http://search.deviantart.com/?q=by:netmanw00t&section=today deviantART RSS for by:netmanw00t en-us Copyright 2009, deviantART.com Fri, 11 Dec 2009 08:18:57 PST deviantART.com http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/tech/rss http://s.deviantart.com/minish/widgets/apple-touch-icon-precomposed.png http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/26288254/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/26288254/ Fri, 31 Jul 2009 00:22:13 PDT
Good news: I traded it in under the cash for clunkers program and got a sweet deal on a *new* 2009 Mitsu Lancer GTS! I've never had a new car, and this one is so much fun it should be illegal.
However, I will miss the angry growl of a 5 liter V8 engine. The Lancer's 4-banger just sounds too weak.

Also, whoops, I am now a full-time software engineer while still being a full-time undergraduate student. I accidentally the whole career, lol.

So my photo output will be even slower than before, if that's even possible. :<

Comments will be responded to in a completely un-timely fashion, but they will be responded to, Eventually. Also, WTF. I have 721 deviations to look at. Maybe I should log in more than once a month?

Thanks,
_NMW

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/24049369/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/24049369/ Fri, 03 Apr 2009 22:10:07 PDT
]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/23901402/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/23901402/ Thu, 26 Mar 2009 14:36:30 PDT
Needless to say, been busy. I got an internship doing software development for a mobile web platform company (); have gotten involved with the sweetest, cutest girl ever; and I've been looking for a new apartment, because my current lease ends in 5 days (and I still don't have a lease for the new place signed! ).

Sorry DA, you went on the back burner for a while. BUT! Chicago's cold nasty winter is drawing to a close and my camera shutter finger is getting itchy again.

Also, DA informs me that I got my 100th fave while I was out. Thank you!



]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/22604185/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/22604185/ Thu, 15 Jan 2009 20:19:27 PST
Also, as you may have noticed, the photoshoot mentioned in the last journal did not materialize. Major bummer. Oh well.

So don't un-watch me just because I'm unproductive for now. I'll be active soon. Promise.

Friends:


Clubs:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/22303119/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/22303119/ Wed, 31 Dec 2008 12:27:21 PST
Sorry I haven't been keeping up with my messages... I'm working through the backlog now. If you haven't recieved a reply or thanks, you will soon!

Hopefully I should be doing a photo shoot with soon. Seriously looking forward to that.

Other than that, it's waaaay too freaking cold outside to do anything, so my gallery might get a little bit stale... :/

Thanks!

Friends:


Clubs:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/21831601/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/21831601/ Fri, 05 Dec 2008 13:28:43 PST paladinlink thinks my journal is getting old, I'll update it.

So pretty much, my classes are almost done for the semester, so my brain is exploding, so no time for photos. Maybe that will change in a few weeks when I'm on break.

Something interesting though: I've found a way to effectively white balance infrared color digital photos in Adobe Lightroom! This is sweet, because before, the only way to get rid of the nasty red cast left over was to open the photo up in Photoshop and do a bunch of editing there.

But now, Adobe has released a beta DNG Profile Editor. Using this tool I was able to produce an Adobe Camera Raw profile that would let me balance the ridiculous color temperatures found in infrared color digital photos. I currently have some old photos where the white balance is set to 14536 K (!), which not only fixes the red color cast, but also appears to do the red-blue channel swap as well.

A sample: Infrared in Lightroom

Unfortunately, it's winter right now, so I won't get a chance to do any new infrared photography for a while, but maybe I'll post some old photos. There's no point in shooting new stuff in the winter, because it's greenery that looks cool in IR.

Hope this info helps someone though.



Friends:


Clubs:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/20152816/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/20152816/ Mon, 25 Aug 2008 16:57:22 PDT
I'm making a brief venture back into the world of film, specifically black and white film. Got my Canon AE-1 back... going to have some fun with that soon. Also loaded up my Canon Rebel X with some Ilford FP4. We'll see how that goes.

I also shot the Perseid meteor shower with some Kodak Gold 400 in my Pentax K1000 after I realized that the batteries in my 20D were dead , and though many shots came out, my scanner is teh suck and failed to get anything even remotely good out of them.

Yeah, I need a proper film scanner but can't afford one. Hopefully I can do something with the next batch.



Friends:


Clubs:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/19381466/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/19381466/ Sun, 13 Jul 2008 23:11:32 PDT
Anyways. I'm in school again (summer semester). I'm always in school.

Guess I should also mention that I've opened up a Flickr account for posting interesting but not art-worthy photos. Basically, the stuff that doesn't make it here, but is still good for other reasons.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/photo_voltaic



Friends:


Clubs:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/17889423/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/17889423/ Wed, 16 Apr 2008 23:41:41 PDT


My little sister just joined DA. She's quite a good photographer for her age, and there's already some gems in her gallery. Check it out.

And as usual, check these talented folks out:

Friends:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/16405993/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/16405993/ Mon, 14 Jan 2008 16:35:28 PST pining for the fjords.

Now that I've got a new partner in crime (~Bang-Life), I should be posting some new stuff now. Still won't be very often (busy with school, etc.), but stay tuned.

Also, check out my friends' galleries:


]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/15180158/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/15180158/ Mon, 22 Oct 2007 20:50:59 PDT
If I don't return comments very quickly, this is why. I will get back to you though! (In fact I'm going through a large backlog right now.)

I'll start posting again when I feel the quality of my photos has gone back up to good levels. That might not be for a while. University = burnt out. :[

Thanks go out to all my watchers, as usual. You are very appreciated.

Friends:


_NMW

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/14747433/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/14747433/ Sat, 22 Sep 2007 18:22:12 PDT
Long story...

Hopefully by next week I'll have that up and running again and be back to posting here.

Friends:


_NMW

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/14307347/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/14307347/ Thu, 23 Aug 2007 16:58:49 PDT


Friends:



]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/13520491/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/13520491/ Thu, 28 Jun 2007 03:32:26 PDT Shooting at night to distract myself from life has become my new escape.

Hope you enjoy the results!

Friends:


_NMW

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/13031807/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/13031807/ Sun, 20 May 2007 22:25:54 PDT
Sorry! ):

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/12920146/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/12920146/ Fri, 11 May 2007 19:39:15 PDT DeviantArt has been broken for over 11 hours today. How do I know? The most recent deviation on the front page was submitted that long ago. Since then, DA has been in "read-only mode for system maintenance" and completely down for that whole time with barely minutes of functionality sprinkled in there.

I feel deeply sorry for the subscribers of this site. They deserve a refund, and DA really should be fairly ashamed.

Because it's not just today - although today is the most unbearable example in recent memory - but it seems like at least weekly DA needs to be turned over to "read-only mode." What good is a community website where nothing can be changed?

Bah, this place's performance has always sucked. When will it end. When will the site's operators actually wise up to the power a huge community like this really needs? Stop being stingy. You have a lot of subscribers, whom you don't deserve until you fix this.

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/9720845/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/9720845/ Mon, 21 Aug 2006 10:50:46 PDT
As you may have noticed, I've switched from purely film photography to almost entirely digital. Why? The quality level is so much amazingly higher. I can do things with the 20D that I couldn't ever dream of doing with the Rebel X and my crappy film scanner. Unless I get a bunch of money and buy an amazing film scanner, I won't be shooting film for a while.

I also am looking at getting some better lenses. Right now I'm using the fairly mediocre EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 lens that came with my 20D, and while it's acceptable for now, I really need some more range. I'm drooling over the EF-S 17-80mm f/4-5.6 IS USM lens, but I can't afford it right now, so I'm looking elsewhere (Sigma, etc.) for an acceptable alternative. I'm also getting sick of borrowing my dad's (also mediocre) EF 75-300mm f/4-5.6 III telephoto lens, so I'd like to replace that with a better lens, ideally one with full-time manual focusing.

But I'm going off to college in a little more than a week, which means my money will be stretched extremely thin. I'm going to try and get my BS in Computer Science in four years (which from what I hear is rather difficult), so my schedule will be very full, and I probably won't even have time for a part-time job during school. That leaves just Xmas and Summer, and the money I make then surely won't be going towards photography, it'll be going towards my tuition and housing expenses.

So I guess what I'm saying is that any really serious photography is going to have to wait a few years. Also, if anyone reading this is interested in offloading some gently used wide-angle and/or telephoto zoom lenses onto a poor student for cheap, I'm very interested. Gimme a note and we'll talk.

Oh, and the film devID doesn't really apply any more now does it? Rofl. I'm going to try and shoot a new selfportrait soon, but I reeeeally suck at those, so who knows if I'll get anything acceptable.
Edit: selfportrait done.

]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/9172802/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/9172802/ Sat, 24 Jun 2006 20:42:01 PDT
w000000000000000000000000000000000t!

It only set me back $1050.00 on Ebay, which is a nice savings of ~$150 depending on where you prefer to shop. I got the kit with the included 18-55mm EF-S lens because my current 28-80mm lens wouldn't really be wide enough after the 1.6x cropping factor.

Anyways, expect to see some awesome high-fidelity photos up soon. I need to take a phototrip and burn some memory.

Laters! ]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/7869083/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/7869083/ Sat, 11 Feb 2006 22:18:33 PST EIZO FlexSvan T965 21" CRT monitor.

This thing kicks all manner of ass. I can now view huge photos at 1:1 resolution with great color accuracy and sharpness way better than before. w00t!!1

Updated screenshot: ([link]) ]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/7482686/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/7482686/ Sun, 01 Jan 2006 19:52:07 PST

Let's see here, last journal entry I wrote was a little over four months ago, so maybe it's time for an update.

As of Christmas, I am now the proud owner of an old Pentax K1000 manual SLR camera. Now, I won't be using this instead of my Canon EOS Rebel X any time soon, but it is really nice. It's got a very good 50mm f/2.0 lens and I may see if I can find some other lenses for it (not having any zoom is a bit of a pain).

Also, I've been accepted at the University of Minnesota, at the Institute of Technology! This is the first of the three applications I made that I've heard back from (still waiting on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and the University of Illinois at Chicago), and if neither of those remaining two admit me, I'll be plenty happy to go to Minneapolis. U of I is still my first choice, so if they admit me I'm definitely going there, and UIC was more of a fallback, so if they admit me I probably won't go there. I'm majoring in computer science.

Over Christmas break I've had a lot of time on my hands since all my friends are at work during the day (I have a summer-only job in a restaurant at a local golf course), I've been getting tons of work done on my current software project, CodewiseBlog (project page here | my blog here). Since this is DA and not Slashdot or some other tech site, I won't pimp the technical end of it too much, but I would like to humbly ask for any suggestions on they layout of the system. I'm not a very good web designer and any comments or constructive criticism will be well-recieved. The layout of my blog is only a slight change of the layout that's in the standard distribution, so use that as the basis for critique.

Thanks, Deviants, for all the comments, faves, watches, and everything else over the past year. Let's make next year even better. Photos forthcoming.

- NMW ]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/6301970/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/6301970/ Mon, 22 Aug 2005 22:19:30 PDT may get one more batch of photos in before I get deluged with work, but once that happens, all bets are off.

Sure, I may get a roll of film in here and there like for winter or spring break, but other than that, don't expect to see anything new here for a while. Sorry!

Wish me luck. I'll probably need it.
-NMW ]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/6248035/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/6248035/ Tue, 16 Aug 2005 22:47:17 PDT
First of all, slides are so much easier to scan than negatives. For one, you needn't touch the image area like you do with negatives in order to mount it in the scanner, so dust is cut down big time. Along with this, it takes much less time to get it mounted properly - I even had my little sister (11 years old) helping swap the slides while she sat next to the scanner, and she did it fine. But the real greatness is the picture quality. With my old film, if I turn up the scanner's resolution beyond 1000 dpi or so, the grain comes out in all its ugliness, but with Ektachrome, it never gets grainy - just a little blurry.

I am having some issues with my scanner however... it's currently scanning everything a bit too dark. If I hold the slides up in the light, I can see they're properly exposed, but for some reason the scanner's picking up everything like it was taken in extremely poor light. Perhaps there's something wrong with the backlight in the scanner lid... I have no idea. It's not really a big deal, because it's proved pretty easy to load up the images in GIMP and just tune the colors, but my expensive scanner should get it right, dammit!

I'm about half done scanning the roll now. It's a 36-exposure roll and almost all of it is "scanworthy", and with the summer winding down I'm busy as hell with Marching Band rehearsal and running errands preparing for school. I hope to finish scanning all the slides tomorrow and get some of the über good ones touched up and put up here.

Till then, stay cool everyone, and as always, thanks for all the comments.
-NMW ]]> ~netmanw00t http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/6118792/ http://netmanw00t.deviantart.com/journal/6118792/ Wed, 03 Aug 2005 02:10:13 PDT
It occurred to me today that I haven't ever used the DeviantArt journal system much, and it's been long overdue that I change that, so here's a start.

I've decided to try tinkering with my methods a little bit. Every photo I have here on dA was produced in the same way: shot on my Canon EOS Rebel X with Kodak Gold 200 film, developed at wal-mart or walgreens or some other such place, negatives scanned in on über-hi-res scanner, touched up with the Gimp, and uploaded. Now, there are several problems with this process that have annoyed me for a long time:

The first problem is that the Wal-Mart photo lab really isn't very good - the prints are so-so in quality - but that's usually okay because I rely on the negatives, which they haven't managed to screw up yet. The second problem is that Kodak Gold film shows really ugly grain in some bad lighting situations. Yes, it is cheap, and yes, you can buy and develop the stuff everywhere, but I digress. The biggest problem is in the scanning stage. When I go to scan the negatives, I have to rip the plastic protectors off and mount the strip in the scanner very quickly, otherwise dust begins to collect on the strip, and this is impossible to remove. I've tried everything, and nothing works well. The best I can do is to discretely smudge away the very small dust specks with the Gimp.

So I've decided to change my methods. Last week I bought a couple rolls of Kodak Ektachrome 200 film from the local (and expensive!) camera shop. The idea here is to do away with the printing process (which I almost never use) and to make the photos more easily scannable, which I understand is one of the main reasons transparency film is used nowadays. Along with the upgrade to much nicer film (or so I hope) will come an upgrade in film developing - I'm going to get it all done at the same camera place. (Even though it's more expensive there, the lack of prints makes it about the same price as before, not including the more expensive film.)

I shot the first roll of Ektachrome while visiting colleges I intend to apply to this year, and I'm slowly going through the second roll before I get the film developed, scanned, and processed, so the end results may not be up here for a while. Sorry!

Oh, and before all the digital fanatics jump all over me about how digital would solve all my problems, let me say that while yes, I would absolutely LOVE to have a Canon Digital Rebel, the nearly $1000 pricetag is quite unrealistic for a kid like me trying to earn some cash to pay for school who shoots some photos in his spare time.
]]> ~netmanw00t