Photography: my new hobby!

Last week I was mooching around some second hand shops in English town of Tewkesbury when I happened upon a camera and a little further inspection and it turned out to be an old 35mm SLR.

I've always had an affinity for high precision equipment, watches, optics etc. Whilst I've never really had a camera before this old lump was only £8 so I decided to buy it. Its a Chinon CM-4 from what I can tell its about 20 years old. It takes Pentax K mount bayonet lenses and is fully manual.

I'm loving it! I've shot 3 or 4 rolls of film already! Of course I should wait and make sure that the shots develop correctly but I'm having fun all the same!

I know from reading here and in other places that I've made many elementary mistakes but I think I got some decent shots, after all, if the shutter speed is not so low as to create the dreaded camera shake and the TTL indicator tells me I'm on the money the picture should come out reasonably well.... It may not be a good picture of course but hopefully I will be able to see the thing I was pointing at!

I'm learning a lot at the moment, I really enjoy using this fully manual camera, of course there are thousands of advantages with newer camera's but at least at the moment, if there is a problem with a shot there is only one person I can blame

The only thing I would like to have is a Depth Of Field preview so that I can check that the apature is set correctly for the photo I want to take.

My mother commented that I seem to have expensive hobbies, how nice it is that I pick up a new one just before my birthday :-D

If anyone can give me any hints or tips, particularly for airshows as I have one coming up, That would be great. I also have a 210mm lens for that one, should get me a little closer!

Cheers
-Rob

Work Stuff

Well, my bosses here seem to be happy with my work. They have just offered to extend my contract for a further two months, which is the maximum they can extend it for.

I'd like to stay but I am going to go home, to my part time consultancy job and most importantly to spend some quality time with my future wife. I can't wait!

Facebook Photo Albums

For those of you that don't have facebook but would like to see the pictures I have taken recently, here are the permalinks to my albums.

General PhotoDinner At Matts
Drinks In Geneva
Geneva Motor Show
Fosdem '07
Archery
Daisy In Geneva
Aberystwyth
Old Archery

New Equipment at work

Horay, I finally have my RCU setup for testing concurrent access via the DDL.

In this picture, we have the aluminium frame for a tpc sector, which holds 6 RCU's. Each RCU has 2 Branches with 2 Front End Cards on each branch.

It might not look like much but its really quite cool :-)

Yet Another Screenshot

Yet again I was using dr17 and was amazed how pretty it can look with virtually no effort.

Module Choices

Semester One:
CS31310 Agile Methodologies
CS33110 Small Real-Time Systems
CS34210 Visualisation
CS35110 Internet Architecture and Operation
SE31410 Server-Side Software
SE39200 Distributed Systems

Semester Two:
CS35710 Ubiquitous Computing
CS35910 Internet Administration
CS36410 Intelligent Robotics
CS38010 Professional issues in Software Engineering
SE33010 Formal methods in Software Engineering
SE39220 Distributed Systems

Next year looks like its going to be rather tough. I've tried to avoid the maths or AI heavy modules which has left me with some very knowledge based (as opposed to concept based) modules with 100% riding on the exam. Oh well, lets see how it goes..... The final year looks far better.

HD-DVD Decryption key

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0. It's the HD-DVD processing key you can use to decrypt and play most HD-DVD movies in Linux. Movie studios are going ballistic over this leak, so Digg the story up and make it reach the front page. The first time, the story got removed.



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