tsoek

 My girlfriend (obligatory: hey everybody, this guy has a GIRLFRIEND) loves ducks so we spent some time at Hawrelak. The babies really liked the grains but the parents mostly did not approve of us being around.. I will upload more as I keep cropping/adjusting for cold cloudy dark day.

Babies race to the grains!

 They fight for firsts!

 Parents have their eyes on us..

Hmm… there are no grains here. Just chipped wood

 And now for something completely different,

Just messing around layers and the high pass filter with a picture that was blurry.

you were really proud you got it all off too.

such a troll cat

 he likes to sleep inside the furry wall

 Now that I don’t live at home anymore and am growing up and living in the real world.. I obviously had to get my own cat.

The name’s Markus. I adopted him today from the Edmonton Humane Society. I think he’ll prefer living with me compared to there =)

 I was just out in the backyard after work today and got a chance to take a picture of this guy who lives back there and likes to make noise. I’d estimate him to be about 8 centimeters in length excluding the tail. Pretty small little thing… he’ll have to put a lot of food away before winter comes and do some more bulking up.

edit: bonus! Here is a picture of the ground. I estimate it to be worth much less than a drawing of a 7 legged spider. But I’m okay with that.

Well… this probably looked a lot cooler in person. The “tail” end of the cloud literally looked like fire in the sky as the sun was setting through it. I’m going to post this anyway because I’m tired of taking photos and keeping them on a memory card and never letting them see the light of day. In a way I let the sun set on things before getting to them, and now that summer itself is over I find myself thinking that once again. Looks like this weekend will be a chance for some decent weather so I’m going to plan to make the most of it and get out there with my camera and see if I can capture fall before that turns to winter and I’ve lost another chance.

Got the rubber mounted to the rims and my wheels mounted to the car. I just need an alignment done and as much negative camber as I can get and I’ll be good to go! I wanted to wash the car before taking these pictures, but I’m going to hold off until the street cleaners finish taking all the sand away and kicking all the dust up.

Tried to show how flush the wheels ended up being with the fender with this shot. I was almost going to get them wider too.

I think the suspension is a good height. One pinky finger width!

Really happy with the colour of these BBS CH’s.

How it looks all put together.

Next step? Lip and painting the plastic siderails along with half of my two piece bumper!

edit: oh, and to tint the rear windows of course

edit2: I did some ‘shoopin to see what the car will kinda look like once I get the sideskirt and top piece of the bumper painted. I only had so much patience with trying to make it look somewhat believeable and I’m liking how it finishes off the stance of the car. Sooo, I am going to go for it.

Thanks to a mistake I made when setting things up, all I ended up over the course of the night were a few shots I took to test exposure times when I pointed my camera into the black. I was using the mirror lock-up function so in my software I have to press the shutter once, then wait for vibrations to diminish, and then go on with the exposure like normal. Except this doesn’t work when you accidentally press the shutter once by hand before going on with the method. I also have a cooldown period so the camera gets a chance to fully write the file to the memory card and to give the sensor a break. Since this was all out of sync, I ended up with hundreds of black photos that waited many, many seconds for the mirror to settle before taking a very short exposure. Awesome. At least I was only out in the middle of nowhere from after 1:00 am to 4:30 am.

So all I have to show is just one test shot of the sky… And un-moving white specs aren’t that cool. I’m going to have to test my stuff on some time lapse overlooking the ravine near home a few times before venturing out to capture the stars for a little while.

I wish the clouds would have stayed away most of the night as well. Sometimes the sky would be so perfectly clear for a few moments and you could see thousands of stars.

 Well, the technical side of my project is mostly 100% done so the only thing left to do now is get outside and see what I get. The warmest day is Friday so I might hold off for that, but I am really itching to see how well this all works. I hope my simple menu system gives me enough flexibility for shooting and I hope I didn’t mess up any of the formulas in my code to control the camera movement. It is pretty basic functionality so I think I got it all right the first try.

*96% Done

When I wasn’t watching the Olympics this weekend, I was busy building the following. The first picture here is of a mount I built that allows me to very slowly or quickly rotate the camera by an external control. It can be programmed how much and how fast to rotate, and the purpose is going to be for time lapse. Same goes for the linear motion mount. I also built a programmable intervalometer which isn’t shown in any of the following photos because at the moment it’s kind of a mess of wires.

 I touched up the design for this linear motion mount. Motor was changed to a differently geared one that allows for finer and much smoother control. I also beefed up the part that slides on the track and holds the camera. It’s not mounted to the tripod here, but instead expertly balanced for a chance to take a quick picture.

 Closeup here of the universal joint connected the motor axel to the threaded rod. I’ve cleverly hidden the bad welding job and threaded rod/universal joint connection with angles and blurring haha.

For the platform that the camera sits on I used two printed circuit boards, bolted them together, screwed them to two welded together coupler nuts, and then bolted on an aluminum plate that finally has the ball mount bolted to it!