I admit it, I can be materialistic but it’s only because I like shiny new things!

Posted by Steve Hanna on February 5th, 2008 filed in Random Tags: art, bill and ted's excellent adventure, camera, nikon d40, photography, picasa, prime lens, research, the mission flickr

Around July, I bought a new camera after not having one since my camera broke during my visit to France. My trusty old Powershot of the 3.2 MP variety had an array of settings that made it fun to use. For a fairly low end camera, it had M, A, P settings and a whole lot of other toys to play with that really taught me a lot about how cameras work (note: this is not the same as being good with a camera and composing shots, I suck at that).

Well, after waiting a while to buy a new one, I settled on the Canon Powershot SD750. Well, it’s a great camera for point and shoot purposes, but to be quite honest, I was really disappointed with it. While it had a whopping 7.1MP, I felt like it lacked the fine-grained control that I used previously. After playing with it since July, I decided that I was going to sell my Toshiba Tecra M4 Tablet and turn it into a Nikon D40. Well, I got my camera a few weeks ago and I lovelovelovelove love it! I’ve been shooting non-stop and hopefully I’ll eventually become proficient and quick with adjusting settings for optimal snapshots.

After a lot of frustration with auto-magic mode, at the advice of these savvy photographers I decided to switch to purely manual mode. Now I admit, I waste a lot of shots getting the settings right, but my latest photographs have been much better than when I just used auto mode.

After shooting for a while, I realized that I have been doing a lot of indoor, low-light shots, where a flash would really ruin the photographs (and not to mention the fact it is incredibly annoying), so I decided to buy a Nikon Nikkor 50mm/1.8d prime lens. It hasn’t arrived yet, but a fast lens will be really fun to play with. The only downside I guess is that the D40 doesn’t support AF lenses, only AF-S; so it looks like I’ll have to be even quicker on the draw and manually focus it! Oh well, hopefully I can turn faux-art into something a little closer to art…for now I’ll settle for pseudo-art. It’s nice to finally have some sort of an outlet for my artistic side. Who thought that the kid who wanted to draw Magic: The Gathering cards in 5th grade for a living would abandon his preliminary career choice and end up being a computer scientist? I’m as surprised as you are, although both endeavors are equally as nerdy.

Anyhow, this post isn’t very interesting, but Kevin told me I should make an update. I’ve ditched Picasa and switched to Flickr. In fact, the feed on the side of the page should give you some of my recent photographs. I love Flickr so far, I bought a pro account and I have unlimited storage space of the high resolution versions of my photos. I really like the layout compared to Picasa as well.

As far as my current status, I’d say that life has been a whole lot of fun lately. Leo came to visit Berkeley with Parisa and Peter and we all had ridiculously awesome time. More recently, John, Kevin, Mark and Mike and I have been hanging out in the Mission a whole lot and basically doing our best to have as many excellent adventures as possible. We’ve been time traveling too!

Other things I’ve been doing include reading a ton of research papers, fleshing out the ideas for my latest research project, looking for a summer internship, and working on some independent consulting. This semester will be far busier than the last!

Anyhow, here are some pictures that I’ve taken recently. If you’re on Flickr, I’d love to hear comments or suggestions.