Home of the Dutch Gecko

Having pestered my parents for a few years claiming that I desperately needed a camera update, they granted me with a fantastic birthday present last May. I will be attending a workshop with legendary landscape photographer Joe Cornish in a few weeks time as a result, and I cannot thank them enough for this opportunity. Their half-jokingly reasoning for the gift was that I “should be able to use a good camera before getting one.” I of course totally disagreed and therefore purchased a brand new Olympus E-520 digital SLR last week. I’ve been keeping my eye on this range since Olympus entered the mid-range SLR market with the E-500, and the wait has been worth it. Boasting features such as sensor dust removal, in-body image stabilisation, live view with autofocus and 3.5fps constant shooting in one of the smallest and lightest bodies available on the market, this is a serious piece of kit. I’m quite wary of Joe Cornish’s dislike of digital cameras, but I feel more comfortable with being able to cock up a few times without repercussions.

I took the camera for a half-day spin around York, shooting the typical photogenic sights. Never have I been so pleased with a purchase - the extreme versatility makes photography so enjoyable. The automated systems (mainly the focus and exposure settings) often need a helping hand, but that’s exactly what I’d expect, and it doesn’t really matter since making those adjustments is totally effortless. The whole thing is designed for people who know what they’re doing, which makes such a change from most of the technology that I’ve experienced. It’s exhilarating to be able to do exactly what I want and not have some gadgetry or algorithm messing with me. Every mistake which came out of the afternoon is mine, and that’s fine. Every perfect shot produced is also mine, and that’s great!

I’ve decided to adopt “It won’t mess with you” as my new programming mantra. While I think of something to program, look at these.

Hmm, two decades. I dunno, seems like a while to me. Luckily I’ve been busy enough to keep me away from this site, so at least I’m over the initial shock now. But still… I’m twenty! What do I do?

It seems the best thing to do is blog, and write Ada. Well, not any more, since the assessment is now truly finished and I won’t need to touch the language again until the third year, when we use it for programming a real-time system. Yup, we do all sorts here…

So, Ada was done, I took a well-earned weekend FragSoc break with my housemates, and then I started the next piece of work - doing a literature survey. I finished it today. I still don’t know what a literature survey is. But in any case when I’ve fixed my linux partition I’ll be putting both code and drivel on this site for all to enjoy.

Of course, any project that takes more than three days must go hand in hand with some awesome procrastination, and Ada didn’t disappoint. I have two photos and the very small beginnings of a PHP-based CMS which I plan to one day install on a snazzy VPS like SliceHost, along with a new snazzy domain to keep me happy. If you want to make me a very happy man, either buy me a few years’ worth of that stuff or give me a job that’ll let me pay it off. And gives me enough spare time to finish the PHP.

Stuff that is awesome:

1. Mountain Dew, especially the new cherry flavour
2. Ubuntu 7.04
3. Procrastination
4. Laid back guitar music

Stuff that is not awesome:

1. Exams
2. Broken headphones
3. Procrastination
4. Untidy room

New photos:

Here, here and here. Woops: and here too.

I’ve been all the way through my old photo collection and picked out some stuff to adjust the colours, sharpen, line up, resize and upload. I’ve been pretty self-critical this time round, so some stuff that existed on the site isn’t present. It might be later, I don’t know.

It was pretty interesting to see the stuff I experimented with from the moment I started shooting to the stuff I did this summer. It’s only been a year and a half since I got my own camera, but it seems like longer. I currently have 2651 photos consuming 4.72GB on my hard drive, though some of them are duplicates, and some of them are just a blur or a black screen. I’m proud to say I’ve only ever deleted three photos, and that was because my memory card was full and I desperately wanted that last shot (no, it’s not on the site, it turned out rubbish). Why does this make me happy? Because it means I can remember things. We can’t yet take a photo of everything we see during our lifetime, but when I have my camera in my hand I stop for a lot of things. Often when I don’t have it I wish I did. I might see a funny situation (four hens sitting on a fence) or just something beautiful (the sun breaking through icicles hanging off a tree branch). Just now I can remember these situations as if they were a photo, but I cannot share them with you and I know I will forget them one day. So I keep those photos that I do have, even if they are only a blur.

You’ve probably found the link to the photo gallery already. It’s available on the right, or you can click here to go straight there. There’s also some funky preview things, but they might break on occasion as I tinker with them. Yes the layout on the gallery is still fairly basic (read: broken) but I needed some photos anyway to change the theming, so I thought I may as well upload them all at once so you could take a gander.

There are some new ones up there. Some of it is very old, but most of it is from the past summer (when I should have been building a website).

As a final, but serious note, I haven’t worked out a copyright system that works for me just yet, so at the moment all rights are reserved, spelled with a capital ©.

Also, principles of programming assignment next week, so this place will be dead Enjoy the pics!