San's last day at work was last Friday (She's fulltime freelance illustrator now, let her know if you need something illustrated!), President's day was a company holiday for me, and I owed my friend David a trip to Charleston because he is stationed there with the USAF and has stopped by Atlanta a few times, so I put in for PTO for Tuesday and San and I took a long weekend and drove to the coast.

It was a pretty relaxing weekend of not doing a whole lot other than eating (starting with some midnight Taco Bell on Saturday shortly after we got there) and some light tourism. San, Dave, and I spent a little bit of time exploring and taking photos on a couple of occasions; My friend Campbell from High School joined us for walking around downtown Charleston and a few meals and movies; And Lindsey joined us to go to Joint Base Charleston to see where David works and get a personal tour of a C-17.

All the good photos from the weekend are here, and here's a small selection:

I'm on Joby.com! A photo that Daniel took of me taking a photo in California is now on joby.com as the anchor image on the front page for the Gorillapod tripod that I was using. Click over to the forth box on the front page or watch as they automatically scroll by until you see:

That's me!

Mountain bike racing season slowed down for a bit, my next mtb race is a month away, and track racing has picked up steam. What would have been my first night racing with the Cs got rained out, so my first races with non-beginners ended up being part of the Pro Racing Series at the Dick Lane Velodrome. I showed up Friday afternoon, warmed up, and did the best 200 meter time trial I've ever done to qualify for the sprint tournament. It took me 13.03s and I hit 37.01 mph which was a new top speed for me by several mph, but that only got me 17th of 29 people which meant I wouldn't be doing any match sprints with pros, which was fine with me! I had 3 or 4 races against a lot of very fast people, and managed to stay with the pack every time. It was a lot of fun, and significantly more fun than the beginner racing I'd been doing.

Saturday was "The Kerin" and in hindsight, I really should have raced. Even though it was a very fast crowd, people I did 200m faster than the night before were doing well in races, and I'll definitely be riding in the next pro series event on July 11th. As usual, when not riding, I took a lot of pictures. Here's Dave Worth from Knoxville, TN speeding by:

Dave ended up sleeping on my couch and we went on a road ride Sunday morning after perhaps a few too many beers Saturday night. I also tried out two new video camera things this go around. First, I strapped the camera to the back of the motorcycle used in the Keirin races. It turned out alright, but one of these videos will definitely be enough due to the consistent perspective:

DLV 2009 Pro Racing Series - The Keirin from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

The second new thing was strapping my camera to Greggory and making him try and keep up with the pros in a 20 lap points race. He did an awesome job both keeping up and getting great footage, and it was nice to not have to be the one trying to keep up for once:

DLV 2009 Pro Racing Series - Mens A 20 Lap Scratch from Chris Kelly on Vimeo.

With some racing-with-pros experience under my belt, my first Wednesday race with the Cs was a whole lot of fun. The results only tell part of the story, but do show that Tyler Grohovec is a Cat-1 road racer just moving through the Cs and Bs to the As! Ability levels in the Cs were a bit spread out so at times it was tough to work together to break away, and I couldn't quite keep up with Tyler, but the highlight of the evening for me was getting 3rd in the scratch race which got me in to the Wheelrace final. This meant I was in a race with s3 other Cs, 4 Bs, and 4 As: we started at intervals around the track designed to have us all cross the finish line at the same time after 5 laps. My 48x16 gear ended up being a poor choice as I spun out a little bit and (like all the other races) couldn't stick on Tyler and Chris's wheels, but I held my own and Emile Abraham (who won the pro racing event last Saturday) didn't pass me until the last 10 meters of the last lap. Having that kind of competition was great, he commented afterwards that he was going all out and had a hard time catching up, and 5 minutes later I was off into the Cs 20 lap scratch race where I only got 6th. Lots of fun, and I'll definitely keep coming back on Wendesdays as this has the potential to be a lot more fun than CX mountain bike racing. And maybe I'll put a stiffer gear on my track bike before then..

Some people I know started off this year doing "project 365" which has participants taking one photograph every day and sharing it with the world. One friend set up photo365.org for a handful of people doing this using Flickr. Some time on January 1st, I decided to participate and have been uploading my imaged to my 2009/365 album in my Gallery, and it's taken me 3 months to finally get around to writing the ~50 lines of PHP to make an RSS feed available for mine. So here it is, subscribe to ckdake.com/365.xml in your browser and enjoy!

Now I just need to figure out what to take a photo of for today...

SugarCON was last week, so I was in San Francisco, California to interact with some of SugarCRM's customers and other employees. We did a good bit of socializing which is partly captured in this photo album of pictures from my little camera, but I took a lot of pictures with the big camera and some things are worth pointing out here. Tuesday evening was the SugarCON boat cruise around the bay, which had some awesome views including:

Wednesday after SugarCON ended, a few of us went to a shooting range for about an hour and took a few pictures inside. (I took this 365 picture on the way there.) San showed up on Thursday and did a bit of San Francisco exploring on her own, and after a boot-camp with some SugarCRM partners, the IT team and most of our significant others headed to Lake Tahoe for a few nights away from the city. The lake was a short walk through the woods from our cabin, and of the Lake Tahoe pictures I uploaded, these capture it pretty well:

We didn't do any winter sports other than throwing a few snowballs, but it was nice to have casual conversations with work people over beers or in the hot tub instead of on IRC. (Also, FYI, when you see "tonemapped" in a URL of a picture here, its a tonemapped HDR image resulting from a combination of 3 images that gives more details in highlights and shadows than a single image would, sometimes more accurately producing the look of a scene and sometimes just making it look awesome.) On Sunday, Jesse, Seth, San and I headed back towards the cost with the hope of reaching Point Reyes before sunset. On the way, we stopped a few times. First for a bathroom break and some pictures including:

Then, at a Point Reyes visitor center on the San Andreas Fault to walk along the "earthquake trail" and break open our 1.5lb bacon and cheese sandwich on the fault line:

Even though we made it to Point Reyes lighthouse before sundown, it was after 4:30pm so the visitor center and lighthouse were closed. Regardless, some great views:

We arrived back in San Francisco under the cover of darkness, and got in some exploring the next day before heading home including Twin Peaks, Fort Point NHS, and the Golden Gate Botanical Gardens:

More pictures from everything are in these albums:

• SugarCON Boat Trip
• Shooting in CA
• Lake Tahoe on Saturday
• Point Reyes
• Exploring San Francisco
• SugarCON etc

All in all, it was a pretty good trip but after 10 days away from home, I was glad to be back!

It's definitely been a busy couple of weeks. We've had a few weekend events at work as we slowly are moving things to a setup that will prevent us from needing to do anything on weekends, and there's been a whole lot of bike riding. But first, my most recent tinkering with HDR photography:

Thats three exposures of one of the trees in my backyard, taken at 11mm on the new tripod with a remote shutter. On to what I've been up to the past few weeks that you might be interested in:

• Tomorrow morning I'll hit 2000 miles of road riding this year, with 1750 of them on the newest road bike. That's bringing me pretty close to 4000 miles so far since February 1st, so hopefully I'll round off the year with 5000+?
• I got new wheels on my track bike and will be training on that this winter for next years season (assuming I don't break anything between now and then!). I've been mountain biking a couple of times and am getting back into the habit of 30mile+ mountain rides, and I'm slowly working out a training plan so that I can maybe win some races next year.
• After 20 or so years of never having a real camera tripod and taking pictures, I finally purchased one. Here's a crummy picture of the Acratech Ultimate ballhead with Leveler mounted on the Gitzo Explorer Basalt legs. It's sturdy, light, easy to use, and I'm looking forward to using it a lot. Hopefully it will last me another 20 years or so.
• I was able to get a Wii Fit for list price! Daniel couldn't have said it better: the internet rules.
• FM.24.08 happened again and was an even bigger success than last year. The tracking system worked great, but I unfortunately didn't take as many pictures as at FM.24.07 last year. Here is this year's good set.
• The final Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed of the year went down and I was able to take plenty of pictures there since almost nobody else from Faster Mustache showed up to spectate! Friday Night Sprint pics and pictures from Saturday. After sprints on Friday, I rode around town and took some awesome night shots from the top of a building in downtown Atlanta, and before FoS started on Saturday San and I went by Connolly Nature Preserve and I got some shots of the champion trees there. (Read more about the trees here).
• Lastly, I'm slowly whipping my mini-web hosting company into shape. If you're looking for hosting, head to ckdake.com/hosting and keep your eyes peeled on www.ithought.org for some exciting news sometime in the next month or so.

I've been wanting a wide angle lens for a while, so I finally bought one so that I'll have it with me in Europe next week: the Canon EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM. Previously, the widest I had was 17mm, and those last 7mm make a huge difference. A friend of mine has this same lens, and after using it in January, I realized that a wide angle lens would make a lot more sense for me to buy than a super-telephoto lens.

My first chance to use this lens was at the second Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed of 2008. You can see all the pictures of the Dick Lane Velodrome Festival of Speed here. Most of them were with the 10-22mm lens, and it should be pretty obvious which ones aren't. The edge distortion isn't too bad, and I really like the effect. I'll probably use this lens more than I initially planned on!

Given the amount of training time I lost at the track due to the broken collarbone, I probably won't be riding in the last FoS of this season, but I plan on keeping up doing ~200 miles a week throughout the year so hopefully next year I'll be taking less pictures and riding around in circles more! I did go mountain biking this morning for the first time since my wreck, and while it was only 1:10 of ride time on a familiar trail, it convinced me that I'm healed enough to start doing more serious mountain biking in places I haven't been. (And by the time I'm back from Europe it'll be 4 months since I broke it which is plenty of time to heal.) Hopefully I'll be able to drag Ben out so we can get back in the habit of mountain biking every weekend and increasing the mileage each time.

I've been participating at DP Challenge off and on for a while now, but my images have rarely finished in the top 50% of challenges. (here's my profile there) Photography is a very subjective thing and the end result of everyones votes can be surprising! I was fairly confident with my entry into the Bicycles II challenge:

but as voting went progressed, it swung around between 4.9 (more typical for me) to 6.8 (a possible first place!). Could I win for once? After the week of voting, I ended up in 15th place out of 135, which is in the top 10%! That works for me. I like first place and tenth place better than mine, but if it was up to me, I would have given myself third :)

Hopefully I'll start doing this more regularly, if only they'd offer and RSS feed of new challenges!