Crowd of hundreds
Actual date: October 17, 2008
The original impetus for our trip to Indonesia was that mom and dad were going to have a multiple-purpose get-together to celebrate mom’s birthday, their anniversary, their many years of service to the church (the church wanted to celebrate that–they weren’t showing off), and to give thanks for me and Denise having gotten married. That last bit was supposed to be celebrated in 2005, but that was the year of the Bali bomb incident and we took the U.S. State Department’s travel advisory (“Don’t go to Indonesia unless you have to.”) very seriously and ended up cancelling that trip. In retrospect with Indonesia being generally safe–not a warzone or anything–and our lives being in God’s hands we might’ve chosen differently with what we know now, but that’s how it went down at the time. So this get-together became a huge deal with hundreds of people invited and a huge feast of food mostly prepared and paid for by people who had known mom and dad for many years and wanted to help celebrate this occasion. » Continue Reading…
E-P1 and accessories
After using the E-P1 extensively for the past few days I feel that I have a good grasp of what it’s about, so I’m putting together a mini-review based on my experiences so far. For those of you not used to reading camera reviews by outfits such as DPReview, Imaging Resource, DCResource, etc., this will seem like a very long review. The camera nerds among us know better though. The standard DPReview… er… review is 32 (!) pages long, so I classify this as a mini-review, even though it will most likely be the longest post I’ve written on this blog to date once I’m through with it. » Continue Reading…
Froghead Grill
We put the finishing touch on a really fun Saturday with some take-out from Froghead Grill. Froghead is a locally owned restaurant in Clinton that serves a variety of dishes such as appetizers, salads, soups, sandwiches, burgers, po-boys, platters, desserts, etc. Plenty of them too. I browsed the menu and there must be around 50 or so items on it. They even serve a surprisingly good fried calamari appetizer–not what I would expect from a place like this. » Continue Reading…
Petra Cafe front porch
We continued an awesome Saturday with lunch at the Petra Cafe in Clinton–a restaurant that serves Mediterranean and Lebanese cuisine. This was our first time at Petra Cafe, and as people who have enjoyed Mediterranean food in the past we were looking forward to it. The E-P1 was once again pressed into duty and did admirably, but I’ll leave more E-P1 analysis for another post.
The building looks like an old-style Southern house because it is. According to their website, they are “located in the historic Potter House in Olde Towne Clinton”. [Denise and I like to pronounce that "Oldee Townee" in mockery of the trend of old-icizing stuff that's not that old by adding an "e" onto the end of words to mimick Ye Olde English. Ridiculous.] You walk in the front door into a big, wide hallway with dining rooms connected to it to the left and right, with beautiful tall ceilings and huge windows all around. I love these old houses and would love to own one if they didn’t a) cost a fortune and b) cost a fortune to maintain. They also have a bar area with a TV showing the latest Arabic music videos, the audio for which is piped into every room. Ambience indeed! » Continue Reading…
Pentimento book store
After seeing the reptiles, we had some time to kill before lunch, so we visited the Pentimento bookstore in downtown Clinton. They’re a locally owned bookstore that sells new and used books.
Inside Pentimento
The picture above shows most of the shop. There’s a few small rooms in the back for children’s books (their children’s book room has quite a few nice books), clearance books, and a stock room. You can see a doorway leading to those back rooms in the middle of the picture, and there’s a bookshelf there that contains the few photography books they had alongside some art and architecture books. I think the photography book section was half a shelf’s worth of books. But look what I found in that small collection of 15 books or so: » Continue Reading…
Family portrait
"I see you, little guy!"
Yesterday we visited the Clinton Community Nature Center for a demonstration on reptiles. We got there a bit early, so we looked around at the aquariums that lined the walls of the demonstration room, and I felt comfortable enough with my new E-P1 to use it for an actual outing. This is the first official outing and real workout for the E-P1, so I was looking forward to seeing how well it (and I) would perform. » Continue Reading…
I checked into the blog today and saw that I had gotten a pingback from David Tong’s “Collection of Olympus E-P1 Sites” post on his blog. Never heard of him before and positive that he’d never heard of me before either, so the long arm of the Internet has bridged this gap and made friends out of complete strangers. Hello, David. Nice to meet you!
This made me curious. I did a quick Google search for the terms “E-P1″ and “5D” and as of right now my “E-P1 vs. 5D–fight!” post is the 5th highest ranked link for those search terms. The Internet truly is the great equalizer, making it possible for posts by nobodies like me to be seen by many.
Ooh, pretty
I rode the fence for a few days on this, probably bugging the crap out of Denise with my back-and-forth. I had almost decided that it wasn’t a good value proposition at MSRP despite my heart really wanting one when I saw on a forum I frequent that somebody was selling one practically brand new but with the optional flash and a 2GB SD card for the same price as I would pay for one new without the flash and SD card. Plus I could expedite shipping for cheaper than I could with the online stores. You had me at “bargain”. » Continue Reading…
Until I started looking into Olympus’s cameras I didn’t know who Kirk Tuck was (embarrassingly enough since I own one of the books he’s written), but I’ve come to enjoy reading his blog The Visual Science Lab. He’s a very accomplished photographer and a good blogger, but I’ve got to pick on him for his recent article “Practice makes competent. Plus some Sunday observations.” It’s not obvious from the title of the post, but in it he talks about his preference for Olympus despite many rational reasons for choosing other brands for professional work (I can identify. There’s more to photography than noise measurements and resolution charts.), and he also talks about shooting RAW vs. JPEG. » Continue Reading…