Snow day in Austin

Yesterday (02/24) Austin had a rare day of snow. I don't have class Tuesdays and Thursdays but I got wake-up calls from Julia and Naishadh about the snowfall. Heading to campus on the West Campus bus, I saw gaggles of students marveling at the snowflakes and having snowball fights. My d40 did its job for the better part of the day until moisture leaked into the directional pad, which caused it to go haywire- not letting me scroll through pictures or change the autofocus point in my viewfinder. Everything dried up just fine when I got home, though, so there's no permanent damage.

This was my first photo outing in a while and I am definitely rusty. It took me about half an hour to get my butt in gear. I was slow to track movement, being sluggish at making the necessary reactive adjustments to autofocus and metering. Composing felt forced and a little awkward. Also, my intuition about exposure was off and looking at my shots later, I found many of the under exposed.

Nevertheless, I had a blast, so I'll take this opportunity to regain my stride. Take a look at some of my favorites from yesterday.

Fish

My roommate's saltwater fish tank is very cool. He got the 55 gallon tank at the beginning of the fall 09 semester and has since spent thousands to equip, populate, and maintain it. Gotta love college businessmen and their disposable incomes...

First Day of Class | Spring 2010

...and my last semester here. Woah.



Gotta "do it big"
"put in some work"
"be real trill"
"get swoll body"
"lay some pipe game"

If none of that made any sense, don't worry. It took me a couple weeks to figure out what my roommates were saying half the time.

Merry Christmas

and a Happy New Year from the De Jesus family



A bit tardy, but hey, at least I'm updating, right?

Graduation Session

Jessica needed graduation/xmas pictures for her parents and I was happy to help. Here are some snaps from the shoot:









I'm hoping to start taking graduation pictures for my friends and peers at UT. It's my last semester at UT so I think that would be a fun thing to do. I could probably make a bit of money from it also. I'll keep you updated on developments.

Camera Phone?

Damn. That last post was a snoozer. I must have been REALLY bored the night I wrote it. I promise more ((interesting)) posts will start coming upon the arrival of the new semester.

New Years Resolution #123: Update blog with better posts.

Camera Phone

This is kind of a strange post for what should have been a semi-"serious" photo blog. I will post pictures I took off my phone. The only reason being is that I didn't pick up my real camera as often as I promised everyone this semester, and that I don't have much to show for myself except for these camera phone pictures. Sad, isn't it?



But I'll try to make this post productive by describing the limitations of the camera on my Samsung Impression, accompanied by relevant pictures. The images hereafter, I should let you know, have made the usual run through Lightroom 2.

The camera's exposure meter has 3 settings: Matrix, Center-Weighted, and Spot. From my experience, none of these settings behave the way they should. Center-weighted and Spot accurately meter only about 3/4 of the time, leaving me with many pictures that are either way underexposed or blown out. Matrix mode does the best job of reading exposure, but usually pictures with high contrast lighting come out a stop too bright. This snap was one of my preliminary experiments on how the camera would handle such a lighting situation:


Contrast isn't the best on the Samsung Impression, which is not unlike most other camera phones I've seen. But, in good lighting, or outdoors, the camera can put out some decent looking pictures with a fair bit of tonal depth. Keep in mind, again, that I ran this image through Lightroom (increased blacks), but this picture was a good example of nice contrast before I messed with it.


I think the best thing about this camera is the lens' surprising sharpness. In good light, the lens can swallow quite a bit of fine detail. Unfortunately, this sharpness means little in dim light or high contrast scenes, when the camera's shoddy metering usually under or over-exposes the scene. Nevertheless, bravo sharp lens:


Also, there's a fun panorama mode that I enjoy playing with when I'm bored:


The colors produced are vibrant and I'm relatively happy with them. However the camera introduces fairly random color casts on every picture, and there is no consistency between images. A scene taken outdoors in the sunlight will look magenta in one snap, and yellow in the next. There are no settings to change for white balance.



Overall, the camera kind of sucks. The metering is almost always wrong, contrast is normally flat, and scenes take on psychedelic colors at times. Also, the biggest drawback to this camera is the enormous amount of delay between when I press the shutter release, to when the camera takes the picture. It's a matter of about a 1/3 to 1/2 second delay! Forget sports photography with this phone. Usually what happens is I try to take a picture of someone doing something hilarious but end up getting the last hazy part of the moment.


However, I am glad to have a camera phone again, after having to use a backup phone for the first half of the year. I know it looks like I'm letting my photo hobby die off a little, but I still very much enjoy taking pictures for myself, albeit with a phone. This semester got a little crazier than I expected and my level of photography-laziness never dropped, thus I remained in my photo-hiatus for the semester. But I hope you will agree with me that these pictures and this post are the beginning of a new fervor and I do sincerely promise to keep posting and taking pictures. Thanks for reading.

Fall 2009

This is my first post in a while.

Just some random snaps on the way from campus to my apartment.





More posts to come.

Summer Time

Back in The Woodlands for the summer. Mandatory animal pictures...

Not just yet...

I picked up two assignments from Caleb on Sunday: a knitting circle and a farmer's market. The old ladies were hung over and ended up not meeting Sunday morning. I then got kicked out of the farmer's market by a douche bag assistant manager guy. Obviously, forces are keeping me in my photo break for the time being.

Birds

The recent photo posts demonstrate my three photo fetishes: Clouds, Feet, and Birds.

Habits (an assignment for my Conditions and Learning class)

REACTION PAPER DUE THURS:

Describe a personal habit that you don't want to modify.

Describe a personal habit that you do want to modify.

In both cases be very specific about the responses involved, the stimuli present when the response is made, and any consequences of the behavior.

A personal habit i would not like to modify is the habit of opening doors for women and elders. The stimuli present for this habit would be the presence of a women or an elder at a door that I am about to go through. The response is opening the door and letting the person through before me. Consequences of this behavior are usually general sentiments of gratitude from the person, as well as my own feelings of well-being derived from a sense of chivalry.

A personal habit I would like to change is cigarette smoking. I would not like to do this anymore. At this stage of my nicotine addiction, stimuli do not necessarily need to be present for smoking to occur, however notable stimuli that do cause an increased need for cigarettes include food, alcohol, and sexual intercourse. Consequences of this behavior are relief of tension and anxiety at the cost of decreased cardiovascular and respiratory health.

Feet!

Back in Austin!

I am slowly, *ever so slowly* getting back into shooting mode.

Clouds.

I'll be in The Woodlands for another week, then it's off to Austin for another action-packed semester.

New Years Eve

Spent it with some pretty ladies over lots of champagne and some of Matt's amazing home brewed beer and ale.




Kings Cup with champagne? Not the best idea in the world.




Happy New Year!

Back at the Studio

...Studio One-to-One Photography at The Woodlands Mall

It's fun as always.

So Comes the End of Fall 2008 Semester

So finals are upon us all and I am currently spending my life at the PCL in an attempt to learn a semester's worth in 3 classes. It seems like every semester is just an insane rush of fun and extracurriculars and drama and everything else BUT studying and when it finally comes to the end, I'm always in a huge marathon cram to make up for my shenanigans.

I'm really feeling for Vin right now, though. Organic Chemistry... Calc 408D... and nothing to look forward to but even more intense classes in the future. Don't worry, you'll make it to med school, buddy.


Bumpin' PCL night life:




This semester's been a real kick in the ass. A whole slew of things went wrong. Losing a few friends (some my fault, others not), bad girl decisions, and the economy completely fucking my family and me over, to name a few.

However, the bad must always be considered with the good. This has been the best semester so far for me at UT. I've gotten really close with old friends (Alicia and Lauren, this is your shout out) and I'm starting to recognize potentially really long, fruitful friendships with people I've met here over the past year. I feel very accomplished about the awesome network of people I'm surrounded by. Weekends are never dull, weekdays are cushioned by campus encounters with friends, and the apartment has been host to countless get-togethers and mischief.

And I really can't say enough about The Daily Texan gig. Damn. I know a few of you DT photogs have run into my blog so I'd like to say how much fun it is working with yall. Working for the paper has taught me a lot about photography, and my own abilities as a photographer, not to mention what I've learned about journalism and print. I've gained a lot of self-confidence about my work, and can really see this as a defining chapter of this young hobby of mine.

Forgive me if I sound weirdly sentimental, by the way. I haven't been taking pictures for very long so every little thing that happens is still awesome and noteworthy. And yeah, it totally makes me feel good to get praise from my family and friends. It's awesome that I've found something I like doing that I can share with people I love.


Here's to another wacky semester at The University of Texas at Austin. Fall 2008, you were kind of a bitch... but we had a hell of a time, too.

I close with two snaps on my way to the PCL today.



Cheers!