When I first bought the lens I tried taking photos of girlfriend’s mechanical watch. The front face is clear so you can see the inner workings. Unfortunately I didn’t really know what I was doing and the results were less than stellar:

It wasn’t until last week that I was able to read up on what I was doing wrong and why nothing seemed to be in focus. A hint to aspiring macro photographers: stop down the aperture very small (f/6 is about as open as you want to go, but closer to f/11 would be better), and jack up the sensitivity of your camera. Get the focus in the neighborhood and then leave the ring alone and focus by physically moving the camera forward and backward.

Around that same time I started looking at small objects again, trying to find subjects. Luckily my landlord is a bit of a collector of random items. He’d found a rock around Winkelman and kept it because it had an interesting texture. The rock fell off a shelf outside and split in half on the ground, and he put the pieces back without really looking at it closely. A closer inspection revealed that this was no ordinary rock.

Warning: the blown up image below is large (3.5MB). Most browsers will load the entire image, then zoom to fit it on the screen; clicking somewhere within the image will usually make it full size. Then use the scroll bars to view it. For scale, the feature shown in the crop is approximately 5mm long.

These are fossils of a type of sea-dwelling animal called a Crinoid that was quite common in the Paleozoic Era, approximately 250 million years ago. (At least, that’s what I think the fossils are.) At the time, most of North America was a large inland sea next to a supercontinent. A majority of the limestone found in the United States is composed of the compressed skeletons and shells of the invertebrates that lived in that sea, accumulated in silt floods over millions of years.

I’d gotten out early from school the day I took this photo, and I wandered around the front yard looking for more small things to photograph. Several honeybees seemed to be very interested in a neighbor’s flowers, so I tried to find one at eye level that was staying still. They didn’t cooperate. In one shot which was unfortunately out of focus, I actually caught the bee as it took flight. Still, you can see the hairs on this one’s leg:

Perhaps the coolest thing about a macro lens is how it forces you to look for really small details. I wanted to take a picture of the tiny green fruits on this tree, which were about half the width of my index finger in diameter, and I saw a little speck on one. So I zoomed in and took a look:

Yep, those are aphids. On a tree branch that was wiggling back and forth in the wind like a windshield wiper. I just set the camera to continuous drive and held down the shutter. Only about 3 of the 30 I took were even remotely in focus, and this one is a crop of an otherwise out of frame shot. I still like it.

Because some of you keep asking, the woman in the first shot is a barista who works at the shop.

I didn’t just take photos of dogs. Not like I could have even planned that. I took pictures of whatever caught my eye. Rooftops, cracks in the sidewalk, plants, cyclists.

I should mention something about the third image, which is a response to the arrest of a graduate student protester who drew chalk outlines on university sidewalks in protest of the casualties of the recent budget cuts. Apparently someone in the admin building didn’t like what he was doing, and he was booked for criminal damage, to the tune of $3000 in cleanup costs. Anyone sane will tell you that chalk washes off with a hose or the next rainfall, and it raised such a stink that the university president ordered the charges to be dropped. Even though this happened over a month ago you can still see this slogan written on walls and sidewalks in public places.

The image compression doesn’t do the lens justice. The pictures from this 85mm really are sharp as a razor.

Along the way, I encountered no less than eight dogs. Morning seems to be a popular time for pooches. Dogs often make great photo subjects, when their owners aren’t hauling them away at a brisk pace. (Most canines are happy to stop and sniff, but if the owner keeps moving, then that’s that.)

I’ll let these photos speak for themselves, in a slightly different format than usual. Click on the crops for the full image.

There was the fantastic trip to the San Francisco area to visit Joey and Monica. We went to this distillery called Hangar One for a tasting. By far my favorite was their spiced pear vodka, but they also have raspberry liqueurs and weird citrus or kaffir lime hard liquor. Monica drove Joey and me up to Sonoma where we sampled the local wines and chocolates. We even got a chance to hit up a concert, and I got to see Monica’s laboratory with the subterranean-industrial-evil-genius plasma whatsit. Very chic, I’ll have to put one of those in my underground lair someday.

I got a girlfriend. She was having lunch with a friend in this kinda hippie cafe place where I was reading a book and having some coffee. She got up, I started talking to her friend, and then wound up spending the afternoon with them at the local street fair. It turns out she went to my high school, and her older sister and I were in the band together for all 4 years. Since then I was invited to the older sister’s wedding. Fun, interesting, and yet very bizarre.

The end of the semester brought quite a bit of chaos as everyone threw parties for everyone else, and because my undirected graph of friends is well-connected, there were n squared parties in the span of a week. This in concert with the unexpected 40 hours per week expected time in for my summer research job had worn my sanity rather thin. Meanwhile my girlfriend had been wondering why I’m so goddamn busy. So we decided to just eschew work for a bit and go camping. That was its own adventure.

Meanwhile I’ve written a paper with lots of help from my professor and submitted it to a conference. If it gets accepted, I might have a chance to go to Europe and present it.

That’s all I can remember for now. I’m going to drag my camera a couple places and hope to get inspired. My lenses and equipment are fine, I just need to take them out of the bag and take some photos with them.

It’s hard to explain, but these toy lightsabers kept changing colors. I have three photographs taken less than a second apart, and the colors are different in each one.

These Norwegian dancers strutted their stuff for awhile before I had to leave. Yes, their outfits were THAT red.

Most days I feel as if I’m in the right place, but every once in awhile, like today, I’ll look back at things and it seems as if my soul is in a thousand pieces, scattered to the four winds. I took a swig of liquid courage and made a phone call back to the board of education to take care of some paperwork, and chatting with native speakers brought me right back to that point in my life… minus a few forgotten words here and there. I didn’t stutter too much. But days like this make me wonder if there are two people fighting inside my skull for control of my life. One wants to follow the logical path of my strengths as an engineer, while the other says I should give that up and go do something, anything in Japan. I’m in my element here, I’m in my element there. The real world says I have to pick one or the other. Maybe I need a door number three.

Even though I don’t read tons of comics, I’m still a colossal nerd. Or at least, I thought I was… but really I’ve got nothin’ on these folks. It nearly brought a tear to my eye to see my fellow geeks dressed as various comic book characters, mostly Japanese. *sniff* It definitely brought tears to my eyes to walk behind one or two rather pungent individuals who NEED SHOWERS BADLY. But it was all fun, mostly because I enjoy people watching in all its forms. These folks weren’t just dressed up, they were literally clad in glee. You couldn’t help but get the vibe that these people were coming together for an almost spiritual communion of sorts, a temporary graphic-novel Mecca.

I tagged along with Diana and her cast of characters to various panels and exhibits. Some of them were artists or writers talking about their work, which was interesting to listen to even if you hadn’t seen or heard their work (and yeah I was probably the only one… but I did buy the first book in a series that came highly recommended by everyone in the party and got it signed). Others were a little bit more interesting, like the body art seminar labeled ominously “18 and older”, which involved watching an artist apply paint to two very attractive women each wearing nothing but a thong. I’ll never think of the phrase “airbrushed models” the same way again.

Of course there was cool swag, like the Star Trek posters they were giving out, and the free DVD of “Death Race” I somehow acquired. And it was cool to go say hello to Wil Wheaton and thank him for his promotion of Child’s Play (he’s well-known for his role as Wesley Crusher on Star Trek: The Next Generation, but of course moved on to other things like books and voice acting by now). He’s become this sort of cornerstone geek icon recently, mainly by just being a normal guy with geekish interests like games and comics, who amazingly hasn’t tried to overplay his celebrity or let it go to his head. That’s pretty commendable I think.

I should post about my new RA position, but I’ll let it wait until I actually go in to see the lab on Wednesday.

I’d planned on moving into a little pink house not a mile from the university earlier this month, but either communications broke down or they decided to ignore my phone calls, email, and the little note I slipped under the door. So last Friday after applying to graduate school (parts 3a and 401.7.lambda?) I took a look at a pair of share homes in the general vicinity of the university. I kinda fell in love with the second place, a beautiful 1920s era home with an eclectic owner. Tons of artwork, antiques, and knickknacks adorn the place. Sure, it has its flaws, chief among them substandard 1920s wiring (with no bathroom outlets, and no ground, ick), pipes that sometimes bleed orange if they haven’t been used, and no central heating/cooling. But its creaky wood floors and curved plaster walls give it a charm that modern cookie-cutter white square houses just can’t match. And not only do I have a bedroom, but also an attached study, complete with a 50s RCA Victor tube radio. All of this less than 2 minutes from campus by bike.

So I moved in the important stuff on Tuesday, hooked up the computer to a wireless network, and have been spending most of my time making the place look shipshape. It helps that my desk sits adjacent to an antique steamer trunk from an ocean liner.