It’s hot today, at least for Shoreline, 90ºF out. Yea, I know for some parts of the country that’s a cold snap but for here, where it’s usually overcast and 55ºF, that’s hot!

This brings up a question, anybody know how to make the degrees symbol, the little ‘o’ that is up high, with a PC keyboard? On my Sun keyboard, I’d hit ?+0 and get that symbol but that doesn’t work on the PC keyboard.

The Ninja Pirate answered this question, [ALT]+1+6+7 = º, but for some reason I can’t add comments to this post now, Blogger says it can’t find this blog, yet, I can edit posts.

If I had my way I’d be at the beach taking pictures of the scenery, I’m sure it’s good now. But I’m too broke to waste gas right now. If anybody has any brilliant income ideas you want to share?

I run an ISP, it’s been slow, probably a combination of bad economy and people out enjoying the sun instead of using their computers, which is what I’d really rather be doing.

The pictures in this post are all pictures I have taken. You can see a bigger version by clicking on the picture in the blog. If you would like to use any of these you have my permission provided credit is given and the URL of my home page, http://www.eskimo.com/~nanook, is included in the credits.

Summer of 1996 at Alki beach in West Seattle, a decade ago, 35 mm Mamiya DTL1000 camera two 2x barlows stacked in front of a 500 mm lens to yield an effective focal length of 2000 mm with a lot of chromatic aberration which actually lent this picture a soft look that I liked given the subject material.

I took this picture near the end of the summer of 2004 in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada at an XLR8 show at the Pacific Northwest Exhibition with the Minolta DiMage Z1 that GoodGuys / Compusa is holding hostage for more than a year now. XLR8 is like a dance troupe / circus act set to popular music. When we first saw XLR8 (pronounced Accelerate) several years prior, they had their own band that did really good covers, but in 2004 they only used recorded music which took a lot from the atmosphere.

This was also part of XLR8’s act. These pictures are grainy because the lighting inside is dim.

I have this trick I use for getting pictures in low light which I call “digital push processing”. Set the shutter speed for the slowest possible without too much blurring, and then set the film speed to the highest rating and the lens aperture all the way open.

When the light is insufficient for normal exposure at the selected shutter speed,
this will create a dark under exposed image.

A histogram shows all of the pixels near the dark end of the spectrum. I use photo manipulation software to stretch that out over the normal dynamic range from dark to light. The resulting photo is grainy, but it makes it possible to capture images that otherwise would be impossible.

With 35 mm, I have shot Konica 3200 ASA color print film. The results I get with digital using the above technique is superior to what I can get with the Konica 3200 ASA film.

This isn’t to take too much away from the show, it was fun to watch live and in person. If you are in the Vancouver BC Canada area near the end of the summer and like big fairs, the PNE is one to go to, and these shows are free.

Vancouver BC is a beautiful city and if I could figure out a way to pull of the financials of moving there and living there I would. Here is a shot of the mountains to the north taken from the balcony of a Red Robin restaurant there. How can you beat a backdrop like that?