Real Car Pictures

Ten years ago, in 1996, I bought a 1993 Ford Ranger in the spring in Alabama. I drove that car all over the place. Seriously. I took it with me when I lived in the high desert in Utah, and drove into all kinds of places it probably shouldn't have gone. I drove it for the 4 years I lived in Seattle. I drove it all through the Canadian Rockies and Montana. I drove it from Seattle to Alaska, and I've been driving it for the 5 years I've lived here. I drove it nearly up to the arctic circle in the Yukon. Maybe I've gotten lucky, but it's never broken down and it's got 150k miles on it.


A Speedo-Meter is included in every vehicle at no extra charge


Styling that can only be described as "Sufficient"

Now it's 2006 and this late spring I bought a 2003 Ford Ranger. Kinda weird how the dates match up. This one is much improved, with an engine twice as big, an extended cab, and 4 wheel drive. 4 wheel drive was the most important factor for me, because I'm sick to death of driving around in the winter here with just a "one wheel wonder" (as they call it up here). I didn't set out get another Ranger, I'd actually prefer to have a Toyota, but those are hella expensive, and this particular Ranger was the only good deal that I came across.



So since I got a new truck I had to go take some pictures of it. Car advertisement type pictures. It was fun, but you'd be surprised how challenging it is to make a Ford Ranger look like a desirable vehicle. You have to get it nice and shiny, and then drive it to a good location. BUT you can't drive it very far or it won't be nice and shiny any more. And you have to do it on a day with perfect car advertisement lighting. If you pay attention you'll notice that car advertisements rarely feature direct sunlight on the vehicle, unless they are in the desert. In the desert it's hard to avoid direct lighting so they often compensate with weird superpolarizing filters that I think is more often post processing than an actual lens attachment. But photos with great reflections you want the area behind the camera to actually be in direct sunlight. So that's an bit of a limitation in the location of choice. Great reflections make the car look like a piece of candy, but if you want to focus on the details of a car, and it's actual color, an overcast day works well. So there's lot's of fun little details you can play around with.

Alright. Enough car stuff on this blog. Next time I'm putting up some real scenery.

Virtual Photography

I like video games, I like video games a lot! I think video games are as good as fried chicken. They keep getting better looking, and now many of them offer "photo" modes so that you can take pictures of what you are seeing. To me there's no point in using that feature if you can't transfer the images to another medium, like your computer.


I've wasted a lot of time this spring playing my xbox 360. I've been trying to convince my dad to get one. He's a big car guy, so I thought he'd be impressed with this game Project Gotham Racing. It has a good photomode but you can only look at the photos you take in the game itself. That's frustrating because it means you can't show your images or describe it to anyone who doesn't have an xbox 360 and also the game. So I figured out how to take pictures of the television screen in a way that doesn't degrade the image too badly, and overcomes the refresh rate issue (for the most part). I can finally share my videogame pictures outside of the stupid game console. Yes, it's been killing me. I bet whoever is reading this is sooooo excited. Ha... These are all pictures I took of my in-game photos from some of the replays of my races.


I think they look great considering they are just pictures of a television screen. Even clicking on these to see the larger versions they still look great, a little softer than what you'd actually see, but far better than my former attempts at taking stupid pictures of a T.V. screen. Project Gotham is alright as a racing game, but these first games that have come out for this current "next" generation look good enough that I'm very excited about what things will be like a few years down the road.







If you mess with the depth of field then for some reason the cars on the tracks come out looking like little miniature cars. To me they actually look more realistic than the other shots. It's just that they look like more realistic miniature plastic cars than they would otherwise. The ones below came out looking like that.

Pandora

I thought I would explain what the new tab to the right it where it says "My Favorite Songs" because it's been bugging me that it says that. I use a program called Pandora to listen to music sometimes while I'm working or browsing the web. It lets you create music "stations" based on music you tell it you like. Each station would start out from a band that you specify, then the program tries to introduce you to new music that has similar qualities to the band you originally named. You can then tell it if it sucks or not. I find that it works great for me if I just let it know what I don't like and only occasionally give a thumbs up to some song I think is particularly good.

Anyway, it let's you create a "favorites" list so you don't forget about stuff and let's you link that list to your blog, which I did. It automatically makes it say "my favorite songs" as opposed to "songs of the week" or "stuff I might get sometime". For the most part, they are all songs I like, but don't own. Some I have heard before but many of them were introduced to me by Pandora.