aaron schwab

it’s Devil’s Night, which, considering my lack of rotten eggs and toilet paper rolls, means very little to me. fortunately, being in an apartment building this year reduces my chances of being a victim considerably. i’m kind of stoked on my Hallowe’en costume for tomorrow night (hint: it’s a parody) but i have no idea where Cagney and i will end up or what we’ll end up doing. hopefully we can find a party or bar function to flaunt our costumes at.

other than that, i don’t know what i can go on and on about today — work’s been steady and, aside from meeting the odd interesting person, largely the same as it always is. it does feel nice to be working over having nothing to do, however.

you wouldn’t know it by my recent post frequency, but this blog’s been on my mind a bit lately — i originally started it up at the beginning of last year with the intention of posting daily or every-other-day updates about what’s going on or about whatever i feel like ranting about that day. it seems i’ve fallen far behind on my posts, but Twitter seems to be doing a good enough job with letting people know enough of what’s going on in my life. i’ll have my website launching soon, too (i’m meeting with my very talented and accommodating designer tonight to go over a draft of the layout,) so the blog portion of that site will allow me to keep up with recent photo work that i do — it’s usually photo-related stuff that i bother to update about, anyways. so who knows; this blog might get the retirement treatment or it might stick around for posterity or to give me a venue to write about things that have nothing to do with cameras. also, i know i’ve talked about all this on here before; i just recently became aware of how much less i have to say nowadays on this blog.

regardless, i’m sure i won’t be able to bring myself to delete it, and, if i consider doing so, i’ll likely think of something to put in here just as i’m about to. hell; i’ll probably announce my website launch here (and on Twitter, and on Facebook, and on my hugely irrelevant MySpace,) so stay tuned!

as usual, i’ve been reading good ol’ Kenny’s site on a daily basis as of late, and yesterday, he posted about Nikon’s new flagship pro body, the D3s. the D3s is Nikon’s midterm release schedule update to the D3, and serves as an upgrade to the D3 to tide consumers over until the projected 2011 release of the D4.

all of this new camera glitter (and my subsequent envy over the D3s) got me thinking about the fact that, for eight hours a day during shooting season at work, there’s a D100 stuck firmly to my hand. the D100 was Nikon’s first prosumer DSLR, introduced in 2002, which, in the digital camera world, is forever ago.

the technical advances made in digital cameras since 2002 seem tremendous when you compare the specifications of cameras of today to those of seven years ago. just for kicks, here’s a brief rundown of Nikon’s newest flagship update versus the workhorse that gets my job done every day:

sensor resolution: 6.1MP vs. 12.1MP
sensor size: 16×24mm vs. 24×36mm
maximum shutter speed: 1/4000 sec. vs. 1/8000 sec.
maximum continuous frame rate: 3 FPS vs. 9 FPS
maximum ISO: 1600 vs. 102,400 (not a typo; that’s 102.4 thousand)
runs like a: tank vs. tank

in spite of the leaps and bounds Nikon’s (and everyone else’s) digital bodies make every year — nevermind in the span of seven years — the D100 cameras that we shoot thousands of images with every day do the same thing that a brand new $5000 body would do, and that’s make great images. neither camera is much good in the hands of someone who doesn’t know how to use them and, with proper application of light, either can create stunning results.

it’s amazing how much people — myself included — fawn over technical details of camera gear, which makes it easy to forget that a good photographer is a good photographer with any tool in his or her hand. some tools make the task at hand easier to do or the goal easier to achieve, yes — otherwise pro gear wouldn’t exist — but the tool doesn’t equal the skill necessary to make great images.

(note: it’s entirely possible that i lifted my entire philosophy on good image-making from Ken again, but it doesn’t make it any less true. we’re all Ken-heads at heart, let’s admit it.)

i’ve been spending most of today at my computer here at home, paging down through the grad photos that we took over the past two weeks and deleting any where a blinking subject or tehcnical error is present. sorting 40,000+ images takes longer than i’d have initially anticipated, but getting it out of the way before i sit down to burn a few hundred proof CDs is a huge timesaver when crunch time actually arrives.

other than that startling revelation, i haven’t got much to report on right now, surprisingly (i wear my life isn’t boring; there’s just not a lot of things that i’d deem blog-rant-worthy at the moment.)

this weekend, however, is the start of KW’s annual Oktoberfest celebration, the drinkathons of which i’ve never attended (save for last year’s and, presumably, this year’s ARCtoberfest to see Gran Casino, which didn’t end up and probably won’t end up being a drunken night for me, anyways.) according to the universal source of all knowledge, Oktoberfest is a 16-day festival held in Munich, Germany, and is also the world’s largest fair. KW has the world’s second largest Oktoberfest celebration and, though i don’t know what the atmosphere is like in Munich this time of year, i do know that the majority of Oktoberfest goers use the event as an excuse to pay a ticket price that’s far too high to drink overpriced beer inside of local venues and tents set up on the streets. i mean, if you’re going to take part in the festival and amend your Facebook status to reflect that, at least spell “prosit” properly.

while i’m all for something like a city-sponsored drinking event, i can’t see myself paying what a festive evening might cost, even though i like the idea of going out with people i know. i don’t know — maybe my gauge for the value of booze is slanted, being a Phil’s regular and all.

after almost 66 hours of work in Joe’s barn’s hayloft, recorded via a bird’s-eye photograph every thirty seconds, and what feels like an equal amount of time spent compiling the images into a timelapse, the video that Joe envisioned at the beginning of his hayloft construction project is finally done and is viewable here. i just got it up ont YouTube last night after several failed upload attempts (the YouTube upload page gives a maximum file size of two gigs, but the help page states one and, naturally, the help page was right.)

this small victory for the start of my stop-motion career comes at the tail end of our first week back in UW’s engineering department for grad photos. it’s been a hectic week, but i figure it’s a good sign when a fully-packed schedule on any given day feels like a normal pace now and not like the pandemonium it once seemed like. it’s Friday right now and i’m seriously craving the upcoming weekend (and the possibility of another Toronto adventure tomorrow night.) as much as my job can feel like a drag after a busy week, i still enjoy doing this. there’s not a huge glamour factor to it, really, but i figure myself to be prety lucky to be able to make my income via the industry i’m most interested in, much less with a company run by more of a friend than a boss, and with co-workers who feel more like friends than co-workers, to boot.

anyways, enjoy the video, and drop a comment on the score composer’s MySpace telling him what a great job he did.