I’ve been playing with this cool video capture tool called FRAPS. It let’s you capture video during gameplay. I captured some of the sniper mission in COD4, edited a little and added some background music. Check it out…
OK….hockey is finally over and Daniel decided to try Lacrosse this Spring, instead of baseball. After only 3 or 4 practices, his team took part in a tournament at Springfield College. Daniel had a blast. Great…more equipment to buy!! 
Recently announced: The new Apple iPhone. Check out the link below for a detailed product feature tour. This thing looks amazing. Built-in iPod, web browser, Google Maps, etc. Looks expensive and until 2009 will only be available with Cingular service.
This is the lens that I just have to have. With an aperture of f/2.8 through the entire zoom range and built in vibration reduction, I can’t even imagine what kind of shots I could get in a hockey rink. I borrowed a friend’s f/2.8 Sigma last year and didn’t have to worry about lighting at all. Got some great shots even without using a flash. With this Nikkor, I could stand on the bench and pan with the players to get some great action shots. The cheapest I’ve seen this lens is around $1500, so I guess I’ll have to save up for it.
Here’s an interesting blog about parenting that is run by a co-worker of mine. He hasn’t updated it in a while, but there are some interesting articles about parenting.
The team played a great game against the District 5 Mariners in Raynham, MA today. Daniel played the first half of the game and allowed no goals. The Blades ended up winning 3-2 after an intense game.
Daniel had another great game today against the Springfield Junior Pics. During his half of the game he only allowed one goal, but I lost count of the shots on net.
Having a week off from work is really dangerous. I’ve finally had some time to pick up my camera and take some new pictures, but also have been playing around in Photoshop and doing some research online about digital editing techniques. My latest discovery is the Orton efffect, as seen above in an image of my sister on her wedding day. This is a tried and true effect to soften images by merging a couple of images at different focus and lighting levels. Nothing new in the photography community, but it’s new to me and I’ve applied it to a few of the images on my gallery. Click here if you want to see more.
Dan had a great game on December 30th against the Neponset Valley River Rats. The team came out strong, but in his half of the game, he only allowed 2 goals after approximately 20 shots on net.
I’ve recently discovered the wonderful world of High Dynamic Range image processing. Digital photography is notoriously bad at handling images with high contrast ratios, meaning very dark to very light areas in the same shot. HDR fixes this by allowing you to overlay several images shot at different exposure values and then applying some creative tone mapping to achieve some pretty amazing results.
This image was my first attempt at this, but I didn’t have a tripod, so I cheated by shooting one RAW image and letting the software adjust for the different exposure values. As I play with this some more, I’ll get some real shots, using several RAW images actually shot at different exposures. I don’t think this is too bad, though, for my first try.
This is the original image shot with my Nikon D70, AF-S Nikkor (18-70mm) Lens @ 18mm, 1/125s, F/5.6:
