I’ve updated my website and moved the blog off to https://blog.samgrover.com/. I will update this feed to splice in more stuff at some point in the future. I’ll let you know when I do that. You may want to move to the blog only feed now or later.

I tried Movable Type over the last two months and didn’t like it much at all. So, I’ve migrated the blog to use Wordpress. Wordpress has a lot of community support and plugins that make it a great choice. It also seems simpler to use and maintain. I continue to support OpenID for comments.

I’m gonna work on tweaking the look and feel of the website over the next few days so come back to check it out later. I’ll also be expanding its focus.

 The result of a little informal poll I did after Super Tuesday. There were 151 responses. Mitt Romney has since dropped out.

It was heavier than I expected. I had ignored my cardinal law in purchasing a camera, “Hold it in your hands to see how it feels”. One year has gone by with me using the Bessa exclusively, and I love it.

I bought it along with a 50mm Nokton f/1.5 lens and an adapter. The camera has an M mount, whereas the lens is a screw mount, so I needed an adapter. My plan was that if I liked this enough I could get an M mount Leica lens in the future and it would fit just fine with the camera. I still plan on doing that. Perhaps a 35mm lens, but more on that later. I bought this Bessa at CameraQuest, a website that I haven’t visited since then. I never planned on buying more of this system and I never had any issues.

My early experience with a rangefinder camera was in 2006 when I borrowed a Canonet QL17 G-III from my friend Doug. At the end of that month I was hooked and understood why the rangefinder is the best camera for street photography. A sentiment expressed by many a famous street photographers of the last century. My favorite part about a rangefinder is that since I can see the frame lines, I can see the things that I’m not including in the frame. You can never do that with an SLR. That allows me to frame the shot best, especially on the street when I have only a fraction of a second to frame and shoot a photo. I don’t have to worry about focusing because I pre-focus and set a high depth-of-field. When I bring the camera to my eye, all I have to do is frame and click. And I love it when the camera goes “click”. The Bessa has a quick sharp sound that is barely noticeable as compared to the extended louder sound of the DSLR.

Another characteristic of the rangefinder is that you can see the photo at the moment of exposure, while in the SLR you just see nothing. As a result, at the beginning, my timing was a bit off with this camera, but not only did I get used to it, I started to love it. Most of the time I take a photo, I just click one frame. No second chance. So it helps to know if I got what I was going for, even though the suspense remains until I actually get the film processed.

Over the last year I’ve put up 193 photos taken with this camera on my Flickr photostream, about 76% of all my uploaded photos for 2007. That’s not an immense number and probably would’ve been even smaller had I not made the trips to Burning Man and to India. I put up 481 photos in 2006 and 807 photos in 2005. I think the trend is down because the cost of using film has made me frugal.

I like using film because of the texture that it imparts to a photograph. I haven’t experimented a whole lot with different films, and settled quite early with Tri-X. Most of the time I push it to ISO 1600 and gives me just the right kind of contrast I like. It also helps to push the film in Portland, since most days are overcast and higher ISO films cost more ;-) Having said that, more and more manufacturers of are moving out of the 35mm film market. That trend has me thinking of digital rangefinders for the future. We’ll see how that goes.

I think I’ve spent enough time with the 50mm lens to now explore more primes. I would prefer to go wider, as that’s what I find lacking sometimes when I frame a shot. Also, I think it would help me get closer while out on the street. So, sometime this year, I’ll get a 35mm M mount lens, hopefully a Leica one. After all, that was the plan :-)

Ever since I heard “Lawyers, Guns and Money”, I’ve wanted to hear more of Warren Zevon’s music. So this week I bought “The Best Of Warren Zevon” at Amazon’s MP3 store. I’ve listened to it twice and now there are a few more of his songs that I really like.

A new favorite song is Lily Allen’s “Alfie” which I first heard way back, and then again recently on the podcast of the wonderful NPR show, All Songs Considered. It’s quite pop-ish.

Recipe for a smoothie: Two Frozen Bananas, Three Frozen Strawberries, One Frozen Peach, Vanilla extract (to taste), Two glasses rice milk. Blend. Serves two. Experiment with quantities!

Mesmerized by Phillipe Halsman’s Dali Atomicus.

Yay for soups! I got my wisdom teeth extracted and am mostly eating soups.

I don’t like calling any photo of mine a favorite, but some are just more interesting than others. Two years ago I listed just a couple of photos. This year, I’ve gone overboard with ten!

Here are my “favorite” photos from this year. I still have to develop two rolls, so maybe I’ll add more later ;-)

And here’s one that just spooked me out! :-)

I just moved this blog here from it’s previous incarnation at https://samgrover.wordpress.com/. I’m quite impressed at the ease with which I was able to export the previous blog and import it here intact with the entries and the comments. My thanks to the folks behind Wordpress and Movable Type. Subscribe to the new feed!

That move was simple. Now I have to move to my new place in real space this weekend. Unfortunately, that will involve some more work! Portland has five quadrants. Yea, five. Portland is weird. I used to live in the Southwest and then I was in the Southeast for the last 18 months and now I will be moving into a small house in the Northeast. It will increase my daily commute, but overall it will be great! By the way, the fifth quadrant is North, in case you were wondering.

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I’ve been sharing this video with friends since I first saw it some months ago. It’s informative and elegant and the music is cool too. It provokes my curiosity, especially with the way it ends. Take a look!

It’s been a while since I updated this blog. About ten months. I’ve been an intern at Intel during that period and I recently joined as an employee.

Also, now it’s been one year since I moved to the SE Portland. I like it here. I have a hour-or-so long commute each way on TriMet, which isn’t terribly bad as it gives me time to read. However, public transit doesn’t work too well when there are more things to do in a day, especially in different parts of town. Even though my schedule at work is quite flexible, public transit can become a bottleneck. That occurs when I want to do more than go to work in the morning and return home in the evening. I thought that was sufficient excuse for me to go in for a car ;-) and placed an order for a new Mini Cooper S in April. I expect to have delivery within a month and am looking forward to that. It will be my first car.

My photography has been up and down during this time. In January, I sold off my Nikon D70S digital SLR and bought a Voigtländer Bessa R2A film rangefinder. After playing with cameras and photography for a couple of years I had come to realize just the kind of camera that would work best for me. The Bessa fit that bill quite well. It was also quite affordable as compared to another option. My previous experience with a rangefinder was definitely a motivating factor. I will write more about my experiences with this camera in a future post.

Russ wanted to recreate the cover of The Beatles’ Abbey Road album cover along with his wife, Patty and son, Riley. He planned the shot and scouted for locations, narrowing them down to two. So, on a Sunday morning we went out to take the shot. We were a bit early for the chosen locations. The light wasn’t right. After a brief time looking around, we decided to go get breakfast and then return to take the shots.

On our way to LaurelThirst, we spotted an intersection on Stark Street and as fate would have it, it was better than the others and just right for the shot. Russ parked his Bug on the wrong side of the road and we started taking shots. They walked through the intersection once and I took some sample shots. After correcting their spacing and rhythm, I took shots of a few more passes with digital and film cameras. About fifteen minutes later, accomodating for light traffic, we were done and headed for a tasty breakfast. I had never tried to recreate a photo before. This was fun, and hopefully I’ll do more in the future. We left out some details, like Paul’s cigarette, Ringo, etc.

After going through the photos, Russ and family selected this shot as their favorite. Click on the image to see the larger version on flickr. There you will also find a link to the exact location on a map.

Amazon started offering downloadable movies a couple of weeks ago. That’s great, especially since they offer rentals. I prefer to rent movies since I usually only see a movie once. If I feel like watching it again and again, I would buy it. In that case, I wouldn’t buy a restricted downloadable file and wouldn’t recommend it either, especially with draconian agreements. I’d rather just buy the physical DVD at an affordable price. You can’t just give a restricted file to a friend and say, “Hey, check this out. It’s cool”. The same is true for restricted music.

The hassle of maintaining my own digital store and backing up stuff is another deterrent. Hard disks will fail, so one needs a more comprehensive backup policy than just saving the data onto a second disk. With movies, that’s a lot of data. There’s no way I’m going to put money into a backup system for that. Amazon’s videos won’t play on the Mac, so I can’t even rent it if I wanted to. That’s another side-effect of the restrictions. Apple is also offering movie downloads through their iTunes store, but they don’t offer rentals. So, I’m off to Movie Madness these days. If someone figures out a convenient way to offer downloadable movie rentals, I’ll sign on.