A walk in the woods or I can't believe it's not flippin' raining!

The rain this month has been merciless. Every weekend was soaking, wet, and miserable. But this weekend shined with quintessential New England fall weather: Cool temperatures, dry air, a slight breeze and a cloudless sky. It was so pleasant that I can almost forgive October for the last few weeks of hell.

On account of the good weather, I managed to get two timely tasks done: I finished stacking our 3 cords of winter firewood which got pretty wet despite being covered and I tracked out into the woods behind our house armed with my trusty camera and a couple lenses. The wood stacking was tedious, but the nature photoshoot was heaven.

In September, I purchase three new lenses for my Canon (which I will someday talk about in a future post). My hope was to put them into service capturing the scenes of New Enland in Autumn. But on account of the rain, my shiny new lenses stayed far away from the great soggy outdoors. But today, I headed into the woods with my Canon 20D, a super-wide Canon EF-S 10-22mm (wide-angle and foliage = fun!) and a telephoto Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L. In 2 peaceful hours I captured over 250 frames. Below is a small sampling of what my camera saw:

Click images to view slightly higher resolution images.


Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/125s f/16 at 10mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/125s f/16 at 10mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/160s f/16 at 10mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/40s f/5.6 at 22mm iso400




Canon 20D with Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L @ 1/125s f/8 at 50mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/125s f/16 at 10mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/125s f/11 at 10mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L @ 1/50s f/5.6 at 70mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF-S 10-22mm @ 1/125s f/16 at 10mm iso400




Canon 20D with Canon EF 24-70mm f/2.8L @ 1/30s f/7.1 at 70mm iso400
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Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 30, 05 | 10:06 pm | Profile

Alabama Photos

I've been meaning to post these photos from our Alabama singing travels quite some time ago. With work and life being so hectic upon my return I managed to completely forget that they existed. I didn't take too many photos. I was thoroughly absorbed by the wonderful singing and deliberately choose to commit my experience to memory rather than film. So, here's a small selection of photos, mostly from the Lacy Memorial Sing. If I got anyone's name wrong, please let me know.

• Click to Read More...

Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 25, 05 | 10:39 am | Profile

Garrett vs. Wilma

My friend Garrett, who recently moved down to Florida, is currently enduring his first Gulf hurricane. He's in West Palm Beach where the eye of Wilma passed within 20 miles. The area is taking quite a beating and he reports that the post-eye storm is more intense that the pre-eye storm, which I believe is common. He's been sending some amusing clips taken on his camera phone. He currently without Internet and water, although on his last report (we communicate by text messages) he still had power. Hopefully, all will be well once it has passed.

The videos below require Apple QuickTime:

Videos
video 1
video 2
video 3
video 4
video 5
video 6
video 7
video 8
video 9 - new!
video 10 - new!
video 11 - new!

Pictures
Powerhouse Gym where Garrett works.

Update: Garrett reports he is alive and well. West Palm Beach is quite devestated: trees and powerlines down ever where, lots of structural damage to area businesses. Even the gym where he works suffered some roof and structural damage and flooding. He is without power, water or Internet access, but otherwise doing okay. There is a mandatory 7:PM curfew, so Garrett is at home playing with his stuffed monkeys by candle light.
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Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 24, 05 | 1:13 pm | Profile

Holy Bandwidth Batman

Amy's web site, KnittingHelp.com, is just shy of its first anniversary. For a relatively new site, I am absolutely floored by the amount of traffic the her site serves. When KnittingHelp.com was first launched in November 2004, it was serving about 300GB of traffic each month. Fast-foward a year later and her site just passed the 1TB (1,000GB) milestone. By contrast, I have a server with over 200 clients on it, some with fairly popular sites, and those clients manage to push out a paltry 100 - 150GB of traffic each month.

All this traffic is terrific, however, there are some consequences when running a popular web site. Namely, bandwidth. Bandwidth is a limited commodity and heavy usage leverages heavy costs. Fortunately, Amy married the the right guy. Since part of my business is hosting, I am able to offer her site a buffet of free bandwidth, which her site happily gobbles up. Unfortunately, Amy's site has become so popular that it just started pushing the bandwdith limit of the server it's been residing on since last November. In order to avoid a hefty bandwidth bill from my datacenter I had to come up with a plan. Warning: geekspeak ahead...

Last night, I hastily mirrored the KnittingHelp.com videos to another server. This server was brought online in August and is mostly idle, serving as a backup for DNS, Mail and nightly file archiving. I set up a separate subdomain pointing to the new server and using Apache's mod_redirect, I transparently redirected all video requests to the new mirror server. Once I flipped the switch, all video traffic was redirected to the other server and the traffic to the existing server plummeted instantly.

Below I have included a traffic chart showing the daily averages for a year. The daily average is somewhat misleading since a day is made up of peak times when traffic is steady and off-peak times when traffic is low. During peak times the server has been pushing out about 8Mb/sec with spikes as high as 16Mb/sec. During off-peak times the server usually idles at around 1.5Mb/sec.



Apart from a short lull in early Spring, the KnittingHelp.com traffic has been steadily increasing with each passing week. Traffic will no doubt keep increasing and we'll have to invent new ways to balance the load between multiple servers. It is fun to watch things grow and see how we cope with those changes.

Finally, here is graph showing the change in traffic once I redirected the videos. The green mountains are Sunday's traffic, a day which is typically slower compared to the rest of the week. Once the videos were redirected traffic pretty much flatlined.

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Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 24, 05 | 10:18 am | Profile

Recommended Reading: Ghost Town

I vividly remember this cover of Time magazine, dateline May 12, 1986. It was lying on the coffee table at my aunt's house. I was too young to fully understand the magnitude of the event. Nonetheless, the reactor image and the capped title remained burned into my memory all these years.

On April 25, 1986, reactor number 4 at Chernobyl exploded and the ensuing fire doused the world with unprecedented radiation. The Soviet Union keep the catastrophe a secret from the world, including the 10 million people living within the areas of heaviest radioactive fallout. It wasn't until nuclear plant operators in Sweden detected extremely heavy level of radiation and brought the issue to the attention of the world, that the Soviet Union announced they had a minor problem at Chernobyl. The radiation was so hot that Sweden initially thought the leak must have originated within their country.

The human toll of this tragedy is not known. The Soviet Union refused to acknowledge an official death toll. Estimates are as high as 400,000. People are still dying from the long term effects of the radiation. Many children living in Belarus will have their lives complicated by cancer.

The radioactive contamination was 400 times that of Hiroshima and will remain on this Earth for 48,000 years. Over 300,000 people were relocated as result of the fallout. Completely uninhabitable is the 19 mile radius zone around Chernobyl which absorbed the bulk of the fallout. This area is known as the Dead Zone.

Children had to part with their favourite toys. People had to leave everything, from photos of their grandparents to cars. Their clothes, cash and passports has all been changed by state authorities. Incredibly, people had homes, motorcycles, garages, cars, country houses, they had money, friends and relatives. People had their lives. Each had their own niche. And then in a matter of hours they smoked out and their entire world fell to pieces.

After a few hours trip in an army vehicle, they stood under a shower, washing away radiation. Then they stepped in a new life, naked with no home, no friends, no money, no past and with a very doubtful future.

Elena, young woman from Kiev, ventured into the Dead Zone on her motorcycle. Armed with a digital camera, a Geiger counter, and remarkable courage and resolve, she documented her trip. It's a haunting tale and an eerie reminder of how delicate our planet really is. You can read her account here. •

Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 20, 05 | 9:47 pm | Profile

My Celebrity Knitter Wife

My dear wife started a knitting web site almost exactly a year today. At the time there were probably thousands of knitting web sites already out there, but what set Amy's apart was the quality and volume of the content. She filmed over 100 videos using my old Minolta camera (a lesson in patience given that the camera only allowed for 30 sec. clips). The video format was unique in that it showed, in 1st person view, hands-on demonstrations of knitting techniques. Later, seeing that the site was quickly taking off, we purchased a real DVcam and more videos were quickly added. And just like in Field of Dreams she built it and they came. And oh did they come. I had never seen a site grow in popularity so fast. It was a combination of good content, good timing and a dash of good luck. People from all over visited and learned and showered Amy with emails about how they could never pick up knitting until they visited her site. The site was an overnight success and is continuing to grow with each passing month.

Yesterday Amy flew out of Logan en route to California to appear on a popular knitting TV show called Knitty Gritty which airs on the DIY network. She arrived in Burbank late last night after the usual air travel snafus. She's already hobnobbing with the stars and spent the flight from Dallas to Burbank sitting beside a couple B-list movie stars: Erin Gray who starred in Buck Rogers and Marc Singer who starred in V and beastmaster. Maybe she will cast them into the director's cut edition of the Knitting Help DVD.

We decided it was best for Amy to fly out solo. First off, Knitty Gritty doesn't pay for anything unless you consider free yarn currency. So we had to completely bankroll the trip on our own. Adding a seat for me would add another 35% to the costs. I don't like planes anyways. I have a difficult time getting over the reality of flying: being propelled through the air by explosive reactions at near the speed of sound in a hollow metal tube with wings filled with gasoline. I'm better off staying on the ground. Next time we'll probably fly out together and make a mini-vacation out of it.

Leading up to this trip we both have been very busy with tasks relating to the show. Amy has been busy working on a few patterns which she'll be presenting on the show. She was busy knitting, fine tuning, and writing them up. In fact, while I was on the phone with her last night she was still knitting up a sweater, scarf and gloves combo for the show and plotting out how to make it to a local yarn store to find more mohair to complete the project. Being married to an addict is so hard some times.

I was put to the task of taking photos of her patterns and making printready her PDF patterns which will appear on the Knitty Gritty web site. Also, on last minutes notice Amy wanted me to design her business cards and a DVD cover for an pre-production knitting DVD she's been scripting. You see, even though Knitty Gritty doesn't pay, it is an excellent opportunity for Amy to market herself, her web site, and her upcoming DVD. So born in the span of a few hours of creative sweat were the first ever KH business cards and promotional DVD cover:





We self-publish everything for KnittingHelp.com. The CD's we burn ourselves. We print the covers and labels and assemble them into double jewel cases which we buy by the hundreds. In designing for self-publishing I keep in mind the cost and complexity of printing and therefore choose to use whitespace to my advantage. Rather than fill every square inch with a color or graphic I use a minimalistic design which is elegant and simple. It makes for faster printing, less ink usage and less opportunity for printing imperfections such as banding and streaking. Eventually we will outsource the production aspects, probably once the DVD is finished.

I am eagerly awaiting Amy's first full day in Hollyword review. She was planning on going into rehersal early and then spending some time seeing some of the tourist attractions like Universal Studios. Tomorrow she does her official filming of her show. I am sure it will go over well.

The Knitty Gritty episode doesn't air until Summer of 2006. Ironically we don't watch Tv and have no way to watch it on our own. So we're going to have to find a friend to record it for us.
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Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 17, 05 | 5:16 pm | Profile

Evil Computer

Well, I was just putting the finishing touches on a brilliant blog entry; probably my best blog work ever. I just needed an image and was browsing Google for images of those flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz when my browser went and quit on me. My work quickly vanished into the ether along with my desire to continue writing. Maybe the muse will strike again. •

Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 17, 05 | 1:35 pm | Profile

NoHo in streaks and lights

Amy and I spent the late afternoon on Tuesday in Northampton. And since we had some time before our usual sing I decided to set up the camera and take some long exposures just as the sun was setting. I didn't have a tripod, so I just placed the camera on the curb elevated slightly on the lense cap. I dialed in the proper shutter and aperture settings to get the effect I wanted and used the auto-timer to trip the shutter to prevent shake. These images haven't been phototouched in anyway. The streaks of light are cars headlights and tailights being captured by the camera during the 8 second long exposure. I was very close to the cars turning down Craft Ave., so the streaks seem to almost pass over the camera.

Canon 20D with Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 @ 8s f/20 at 50mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 @ 8s f/20 at 50mm iso400



Canon 20D with Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 @ 8s f/20 at 50mm iso400

A Quick How-to

Long exposures are fairly easy to do. Here's how I took these shots using a Canon 20D Digital SLR. Any camera with manual capabilities would be able to produce similar shots. I set my camera to manual mode so I could control both the shutter speed and aperture independently. Next, I determined how long of of an exposure I needed. I knew I wanted to capture a good amount of movement and decided 8 seconds was going to produce the lenthy streaks I was going after. Next I needed to choose a film sensitivity or ISO. I guessed that ISO400 would probably work. Then, I metered (measured the light) in the frame and choose an suitable aperture. I metered the twilight sky and kept stopping down the aperture until my camera's built-in light meter indicated a correct exposure. I reach a correct exposure at f/20, a 1/3 of a stop before the smallest possible aperture on this particular lense. Had I not been able to find a correct metering within the limits of the lense I would have had to decrease the ISO to ISO200 and tried metering again. Next, using manual focus, I focused the lense at it's hyperfocal length so that everything in the frame would be equally in focus. And finally I placed the camera on the curb, set the self-timer and pressed the shutter button. The self-timer automatically trips the shutter and prevents camera shake had I manually pressed it. The shutter opens and stays open for a full 8 seconds. After 8 seconds, voila, I had my properly exposed long exposure.

Posted by: Sheldon Finlay on Oct 14, 05 | 9:33 pm | Profile