 Today's Photo/Stuff
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Jul. 30th, 2009 @ 01:25 am 
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Note: I've fallen behind on LJ again, and it's way past my bedtime so I'm not catching up now.
The possibly-owner dude at the camera shop today pointed out an external hard drive to me and told me that they were really good.
I had to admit I have three of them. He was approving - the issue at hand being people who don't back up their data, and end up losing all of it.
I do backups. The only time I've ever lost serious data due to backup fail was when my father reformatted the shared family hard drive, and backed up all of my stuff... except the stuff he didn't.
It looks like I'm going to have to talk to the service folk for the manufacturer of my computer, because the audio jacks are malfunctioning and periodically the display freezes up for a second or so, which: no. So, before they put their filthy hands on my beloved computer, this will include me backing up my data thoroughly.
Anyway. Today's photo is one of my relatively successful peacock shots (peacocks, as I mentioned, being hard to photograph due to the whole iridescent feathers thing). I think what I love most about this one is that you can see the buildings reflected in his eye:
I took that one at uni, of course; the peacock was standing on the stage of the Dolphin New Fortune Theatre (a Globe-style outdoor theatre) (edited due to pointing out of mis-theatre attribution by ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif) theducks, and I was walking along the path next to it, which is about a metre lower. My 17-85mm lens was at full extension, and I took a series of pictures, getting gradually closer with each one and seeing how close I could get before he walked off. I was thereby able to get this extreme closeup - that picture isn't cropped, just resized, and on my screen it looks about the actual size of his head.
I find it pleasing. If nothing else, taking pictures of peacocks you can't really just crop the image to get a bigger version of part of it; scaling the image down significantly is the only way I've found to keep them from looking horrible due to the weird visual artifacts iridescent feathers produce.
Which is, of course, why I've been so much more successful at this with my new camera. My compact can zoom, but it can't get as much magnification as my Real Lenses can, and of course, the difference in how much you can scale down a 15.1 megapixel image and a 5.0 megapixel image is rather substantial. (My default rescale for DSLR images for posting online is 15%.)
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That looks really good! Nice shot.
![[User Picture Icon]](https://v2.dreamwidth.org/3974986/75896) |
| From: | ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png) sami |
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| Date: |
July 30th, 2009 01:45 am (UTC) |
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Cheers. :D
It's kind of awesome, having interesting birds like peafowl around that, though they don't let humans come *too* close (usually they maintain a minimum distance of a few feet), are nonetheless sufficiently accustomed to seeing many, many humans around them that they're relatively easy to photograph.
I think, in the tiny minds of the Arts block peafowl, humans are mostly just intermittent noise pollution. They put up with us because where they live, they have interesting buildings to climb over, are regularly supplied with food, still have grass to wander around on when they feel like it - plus, of course, all the peafowl who live there now were born and raised on campus. Humans are a vaguely annoying aspect of home.
Yeah, that makes sense.
I love how much fun you're having with your camera!
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| From: | sami |
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July 30th, 2009 01:52 am (UTC) |
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So do I. :D
It's also an odd source of pride for me, that my university, and my faculty in particular, is just quirky enough to be all, yes, we have peafowl living wild around the Arts buildings, what's your point about it. There are peafowl. They wander around. They're fun to watch if you're killing time between classes; it's also fun to watch strangers to the Arts block stop and stare, trying to work out if they're really seeing what they think they're seeing.
There's little forewarning because it's not something people think about enough to tell people about them most of the time - they're just there. If you're an Arts student, having peafowl wandering around is normal. The other parts of campus are boring for their lack of wildlife.
I can totally see that happening, yes. :D
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