick mini-vacation. There’s a state park there with an absolutely gorgeous gorge that you can walk through. We took many, many pictures. I’ve posted some (not all yet, but most) here:

Dria’s Watkins Glen Roadtrip Photoset.

So after researching and reading and agonizing over which little point&shoot camera I wanted to pick up, I finally settled on the new Nikon P5000.

Major feature rundown:

• Weighs around 280g with battery and memory card. Super light.
• It’s 3.9 x 2.5 x 1.6 in. Tiny, but not so tiny that it’s awkward to hold/use.
• Excellent ergonomics/design. Controls are intuitively laid out, easy to access and use, and the menu system is very nice.
• 10 megapixel.
• Kick ass macro mode.
• Automatic, semi-automatic (Shutter priority and Aperture priority), and full manual mode. I used full manual mode for all the pictures I took this morning, and it’s dead simple to use.
• Drawback: no RAW support. This is a bit of a drag, but is the only drawback I’ve found so far.

All that aside, here are the shots I took while walking home from my doctor’s appointment this morning: May 11 walk.

Random note: turns out using the “Rotate picture” feature on Flickr completely hoses the EXIF data for those images. I’ll have to re-upload the ones that need to be rotated.

I took a few more pictures on Tuesday, but it was a lot colder out so my walk was a lot shorter. Nothing spectacular to show for it (you can view the bits I’ve posted here), but I did learn quite a bit so it was worthwhile. The temperature appears to be above zero again today, but I think I’ll cater to my illness and stay indoors. Stupid cold.

The TV season seems to be gearing up again, which is good — reruns were starting to irritate me. Most exciting is that Rome (Season 2) starts soon. If you haven’t watched the first season, I strongly recommend it. I think the only TV series better than Rome is Deadwood, and even that’s a tough call. Both are brilliantly written, brilliantly acted, and just top-notch productions all around. Turns out HBO knows how to make stellar TV. Stupid cold.

Quiet last day of holidays before getting back to work. Made a big batch of beef stew (very yummy), puttered around the house a bit, and went for a walk to take some pictures.

One of my goals this year is to work on my photography a bunch, so I’m trying to get in the habit of actually taking more pictures. Today’s walk resulted in 97 photos, of which I’ve processed and posted 20 so far. You can look at them here, if you like. I might process and post some more later, but I’m not sure how many more are actually worth sharing.

Happy new year and all that.

In the mean time I messed around and took some shots using my awesome Nikon 60mm macro lens. The problem right now is that now I need to figure out how to embed the proper colour profile in the images for browser display. Hum. Anyhow, here’s one of the shots I took earlier:

I really am a big fan of wideangle shots. This and the 18-70mm will be my standard “walking around” lenses, and the telephoto and my fixed focal-length macro will be for special occassions.

My future camera will be a Nikon D70 or D70s or whatever the next proper Nikon DSLR turns out to be. I really, really want a proper DSLR. The time will come eventually.

Amsterdam. Tons of fun, met lots of great people, had a ton of good food, walked more in a week than I probably have in the past two months combined. Gorgeous weather, great hotel (facilities, at least…the staff was a bit off, but more on that in a moment), utterly phenomenal coffee.

Europeans seriously know how to make good coffee.

On service: I’m not sure whether it was just a bad week or something, but the staff at hotels and restaurants we frequented during our stay in Amsterdam was pretty universally sub-par. I’m not sure why this is, but we just got generally lousy service every where we went. Some folks were ok, and everyone was generally friendly, but, really, servers at decent-or-better restaurants in Canada are, on average, just much better at what they do. In one Amsterdamian restaurant our waiter was so in-your-face that I found it distinctly uncomfortable.

Whatever happened to Zen Waiters? The basic premise I work under is this: the less I notice the service I’m receiving, the happier I am. If a waiter spills wine on me (yes, this happened), or if I have to flag a waiter down for a second round of drinks (this also happened, multiple times), or if I have to physically back away from a waiter because he’s a total close-talker (also happened), or if I wait for my food long enough that I check my watch (happened), or if I have to physically walk around looking for someone to give me my bill (slight exaggeration, but close to truth)…guess what? The waiter sucks.

The best waiter I’ve ever had was at Acton’s Cafe in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. Quiet, efficient, unassuming, brilliantly experienced, and extraordinarily talented waiter. We sat and ate several courses happily, never once having to ask for anything (water, wine, food, dessert, coffee, bill, whatever). My soup, as I recall, simply showed up like it fell through a tiny hole in space-time. I never once noticed the waiter until we were finished and I realized, all at once, that I never once noticed the waiter. I love service like that. I also, I’ll have you know, tip extraordinarily well for service like that.

If I ever end up walking away from this whole interweb thing and go back into food service, I think I’ll make it my life’s work to be that good a waiter. Really talented waiters who take their vocation seriously can make extremely good money. The problem, I think, is that most waiters think that they’re too good for what they’re doing — most high end waiters probably fancy themselves as a maitre d’, or perhaps as an underemployed sommelier. My god, the in-your-face guy was just unreal. He put me off so badly in the first five minutes we were sitting at the table that I simply didn’t want to talk to him again, and avoided it as best I could. What a piece of work.

Um…anyhow, that rant aside. I had a great time in Amsterdam, waiters bedamned. Oh, and the bartender at the hotel. I mean, seriously dude, if someone asks you “what scotches do you have?”, it’s not an invitation to play 20 questions. WTF?

Unrelated, here are some more photos, but not of Amsterdam.

Here’s a picture of the roast before cooking:

Three of the bottles of wine:

The recipe I used was scribbled hastily on the back of a receipt:

The last line got cut off, but says, “meat therm to 120″. The actual cooking time was closer to 90-100 mins, and I turned the oven up to 375 about 45 mins in because it was just taking too long. This did no harm at all, and the roast was absolutely perfect.

Here’s a picture of the meal part way through the feeding frenzy:

All in all, it was an ideal meal. Excellent food (if I do say so myself), fantastic wine, and good company. The aftermath was a somewhat destroyed kitchen and a slight hangover, but it was totally worth it.

Yum.

This photo, for example, is available for use with no restrictions. Nice stuff. Yay for sharing and stuff :)

I dunno. It just made me laugh. The best part is the article it’s attached to:

Someone rebutts the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility’s sudden realization that, omfg, video games are violent.

Not really much to say, that picture (from BCC News) is just awesome. I’m really not sure what the hell’s going on over in the Ukraine, but apparently there are a lot of people who are extremely pissed off about the whole thing. I think I’ll go read about it.

“Tens of thousands of opposition supporters, who say the vote was rigged, have surrounded the commission building in a third day of protests.”

This just in: “Secretary of State Powell says United States does not accept results of Ukraine’s presidential elections, due to reports of fraud.”