the guy who ran weblogs.com shut his site down with zero notice. thousands of blogs have disappeared.. it’s been covered by slashdot and, surprisngly, netcraft. as someone who provides free hosting, i can feel the pain of running services for people who don’t understand the work that goes into them. but at least i’d try to warn people if i had to dump everything. once in a while i do get thank-yous. i should compile some updated stats of the offramp skunkworks…

in the last month, offramp has received 43000 emails and sent 4700. it rejected 22000 emails. the web server’s seen about 2759000 hits. 50 unique users logged in.

spent some time today doing software updates. ssh on the web server and staged it for the shell server. i also upgraded 3 installs of Gallery, truly cool software. The gallery on offramp has more than 3600 uploaded images in it! it took some time for the upgrade to update all the images.

not been feeling too well lately.. also haven’t been too productive at work. most likely it’s from not sleeping enough and thinking too much about projects that are going crazy from key people being out. yesterday i was sick to my stomach and left work after lunch.. went home and slept. slowly, i am getting better.

think think thinking a lot lately.

i feel like i should post an image tonight.

this is a shot i took when i was hiking with one of my best friends jeff and his wife, jessica. i shot it with the rolleicord.. it felt like the right camera to take that day.

did some portrait shots of my dad and stepmom tonight. we used his sony 5 megapixel camera and i brought my studio lights and meter. i had to fiddle around with the camera to force it to use the flash, and how to set aperture and shutter speed in manual mode.. once i got everything setup, the shots came our perfect. low iso to cut down noise, lights through the umbrellas at 45-degrees to light evenly. i had to raise one light up to cut out reflections on my dad’s glasses. some post-processing in photoshop and these should be great.

tonight showed it really is about the lights when it comes to doing decent portraits.

i also showed my little step-brother my shen-hao and showed him all the features. he likes checking out the new toys and asks lots of questions about cameras when i’m there. he asked for an update on how many cameras i have now. “i have 17 now.” “wow! didn’t you have just 8 last year?” “something like that.”

lately i’ve been disappointed about hobby peers. that is, people in me demographic who are interested in wet photography. i wrote up a sizeable rant on the subject, but decided to hold off. i got some good thoughts on the subject from sid and i’ve spent the past few days thinking about things.

two nights ago i wandered up the peninsula at night, driving around, thinking. yesterday after work i went off to the santa cruz mountains to do some shooting. it’s been great to have some solitude like this. the weekend is approaching fast.. i plan on going to the bryant st. swap meet saturday morning (looking for a 200-250mm.. that reminds me. if i wanted to buy a lens board, where could i go locally? no clue!) and who knows what else this weekend.

i haven’t decided on what i’ll do next, with regards to my dilemmas. but i do have some ideas.

happiness is..
..the caramelly foam left over from a caramel macciato

field camera work is very nice. with a polaroid, i get instant feedback on my settings, composure, focus, etc. then i shoot the scene on ilford delta. then i get to have even more fun on the enlarger. it feels like a crime printing from these negatives on anything less than 16×20 paper.

i’ve been wanting to take it to the streets. when i get some more ideas, a location, or an image in mind.. i’ll be ready.