DeArmond.net

I saw this beautiful scene driving home from Kirkwood. I just had to pull over and take a shot. Sunsets are particularly hard to photograph. The light is all different colors, so the white-balance setting on your camera can get thrown off, and when a distant subject is, itself, luminescent, (the sky) getting detail in a foreground object is almost impossible. A flash could work if the subject was small enough and close enough (the trees were neither). Fortunately, silhouettes are quite attractive as well.

I took this picture with my Canon S50 on a mini tripod. I opened the sunroof on my (late) Pathfinder and rested the tripod on the roof (a very handy technique). The tripod was necessary because, despite all the extra light, I had to set the shutter-speed to 0.8 seconds.

The moon was just a bonus. (No Photoshop required.)

There was an interesting announcement today which came directly from Apple: The new Intel-powered Macs (MacBook Pro, and the 2006 iMac) are able to boot natively to Windows XP using an Apple utility called Boot Camp. This means that if you're a Mac fan, but there's this one piece of software that you HAVE to use, you can still buy a Mac and run your software natively on Mac hardware. This also means, however, that you get to deal with all the insecurities which are part and partial to the whole Windows package. You also have to actually purchase Windows XP ($194.99).

Still, this is a big step. For many people on the fence, this is likely to be the feature that will convince them to purchase a Mac. Shawn's crystal ball says: lots of users with this "dual-boot" setup with Windows and Mac OS X on their Mac. The Windows side will be totally screwed up with your choice of malware, while the Mac side will be running just fine. People will choose to use Mac OS X instead of fix Windows.

Boot Camp is currently in public beta, which means it's free to download, but use it with a grain of salt because it's not officially a finished piece of software. It will be officially released as part of Mac OS X 10.5 "Leopard" whenever that comes out (probably early 2007).

In any case, I've heard reports of it working as promised. The next step is to have both operating systems running simultaneously, so you don't have to restart your computer to get to Windows. Also, look for Linux to be available in a similar configuration.

This photo was taken in May 2005 right across the street from our house. We had an unbelievable butterfly migration that passed right through Woodland. These Painted Lady butterflies congregated on these privet bushes; there were three bushes in a row, and each one probably had about 50 butterflies crawling on it. Every time a car blew by, they would all take off at once, fly around for a few seconds, and then land again.

Well, we have to start somewhere, so let's start with one of my earliest digital pictures... but still one of my favorites. This is a grasshopper sitting on top of a purple flower. The grasshopper is about a centimeter long. Needless to say, I used a macro lens for this photo. If you can tell me the species of grasshopper or flower, please leave a comment.