This photo was taken with my Nikkor 18-35mm f/2.8 on my D60. The lens doesn't have image stabilisation (IS in Canon lingo and VR in Nikon lingo). It's a wide angle zoom, and it's fast so you usually don't have to worry about hand holding the camera in low light (camera shake is more of a problem with telephotos and less of a problem with wide angle). It was taken at 17mm f/2.8 at 1/10 of a second. At 17mm it's the same view you'd get on a film camera as about 25mm, so the traditional rule of thumb is that you should shoot it at at least 1/30 of a second (one over focal length).

Close up (this was cropped, not resized) reveals that I got away in this case shooting a bit over one stop slower than the traditional rule of thumb. Sometimes you get lucky.

din dins

This one was also taken hand held, but with the Nikkor 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 VR that came with my D60. It was taken at 35mm f/5 at 1/4 of a second with VR turned on. This illustrates the strength and the weakness of (any form of) image stabilisation. Without the VR the dish and the tablecloth would almost certainly have been blurry. With or without VR though, the shutter speed was too slow to freeze mum's hand. You don't always want to do that of course, sometimes a blur expresses the moment better than a freeze frame.

On balance I would rather have a faster lens without VR than a slower lens with VR. Generally the faster lenses aren't as cheaply made and produce a sharper image, but they are also more flexible in low light (or even in bright light if you want to freeze a helicopter rotor blade or something like that).

Even better would be a fast VR lens of course, like the Nikkor 17-200mm f/2.8 VR. If I get one I'll shoot some tests to compare in camera image stabilisation with my Minolta Maxxum 7d + Sigma 70-200mm f/2.8 to lens optimized image stabilisation with my Nikon D60 + Nikkor 17-200mm f/2.8 VR. Should be interesting.

Happy Birthday Mum!

It was 41 degrees today.

Saw Slumdog Millionaire.

All of that was hard work and I am tired now. Goodnight.

Grandpa's slides apparently from a trip to the snowy mountains with grandma, mum and uncle graham.

Grandpa's slides from grandma, grandpa and mum's visit to the Breadknife, Lighting Ridge and the Warren Bungles. Taken in the mid 1960s in country New South Wales

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Of course grandpa isn't in any of these because he took them. Enjoying working with slides again. It's not quite as nice as a black and white dark room, but there is some enjoyment to be had at spotting old photographs and bringing them back to life. Didn't do too much work on these though, I don't feel okay about doing colour correction on grandpa's slides (do it all the time on mine), but removing dust from the scans seems legitimate.

some time in the 1980s...

people...

things...

places...

Grandpa's photos July 1983.

1. Bandelier
2. Santa Fe
3. [illegible] Springs
4. Pikes Peak

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July 1983:

I scanned another roll of grandpa’s C-41 today. These ones are from the same trip, and according to the envelope scroll include:

1. Taos
2. Bandelier
3. Rio Grande
4. Los Alamos

Los Alamos

The pond is named after someone named Ashley Pond (I kid you not)

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Taos

Rio Grande Gorge

Bandelier

hotels

Apparently grandpa took a picture of pretty much every place that we stayed
on this trip. Sort of mundane in a way, but I enjoy how everything looks just
a little bit different by being 80s.

other...

not entirely sure where these are from...

These were taken before the last set that I posted. They are all in New Mexico, closer to the area where I actually grew up. Although, again, this was long before we had any idea that we’d be moving out there. I had to spot more of these than from the last set, although the majority were completely clean! Some of them had some paper glued to the edges, put there probably by whomever had processed the film. I hate it when places do that because it is not good for the long term storage of the film.

Grandpa was a good photographer. There isn’t a single frame that is out of focus or incorrectly exposed, and the compositions are good.

August 1983, photographer: grandpa (except for the few photos with him in it). The envelope has these four names scralled on it:

1. Pikes Peak
2. Bear Lake
3. Dean Lake
4. Chasm Falls

(there maybe errors in the transcribing process, of course)

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I think these were taken on our first trip out to the Southwest, when we were living in New Haven, and therefore before we had any idea that we’d end up living there for nearly twenty years. I found these and plenty others while we were cleaning out the shack. I only did some minor spotting on two of the photographs, and colour correction on one small region of another where there was an unnatural green cast. They are in remarkably good nick given the age and how they were stored.

Apparently when my mum traded in the Tercel for the Corolla I made her feel like a heel for selling an unofficial member of the family into slavery. She reminds me of this from time to time, but I can hardly be held accountable for my actions (I think) because I was only like 12 or something at the time, and it was years ago and I am pretty sure that the statute of limitations on that sort of thing has long since expired.

When grandma passed away this year, mum inherited her house in Gosford. It is a tiny fibro hut with poor insulation and is very cold in the winter. I wonder how grandma, grandpa, mum and my namesake uncle Graham all fit in there. Somehow it is still home to me, even though I only barely remember living there before I moved to America^[1]. One day I will inherit that property, I am certain.

Mum told me today that she and Don had decided to knock the house down (I know they don’t do this lightly) and put up a bungalow. Although I will be perversely sad to see the old house go, I am also quietly breathing a sigh of relief, because, as I told my mother, I don’t think I could bring myself to knock it down or sell it or anything when I inherit it.

Sentimental, I know.

1. I usually mark my first memories with coming to America, but I do have faint glimmering memories of that house from back then

Most of the time lately I wish that I didn’t quite have both feet so firmly planted in two totally different countries. How did I wind up yearning for a life at the same time in each?

I watched 4 episodes of Doctor Who today, and one yesterday. Four were recorded from when I was in the states and one was aired on TV tonight. Two of them were really good: 42 and Blink. The other three were kind of blah. 42 was obviously a reference to Douglas Adams, who was a writer for the original series, but I think it was also a sly reference to 24, even though there was no torture involved. Blink was cool because it was one of those episodes which didn’t focus on the primary characters at all, and instead you get to see the weird havoc wrecked by the Doctor. They’ve done this once before and I think it has worked well in both cases.

Went to Aunty Joyce’s for afternoon tea today. My mum is still intimidated by her, which is kind of amusing. It’s nice to see her; I feel like seeing once somewhat estranged family fills in holes that are worth filling in. It also gives me hope. Tonight Don picked up this manual thingy and read the title: “A Practical Guide to SAX” only it sounded like “sex” to me so I asked “how practical is it?” SAX is the name of some hardware thingy that mum has at work.

Today for mum’s day we brought grandma home for a family barbecue. In this case “home” is Gosford, where nobody actually lives anymore. Anyway, mum was running late as always and so while Don and aunty Rae were picking grandma up from the nursing home, mum and I went looking for a mum’s day card for grandma. Pretty much all of mum’s day cards had been taken, and the only one with “grandma” on it was too frilly for me to take seriously (there were “nana” and “gran” cards but I have never called grandma anything but grandma, so they seemed particularly unnatural). It suddenly struck me as slightly absurd that I was standing there in the newsagency looking for a mum’s day card with my mum standing right next to me.

“Happy mum’s day, by the way.” I said.

The other lady in the store also looking for a last minute mum’s day card thought this was pretty funny. Anyway, I think that mum and grandma know how much I love them and how important they are to my life. That the Hallmark Greeting Card Cartel sponsors the day is rather beside the point. It was nice bringing grandma home for the day.

Aunty Rae and mum were looking through some of my great grandfather’s old WWI records and stuff. His given names were “Fredrick Graham”. Seeing his name on one of the papers, it reminded me that I am really named after him. I always think of myself as being named after my uncle Graham (and I am), but my mum actually called me Fred for the first few days of my life. Thankfully mum and dad agreed on Graham instead.

I am now the proud owner of a Nintendo Wii. It was a hit. Not just with me, but also with the family. Mum and Don both tried it out and all along the way nanna was coaching.

“Don’t move your hips!”

“Follow through on your swing!”

und so weite.

Then when Don got up to play nanna yelled at him to get out the way and not block her view. This, from my grandma, who hates computers, any form of technology and anything new.

Tennis is my favourite. Golf and bowling are okay, but baseball is terribly dull lacking any out fielding. Tomorrow I am going to see if I can snag Twilight Princess and an extra controler and the real gamming will begin :)

The Chrissy^[1] decorations are out already. In America don’t they usually wait until after Thanksgiving for that? Anyway, it’s not the timing that is unnerving for me, but the time of year. I know I will have to get over this, but this isn’t the time of year that you expect to see snowmen and fat guys in cold weather gear.

1. Australian for Christmas
2. the “Gong Ride” or Sydney to Wollongong bike ride
3. Or for that matter, how I managed to get along without it when I was over there

Tonight I had dinner with some long lost relatives. Actually not really; I hadn't seen them in about a year and a half. I see family on my dad's side (aside from Dad, his wife and the kids) so seldom that when I do see them it feels as though they are long and lost. I’ve never lived so close to so much family. It’s nice.

Also: my dad bought a new car. It was about time that old clunker was way too small for the size of the family. It’s so weird to think of my dad driving a car with those modern curves. I instinctively think of his car as being a boxlike refugee from the 1980s. Apparently Lara misses the old car. Reminded me of how heart broken I was when my mum sold the Tercel. That was years ago.

It was actually even pretty nice to talk to my step mother tonight. She treated me like shit when she first started dating my dad (that was years ago), but I’ve tried not to hold a grudge against her, as I think that would just hurt my dad, and solve nothing.

She is ethnically Chinese, so I got to ask her intelligent questions about which dialect of Chinese that her family spoke (she is herself essentially a native English speaker), and where her family originates from. Before I started studying Chinese input methods I was aware that there were many subtle regional differences in Chinese languages and culture, but totally ignorant about what they might be. I’m still pretty ignorant, but at least I am learning. I tried to get them to show me Tristan and Lara’s middle names, which are Chinese, and so have Chinese characters that correctly represent them. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get my laptop out of simplified Chinese mode, and my step mother only recognizes the traditional variants.

I’m pretty sure that “David”^[1] is a jerk. He came by tell me that I was working on the wrong thing today and that the resolution on my monitor reminded me of the cruddy old days when X Windows was all the rage. Hello, if you didn’t give me shit to work on then the shit that I work on wouldn’t look like shit. Blah, whatever. Either it will get better, or I’ll be gone soon. I don’t much care which.

1. guy at work who offered me the position that no longer exists