¹ Some were digital, some were 35mm. When all the film has been developed, we’ll select some of them to send off to the magazine who requested the photos. Once I have clearance from the AWelkin & the magazine people, I’ll post some of them to Flickr.  Though we also have a couple more shoots to do, so don’t expect to see those photos any time soon.

Well that’s a fine how-do-you-do! © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Erotic images can turn you blind
• A World of Warcraft World
• Monkey Business: Keith Chen’s Monkey Research
• The family that plays together.… grounds their kids for staying up late!
• Things That Only Happen In Movies
• The Caffeine Database [Editor] Even better than the caffeine database’ on the same site is the Death by Caffeine calculator. Apparently, it would take nearly 185 shots of espresso to be the death of me. Hmmm… The Terrapin has a Ghengis Kahn which is 4 shots of straight espresso that’s means it would take about 46 Ghengis Kahns to take me out. Heh.

Not from Pukka:

• Office Guns
• The Elizabethan Costumer’s Guide To Home Depot
• Canon s400: Awesome Moon!
• Christopher Walken for President in 2008 [Editor] I’ve no idea if this is legit.
• View the Earth from various satellites [Editor] This link was sent in by Pukka’s wife.
• Lego Lovers Unite in Arlington
• Man builds Viking longboat from 15 million lolly stick
• Kittens Start Fire After Using Fax
• Is Your Boss a Psychopath? The same site also has a short quiz to determine if your boss really is a psychopath.

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

• Google Moon: “In honor of the first manned Moon landing, which took place on July 20, 1969, we’ve added some NASA imagery to the Google Maps interface to help you pay your own visit to our celestial neighbor.” Zoom all the way in to find out one of the moon’s secrets.
• PhotoMuse: “An ambitious project to create one of the largest freely accessible databases of masterwork photography anywhere on the Web, a venture that will bring their collections to much greater public notice and provide an immense resource for photography aficionados, both scholars and amateurs.” Found via the New York Times
• Hacker Erased Spammer’s Database

¹ Come to think of it, I’m not sure he was even in the office this week.

Pukka’s Links of the Week © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Digital Photo Color Correction © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Ariesna and I went out walking today. Partly because I have a couple dozen rolls of unused film collecting dust, but mostly because AWelkin will get a chance to see Iwahara-san & Keki-san at a conference this month. Why is that important? Well, they were fabulous to all of us who went on the trip to Japan last summer that I feel the need to extract some hospitality vengeance upon them. :D

Around 1pm, we headed out and started today’s walking/photography adventures. We went over to the Iowa River & Power Company’s parking lot and I started taking pictures of the river, some trees the remains of the dam¹. However the main reason we were there is I’d heard from a co-worker that there’s a big nest of eagles in that area. We’d probably been there about half an hour without seeing anything when some other people came up with binoculars. From what we could overhear them saying; they were coming to try and see the eagles too. So I asked them about the eagles and they pointed the nest out to us². We chatted with them for a couple of minutes and they mentioned some other areas around town we could go to look for eagles. Then we started walking away and spotted an eagle a bit further up the river. I probably shot 15–20 pictures using my 35mm camera and I know some of them weren’t focused that well. Hopefully, at least one or two will turn out nicely. We left shortly after that and went to a couple of the parks over in Iowa City and then down by the Iowa River and the UofI’s Art museum. It was a lot more walking than we usually do, but it was a good time.

I only ended up using about 2 rolls of film (~50 total photos) but I also took some shots with my digital camera. The image attached to this post (and now added to the Gallery) was the last photo I took today, as we walked back to the car. I’m starting to feel a bit tired, so that’s all for now.

¹ They’ve torn a good chunk of it down, but I’m pretty sure the plan is to rebuild it.
² To give credit where credit is due, Ariesna had spotted it but from the description I’d gotten; I told her that was too small to be it. Besides, we hadn’t seen any eagles near it or anywhere on the river.

Photo-day © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

.… these folks over at the RC Groups forums who have been rigging up small digital cameras to their R/C airplanes and getting some fantastic low-altitude aerial pictures. The trick is to find cameras that are light enough not .… 2005 Calendar Entries [RCGroups]

Kudos to Gizmodo for the link!

My favorite entry is a toss up between RoadKill’s shot of Montfort, Wisconsin or edthedoc’s shot of Oxford University, England, UK.

Low Flying Cameras © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.

Sometimes I wonder about pieces of my life, whether I like them or not. I do mostly like my life, but I know there are things I would do differently if resources like time or money weren’t an issue. Today what I want you to consider is what your fantasy life.

NOT well, I’d get a million dollars and live on a yacht with Orlando Bloom (although there’s nothing wrong with that fantasy, that’s not the kind of thing we’re after.) Here’s what I’m talking about: what kind of changes would you make in your life, the life you have now, to improve its quality.

Shen then listed 6 things; I liked the idea, so here are my six:

1. I’d get 7 solid hours of sleep every night. By solid, I mean none of that weak@$$ lying in bed waiting for sleep to come, but honest to God deep REM sleep.
2. I would carry a camera with me everywhere I go and work at bringing my photography skills back up to snuff.
3. I would be living in a nice, cozy house (with plenty of storage!) rather than my rather cramped apartment.
4. I’d change the dresscode at work so I could wear t-shirts again.
5. I’d take up Tai Chi or some form of martial arts to get into better shape.
6. I’d spend an hour everyday in a sunlit room working on my drawing skills.

What’s on your six? Feel free to answer here or in your own blog.

What’s on Your Six? © Mark McKibben, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 United States.