photo log.

I got the Eye-Fi Share this week. It is generally great, but has some quirks.

Pros:

• Uploads to local folder/iPhoto and Flickr
• Easy to set up
• Dead simple to use
• Does just what it says

Cons:

• Slower writes than other SD cards
• Can’t do burst photography
• Movies are limited in length
• Only works on one wifi network
• Burns out batteries pretty quickly
• Photo uploads hammer network
• Camera is yet another thing to check

Overall, I’m happy with it. The burst mode thing got me at a birthday party, but I got over it. It’s really simple to use, and making me consider Flickr as a primary photo repository.

An Eastern Bluebird (Sialia sialis) perches on the deck in my backyard.

I seem to be on the mend; I actually enjoy taking bird pictures again.

Flowers, too.

My ear is healing well, with substantially fewer periods of dizziness or pain. It’s still a bit numb, but as the nerves were cut it’s expected. (Apparently, it’s going to itch a lot when they regrow.)

I am cautiously optimistic about regaining some hearing. I think it’s a little better, especially in crowds. I’d like to see the hearing test results in a month or so before really believing it, though.

Mostly, I’m glad it’s all over with. Less thinking about ears, more listening to birds.

The weekend was filled with a welcome set of domestic activities, none of which were beyond my abilities; mowing the lawn, planting some trees and bushes, putting together a bookcase for T.

This is a modest list, to be sure.

But I take great joy that these tasks were merely exhausting, not debilitating.

It’s a welcome change.

The tulips in my front yard are doing quite well this year. I suspect it helps that there are very few deer paths nearby.

Also, if you like flowers, I highly recommend visiting the Keukenhof near Lisse. I recommend it even if you don’t like flowers, because it’s that wonderful an experience.

The Governor’s wife and her attendant walk through the Palace grounds of Colonial Williamsburg.

I don’t normally do self-portraits. Call it a character flaw, but I find the rest of the world far more interesting than the face I shave in the mirror every day.

This was a different day. This was the day I discovered that one of my immediate family members has cancer.

I was jovial and positive on the phone. But after I hung up, I grabbed my camera to go shoot outside in a desperate attempt to not face it.

It worked about as well as you think it would have. Nothing held my interest.

Finally, I just sat down in the middle of the woods, put the camera on continuous shooting, and let myself think.

This is not a good picture of me. It’s not going to win any awards, or convince people that I should quit my day job and become a model. I’m not happy, or positive, or any of the things people usually associate with me. The lighting is going as the sun sets.

But it’s an honest picture, one that captures a moment that I pray I never have to face again, but know that I will.

And honest pictures should be celebrated for what they are, not what you think they should be.

Just like life.

But seriously. Compare the photo from the previous post, sent via email to Flickr:

to the same photo, sent via email, but compressed on Tumblr:

Guys? I really want to like Tumblr, but you’re not making this easy on me.…

A Red-shouldered Hawk (Buteo lineatus) perches in a sweet gum tree.

Recruiting sign on display at the Casemate Museum in Fort Monroe, Virginia.

Amidst all the family activities this weekend, I spent some time considering the Tumblr Photo Compression problem. I had some downtime tonight to finally poke around at some of the alternate solutions I’d come up with while doing other things.

My conclusion? The compression is pretty bad. But creating some Flickr/Movable Type 4 hybrid thing to solve that problem is like using regular expressions: now you have two problems.

Tumblr is simple enough for me, for now. I’m tired of messing around with complicated systems; getting away from them is the entire point. The photos likely look worse on your screen than they do on my phone, and I’m sorry about that.

But the good ones will wind up in the Photo log eventually, anyway. So don’t worry about it.

Moving on now.

An American Cream Draft horse, at Colonial Williamsburg.

It’s rather a pity that Tumblr applies so much compression to photos uploaded to their service. It’s the only flaw I’m unhappy about, because it actually degrades the quality of the content I’m publishing. Everything else I can accept as part of minimalist blogging, but this is like smearing Vaseline over my lens. Which is, you know, not what I generally do.

(Oddly, the compression is mitigated on an iPhone. I suspect the massive DPI is to credit.)

I’ve put some comparisons up on Flickr, but will have to see if it’s the email compression the iPhone applies, or Tumblr’s. I suspect that the former shouldn’t be underestimated — and as a consequence, the iPhone camera appears to take worse shots than it really does.

The Palace Cupola at Christmas is now up in the original size if you would like to use it for a desktop picture.

(I really should shoot with a tripod more often.)

You may have noticed that I shoot a lot of horse photographs. Part of this is because my son went through a period when he could not get enough of the horses downtown in Colonial Williamsburg.

And part of it, frankly, is that I like horses. I can’t ride worth a damn, but I like ‘em anyway. So there.

We’ve had a few new arrivals in the CW stables in the last few months, and I haven’t learned all the new kids’ names, so I can’t properly attribute these photos to a model. But eventually I’ll have the current crop down.

Anyhow, I kept telling him, over and over, that I had no treats on me and just wanted to take his picture. No apples, no mints, no altoids.

He preened, and posed, and then pestered me for a reward anyway.

Oh well. I gave him a good nose-scratching to make up for it.

The Governor’s Palace in Colonial Williamsburg has a storied history, and is well worth the visit.

The Tucker House at Colonial Williamsburg serves as the donor reception center, where contributors of $100+/year can go to take a break while touring CW. The house is staffed by helpful, friendly volunteers — all of whom know my son.

When he was younger, Trip would go there three times a week without fail. Now that he’s older (2.5 and counting!), his schedule is more erratic, but he still visits about once a week or so to get a cookie and eat it on the front sign. Given how hot and cold it can be walking around Williamsburg, I’d say we more than get our money’s worth out of his contribution.

This photograph was taken in the late afternoon sun, from the Palace Green. I used a tripod for the first time on one of my walkabouts this particular afternoon, with some good (and bad) results.

More photos from this shoot to follow.

Yes, those are artichokes in the wreath.

Williamsburg is awesome at this time of year.

Each year, the Ronald McDonald House of Dallas puts on a holiday display of trains for charity.

It is, honestly, pretty darn cool.

More photos are available in the Flickr Set.

Busy again this year; 91 kids, one more than last year.

Trip was more interested in answering the door than collecting candy.
He’s a funny kid.

Colonial Williamsburg’s "Prelude To Victory" weekend celebrates the march of the American and French armies through Williamsburg on their way to besiege the British forces in Yorktown in October, 1781.

More photos are available in my Flickr set .

At the evening concert in downtown Williamsburg.

Doing it the the old-fashioned way takes time. Lots of time.

What, autumn already?

Unexpected colors on a great fall day.

“The BOOKBINDER will be open at one o’clock in the afternoon.”

I think I’d like a profession that I could spell in ALL CAPS.

Holy cow, a smart car in the wild!

I love ISO warning glyphs. There’s nothing like clearly communicating
gruesome death scenarios to enliven one’s day.

The second one is a personal favorite.

Nothing like the approach of a tropical storm to liven up your forecast.

A House Sparrow (Passer domesticus) sits on my stoop.

Caesar (the new kid, stage right) and Prince try to work it out.

This Eastern Tiger Swallowtail (Papilio glaucus) butterfly alit for a moment on the ground before taking off in a frenetic flight around me. He was terribly difficult to shoot, even in rapid-fire mode.

The Tiger Swallowtail is the state insect of Virginia.

This practically cries out for a caption contest.

This was the site of several rousing games of poohsticks today.

My struggles with photo galleries are well documented on this site. I’d settled on Flickr, despite some reservations, and there are some things that Flickr does really well.

• Being able to post iPhone pictures to this site while flying across the country, or to Trip’s website on a daily basis, admittedly rocks.

• Some photos that get posted here deserve comments, but you know my position on comments on this blog.

• The hundreds of pictures I post don’t count towards my somewhat limited space on my webhost.

Unfortunately, and I can say this because I know nearly all the readers of this blog, Flickr is not well-liked among my friends and family. And I can see why:

• It has a confusing interface for browsing many pictures.

• Multiple people had login problems.

• Organization is a) confusing to a casual browser and b) requires another step in organizing photos. (Sorry, but tagging doesn’t immediately make sense to a lot of people.)

I do most of my work in iPhoto; while I’d started bumping into the performance limits of iPhoto 5, I knew that I could always upgrade to iPhoto 6 to fix that problem, but I also knew that a new version was coming any day now. So that wasn’t a huge issue (but it was certainly making me grumpy.)

More importantly, there was no way to eliminate that second step of having to organize photos on the website as well as within iPhoto. There are good export plugins to Flickr, but that’s all they are — exporters. Once the photo is up, there’s no way to sync information.

Eventually, and you can probably go back in my photostream to find the exact date, I just gave up on organizing my photos on Flickr. Too much time was spent tagging, writing captions, assigning to sets. It was a step that I didn’t need, and no one commented on it when it went away, and it didn’t have any impact on my negligible social presence in Flickr… so it was gone.

Earlier this week Apple released their .Mac Web Gallery, which is seriously all kinds of awesome if you already use iPhoto and .Mac. Even if you don’t, it’s still all kinds of awesome as a photo gallery. Slick? Yes. But its also easy to use, with download and upload tools that make sense. Its interface is easy for visitors to change.

Or, at least, that’s my impression of it.

I was giddy when I saw how it integrated with iPhoto in the demos. (I was also giddy at how it integrated with the iPhone, but that’s another story.) You make a change in iPhoto and it appears on the web. If a visitor uploads a photo to the gallery, it goes back down to iPhoto. Hooray!

It’s shiny, it’s glossy, and it certainly holds a lot of promise for making my life easier. It doesn’t do some of the things Flickr does well, like generic camera phone uploading, posting to blogs, and holding large-resolution versions at the ready. I can see both as tools that work, and that this isn’t an either/or proposition.

But some feedback to Flickr was so negative when I switched last time, I’d be a fool to not ask you what you think.

So: here’s my gallery. Please let me know what you think of it.

Unfortunately, the eggs that are on the caterpillar are wasps who will hatch and kill it.

Nature sure can be gross.

Holy crap, they’re even scarier up close.

I ended up watching a lot of movies on my iPhone on my recent trip out to California. Holding it gets pretty old, though, especially when you’re getting ready to sleep.

The solution is pretty obvious when you have all those nice, heavy pieces of cardstock lying about.

Charlotte is a nice airport, but I’m ready to go home.

Thunderclouds tower in the last light of the sun.

This is the plane that I’m taking to San Francisco, a CRJ 200 regional
jet.

I didn’t ask if this market was down today, too.

Up the hill from our hotel, there are a lot of lights.

Taken at Universal City, CA.

Please note: not a helicopter.

Early morning at 20,000 feet.

We took a different route today.

Trip was adamant that they be arranged just so.

Last August, a nor’easter dropped 10 inches of rain on Williamsburg, damaging the dam on Lake Powell. As a temporary measure, the water levels of the lake were lowered by 7 feet to reduce the pressure on the dam.

This summer, the mud turned green as a variety of grasses and plants colonized the lakebed, slowly creeping across the flats. Geese and herons are a common site along the banks of the marshy stream that flows through the northern side of the lakebed. It is a far, far different site than the placid lake ever was; this view constantly changes, an environment in transition.

Nature finds a way.

The sun sets over the Springfield Interchange in northern Virginia.

Trip rearranges the DVDs to his satisfaction.

Every weekend before Independence Day, Williamsburg is invaded by His Majesty’s forces and placed under martial law.

Soldiers are everywhere.

(And I mean, everywhere.)

The town is turned into an armed camp, and townsfolk are arrested and subject to military justice.

Papers are tucked into the brims of hats, ready to be presented when requested. And they are requested a lot.

This weekend recreates the occupation of Williamsburg from June 25th to July 4th, 1781, by the British forces under General Lord Cornwallis.

The occupying army were not maurauders, and made efforts to win over the Colonists.

Some Loyalists even signed up for service.

It was, however, still an occupation. There is nothing trivial about martial law.

The presentation of the tyranny that led to the ‘Revolt of the Colonies’ is a startling reminder of what freedom is, by taking it away for a weekend.

Life goes on, but it is far, far different.

The re-enactors who converge on Williamsburg do a great job. They present the human side of the enemy in our national creation myth, and show that the American Revolution was fought not by monsters, but by honorable men.

They accurately portray the variety of forces that fought during the war, including the Hessian mercenaries:

And many of the British dragoon corps:

As well as many of the infantry regiments:

And all sides of the military are presented.

I should mention that it’s wickedly hot, they’re wearing wool, and they sleep in tents. We had a major thunderstorm roll through this year, too.

And by invading my peaceful town once a year, they remind us all of how tyranny looks, lest we forget.

More photos are available in my Under the Redcoat set on Flickr.

It’s always more fun when water’s involved.

NOW it’s time to relax. (Taken on my iPhone, squee!)

(Taken at the NRAO 50th Anniversary Symposium.)

Where? At the Williamsburg Farmer’s Market, of course.

Because my son loves horses, I am now able to identify most of the horses that pull Colonial Williamsburg’s carriages on sight. For example:

That’s Jack and Jill; I recognized them because Jack could stand to lose a few pounds. (And by a few, I mean a lot.)

Jack, of course, is usually in the pasture on DoG street, greedily taking handouts from the visitors. He looks much more dignified in this picture than when he’s snarfing grass from kids.

A Gray Catbird (Dumetella carolinensis) has a snack while perching on a fence outside the St. George Tucker House in Colonial Williamsburg.

I was really quite happy with how this series of shots turned out; the Tucker House always provides a nice striking background. (I think the second shot is my favorite for exactly this reason; the background is outstanding.)

And, you know, I’m there every week. So it’s not really out of my way.

This bird rooted around on the ground for a little while before moving up to the top of the fence. I didn’t know what he had in his mouth until after I viewed it on my computer.

Mmmm, tasty.

One of the trees in the Bruton Parish Church graveyard.

Why yes, Coke is on sale at Ukrops for $0.88 a bottle, with no limit. Why do you ask?

Jack, one of Colonial Williamsburg’s carriage horses, pauses for a close-up.

In case there were any doubts, Virginia can be very, very green.

This weekend’s film crew was after the Colonial Williamsburg Fife and Drum Corps Alumni:

Did you know that the Corps has over 700 performances a year? Holy moly.

This was also my first time watching the CW Productions crew at work.

It wasn’t very hot yesterday, so the multiple takes they went through to get the right shots probably weren’t an issue.

It’s hot enough today, though, that I can imagine folks want to get it done right the first time.

Merrystar looks up at the drifting cottonwood seeds in Colonial Williamsburg.

Off one of the side streets near William and Mary.

I suspect the sign is trying to fit in with the in-crowd, but may be trying too hard.

A white dandelion, moments before getting hit with a stick.

No shots of Williamsburg this weekend. Merrystar and I instead spent Saturday up in Maryland at a wedding:

I’m normally quite shy about shooting people in public. I take plenty of pictures of my family, but not so many of strangers. That’s unfortunate, as those shots usually turn out quite well.

I confess: it was nice to be at an event where people expect you to be taking pictures of them.

I am also happy to report that everyone remembered their lines.

(Congratulations, you two!)

Two of Colonial Williamsburg’s horsemen make ready for yesterday’s Dragoon training.

Dragoons are perhaps unfairly maligned because of their name’s similarity to Dragons — they are mounted infantrymen, usually armed with sword and musket/carbine.

Many of the horses who participated in Saturday’s training had never had military training before, so there was some uncertainty on the trainer’s part as to how the afternoon would go.

A young Northern Mockingbird (Mimus polyglottos) poses in the nor’easter rain in Williamsburg, Virginia.

Photo by Merrystar.

One of several white-and-yellow Daffodils (Narcissus) in our front bed.

Photo by Merrystar.

A Tufted Titmouse (Baeolophus bicolor), moments before flight.

An American Goldfinch (Carduelis tristis) perches on a feeder in front of a flowering dogwood.

I am really quite pleased to have YAH back from the shop.

This time, I took her to Ebby’s Auto Painting & Collision Repair (757-220-0695) and they did a great job with her. Their good reputation in town is justly deserved.

Best of all? She was clean when I picked her up.

It’s the little things that matter.

This tree is getting ready for a photosynthesis party.

Scene from this morning:

Her: Good morning! We have a surprise for you!

Trip: Mahning! Dada!

Me, groggy: Wha?

Her: <opens shades and points outside>

Me: What the … ?

Trip: (s)now!

Indeed, there was snow. Lots of snow.

We had about an inch fall last night, and another inch or so this morning.

The air was cold this morning.

REALLY cold.

Brrrrr.

Don’t get me wrong; we still went out for our Saturday morning walk downtown. We just walked quickly. Even Trip admitted it was cold.

(It’s melting out there now, but is expected to freeze over again tonight. Bring your plants in.)

Happy April Fools’ Day, everyone. (It’s one of my favorite days of the year.)

Half of a plastic Easter Egg deposited in the branches of a tree during our neighborhood Easter Egg hunt.