Moments of Permanence - July 30th, 2009

About July 30th, 2009

Today's Photo/Stuff 01:25 am
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] 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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07:41 pm
A Tory MP recently suggested something stupid relating to the Bible, then added that she didn't think even Richard Dawkins would quarrel with that.

As Marcus Brigstock pointed out, Richard Dawkins would probably quarrel with his own reflection if the mood took him.

I'm somewhat depressed and frustrated at the moment, for reasons I'd really rather not discuss.

And so, I give you the Sad Red Panda of Woe:



Hopefully I will feel more cheered later - tonight I'm going to go see [livejournal.com profile] harveystoat do standup at the Blue Room.

Whee.
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