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!

I take a lot of pictures. I figure I should post them on here. Here goes one. This is a HDR of the trees in my backyard:

(If you see a "used without permission" watermark on the image in your feed reader, please let me know in a comment or by email, so that I can add it to the list of allowed referrers!)

I use F-Spot to manage my photographs. It's fast, clean, simple, and does everything in my current workflow which is JPG on camera -> YYYY/MM/DD folders -> Gallery on my website. Once I start shooting RAW it will get a little more complicated, but F-Spot keeps moving forward so hopefully they'll come up with a plan for that.

When uploading images to Gallery, I noticed that my photo timestamps were off. Conveniently, there was a discussion about this on the F-Spot mailing list at the same time and it turns out that every time you import an image in F-Spot, it adjusts the EXIF Timestamp information based on your timezone. Basically, if you're 5 hours away from GMT, on import F-Spot writes to the file that the image was taken 5 hours later than it actually was. Not only does it do this once, but if you re-import images into F-Spot for whatever reason it does this again, again, and again.

This was a bit of a surprise because EXIF information written by the camera shouldn't be changed by an import program! I thought I'd lost all the actual capture date/times of my ~30,000 photos, and was getting pretty upset that software would do this, but after digging through EXIF headers from all the cameras I've had, it turns out that the "DateTimeOriginal" was still good! I disabled F-Spots ability to write metadata to files (which means I'll have to stop tagging images until this is all resolved upstream) and wrote a little script to fix my files. If you've run into this and would like your original EXIF information back so that photos taken on New Years Eve as the year ticks over aren't at some hour after sunrise on Jan 1st, use this! Just replace $directory with the path to your photo library, store it to a file named "fixer.pl" and run "perl fixer.pl". Note that you'll need find and jhead installed.

EDIT: Note! I looked at this again with my 40D and new version of f-spot. It seems that now the correct EXIF header is "DateTimeDigitized" and _NOT_ "DateTimeOriginal". Please verify things on your setup before running this random script you found on the internet!

#!/usr/bin/perl -w 

use strict;

my $directory = "/media/photos/";

my %opts;
my @files;

@files = `find $directory -type f -iregex \'.*\\.\\(jpg\\|jpeg\\)\'`;

foreach my $file (@files) {
        chomp $file;
        my $dateline = `jhead -v "$file" | grep DateTimeOriginal`;
        if (defined($dateline)) {
                $dateline =~ /.*\"(.*)\".*/;
                my $date = $1;
                if (defined($date)) {
                        $date =~ s/ /-/g;
                        system("jhead -ts$date \"$file\"");
                        system("jhead -ft \"$file\"");
                }
        }
}

My friend Robert e-mailed me asking for any camping pictures I had because the Technique (the Georgia Tech newspaper) needed some. I talked to him today and turns out they used one of my pictures so I'm now a "published photographer" or something. Check it out! (Gilbert, you're famous now) There used to be a picture I took on chinesefood.about.com but that page has gotten a new editor and all new content along with it.

And July 4th Fireworks Pictures are uploaded. I really need to start taking a tripod to these sorts of things.

Earlier this week I turned 23. Just another day really except San was in town and we ran around all weekend and I ended up with slightly more things than I started the day with:"Thinking of You 2" by Sam Brown, and the Japanese edition (none of this silly American dubbing and cropping to 4:3 stupidness) of My Neighbor Totoro. (And a crochet corn dog. with crochet ketchup and mustard on it). So hooray for crossing of another book and dvd from my wantlist. San actually came up with what to get me before looking at the list even though they were on the list. Awesome.

Saturday we went to Big Basin State Park to see the Redwoods and then headed down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium to see the Sea Otters, and then down to Pebble Beach to see the ocean. Sunday was the SF-88 Nike Missile Site and Mt. Tamalpais.

Fireworks in Mountain View on July 4th were pretty disapointing. Lenox Mall fireworks in Atlanta (pictures from 2005) and things like fireworks over the river in Prague (pictures from 2005) just have me spoiled. Most of what I got out of them on the 4th here is that I need to get better at taking pictures of fireworks and maybe use a tripod once in a while. Hopefully I'll get around to uploading the pictures from this go at it tomorrow.

One more month to go in California!

Two of my primary interests, photography and computing, relate together in a pretty neat area that is a common computer science research field but seldom applied in real world applications: metadata tagging. Sure, I use F-Spot to tag my pictures and can click on someones face and see all of the pictures they are in, but the software doesn't tag things for me and even though Gallery now supports tags, these aren't communicated from F-Spot when I upload them. I have 10,000+ images in my photo gallery and I'm certainly not going to take the time to re-upload all of them once everything shares tags. Then there is Flickr which is solely based on tagging images but I've never found their interface to be particular appealing to me. F-Spot will export there, but again, I don't think it supports tags. (I don't use Flickr so I haven't tried this out yet.)

Anyways, tags are neat because they allow people to easily find things in huge collections of pictures but what happens when people start tagging things with location data? Gallery has a module that can display the thumbnails on a map using Google Maps, which is very cool, but thats just the pictures someone has. I was digging around and came across something very neat in the Yahoo Research Berkeley blog. They've built a tool, "World Explorer," that "opens a window to explore the entire world through the eyes of the users of Flickr." It is very cool! World Explorer pulls geotag data from Flickr and uses it to overlay keywords on a world map. You can zoom in and out and move around, similar to several other mapping tools like Google Maps, but keywords from Flickr show up on the map and their font size represents the perceived importance of them. Zoomed out looking at the US you see state names, and zoomed in to Atlanta there are tags for the new IKEA, Oakland Cemetery, Georgia Tech, and even "Graffiti." It's a novel new way of visualizing this data and I'm curious to see what future directions it might take!