Since I’ve taken to the hobby of photography, I thought I might take another photography class (the last one I took was in 2002). I also thought I might start posting the photos here on my blog. To liven things up a bit, I’ll post some highlights of one roll of film at a time.
Click the larger image to the right to see the album, or the square thumbnails to see a larger version of that photograph.
This first roll was taken at “the pond” where we waterski here in Eugene.
Maybe I need to quit blogging since I only get into it once a month or so. I’d rather figure out a reason to post more often. Maybe photography, we’ll see… In the last month or so, I’ve picked up my first DSLR camera, a Digital Rebel, and taken to photography as a hobby rather than a passing interest.
Also, like 2 months ago, I signed up for a Flickr account, mostly for a class project. I was going to make some mediocre review of the service, maybe try out Smugmug and Picasa, figure out which one to sign up for the “Pro” version of. Well I realized how many people I know on flickr (several), versus Smugmug (one), versus Picasa (one), and had to go to Flickr by default.
That said, I like the rich feel of Smugmug better, especially the function of the site on the Wii’s integrated browser. I also like the fact that it’s owned by neither Yahoo nor Google. On the other hand, being backed by Yahoo or Google may be a good thing, since neither one is likely to vanish into the night. But still, the ubiquity of Flickr, the reasonable price for the “Pro” upgrade, and the fact that more people I know use it, I had to go with Flickr.
Yadda yadda yadda, here are some samples of the photos I’ve taken (besides the one of me), and also a link to my flickr account.
Well the other night I was bored, and found a coupon for 1 month of BBO:TA free (instead of the standard 2 weeks), so I signed up. Filling out my queue, I was impressed, they had most of the titles that convinced me to sign up for GamezNFlix last year (which after I signed up, I found out they didn’t really have them in their inventory, just listed as “ordered”… most as much as 3 years prior! Can we say LAME?!)… Anyways, it looks like Blockbuster actually has these. They also had lots of cheesy ski movies that Netflix didn’t have, or didn’t show me in my searches. I’m a sucker for a bad movie that involves skiing.
Well my first 3 disks arrived today. Oddly, it was the 1st, 5th and 6th disks in my queue. I like that they keep disks moving even though the one you want right away is on a “very long wait”, but 5 & 6 happened to be disks 2 & 3 of a tv series. Not cool to miss the first disk. And the first one was the last disk in a series I had been watching from Netflix. This was one of those double sided dvd’s, and it’s like the layers are separating. One side played fine, but the other doesn’t play at all. So the first disk I watch is reported unplayable. Probably doesn’t help my karma with them.
So it was probably a draw of chance that my first selections flopped, but it’s not a good first impression. My first impression of Netflix seemed to be nearly brand new disks and fast shipping. These other services have been fairly scratched and sometimes unplayable disks. I wish the quality control was a little better, maybe incorporate a polishing step for disks every so often, not just when problems are reported.
Overall, I’m a little impressed how quickly these were sent out, the shipping estimate was pointing to Saturday and Monday! As I mentioned earlier, I like that the disks keep moving, but I would prefer an extra check to see if it’s part of a series (even though I unlocked this series, so I could move it around in my queue). Regardless, I’ll go drop these off at Blockbuster over the weekend and hope my “second impressions” are better than the first 🙂