Eating The Moon

I had the pleasure and honor of standing out on a cold and windy evening craning my neck up towards the sky, gazing and squinting through dark clouds, looking for the moon going through phases of the total lunar eclipse.

Serendipity, however, decided to give me something for my trouble in the form of a beautiful cloud burst. However, the moon was over exposed to the point of being a pure white disc. Taking one of the well exposed moons, I merged the two to produce the following:

"Eating The Moon" - Wing Tang Wong

Neither shot by themselves were very interesting, in and of themselves, as it was early on during the eclipse and with a 200mm lens, I could only get so much of the frame filled. While not "as shot", I ended up really liking this shot.

It reminds me of the mystery and magic of the moon.

You can see more images I took from the Lunar Eclipse in my gallery.

A Little Food For Thought

It is entirely true to say that I do not post enough and I do not do enough shooting. If I have time to lounge around on a Saturday... I have time to whip out my camera gear and shoot something. It should not matter the subject, the location, or the weather. If there is light, there are photographs to be made.

So it is with great joy that this morning, I converted my bedroom into an impromptu cramped food photography studio. No.. I'm not going to show images of my bedroom turned studio. But I will show the fruits of the labors employed...

A delicious trio of baked goods from my friend and baker, Lisa.

What you see here is a plate of cookies that my friend Lisa, the self-titled "Clumsy Ninja Baker", had baked and mailed to me! She is just the best.

Managing Resources - Part I

As much as I love photography... I'm not sure of how I feel about managing all of the files that are generated from the photographic process.

Currently, I shoot with the Sony Alpha A700. I shoot exclusively in RAW files. These files weigh in at around 17MB apiece. But I rather like to think of how much space I need in terms of how many of those 16GB CF cards I fill up. Over the course of the last few years, I've amassed nearly 1TB of RAW files. These files currently live in two locations: in a Lightroom 3 catalog on an external 2TB drive and on my desktop, which I rarely use. This desktop computer is the subject of this post.

How I Got Here

When I built it, I wanted to make sure I had a machine that would last for the next three years, so to that end, I ended up getting a server class motherboard:

• Tyan 2 socket server socket motherboard
• 2 x 6 core AMD Opeteron 64bit CPU(s)
• 16GB of memory
• 8 x 1TB SATA drives
• 1 Kwatt power supply

After much back and forth, I eventually settled on OpenSolaris for access to the much prized ZFS filesystem. The storage on the box was meant to be an archive, and it has been. However, because it has also been running OpenSolaris, I've been unable to run any of my photo editing software or any of my video editing software, rendering the box effectively a very expensive NAS box. Ugh.

I only power it on periodically to sync up my laptops and to archive my working copies of photos, albeit in a very haphazard fashion. I am SO not adhering to DAM standards! No doughnut!