With a months end, comes another months begining.
Shintara is evolving, over the last week I have added a contact me form - previously I would have just used a mailto link, but because of the hordes of spam I get I decided to take out all links to my email address which has stopped alot of the spam coming through. I have also added a validation link - yep shintara is now officially xhtml valid, soon to come I will import the old unix files and get the photography section working - unfortunatly this does take some time.
Photographic camping tripOn Friday 29 August Brad from iserv and myself went on a photographic trip to Hillend, an old gold mining town in way out west NSW. Hillend is an amazing place, it feels as though time has stopped and you have travelled back to the late 1800's, most of the town remains untouched and very simular to what it was like.
We got there early on Friday afternoon, set up camp, had a rest and went to the local attractions for some afternoon photography. I think I was more in awe with the place that afternoon rather than concentrating on taking photographs, though I did suss out some good angles for Saturday morning. By evening we were buggered, we walked down part of the Old Bridle Track - the down part was easy coming up a 45 degree slope was the tough part. Sitting down in front of the camp fire drinking Wild Turkey and Coke, sharing tales and staring up at a clear sky was how we spent the night and of course an early night was in order as we were getting up at 5:45 am.
Up at the crack of dawn, rugged up with a few layers of clothes, we stepped outside and the clear night sky had changed to a cloudy morning sky - what a let down! After an hour and a bit I gave up on getting some morning photos, though it was fine enough to get some OK photos I have gone past that stage and am trying to look further than that.
Crack of dawn at Merlins Lookout.
After leaving the lookout we spotted some wild goats, I stuck my 50-500mm lens as I didnt want to get close enough for one of them to charge me. I flicked the ISO to 400 set my exposure and moved as close as I could get. I got a few OK shots of the goats, while doing that I noticed Brad up close trying to get a real close up, next thing I knew the goats were racing towards me I lined up an action shot of a goat running locked in and then lost focus - I looked at my settings and I was on AI Focus, "fuck" was the word that went through my head, by the time I set AI servo the goats were all but gone! It really wasnt my morning.
What do wild goats do when they get bored...?
After the goats were not to be seen we headed back to the other lookout (I forget the name), by this time I felt really uninspired so I packed my camera gear. After scaling down 45 + degree slopes and then climbing back up hunger was getting the better of us. Keep an eye out at Brads site for his photo's.
What next?I have done sweet f/a on the PF Project, so some more updates on that are coming, hopefully I will compile some howto's on setting up a machine for OpenBSD and writing the actual firewall script - I say hopefully as at present I have little time and I am refreshing myself with perl at the moment.
Little time seems to be the flavour of this month, and I can see that overlapping into next month. At present updates on this 'sort of blog' are slow, so please be patient, if you need to contact me the new contact link will let you do that. Something that is on the horizon will be a comments section, kind of like a guestbook. Stay tuned for more.
Latest Imagary
Image specs:
Camera: Canon EOS 10D, Lens: 70-200mm Sigma
Shooting mode: Manual, Shutter speed: 1/4000, Aperture: 4.5, Focal length: 146mm, ISO: 400