By popular request (well, one person requested it), here’s yet another post. There’s just one problem: I’ve got nothing good to write about. But, even without the request, I didn’t want ten days to go by without a new post.

So, without further ado, here’s a random photo post by yours truly.

These, above and below, were taken on the 16th, the same day as that panoramic photo. I had little to do, earlier in the day, so I just took a bunch of plant close-ups. I was also testing how to get shallower depth of field using my point & shoot camera after having read about it the day before.

These other ones were taken today yesterday. These are more random than the above. I had installed CHDK on my camera, and I was testing it everywhere. Other than manual control of shutter speed and being able to use optical zoom for video recordings, I haven’t gained much benefits from this upgrade. I was hoping for manual aperture control (my primary reason for installing this firmware), but turns out the camera doesn’t have an iris diaphragm. Just an internal ND filter which I can now control, but still not good for long exposures in daylight. Oh, well.

In the afternoon, I was watching this rather sad documentary called The Last Days of Left Eye. It’s rather depressing, because she had so many plans for the future, and her life was cut short by a car accident. What I didn’t know when I first heard the news that she died, is that she was filming a documentary about her life, and much less that there was actual footage of the moment when she died. I knew little about her until this moment (I just liked TLC’s music!) and, after watching that, it feels a bit as if I had met her personally.

At night, there was a power outage. Didn’t last long, but I got bored and sat on the balcony, still taking photos. It was very dark outside, and I could only see the lights coming from the house in front (pictured above). I spent the whole time taking long exposures.

By the way, a couple of photos weren’t going to make it into this post. Some, like that first remote control one and the long exposures, were far too noisy (evil chroma noise, see here to learn what that is). Thanks to the magic of the wavelet denoise plugin for GIMP, I was able to get rid of the noise while leaving details untouched. Anyway …

This post should be enough proof that I’m still around. It’s a long weekend that has yet to end. Today is the day of Juan Pablo Duarte (the nation’s forefather), and I’ve done some serious procrastination. I’ve got quite a lot of work to do for this week, and I spent the last two days doing pretty much nothing (I’m good at that). Better get an early start tomorrow later today if I want to get things done!