At Christmas, the entire extended family got together to celebrate. While together, we took a group photo that had everyone included except my cousin Alex, who had to work.
Streeter and Nelson Families (minus Alex)
Good thing we left room for me to Photoshop her into the picture.
Streeter and Nelson Families (with Alex)
In October of this year, I traveled to Hong Kong and Nepal over a two and a half week period. From the US, there are no direct flights to Nepal; they all connect through other countries first. And from San Francisco, most connect through Hong Kong. When I saw that we'd have long layovers in Hong Kong, I decided that we should just make them into stopovers, of which I've had great success with before. In the end, I spent around 4 days in Hong Kong with my friend Wenzhe and my sister Amy. Since I've taken several trips to India and parts of Asia, I'd been to the Hong Kong airport on multiple occasions, but never did manage to step outside of the airport (or even customs for that matter). So I was excited to finally get to taste the food and see the skyscrapers I'd heard about.
Spicy Crab
We poured over episodes of No Reservations, reviews on TripAdvisor and tons of other travel blogs and sites we came across. Our plan, arrive, check into our AirBnb place, and get some delicious food. We definitely accomplished that. We ate everything from Roasted Duck (basically Peking Duck, just in Hong Kong), to spicy crab, to a Michelin Star dim sum restaurant (I went back for seconds). We organized our days around what we wanted to eat and where we wanted to eat, then fit in places to see from there.
Fish Market
A visit to Hong Kong is almost never complete without ...
It's been a while since we last took any Streeter Family photos. So while together for Thanksgiving this year, I rounded us all up and took a hundred pictures. Then I picked out two that actually came out. See them below, along with one we took while at Lake Tahoe cutting down trees.
Streeter Family
Streeters on Lake Tahoe
Streeter Family with Grady
I haven't taken many pictures lately, and wanted to get back in the habit. This past Sunday, I woke up early and drove up to Russian Ridge Open Space for the sunrise. Here are a couple pictures from the trip.
Valley Sunrise
Bay Area Sunrise
Setting Moon
What does one do when one has a cabin in Truckee and a season pass to a ski resort that is blacked out? Well, in my case, I still want to be active in the snow. Over the past week, I decided to go snowshoeing up near Donner Lake. Family and friends parked near Donner Summit and then followed part of the Pacific Crest Trail south towards Sugar Bowl until we were able to overlook Donner Lake on a beautiful day.
Forging a Trail
Icicles
Then, a few days later, on New Years Eve day, I went nordic skiing for my first time ever. We started at the State Park at the east end of Donner Lake and followed a trail several miles out, for about a four hour trip. By the end, I was definitely ready to be done with the skis, and probably won't go that long again until I'm a bit more experienced on skis (downhill and nordic). It definitely didn't sour my first experience though and I plan on going at least several more times this winter.
First Time Nordic Skiing
Snow and Shadows
After Thanksgiving at my parent's house, I took off with some friends to Bishop for 3 days of bouldering and some sport climbing. We arrived just after some storms had passed through the area, leaving a light dusting of snow in some places.
Eastern Sierras Under Shadow
Then, right in the middle of the trip, we got a couple inches of snow in the evening, electing to remain at our site camping in it.
Fresh Snow
In the end, Bishop was super cold (got down to the mid teens at night) but provided some great climbing in the Buttermilks, Gorge and Happys. Makes me look forward to another climbing trip soon!
Star Trails
I've wanted to recently upload some of my pictures to Facebook. However, there are several things I really dislike about Aperture's built-in Facebook syncing.
First, order is not preserved. I want pictures ordered in a predicable way. Often, by date. I have yet to figure out how Aperture chooses to export, it seems to be quite random and is infuriating.
Second, tagging friends on Facebook from the built-in Aperture Faces is spotty, at best. Sometimes it works, and other times I get lots of pictures with people's names tagged, but those names are not linked to the proper Facebook friends, despite being tagged with the exact same name. Again infuriating!
Third, making any change in Aperture (adding a tag, etc), causes the photo to be re-uploaded to Facebook, creating an updated photo album feed story. I don't want this behavior. I want to export my photos to Facebook and then choose when it should be updated again. I'll let you guess my emotion.
So, what other options are there out there? Well, this guy Sean Farley created a plugin. However, it is broken on my computer. Supposedly, it does work for some people on Aperture 3, but I cannot get it to even show up in the Export menu and I get no Console messages. I've even emailed Sean twice trying to contact him and help figure out why it is broken. No response.
Finally, I've given up with these options. I'm not a prolific Facebook photo uploader, but there are times when I want to put up pictures on Facebook instead of Flickr. And I couldn't do it without exporting the photos from Aperture to my disk, and then using Facebook's photo upload.
So over the past couple weeks ...
I recently purchased a wide angle lens for my new Nikon D7000. I thought a lot about the wide angle lens options available for the camera and found there are essentially 5 options for people with Nikon DX bodies:
There is a fixed aperture (f/2.8) Tokina with a smaller range (11mm - 16mm), but I really wanted a lens with a larger range. This lens is going to cover the smaller end for me in my bag. Plus that Tokina is expensive... Then I debated for a long time which to get. So I went back to the inital reason why I wanted a wide angle lens: I wanted the exaggerated depth you can get with a really wide angle lens. That gave good arguments against one of the Nikons and the Tokina. That extra 2mm the Sigma and Tamron have really makes a big difference on DX a body. Granted, the Nikon glass is going to be really awesome, but it also costs a lot more for the 12-24 (~$250) and even more for the 10-24. The Tokina is really tempting, and DPRreview makes it seem like a great lens. Even though it is a bit less expensive than the Sigma and Tamron, I decided that I did want that extra focal length.
Thus, I was left with the Sigma and Tamron. Eventually, it just came down to having used the Sigma quite a bit. A buddy of mine has the Sigma, and I've used it a number of times on photo trips ...
After the Cal game this past weekend, I took off for a quick two night trip to Monterey and Big Sur. I went to the former to see my sister run the Big Sur Half Marathon and to the latter because I had never been there. I figured I'd take my camera and shoot some photos along the way as well.
Driveway
Highway One
Bridge at Sunset
Last Saturday was the last night game that will be played in the old Memorial Stadium. After this season, the stadium will be renovated for earthquake safety and to create a new and competitive student athlete center. Next season the Bears will play at AT&T park in San Francisco, home of the World Champion Giants before returning to a renovated Memorial Stadium in 2012.
Unfortunately for us, our last night game was against number 1 Oregon. Though we didn't win, we came really close, losing 13 - 15, which was a spectacular game for Cal's defense. I used the opportunity to take a couple pictures with my new camera.
Sunset at Memorial Stadium
This coming Saturday is the 113th Big Game at Cal. Cal has held the Axe for 2 years straight, and 7 out of the last 8 years. So far, for every Big Game I've gone to and every Big Game that Dean has been at Stanfurd during, Cal has won. The one year I didn't attend (I was in India) and Dean wasn't attending Stanfurd, Cal lost (2007). In other words, Cal is about to upset #8 Stanfurd.
Last Memorial Stadium Night Game
As far as my pictures I took with my camera, I have been extremely impressed with the Nikon D7000's very high dynamic range. All the pictures here are untouched JPEGs, straight from the camera (Aperture can't yet process the D7000's RAW images - plus I ...
