Painting techniques in today’s Top 200 Photo

photo #31 is:

It was quite a challenge to paint my house when we first moved in. Of Danielle, her father, mother, and I, neither of us had painted before. Her mother had done some painting under the direction of her uncle, but not on her own. So over the course of a weekend we slowly figured out different techniques to speed the process up while still getting good results. At the eleventh hour (unfortunately, figuratively and not literally), Danielle’s mom remember this technique for protecting the area being painted when painter’s tape couldn’t be used. I just took this photo to document the technique for the future. Thanks to google hits, this one ended up with 928 views as of the time of writing.

Once again to Cornell for this Top 200 Photo

photo #32 is:

This annoying orange fencing is what I spoke about when I said that when Slope Day became an official event, it became annoying to navigate around campus. As I mentioned in my Libe Slope panorama, nearly all the upperclassmen have to pass through it to get to class and not everyone is able to party on Slope Day. I’ve been in classes that had quizzes, exams, or labs on Slope Day. It doesn’t matter that it’s Slope Day, it’s still the last day of class.

For this Quarter I continued listening to my music in order as I attempted to go through my entire catalog so that Amarok could auto-rate the songs I liked and I could switch to a dynamic, random playlist.  I actually finished going through all my music A-Z (and Japanese characters) - except for songs that didn’t have the Album Artist set.

Through a quirk of the way Amarok is programmed and the sorting I’ve selected, a bunch of artists who had the Album Artist blank did not appear along with the artist.  In other words, if a Kanye West track had an album artist of either Kanye or Various, it would appear under Kanye.  But if that field was blank, it appeared under “various artist” at the top.  It’s a strange quirk and as I go through this final category in Q4, I’m trying to remember to fix as many of those as possible.

Take my hand in this Top 200 Photo

photo #33 is:

Much like the Nam photo that was #40, in this photo I am taking advantage of the effects wide angle lenses have on their subjects. Things closer to the lens look much larger (compared to a normal lens) than those further away. Like the candle photo, this one only ended up with this many views because it was used on a website. In this case, it is Pixel-Peeper, a site that contains example images to see how well lenses perform. On that page I linked, this photo is, at the time of this writing, the number one image on there. This has led to this going from an obscure photo to being the most-viewed photo in my 365 project. This is annoying in the sense that I feel I have lots of photos in my 365 which are much more creative (like The Last Supper, or the last five photos), but neat because, as an artist, I want as many people to see my work as possible. So if this leads to more views on my 365 photos (and it has) or of my stream in general, then it can’t be that bad.

[caption id=“attachment_4997” align=“aligncenter” width=“400” caption=“Saren is not a believer”] [/caption]

Sorry I took so long to get to this. My last post had me finding out that the Reapers were actually the most ancient species I’ve heard about until now. And after my face off with Saren on Virmire, I thought I’d have to chase him to Ilos to finish the game. But, nope, I was able to do whatever I wanted. This was kinda weird timeline-wise, but I already discussed the disconnect that makes you realize this is a game last time around.

A powerful Top 200 Photo

photo #34 is:

I opened the battery compartment to my Fujifilm camera and dumped the batteries out. I was going to throw them in the charger when I realized I really liked the arrangement they’d fallen into. So I decided to practice with my camera’s macro mode and shoot the photo. For a while it was one of my favorite macro shots. And it’s one of my few photos to be used on another website thanks to the fact that it was licensed under the creative commons.

Back to Hawaii for this Top 200 Photo

photo #35 is:

It was one of those trips to Hawaii without Danielle. I was really bored so I went out onto the beach since my hotel was right across the street from the beach. I found this long concrete pier that had a crowd of people on it. I figured I’d go check it out. Essentially, people were waiting until the waves stopped, then jumping into the water. It was a good 20 feet or more to the water below. The reason for waiting for the waves to stop is that otherwise they’d slam you into the concrete pier. Also, you had to launch yourselves a ways out because you didn’t want a wave to arrive as soon as you’d landed. I was standing behind two girls (who you’ll see in photo #29) and they jumped in one-by-one. I love shots of dynamic action like jumping because it tends to look really cool. I missed her friend, but I got her jumping in.

Computers in today’s Top 200 Photos

photo #36 is:

These were the computers I was using in 2005. The one on the left was running Linux. The Laptop was running Linux. The computer on the right was running Windows XP. I no longer have any of those computers, monitors, speakers, or mice. They all either broke or were replaced. The longest lasting was the computer on the left which was my print server until recently. (/2011/02/11/replacing-the-fileprint-server/)

I forgot about this little project for a while, but I remembered in time to make October’s background.  I’ve decided to stop making the square versions of the background.  If I get enough people who actually want it, I’ll reinstate it.  To set as your background, click on it then right-click and set as desktop.  If that option’s not available, save it to your computer and use your OS’s method of setting the desktop.

More stroboscopic photography for this Top 200 Photo

photo #37 is:

Galileo postulated that in a vacuum (in other words with no air drag) that any two items dropped should fall at the same rate regardless of their mass. I didn’t hold both of these scissors at exactly the same height, so to compare you have to look at the distance each travels per unit of time. Of course, it is right (and has been tested in space).