We had a short (450 mile roundtrip) 2-day trip to Lake Tahoe this weekend, which was also the first multi-day ride with Priti on the ST1300. The bike performed technically flawless on the ride, but some comfort factor for me went missing. I enjoyed the ride on the highway less than what I was supposed to, and found myself thinking more of the ultimate 2-up touring machine - the Honda Goldwing GL1800 !!!
What a fantastic way to spend the longest day of the year. Vipin of RTMC at Sunnyvale and Captain Nandu Chitnis of Bikenomads at SF, it is just impossible to not have a ride.
So it happened, Vipin rented a monster of a bike, a Harley Roadking 1400cc, a long jump from his 350cc Royal Enfield at home. It shakes a human like giving a reality check, but the v-twin torque is simply out of the world.
We had a pretty big gang ready for a day long fun. Pravin and Suyash of Bikenomads came on a rental car. Nandu’s wife Medini, daughter Rucha and son-in-law Sai also tagged along. Vipin and Nandu shared the bike rental and we were off to Big Sur.
We had superb lunch break at our favorite restaurant Dennys in Santa Cruz. After that the road was a bliss. The temps went down from a scorching 100F to 72F. It rained a bit while we were eating, and all we had was the refreshing smell of wet earth, a blue sky with scattered clouds and most importantly, hardly any traffic.
We enjoyed the CA-1 paradise all the way till Julia Pfeiffer state park when the temps went up as we diverted from the ocean a bit. So a quick U-turn and we were beside a pristine aquamarine beach. Incredible colors. Too bad the beach was private. We had the usual photoshoots and banter before Nandu and family took off for San Francisco.
Me, Vipin and the other cage went to enjoy the Carmel beach before the final ride home. Vipin was getting scared of riding in the dark but it was unavoidable. We had to take 101 and Vipin thought he must remain below the speed limit, no matter how fast the cars passed him. I tried to make him speed up to at least 65, the limit, but he somehow stayed around 50, arghhhh But I do remember how slow I used to be when riding with my local buddy, I used to ride the limit while he did limit+10 or more !
Back to town at 9:20pm after a 230mile of grinning ride.
Looking forward to multi-day rides with the gang sometime.
Special thanks to Rocky for introducing me to Nandu, otherwise this fun and camaraderie would not have happened.
The epic wait is finally over. Almost 3 years of marriage and 12 years of knowing each other and never having the feeling of living together “forever”.
Priti is here now, and first time in her life on a one-way ticket.
A lot of catching up, tons of things to do to make up the lost time together. Taking it one day at a time and trying hard not to get overwhelmed.
Photographs are the best way to remember these euphoric days. My flickr sets of her will continue to grow in the coming weeks.
I knew it had to happen soon. Serious photography is just not possible without coming back to the roots, the deliberate process of using larger format cameras. This day would not have come today if not for the constant inspiration from my friend and mentor photographer Francesco Gallarotti.
I am lucky to have a store like Keeble & Schuchat near me. They are a rental heaven, and I can use a medium format for a song.
So I picked up a Hasselblad 503CW with A12 back (6×6) and 80mm/2.8 Planar lens today morning. They even sacrificed a film roll just to show me how to load and remove film from the back. I am now very impressed by their attitude and courtesy.
First stop, Stanford university. Midday sun and architectures make quite contrasty scenes and I took the advantage of it for the Ilford FP4+ I put in. Every shot was metered by my 5D and taken on the tripod. It was a dramatically different process. Each of the 12 frames counts on a 120 roll. No guesswork, no assumptions. I missed having a light meter. Carrying my camera bag over and above the hassy was a bit painful for the back, not to mention the bogen tripod. I walked around a lot but finishing the roll was far from easy. Stumbled upon a large format photography workshop and even got a chance to look at the ground glass of a wooden LF view camera using a black cloth ! Fantastic. I left stanford after an hour of shooting with a few frames still left on the first roll.
Next destination, San Francisco, of course. But stopped by the golden gate national cemetery, it always looked striking from the 280. Enjoyed the peace and serenity of the place and was able to finish the roll.
San Francisco never ceases to amaze me. At the same time it pisses me every time I go there, for several reasons. The near impossibility to park on a road, the GPS losing the satellite reception often, and the constant hunt for a restroom in the bone chilling wind even in the middle of May !!! Today being a special day I decided to tolerate everything I mentioned above. But like salt on a wound, when I finally parked near Lombard street to shoot the classic photo of the cable car against the backdrop of the bay, I ended up waiting 45 minutes before someone told me the cable car was broken. I barely started the 2nd roll and had a lot of expectations for the day. But the rest of the sunlight got wasted just driving around and finding a space to park. No such luck. Parked near chinatown to eat when the daylight was already dim and I barely had any energy left.
I still have two more bw and one slide roll to finish tomorrow. Looking forward to an early start and a productive day ahead.
Medium format rocks. There is nothing like it. There is a surreal quality in the view through the hassalblad’s waist level finder. It looks 3D yet it helps frame a 2D image much better than a 35mm viewfinder. The square format makes everything look just right. I wonder how I will be able to keep using 35mm film. I am pretty sure I will just switch to MF, atleast for the bw negs. Since I have a 35mm slide projector, I might just keep shooting slides in 35mm.
That’s right. Picked up a nice used semi professional film SLR for 10 bucks. Worth the 90 mile roundtrip to San Francisco on my ST1300. Why 10 bucks for a camera usually available for 100-150 bucks used ? The command dial is broken which is a common issue of that model. It will “click” only in the “lock” position (to switch off the camera) and wont click when changing shooting modes. That means I have to look on the top LCD for confirmation when changing, say from Av to M mode. Not a big deal for me at all. Every frame counts when shooting film and I guess I will notice if anything changes accidentally.
I am having a renewed interest in film, especially bw film, after yesterday’s darkroom experience. I am gonna finish a couple 35mm rolls, and then looking forward to renting out a hasselblad (medium format film SLR) from Keeble & Schuchat.
Back to the darkroom after 3 years. Time flew but the fun remained the same. Just found out this nice rental darkroom (the darkroom at de-bug) in a random search. My coworker Ken (flickr: wirehead) jumped to this opportunity and we had 3 very productive hours today evening.
We both took the $35 membership option as we know we are gonna spend way more than 7 hours in a month at $5/hour rate.
I am looking forward to getting a cheap used canon film SLR to finish my leftover 35mm bw film and rent out a hasselblad for a weekend. This would be my first medium format experience. Ken brought some MF negatives and the prints blew me away.
Thanks to Dan’s super short notice, a wonderful ride happened today after a very long time.
Usual suspects: Dan, Ken, Ron, Jeff. I was surprised Jeff got Nancy along too. And what a guy, just because the ST is a great touring bike, he rode it non stop 130 miles to Cloverdale while Nancy on her first ride on the ST got a hefty dose of hypothermia. Took her a while to defrost !!! I guess at this rate Jeff is gonna ride that wonderful two-up bike one-up all the time, lol.
In short, 11 bikes, 12 people, twisties of CA-128 and CA-1, and an awesome feast at a private ranch on CA-1 near Stewart’s point made a memorable day.
Route: Breakfast meet at Star restaurant, Cloverdale. All the way on 101N. Then CA-128 to CA-1 and down to the ranch for a late lunch. Then CA-1 down to Bodega bay and catch up on 101S at Petaluma.
I rode really good this time, thanks to the ST’s sportiness. But I still got stiff on the sharp curves of CA-1, when I could catch a glimpse of the pacific far down below. Makes a lot of difference (and panic) in the mind.
While I was getting confused on what to code on the quarterly hack day, our senior manager brought a Lego Mindstorm NXT programmable robotics kit for some fun. The moment I saw his mail, I ran to his cube to grab it. This was my one chance to enjoy some building and coding fun together in the name of hack.
So I spent the whole Saturday figuring what to make, and suddenly this idea struck me. In this age of social networking mania on the web, why not make an intelligent picture taker which can roam among people in a room and take some cool shots.
This is by far the best toy I ever handled. I always wanted to make toys with servo motors, and the kit has 3 of them. So 2 of them went to the wheel and the last one became a concoction to trip the shutter. Give the right amout of power and it will press just like a human finger. Woot.
Other than the motors, there are 4 sensors - ultrasonic (to “see” like bats), sound (mic), touch and light. Am having a ball of time to develop code in NXC on my Mac. A major part of the fun is in multithreaded event programming, using mutex and semaphores. Downloaded a very convenient compiler from Bricxcc and it is a breeze to compile and send the binary program to the robot over bluetooth. Here are the commands:
I am targetting to have these features for demo on Monday:
1. Front bumper hits something => move back a bit and take a picture.
2. Some obstacle comes in front and stays there for a few seconds => take a picture.
3. Explore the room intelligently.
And I still have my D70 in the bag. Not that it is obsolete because I have been using it for 3 years, but my recent work has been pushing the image quality to the limits. I have been doing some decent amount of low-light work and the noise at high ISO (800-1600) is not tolerable any more.
I looked around for a true upgrade to a full frame body and Nikon only has it in its $5k D3. While an amazing camera with spotless images at ISO6400, it is certainly not affordable for me. The D300 felt just perfect in my hands, but it is still a crop sensor body. The 2 year old Canon EOS 5D has just what I need: full frame, high performance in low ISO, and a great kit lens, the 24-105/4 L IS USM, all for an attractive price from bhphoto.
Some say switching brands is expensive, because of the existing lenses. I have only two good nikkors, namely the 50/1.8 and 85/1.8 and they will stay for my fm3a anyway. For now, my bag looks perfectly sane, with the D70 as a backup body with 50 on it, while the 5D takes up the main job.
Being in the still photography domain for over 5 years, I decided it was absolute time to check out the world of motion pictures. I love great movies with a solid story and always wanted to make a short one myself. I have recently watched some movies carefully and researched on the basics of editing. It is time put all the dreams in action, along the lines of both documentaries and short films.
The jump to videography could take longer if not for Alena, a budding actress with boundless enthusiasm in movies. She inspired me so much over a couple sessions of chat that it made the final push for me.
I have been eyeing on the 3ccd prosumer camcorders but decided to first try out a cheaper option. Picked a mint Sony DCR-SR200 40GB HDD camcorder for 370 bucks at half its new price, almost the same I paid on a Hi-8 tape version 2 years back for family.
But I do remember how slow I used to be when riding with my local buddy, I used to ride the limit while he did limit+10 or more !
