trisweb.com

I’ve selected and uploaded 100 of my best photographs ever. I thought I’d only come up with 20 or 30 or so worthy of putting in this collection, and while I admit that maybe they’re not all the best, I’d consider it a pretty good overview of my photographic experience thus far.

I’m highly critical of others and not critical enough of myself, so I appreciate comments of all kinds. My thoughts are that I’m obsessed with three things in general: skies, reflections, and shadows. I always try to frame a shot in some interesting way rather than just point my camera straight at the subject.

I know you can’t see it with the small images, but the truth is, my camera (a Casio Exilim 2MP) isn’t good. The quality of the CCD is horrible. All images turn out grainy and pixelated, and that can only be fixed by resizing down. So prints are bad. It also has no possibility of macro. But the good thing is that it’s really really small, so I always have a camera. Many of the photos in this collection were taken with borrowed friends’ cameras, including a 5MP Sony Cybershot, my dad’s 2MP Canon, and my brother’s 3MP Nikon, all of which have great optics and macro modes.

Anyway, take a look at the photos and give me comments! I won’t blame you if you don’t look at them all. I went a little overboard.

Preface: Keep in mind that the only reason I care about audio fidelity and sound quality is that I care about good music. I love music of all kinds, and I believe it deserves faithful reproduction. I make it a point never to forget why I strive for better quality audio.

The trend in recorded audio quality has been a bell curve over the last hundred years or so. From the phonograph to the LP to higher quality recording and digital mastering, to the slight step down with the move from vinyl to CD, music is moving today toward a huge decline with the advent of “perceptual compression” like mp3 and other formats. The music industry should know that it’s their fault entirely that this decline happened, and that it led to the entire mp3 revolution, the file-sharing predicament, and the eventual decline of the physical media.

I was reading an article in the SF Chronicle this morning about a blogger Justin Hall (links.net) who had been blogging for eleven years (in some form or another). That’s quite a feat. I’ve been going for only three, and while I don’t feel like a newcomer anymore, man, eleven years I can’t even imagine at this point. For thousands of people, blogging is a way of life; we share details of our lives, link the internet together inextricably, and share knowledge to no end. But someday you have to stop. Like life, blogs can’t go on forever. So the question is, when do we stop? And what happens to our blogs when we do?

Just found out my dog Poppy died on Monday. It was something we all expected, like it could happen anytime. After all, she was fourteen years old. But like most things you expect to happen, there’s always that feeling that it won’t happen today, but sometime way off in the future that you don’t have to worry about yet. That’s how this was.

Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been debating with Ryan lately about lots of things mostly having to do with religion. The whole thing (so far) amounts to about ten pages of very rich reading. It’s sure to bring out your innermost beliefs.

Now if only I could write like that on my paper…

I’ll give a little story to go with the photo this time. This is Mammoth Peak, in Yosemite—or, really, Tuolumne Meadows, the part of Yosemite that most people don’t visit. This is where I go… whenever I can. It is my second home; a place where I feel as comfortable as I am in my own backyard; because it is, really.

So I climbed this mountain with my dad a few years ago. If there ever was, or ever will be a time when I consider myself growing up a notch, that was it. I conquered a mountain; I stood above the rest of the world, looked down, and stood in awe.

Actually, it’s quite hard to think profoundly at 13,000 feet. It’s not the lack of oxygen, but something else, I don’t know what. All you can do is watch. Thoughts come later, like when you’re sitting at a desk getting electrons shot at your eyes all day; you close them, and the view from the top of a mountain is there, and all you can think about is how amazing it is, how much you want to be there right at that instant, free from everything.

If only life was always as simple as a mountain….

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1600×1200

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1600×1200

1024×768 | 1152×864 | 1600×1200

Help downloading wallpaper: Just click the appropriate link (if in doubt, just click the thumbnail), right-click the image and choose “Set as Wallpaper” or equivalent. If you want to save it, right click the image and choose “Save image as…” or equivalent.