After reading a blog post by somebody about their lens usage over the past year, I decided to dig into Aperture’s internals and pull up my own lens statistics…
After fighting with Aperture’s screwy internal schema and Aperture’s screwy date/time stamps (which are actually the Unix timestamp minus the Unix timestamp for January 1, 2001 - apparently that’s Apple’s “reference” time), I finally managed to finagle the data from Sqlite (which Apple uses for Aperture’s internal database).
The results for December 2008?
- EF-S 60mm f/2.8 Macro USM: 94
- EF 28mm f/1.8 USM: 1 (sad!)
- EF 85mm f/1.8 USM: 340 (yes, Tony, I’ve been favoring that one recently!)
- EF 17-40m f/4L USM:45
- EF 24-70 f/2.8L USM: 424 (borrowed from Tony for a wedding I shot)
- EF 70-200 f/4L IS USM: 105
It’s been an interesting exercise - I also ran the numbers for other months, and my usage certainly varies. Some months the macro lens gets quite a workout, others not so much. You can almost tell when we’ve visited the zoo (the 70-200 pretty much lives on the camera for those visits). Our Door County trip was mostly 17-40 territory (a little macro thrown in).
In case anybody wonders (or I forget by the next time I think about running this query) here’s my SQL:
SELECT zpropertyspecificstring, count(a.zversionid)
FROM zrkversion a
JOIN zrksearchableproperty b ON a.zversionid=b.zversionid
WHERE strftime(’%Y-%m’,a.zimagedate+978307200,’unixepoch’)=’2008-08′
AND b.zpropertyidentifier IN
(SELECT zuuid FROM zrkpropertyidentifier WHERE zpropertykey=’LensModel’)
GROUP BY zpropertyspecificstring;
So I recently got a set of Paul C. Buff CyberSync flash triggers. My earlier/cheaper triggers don’t work with my 430EX, and limited my ability to do off-camera flash. Since I’m still rather interested in exploring that direction, this was a problem.
After some hassle with UPS (AlienBees claims their shipping does not require a signature, but UPS begged to differ), I picked up the triggers yesterday and gave them a try today. Imagine me freaking out when the flash gets triggered every single time I trip the shutter… but… the image doesn’t light!
Turns out there’s something up with the alignment of the antennas, possibly also related to the distance between the transmitter and receiver… Apparently the antennas don’t like being parallel — actually, that’s not correct. The antennas love being parallel. So much so, in fact, that they’ll trigger the flash before the shutter opens!
I finally figured it out when I noticed a small strip of lit image at the very bottom (Canon’s shutters open from bottom-to-top). The flash triggered before the shutter opened, and what the sensor captured above was actually the flash bulb cooling down after firing.
Needless to say, I’m relieved that I didn’t waste money on another attempt to avoid buying the über-cool, über-reliable (and thus über-expensive) PocketWizards… It’ll take some experimenting to determine how to best avoid a repetition of my first experience with the CyberSync triggers, but at least I now know where to start!
Hopefully I’ll soon have some photos showing me gaining experience with off-camera flash as a result!
It’s been so long since I’ve posted… While this past month has had much stress involved — mostly work related — the past two weeks have also seen my first real vacation of this year.
So two weeks ago Jenny and I went to California for the SSP 50th class anniversary. Along the way we met up with my brother (also in town for the reunion), and later with a very good, long-time friend Brad and his wife Katie. While we didn’t have nearly enough time with anybody (only so much you can divvy up four days — including travel), it was nonetheless a good trip and a great break from routine!
My return to work involved a fair amount of stress, partly related to goings-on during the two work-days of the SSP trip. The end result was my burn-out from the long slog of this release cycle got greatly magnified, and it was emotionally a very difficult week to get through.
Thankfully, last Friday I started a week–long vacation with Jenny and her Family to Door County, Wisconsin. Every year Jenny’s family rents a house in Door County and her (almost entire) mother’s side comes to stay for some part of the week! We’re now unfortunately drawing towards the end of the trip, but it has been a very relaxing and rejuvenating week. One thing to mention — tonight Jenny and I spent the evening at Door County’s drive-in movie theater (saw the new Batman and Get Smart), which was quite the experience for me (I’d never been to one). I enjoyed the experience, even though I don’t think I’d want to see every movie at a drive-in — still it has a certain charm you don’t get elsewhere!
I’ve also managed to snag a good set of pictures that will make it up onto the photoblog fairly soon (my current queue runs out shortly), including many I’ve gotten while playing with one of my new toys, an NDX filter for my wide-angle lens (NDX = 10-stop neutral density filter, essentially a solar filter allowing me very long shutter speeds — great for smoothing out water!). My next photo updates will have to include some pictures from the SSP trip, as well, but except for an Arboretum visit in Pasadena the trip was rushed enough that I didn’t get much for photoblog pictures.
Well, that’s all for the moment — it’s time to sleep and prepare for relaxing some more tomorrow. Keep watching my photoblog and you’ll soon see my photos! (the one at the top of the post is a teaser!)
A little late, I guess. But this past weekend Jenny and I became members at the Minnesota Zoo! So far in the past year we’ve joined the Science Museum of Minnesota, the University of Minnesota’s Landscape Arboretum, and now the Minnesota Zoo! At least Jenny doesn’t mind that I tote the camera around when we visit (thanks, Honey!)!
In any case, we spent this past Saturday at the zoo — me trying to get up-close with the animals using my telephoto lens, plus a borrowed 1.4x extender (thanks, Tony!). I feel like I’ve neglected telephoto — my telephoto shots are clearly weaker. The more macro-oriented shots I did in the butterfly tent turned out just generally much better — better composed, sharper, etc. Perhaps I just need to park out there someday with the telephoto and work it…
One of the more amusing things from the zoo, though — we witnessed the handling of a Prairie Dog jailbreak! Apparently some of the prairie dogs had dug under the gate, and made it out into the surrounding animal pens (some buffalo and deer — they weren’t in much danger of becoming tiger-food). They had lots and lots of zoo staff and volunteers rushing over with traps, and the non-escaped prairie dogs freaked out over the intrusion of their territory by these tall invaders!
And the new Russia’s Grizzly Coast exhibit provided some nice bear-sightings! Actually, they had dropped some lettuce into the water by the glassed-in viewing area, and one bear was swimming right up to the glass to get his meal. His paws kept landing against the glass, giving us a great view of their immense size (and the claws!). It was interesting how the fur floated around in the water, plus the bear did a great job keeping its ears dry… Not sure if it always does that, or it just happened to not get them wet, or what!
There’s still lots for us to see — we didn’t make it to the dolphin show, or The Tropics area, and I’m sure there’ll be days when the animals provide better viewing. But now that we’re members, we can make as many visits as we want :-)
I bought the mwyman.com domain some time ago, but haven’t had anything concrete yet to put there. Since this site is already my personal blog, I figured mwyman.com could be used as a more photography-oriented site, and decided to put up a photoblog there (which isn’t really hard - there’s some photoblog equivalents to WordPress, and I got one of those up and running in a really short time).
The reasoning behind the photoblog was that I often don’t take enough pictures to justify a full web gallery, so posting one or two pictures to the photoblog at a time would make more sense.
I’m still working on an iPhone web app and other projects, but since I was out taking pictures this weekend I thought I should make the short effort to get something up and running. Rather than code my own, I figured I’d use something everybody else is using.
Late Update: As a side-note, I recently updated to Apple’s Aperture 2.0, and I have to say that the new 2.0 RAW processing is really nice, and well worth the upgrade!
Spent a wonderful evening setting up the Christmas tree at my house. Jenny’s assistance means (among other things) a much more even distribution of ornaments.
I’m working on perfecting my ornament photos - the idea being to use ornament photos as the basis for some Christmas cards, possibly in future years (if I can’t get anything for this year).
Unfortunately the tree being fake becomes more obvious in photos:
Hmm… I guess I’ll keep trying.
Again with the Marching Band photos… This time from all the games!
I now have marching band halftime/postgame photos online for the Wisconsin game this weekend. Nothing much, and with my good wide-angle lens gone (vacationing in New Zealand and Tahiti at the moment) these are not my sharpest MB photos. While equipment isn’t the really important part of photography, is sure does make some things easier - like razor sharp wide-angle shots at 300 feet! Sorry, this old lens just doesn’t cut it!
Check out the images:
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Well, probably not, but…
Got my first paid photography gig this week. After taking some photos at work to use as examples for our illustrators, apparently they were impressed with the amount of equipment I had (Gary, if you’re reading this, shame on you for that thought!). And since they needed a studio photo of some of their boxes (for distributors, etc.), I was asked if I could handle such a request.
Now after a couple hours and over a hundred photos later, I’ve had an image purchased. Not bad for something I look on as a hobby.
Mind you, this is not technically my first photograph published… I’ve actually had two prior photos - both marching band photos printed in the University of Minnesota’s Gopher Game Day pamphlet… One was not attributed (miscommunication, I believe), but last weekend’s pamphlet had my name in it :)
Tony’s still got me beat, cash-wise. But for the number of photos I actually had to post-process for a single commercial photo, versus his wedding gig, I probably came out ahead in the $/effort department… Hi, Tony!
Went this past weekend to the Renaissance Festival with Jenny. Got some great pictures, but have yet to get them ready for posting. Between prepping those and wanting to re-theme my picture sites, it may be a few days (weeks? eek!). Anyways…
