Attentive Pupil

One of the fair princesses is getting some pointers in blacksmithing. Photographed with a Sony a700 and a Sony 16-80mm f/3.5-4.5 Carl Zeiss Vario-Sonnar T zoom lens. The monochrome shot is the straight-out-of-camera JPEG, while the color shot below is processed from the .ARW file.

Meme Dump!

Elsewhere...

• Training by Sight


• 1967 Mustang

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Gear Check

I've learned in the past to check and make sure I had a memory card in the camera when I left the house. Apparently I need to remind myself to check and make sure the battery's got a good charge on it before leaving, too.

I got to the Fair yesterday morning with the Sony a700 and, after my customary morning lemonade I wandered over to the Pioneer Village show to start taking pictures, and the camera wouldn't power on. I pulled the battery and reinserted it and it had just enough charge to illuminate the screen with the "battery is exhausted" message.

The a700, which is really just a Minolta Maxxum 7D successor in Sony drag, is one of those cameras that will slowly drain a battery as it sits. Put a fully charged battery in it and in four or five days it'll be spent. I'd last checked the battery on Sunday around lunch and by 10AM on Tuesday morning it was kaput.

Fortunately it was Two Dollar Tuesday at the State Fair yesterday so I wasn't out a sixteen buck gate fee.

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Spray Tip

If you're buying defense spray, avoid CS spray or the kind that claims to mix CS in with the normal OC (oleoresin capsaicin) pepper spray.

CS takes a while to actually take effect (ask your friends who've had to go through the gas mask stuff in military basic) as the crystals dissolve and release their evil magicks, whereas OC takes effect as soon as it comes in contact with a mucous membrane.

I don't know about you, but it doesn't do me any good if a bad guy suddenly gets all teary-eyed and runny-nosed when he's thirty seconds or a minute into beating my ass.

Get Pom. Compact, good range, and an innocuous-looking dispenser that doesn't draw a lot of attention when sitting in a pocket or on a keychain.

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Meme Dump!

Monday Memes!

Fair Folk

People I saw at the State Fair...

Meme Dump!

Backyard Safari

So, on Thursday I needed to put some miles on the Mustang to keep the battery charged up, and I decided I'd nip down to Roberts Camera after lunch and grab a couple rolls of film to toss in the freezer for later.

I got in the car with my camera and the little canvas tote bag I carry that holds my iPad and my handy umbrella and motored on downtown. It's not far, a fifteen or twenty minute drive on surface streets. One of the guys who works there lives near me and he does it by bicycle on the Monon Trail nearly year 'round.

My tote bag.

I got there and grabbed a couple rolls of film. While I was idly nosing around in the used camera department I spotted an old Nikon D2H pro body in really nice shape. They had it packaged with an inexpensive 50mm f/1.8 AF-D Nikkor, a battery & charger, and a formatted CF card already installed for a little over a C-note.

Now, I'm a sucker for old pro bodies and the D2H's slower, higher resolution cousin, the D2X, has been a stalwart for me. The D2H is doubly interesting because it used Nikon's proprietary LBCAST sensor technology, the only camera to do so, before Nikon went to CMOS sensors like everyone else.

I rang up my purchases and was on my way out the door when I glanced at the wall of clearance bags hanging on the wall next to the exit, and there was a blue Peak Design Everyday Sling, like this one, but in the smaller 6L size. "Think how much money I'm saving!", I thought to myself as I took it to the cash register.

So I got home with my purchases and began unloading the car. Now, I had three bags and the DSLR around my neck to ferry through the detached garage and to the picnic table in the back yard where I would set them as I unlocked the back door of the house. 

I transferred them in stages to the hood of the Zed Drei in the garage, shut the overhead garage door, then staged them in two trips to the picnic table, pulling the door on the garage shut behind me after the second trip, giving the knob a little conscientious twist to make sure I'd locked it.

Now to unlock the back door of the house...

...uh...

...with the keys that were still sitting in a little pile on the roof of the car in the locked garage.

So I got to spend Thursday afternoon sitting in the back yard waiting for Bobbi to get home from work.

Oops.

Meme Dump!

Busting the Myths About Car Holsters

One Ford gave its life in the name of science to make this video...

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Tab Clearing...

• Swiss politicians push to cancel order of three dozen Lockheed-Martin F-35 fighters in response to tariffs.


• US government easing criticism of foreign nations for human rights abuses.


• Pepperidge Farm remembers when the GOP was big on states rights.

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When the Viewer is Part of the Art

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A post shared by Austyn de Lugo-Liston (@austynliston)

Meme Dump!

Dark Groundhog Day

Bobbi and I stumbled across a Brit TV series called The Lazarus Project about a dude who notices that he is living the same stretch of time repeatedly. It turns out that there's a secret organization with a time machine whose job is preventing cataclysmic disasters... plagues, thermonuclear wars, that sort of thing ...and he's a mutant who can detect the timeline being tampered with. He gets recruited into the outfit and becomes a time agent.

We're two episodes in and I'm hooked.

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Draft Animals

Yesterday morning at the State Fair I was shooting the Olympus OM-D E-M1X with the M. Zuiko Digital 40-150mm f/2.8 PRO. Given the 2X crop factor of the Micro Four Thirds sensor, that's the equivalent of an 80-300mm lens on full frame, so a lot more reach than I had on Friday.

These three shots are JPEGs straight out of the camera.

Memes of the Mid-Week!

Meme Dump!

Debating...

There's rain in the area today, and although it's supposed to be dry from nine in the morning through noon, I was going to give the fair a miss. The Pioneer Village show will be curtailed somewhat by the weather, and it'll be muddy off the sidewalks.

On the other hand, admission on Tuesdays is only two bucks, and it's just a ten minute bike ride away.

Hrmmm...

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Memeing Monday!

Fair Weather

The first day of the State Fair, last Friday, dawned clear and sunny. A front had blown through on Thursday and the humidity that had been stifling for the last week or two was gone. Further, the temperature was only supposed to reach 71 or 72, and that by late afternoon.

I grabbed the Canon EOS R and the RF 24-105mm f/4-7.1 IS zoom lens, hopped on my trusty bicycle, and pedaled down the Monon Trail to the fairgrounds.

My fair routine has gelled pretty nicely over the last couple years. With the paved trail on the north side of 42nd Street completed, it's easy to take a left off the Monon and chain my bike to the fence outside Gate 12 on the north side of the State Fairgrounds, the closest one to Pioneer Village. I get there a few minutes before the first show of the day, which gives me time to grab a fresh-squeezed lemonade and chill in the shade after my short ride.

The 24-105 is a good general walking-around focal length range, but a little short for the kind of photography I like best, which is candid portraiture. You wind up with a lot of foreground.

That's okay, though, since I have eight more weekdays of fair action and plenty of longer lenses.

The weather on Friday was great, but Friday was also the last day of summer vacation for Indianapolis Public Schools, and it started getting pretty people-y up in there by 11:00AM, and so I split a little before noon. More fun come Tuesday!

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Meme Dump!

Automotif DLXXXVI...

I remember when Mercedes and BMW model numbers made sense, when they were all ordnung, but now they don't necessarily have much to do with what's going on under the hood. Take this SL400, for instance. If I told younger me that there was an SL400 Benz in 2014, younger me would have assumed it had a 4.0L under the hood, probably a V-8.

Wrong. It's got a 3.0L twin-turbo V-6. I'm not even used to Mercedes having V-6's yet and now they won't put the right number on them.

I'm gonna go yell at a cloud.

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Can't make this stuff up...

Yes, this is a real tweet from the GOP's official account.

Yes, the car in the picture is a Lada. A Soviet-era Lada.

Stand Here to Click...

Jim Grey talking about his visit to Westminster Palace, mentioned that photography on the premises, which is the home of Parliament, is pretty heavily regulated.

"We wrapped up our tour by walking out onto a patio that overlooks the Thames. On the pavement is a large black rectangle with a camera icon in the middle. It’s the only place from which photography is permitted on this patio."

I immediately went to check the GoogleSat, and sure enough...

Meme Dump!

It's that time of year again!

Getting ready to head down for my initial scouting run at the 2025 Indiana State Fair to plan out my schedule for next week.

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