Well, I have to be honest, I haven’t been keeping up on my programming lessons. I ended up getting really absorbed into the software that we use at work, called Remedy, and the week before last, I went to a conference in San Jose for a week. The WWRUG (World Wide Remedy Users Group) was a very educational and fun experience. I didn’t realize how many people and companies use Remedy. It literally runs everybody’s IT. But other than that, I haven’t done any programming lessons. No iPhone apps, no Javascript, and nothing for Windows 8 either. I did just buy the upgrade for Windows 8 Pro. $40. Not too bad. I had to buy 2 copies though, because my girlfriend wants Windows 8 now too. So I’m sitting here updating her old Vista machine to run Windows 8. And while I do that I’m writing a new blog entry.
So, I haven’t posted anything in a month. As mentioned above, I’ve been busy with some work related stuff. Also, Amazon gave me an Amazon Store Card, and I’m going to Hawaii in November… So I bought myself a Nikon D3200 that came with an 18-55mm lens and then I also got a Nikkor 55-300mm lens. I’ve been wandering around taking pictures of things. Mostly my dog, but also a squirrel, some flowers and trees, and stars.
Taking pictures at night is hard. If you take too slow of an exposure, the stars start moving across your picture. If you take it too fast, it doesn’t show up. If you set the iso too high, it gets noisy, and if you set it too low, you get a black photo. In the end, you have to adjust three things to get a good picture, the iso needs to be fast enough to capture the light, but not noisy (I found 400-800 worked good for me), the aperture needs to agree with the iso setting (I kept mine around f/3.5-6) and the shutter speed (I varied this from 10 seconds all the way up to 2 minutes. With the zoom, I couldn’t take more than a 15 second shot before stuff started streaking).
So I got a pretty nifty camera, and I’ve been learning to use it. Hopefully I’ll get rich and famous with one of the pictures I take in Hawaii next month :)
If you want to see some of my stuff, you can look at it on flickr.
Also, I have this place that will sell you a framed print, they’re expensive, but they’re art sellers. You can check out my store here: ImageKind