Most Popular Seansense of 2008

• Post: Sony HDR-SR11 First Impressions Review with 5,706 views.
• Video: Sony HDR-SR11 First Video with 8,940 views on Vimeo.
• Photo: Unknown (I don’t have a good way to track this since I switched galleries mid-year. The most viewed photo in the new gallery is currently Road to the Campsite with 49 views. Weird.)

Most Commented Seansense of 2008

• Post: Sony HDR-SR11 First Impressions Review with 37 comments.
• Video: A Day in the Life of Anini with 40 comments in various places.
• Photo: Unknown. (Again I don’t have a good way to track this.)

Least Popular Seansense of 2008

• Post: Photography - The First 90 Days with 1 view and 0 comments. (There are others, but this is the only one with original content and more than a couple minutes work put into it.)
• Video: Hellhole Canyon with 188 views and 1 comment.
• Photo: My Pizza Fail utterly failed to impress anybody, even though we thought it was pretty funny.

Sean’s Favorite Seansense of 2008

• Post: Fifty-Five Hours in Israel - This was a fascinating journey and probably my best writing of the year.
• Video: NIN - Discipline (Unofficial Video) - Although this video wasn’t a huge internet sensation (804 views, 13 comments across various places) and gathered mixed reactions from friends and family, I put the most amount of work into it, and it came at the biggest cost; the camcorder’s screen was accidentally scratched while recording and we wasted quite a bit of perfectly good food to get all the shots.
• Photo: This is a tough one, but I think this picture is probably my favorite of the year, just because it makes me happy to look at it.

Sean’s Worst Seansense of 2008

• Post: In retrospect, I feed kind of bad for lambasting smart cars. After all, as far as fashion statements go, they are (were?) a positive trend.
• Video: My Torrey Pines Time Lapse experiment is rather headache inducing to watch. (Not recommended for epileptics.)
• Photo: Again it’s a tough choice, but this one is pretty bad.

Please share your own stats and best (or worst!) post, video, and photo of the year!

Happy 2009 to all, and thanks for reading, watching, and viewing!

Three different houses, three different house cats.

Marc’s cat Polly.

My mom’s cat Sashi.

My mother-in-law’s cat Dolly.

Well, I did it. I bought myself an early Christmas present: the Panasonic DMC-LX3 I’d been drooling over.

It is an interesting camera; when it comes to the specs everyone knows and loves, it doesn’t stand out. Its megapixel count is “only” 10.0, and the zoom is just 2.5x. Novices will shrug their shoulders and move on. In order to appreciate the camera, you have to know what an aperture number means (f/2.0 to f/2.8 anyone?) and have a feel for what a 24mm lens will do for you.

First impressions are very good. It feels nice in the hand, with a smooth metal case and a hefty piece of glass up front. The camera body is only about 1 inch thick, but the retracted lens adds close to another inch. The screen is very large and bright, and the controls seem decent, although the Menu button seems to function different from my brain, as I keep pressing it at the wrong times.

I bought this camera to fill a gap between my DSLR (Olympus E-500) and my little waterproof point-and-shoot (Olympus 770SW). Both cameras are are good in their respective elements, but neither excels at social occasions. The DSLR is too large to cart around to many events and can make people uncomfortable when you point it at them. The 770SW takes nice photos outside during the day, but is quite poor at night or indoors, when many gatherings take place.

So enter the DMC-LX3. With its fast, stabilized lens and small size, it seems to fill the gap nicely.

I played around in the house last night snapping pictures of every little thing I spotted and was quite impressed with the initial images. In macro mode at wide angle it can focus on things that are practically touching the lens, which is fun but dangerous! Below are some samples. Click here for a couple more.

f/2.0, 1/15 second, ISO 400, 16:9, standard color mode, hand-held

f/2.0, 1/30 second, ISO 160, 4:3, dynamic b&w, hand-held

I’ve been in a bit of a creative rut the last few months, but I feel that I’m finally starting to come back around with a renewed interest in my favorite creative hobby, photography. To get my mind back on track (and to help convince myself I’m not such a miserable failure), I thought it would be fun to look back on my first 90 days of being serious about taking pictures. On December 26th, 2001 I received a Canon PowerShot G2 for Christmas. This was my first good camera, and I had wanted it for quite a while. I really enjoyed using it and took some really fun pictures those first 90 days.

(Note: The photos have been “remastered” for your viewing pleasure.)

My first good creative picture.

One of my all-time favorites.

Statues can make good models.

+7 more in the the gallery.

Over the Thanksgiving break I went bowling with Mel, her brother Dave, and his friend Matt up in Oregon. I took a few photos with my Olympus Stylus 770SW, and despite the grain/blur, they’re fun pictures.

A couple of my favorites are below. There’s more in the gallery.

The quintessential bowling picture…

The Matrix is a system, Neo. A bowling system.

This was a fun situation to shoot in. It makes me want a small camera with manual controls that’s good in low light.

A few weeks ago, my job gave me an incredible opportunity: Travel solo halfway around the world to meet with a customer in Israel. The catch? The meetings would last just two days. If I wanted to stay longer it would be out of pocket. Since brining Mel along was not financially plausible, I decided to go ahead and set a personal time-distance record: 16,000 miles over 5 days.

Read more

(We tried submitting this to FAIL Blog, but unfortunately it failed to meet their high standards.)

You may notice a new “Gallery” tab at the top of the Seansense main page. I’ve installed Gallery on the Seansense website, which is an open-source web-based photo album. It integrates nicely with Wordpress and will be used in the future for all of my photos. You can access the gallery using the aforementioned tab or by navigating to gallery.seansense.net.

I’ve finished migrating all of the albums referenced in posts on this site to the new gallery. I still have more older galleries to migrate over from the MobileMe (formerly .Mac) Web Gallery and other places.

In the interest of saving $99/year I decided not to renew my MobileMe account. The main thing I used it for was the gallery; I never used the e-mail, syncing, or web-based stuff. The 20GB online storage is nice as it’s well integrated with OS X, but my web host gives me 600GB disk space. I’d like to make my domains, web hosting, and ISP the only things I spend money on for internet, because with these things I can do just about anything I want to. All the extra paid internet services are just money down the drain.

I’m also looking at various other ways to save and consolidate. Mel is starting an unpaid internship this fall so we’re going to be on one income for a while. More on that later.

Melanie and I save up all year to take one annual “big vacation”, and this year we decided to go to the Big Island of Hawaii for a week. This was our third trip to Hawaii together (we’ve also been to Kauai and Maui). What can I say? The place is addictive! The fact that we had a free ticket thanks to frequent flier miles sealed the deal.

We stayed in an awesome condo at the Fairway Villas in the Waikoloa Resort area north of Kailua-Kona. This turned out to be an excellent location, as just 20 miles south in Kona the weather was not nearly as nice and suffered more from the vog. The area also had some awesome beaches, our favorite being Waialea Bay just up the road. The sand was nice, the water calm, and the snorkeling excellent. We liked it so much we’d get up early in the morning just to be among the first to arrive. One morning we had it all to ourselves for a while. Paradise!

We also went on a helicopter ride from Hilo over the volcano. We opted for the “doors off” flight, which was wonderful if not a little windy and cold. It made for some excellent photos and video and was quite exhilarating.

The big island certainly is big; it’s over 220 miles to drive all the way around. We did a lot of driving and saw a lot while we were there, but really we just scratched the surface. There was a ton of stuff we didn’t do, and we had such a nice time there that I wouldn’t hesitate to go back and do the rest.

Click the image above for the photo gallery.

A video is coming soon!

Last week I turned 30. I’d think of something clever to say about this milestone, but now that I’m so old such extravagances are out of the question. I get tired just stirring my Metamucil. Don’t worry, I’ll still be blogging… You can look forward to such exciting posts as “All this progress — phooey!”, “By gum! 2nd BM this week!”, “An Open Letter To The Dog Who Shat On My Lawn”, and “Has Anyone Seen My Reading Glasses?”

Last week was also Melanie’s birthday, so to celebrate our mutual birthday week we headed out to Vegas. Figuring that it was a somewhat major birthday milestone, we decided to live it up and stay a night at the Bellagio and a night at Mandalay Bay. The Bellagio was awesome, great room, great service, nice atmosphere. The pools were great too. The Mandalay Bay had a great room but it was way too busy and crowded… We got to the pool at 9:30 AM and couldn’t find a single chair. Blah. But we got to see Penn & Teller, eat good food, and gawk at the ridiculousness that is Vegas. Good times.

Click on the image above to see the gallery.