This is a picture I took back in April from the 3rd floor of the apartment building I live in. The full moon was just rising, and we were having one of those unusually high tides when I took the photo. Olympus C4000Z, 4 second exposure time, f2.8, ISO set to 400.
I like to collect things. One of the collections I'm most proud of is my small collection of radiology related things. There's not much in it, but I enjoy each piece I have. I try to acquire new items when I can, although nowadays with service engineers having to return all the bits they take out, it's a little harder. My favourite item is the hand held fluoroscope that I acquired off E-bay. It's the oldest piece I have. It gives me a connection to how radiology used to be done. I just find it cool to hold it, and imagine how someone would have used it 60 or 70 years ago. Unfortunately it doesn't have any labels on it, so I have no idea just how old it is.
Go visit my museum of radiology artifacts.
Took this one yesterday morning at sunrise. It's a little blurry because of a slow shutter speed (1/4s) and lack of a tripod, but I think it captures nicely the neat orangy sunlight I get to wake up to most mornings.
Today I spotted a viola the neighbours were selling at their yard sale, so on a whim I decided to pick it up. Unfortunately I missed out on the Lemond road bike he was selling yesterday, otherwise I could have started up two old hobbies.
I used to play viola for about 7 years between grades 4 and 11. I enjoyed playing but being somewhat tone deaf (although I can tell when something doesn't sound quite right or is out of tune) and somewhat lacking in the rhythm department, I think I had gotten about as good as I could get by the time I reached high school. And by then my interests were starting to diverge to other things like cycling and running.
I hadn't touched a viola since then but always thought about getting back to it. When I saw the neighbours set one out this morning, I just thought it would be too good of an opportunity to pass up. It's in reasonably decent shape and sounds decent despite having a thin crack along the top of the body. It's missing a G string, needs a new bow and maybe some new pegs but those things should be easy enough to find somewhere.
I wonder if my viola books are still back home sitting in the closet.
Ok, so now that I've got this spiffy viola, I need to find a place around here where where I can get:
This should be interesting. Simba was a total spaz yesterday when I was checking out my new toy and plucking the strings trying to tune it. I bet it will be even more entertaining when I actually start trying to play the thing.
Anybody know of any good local music shops that carries stuff for string instruments?
Inside the body of the viola, there are two stickers. One sticker says
A. R. Seidel
Mittenwald OBB
Handmade copy of
Antonius Stradivarius West Germany
This sticker has 1986 written on it.
The other sticker says
Glaesel Shop Adjusted in Cleveland Ohio
and indicates the model number of this particular viola is VA10E, Reg #M7890 and is dated 9-86 which, coincidentally enough, is right about the time I stopped playing.
It's a 15" body, so it's a little bit on the small side for me (a 16" or 16.5" would probably be more my size). The edges are a little beat up and there are a couple of thin cracks and a few scratches on the body, but nothing that seems to affect the sound (yet). I'd say the viola has seen its fair share of use and abuse at the hands of many students before falling into my hands.
While running errands over the weekend I stopped at a nearby music shop to see what they had for string instruments. Picked up a set of strings and a pitch pipe to help me get things into tune, but they didn't have any viola bows in my price range. The ones they did have were very nice, but a little more than I needed at this time. Thanks to the pitch pipe and a few MIDI files I found online, the viola is now newly strung and sounds decently in tune, although the A sounds kind of odd to me. Maybe when I hear it with the bow it'll sound better. Plucking the strings does make some very satisfyingly familiar sounds though.
Now I just need to find a bow and some beginner's books.
Finally got around to ordering a new bow for the viola a few days ago, and it arrived today.
Sounds a little rough right now. Still need to get the bow broken in with rosin and remember how to bow the strings. Can definitely tell the viola's just a little too small for me (or else I just have fat fingers).
Now to see if I can re-teach myself all the viola-playing stuff I used to know.
The photo meetup group was lucky enough to score several invites to the opening bash on Friday for the Red Bull Illume photo exhibit currently on display (through March 27) in Marion Square.
We arrived about an hour before sunset and set about doing the things photographers do.
Being the pollen season, everything was getting washed up a bit before the lighting up took place.
The Red Bull Illume exhibit from a higher vantage point
There were drinks and snacks (provided by Caviar and Bananas) and lots of people hanging out. Then it was time to turn on the lights and show off the photos.
There were some pretty amazing photos in the exhibit. It's open from 7 - 11 PM until March 28. Definitely worth checking out.
A first attempt to stack multiple shorter exposures to produce one simulated long exposure.
This is composed of 4 images, ~10 minutes each, f/7.1 ISO 400. Loaded each image in GIMP using Open as Layers and combined each layer using the Hard Light mode. It seemed to give me the best result. Switched the image to Grayscale mode and saved.
The really bright streak is Jupiter.
One of these days I'll make the effort to venture out to some place darker than my back yard.
A little more internet searching led me to a suggestion to use GIMP's Lighten only mode for combining layers.
This is the same image from yesterday, only using Lighten only to combine the layers.
I also found this great set of GIMP plugins that someone wrote for processing astronomy type images. It's the 'Set mode for all layers' script that I was most interested in.
My third attempt at stacked images for star trails (the second attempt was all out of focus). This time I put the camera on burst mode, 30s exposure (the longest exposure my XT will do before bulb mode), f/3.5 and left the remote trigger locked down. This is Orion streaking through the sky, composed of 58 images.
The much shorter exposure and wide open aperture gives a much darker sky and brings out a lot more stars. It also means a lot more images to process: 60 images for a 30 minute exposure. Loading all those images requires a computer with lots of RAM.
Good thing I bumped the memory in my computer up to 24GB. The computer hardly breaks a sweat when I ask GIMP to load that many images (at 3456x2304, GIMP says each image takes up 71MB).
Now I want a wider angle lens for my camera.
Some high thin clouds add an interesting background to tonight's efforts.
A stack of 182 30s images, f/5.6 ISO 800. Click through to see the full size 3456x2304 image. Look closely and you'll see dots from high flying airplanes. See if you can spot the streak of what I think might have been a passing satellite.
