Sitting at my desk just now, I felt compelled to throw my hands up in the air, not because of the spoilers per se that are contained in the link below, but because apparently no one bothered to tell me earlier that Carla Gugino is going to be in the Watchmen movie.
Morning Spoilers: Spoilers For Watchmen, Dragonball, Lost and CJ7
Took a trip with a birder friend a week ago to the Sacramento National Wildlife Refuge Complex — which, by the way, as a poetic name destined to inspire a sense of wonder in children, naturalists, artists down the decades, I’m sure. Way to roll trippingly off the tongue, SNWRC.
It was a lot of fun, and edumacational. I took hundreds of images, although most of them were distinctly crappy. (Conditions weren’t optimal.) Some are fine, and some are vaguely appealing in an impressionistic way. It was a particularly rich environment for raptors, compared to my usual haunts. There were quite a lot of Northern Harriers,
along with a few Red-Tailed Hawks,
plenty of Turkey Vultures, a Bald Eagle,
a Peregrine Falcon,
and a White-Tailed Kite.
There were also some more ridiculous-looking birds, like the Ring-Necked Pheasants,
White-Faced Ibises, Whimbrels,
Black-Necked Stilts,
sandpipers, Wilson’s Snipe, etc.
There were also a number of ducks, including Pintails, Northern Shovelers,
and Cinnamon, Green-Winged, and Blue-winged (not shown) teals:
There were also less visually impressive species like the Downy Woodpecker:
and Western Meadowlark:
The full(ish) list:
* Pied-Bill Grebe
* Double-Crested Cormorant
* Great Blue Heron
* Great/Common Egret
* White-Faced Ibis
* Turkey Vulture
* Greater White-Fronted Goose
* Snow Goose
* Gadwall
* Wigeon
* Mallard
* Blue-Winged Teal
* Cinnamon Teal
* Green-Winged Teal
* Northern Shoveler
* Northern Pintail
* Ring-Necked Duck
* Scaup
* Hooded Merganser
* Ruddy Duck
* White-Tailed Kite
* Bald Eagle
* Northern Harrier
* Red-Tailed Hawk
* Peregrine Falcon
* Ring-Necked Pheasant
* American Coot
* Black-Necked Stilt
* Spotted Sandpiper
* Whimbrel
* Western Sandpiper
* Wilson’s Snipe
* Belted Kingfisher
* Nuttal’s Woodpecker
* Downy Woodpecker
* Northern Flicker
* Black Phoebe
* Common Raven
* Bushtit
* Marsh Wren
* Yellow-rumped Warbler
* Song Sparrow
* White-Crowned Sparrow
* Red-Winged Blackbird
* Western Meadowlark
* House Finch
Non-bird:
* Black-Tailed Jackrabbit
* California Ground Squirrel
Just kidding. But ??Alias?? fans will recall the tech who removed Sloane’s implant recording his own death using a device of this nature.
The camera, which researcher Michelle Hauer and her team recently filed a patent for, is small enough to be implanted directly on the eye’s lens, and feeds image data to a chip at the back of the eye, where it can either be fed into the optic nerve to aid the blind, or just into a portable hard drive to aid the creepy.
http://www.nekocase.com/news/2008/01/aqua_teen_hunger_forcewoo_hoo_1.html
I think I shall.
I’ve been contemplating using my employee fee waiver to take a b/w photo class at Laney — traditional darkroom stuff, etc.
But, I wasn’t sure how much I might love or hate the process of shooting with film, so I bought a preposterously inexpensive thirty-year-old (give or take) Nikkormat FT-2:
I wanted an old Nikkormat because I have a few equally ancient non-AI lenses already, and the early Nikkormat models, along with the F and F2, are the only cameras that are fully compatible with them.
I shot a test roll with Kodak Ultra 800 purchased from Walgreens; that came back more or less correctly exposed, so I proceeded to shoot a couple rolls of Kodak BW400CN, a black and white C41 process film (means “any old photo lab can process it like color film”).
I like the second one a lot. The guy at the photo lab liked the speaker. (Incidentally, discussing photos I’ve taken but haven’t seen yet is one of the more awkward consumer experiences I can think of offhand.)
I don’t have a workflow figured out yet (I don’t have a film scanner, but high-res scans are expensive, and so, for that matter, are prints), but I do like being able to produce images with that retro-fabulous filmic look. Still not decided on that class, either. (The list of required materials is extensive, and not exactly cheap, and I’m not sure how I’d fare in a chemical darkroom, lungs-wise.) But I’m definitely glad I got the camera — thank goodness for 1960’s and 70’s-era Japanese manufacturing.
I keep expecting to see Tom Cruise blast down College Avenue on a street sweeper…
