Bali Motorcycle Road-tripping
Here's the motorbike I rented that I've been using to explore Bali the past several days. Instead of succumbing to the constant calls of "transport," I can go wherever I please for the low, low price of $4 USD / day.
Beach Sunset
A few pictures from Bali are now up. Check them out.
Singapore Opera House
I've posted several of my pictures from Singapore on my previous posts. But here's a link to all of the pictures.
I'm a heavy user of Apple's Aperture. I enjoy taking photos and then use Aperture to organize and do basic touch-ups for those photos. Earlier this year, Apple released version 3.0, which had numerous enhancements (my favorite is localized adjustments) and compelled me to upgrade. Since that date, I've almost been extremely close to regretting my decision every time I opened the application. Version 3.0 added a bunch of new features, but something has been killing the performance on my brand new 15" MacBook Pro. When I have the latest hardware with 4 gigs of RAM, I shouldn't have to wait 10+ seconds to enter full screen mode or to view the next photo. There was absolutely no reason for this other than the updates to Aperture. The subsequent version updates (up to the recent 3.0.3 update) did nothing to alleviate my wait-times, they only squashed bugs I ran into.
Lately, I've been using Aperture more than ever because several recent trips I've gone on have left me with a ton of pictures to go organize. If it wasn't for the fact that I've got 8+ years of photos and associated metadata, I would have jumped ship months ago. I've tried all of Aperture's First Aid options (accessed by holding Option-Command when opening the app): rebuilding permissions (this shouldn't cause performance issues, but hey, I was desperate), repairing the database and finally resorting the the rebuild database option. I felt like the speed increased slightly after repairing the database and was optimistic that my problems were solved. Yet, I still had issues. I've been convinced that this has been a disk related as my memory and CPU are never loaded very heavily when I ...
Whale Vertebrae
I have finally gotten around to posting more pictures from Venezuela. I posted them to Flickr in my Venezuelan set. There is also a slideshow on Flickr and the photos are also on my site.
Enjoy!
Colorful Address
This past Sunday, a buddy and I met up to head out on a photo shoot. I've had a goal of trying to take more pictures and also to think more about the pictures I'm taking, and going on a trip with the explicit goal of taking pictures is exactly what I need to do. We did this once before at the Arastradero Open Space in Palo Alto.
So Wenzhe and I met up and drove to a place he had visited before, Alviso, CA. Alviso is on the South edge of the San Francisco Bay, situated between Moffett and Milpitas. There are a number of older buildings, some train tracks and promised to hold some interesting subjects near sunset. I ended up taking quite a few shots (180+ in total) and narrowed it down to 31 pictures that I found interesting. One of my goals this trip was to think about different ways that a scene could be cropped once the picture was taken. So I'd take a picture thinking that it might work one way, but a subset of the frame could work with a different crop. So I tried experimenting with that in mind a bit.
Check out the pictures and let me know your thoughts.
Railay East Sunrise
I've finally gotten around to finishing tagging, titling and describing my trip to Singapore and Thailand that occurred in March (!!) of this year. I know that it is really late, but I guess it is better than never. I put all the pictures up on flickr for people to check out. Since I've got flickr integration now, you can see the pictures in my photo gallery on my site. I've changed the privacy settings for all the pictures that have people (I know) in them, so to see those you will need to be a contact of mine on flickr. However for all the other ones, you can check them out on my site.
I also have the trip up on my travel page, so you can get a general idea of where I went. You can check it out at here.
