fouldsy.com

For well over a year I’ve wanted to experiment with HDR (high dynamic range) photography, the blending of multiple photos taken at different levels of exposure. Over the winter I’d been slowly eyeing up various places around town where there is some interest, as I think HDR can be easily overdone and applied to subjects that don’t warrant it. But, each to their own. I’m hoping to stay calm and use subtle blends. So, coming home from work with 60F weather and blue skies, I grabbed my camera gear and jumped on the bike for some areas I’d seen just yesterday with Jeff:

There must be a fantastic story about this old army truck. I will try to pick people’s brains tomorrow on it!

Right next to this location, there’s also a burned out house just sitting having never been cleaned up. Again, would like to find out a little more about it. I can only hope everyone got out safely. This is still my biggest fear with living out here:

These HDR images were created using the awesome Photomatix software, which I realized very quickly, and with HDR in general, not just this piece of software, requires a good number of images to work with. The Canon EOS 50D by default only does 3 auto bracketed shots at up to +/- 2 stops exposure. I have found a good tutorial to quickly adjust this to 9 to 12 shots which I hope will reduce the graininess present by a lack of range in the tonal adjustment processing. 5 to 9 images seems to be a good standard for creating HDR images. The tripod and balllhead were awesome in setting these up, with ballhead so much easier to quickly and precisely line up what you wanted, and the quick release plate meaning I could also easily move to somewhere else lining up shots.

I’m looking forward to experimenting more. I know with the right conditions or filters, I may seemingly be able to achieve results close to these, but even photographs I made at what I would consider the right settings and looked very respectable pale alongside an HDR composed shot now. Check out the large resolution versions on flickr to see what I mean It works really well, and just the effect I was hoping I’d be able to achieve.

I am starting to really love my Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens Does take some getting used to as especially at low f-stops, the auto focus just can’t quite pick out when I’m wanting to do. Auto is for whimps anyways, right?! This was scrambling around some old machinery on my way to Jeff’s last night:

And we may not have KFC in Bethel, however there was a QFC at one point:

But, the important thing was getting another front page photograph on the Tundra Drums of my shot of Joseph repairing his salmon nets:

Very happy I have a few extra photos on flickr I got from Friday night which were fun. Tonight I had some friends over for poker which then moved on to Rock Band which was great fun too!

This is a pretty sight:

In 10 minutes I was able to promote a replicated LUN on our off-site DR SAN, rescan for volumes on our off-site DR ESX host, and then add the VM to the inventory and power it up. Given our replication scheduling and speeds, I should be able to bring online a fully-functional VM in a state no more than 2 hours behind what the production server was. I’ll take that Finishing off the documentation for the infrastructure and can move on to other areas, such as migrating more of our physical servers in to the environment - I’ve already decommissioned 7, and currently running 17 production and 5 dev VM’s.

On Monday I implemented some routing and switching changes with the help of AT&T and our awesome network support guys from Integrated Logic. This finally let our iSCSI traffic for our Equallogic SAN units talk to each other between the district office and our off site location, Gladys Jung, across a 100Mb fiber line. To say I was a happy monkey upon seeing the LUN replications firing up is an understatement! Tomorrow I plan on bringing one of the LUN’s online, connecting to the DR VMware ESX host and seeing if I can actually bring the virtual machine online. At that stage, I will definately be beyond happy. We started planning our VMware infrastructure at the end of September, and has been a long project to get to the finish line, but totally worth it in terms of the set up we are now running, especially for the middle of no-where Alaska!

Today I bought the bullet and plumped for OS X and iLife updates, taking my MacBook from OS X 10.4 to 10.5 and iLife ‘06 to ‘09. Was literally 3 years ago last week I got the little guy, and I have to say, after a 2Gb RAM upgrade pretty much right away for under $80 and then a hard drive replacement, also around $80, after 18 months of abuse (literally - more than a dozen major airline flights, bush airlines, and 2 month road trip!), it’s been flawless and still powers everything I need without leaving me wanting. It’s probably the most impressive piece of computer equipment I’ve ever bought (I would say electronics in general, bit I do love my Canon EOS 50D!). Given I’ve seen hundreds of new machines passing through the office and workshops this past week for imaging and inventory, I know what the current crop of MacBooks run at, and for general day to use, this 3 year old baby is holding it’s own still!

This last week I’ve been very busy at work as there are a lot of things I can be getting on with, config changes to make, and new systems to deploy, etc. whilst the majority of staff are out. I have been busy deploying a new district office DHCP server and pair of district-wide DNS servers also handling recursion from the X-serves out in sites. I have some layer 3 routing changes to implement tomorrow with AT&T to hopefully finally get SAN replication between our disaster recovery site and district office.

I did head out to Pinky’s Park on Tuesday to watch a little softball:

Four night’s a week there’s a fairly informal league for teams to play in which was good fun:

Wednesday night I then took a ride down to the river to check out the boats moving in + out from people fishing. The last week or two there has been a good run of salmon, with fish drying all over town outside houses:

I also met a cool old local called Joseph that I watched repairing his salmon nets with the traditional tools:

He let me hang around a good 10 minutes or so watching and making some photographs, with one his dogs also keeping watch on the proceedings in case anything good happened:

On Friday, Jeff had Dennis and I round for a roast dinner. I got to play with my new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 lens which I have fallen in love with! This is Dennis playing barman and making sure not a drop of tequila was spilled:

And then the chef himself taking a break after dinner to drink + chat:

I submitted a few photos in to the Tundra Drums after they got in touch asking for some possible photos to run in next week’s edition. Hopefully they like some of them and they get printed. Large sized photos of these ones here are on my flickr account.

This has been another busy week at work, with a couple of nights doing a remote server gig down in Wyoming as an outside project, as well as a late night Tuesday working with our VMware consultant. Starting to see the end of that project, once we work around yet another networking snag. I did finally get my VMware Certified Professional certification in the mail yesterday after passing the exam at the of January though, so that was pretty cool.

Dog sitting has not been particularly easy at times either, even Nikko is starting to tire of the little monster that is Suka. This Nikko earlier today whilst Suka was distracted elsewhere:

And the other monster trying to big scary guard dog at the window as a plastic bag blows by:

This past week I also got cell phone through GCI. When I figured out I can pay the same amount per month for a cell phone with 800 anytime minutes plus unlimited evening and weekends as I do for a fixed landline, it made more sense to switch, especially given how little I actually use my landline as I’m usually out elsewhere anyways. Feels a little weird having a cellphone again and be sending text messages, just sucks to not have data service out here for mobile internet or MMS. As with everything out here, it will slowly arrive, and service/quality has been better than expected actually. Just need to get an iPhone working now…

I’m now camped out at Jeff + Angel’s dog sitting Niko and Suka for the next week Is a nice little change, though was weird driving them up to the airport and then coming back myself and dealing with the joys of AC store parking lot! Never imagined I’d be driving round Bethel. Still, there were a few little errands I was wanting to get done in the next few days, so will be a help having a car to use.

The last couple of weeks have slowly been easing up at work with the bulk of the teachers and associated staff winding down. I am feeling kinda like a lost puppy with so many of my play buddies gone though now! I have the last of the VMware SAN replication to do this week with a consultant on-site Tuesday + Wednesday to move our second Equallogic unit off site. I already moved an ESX host to our off site location which works nicely given we have a 100Mb fiber line out there too.

I have a couple of website projects lined up, and a few photography projects to think about over the summer. Nice to have contacts now Some of those could turn out to be quite fun and a good experience. I scanned in 4 rolls of 35mm film the last couple of days too which gives me plenty of post-production work to do this week whilst hanging out here with the dogs. There’s a right mix of photos from the last few months, so will post some when I’m happy with the results.

The last couple of days have been busy with VMware and PowerSchool. We’ve had a consultant in working with us, and it was the perfect opportunity to migrate our student information system (SIS), PowerSchool, in to our VMware environment. I was planning on leaving PowerSchool as one of the our last physical servers to move in to the virtual environment, but given we had the experience on site to do it and I was confident in how VMware has been running, I thought we may as well give it a go. If nothing else, could simply roll back to the single physical server.

But, it all actually went fairly smoothly. I built up a template for Win 2k3 Enterprise with the base config and software, then deployed to 4 new virtual machines. One of these is running Oracle for the backend database, two are running the PowerSchool application node, with one being designated for general staff + parent logins, and the other for teachers and grading, and a final server dedicated to serving images, scripting and PHP reports. I have also snap-shot’d the database VM and one of the application nodes to be used for testing reports and in training sessions. Add in the new SIF ZIS which will be being deployed by the state over the summer, and that gives 7 virtual servers for PowerSchool, a far cry from the reliance and strain on a single physical server.

I’m really happy with how the migration went, as it really showed the power our VMware environment provides in terms of flexibility and resources. It also takes a huge weight off my shoulders, as we’ve never been able to successfully recover from a simulated failure using the backups due to the complexity of the integration between components, so with using straight vRanger Pro snapshots of the entire virtual machines, I can recover in minutes. I can also easily duplicate entire servers for testing updates, new releases (such as the upcoming PowerSchool 6), or for training purposes. Given PowerSchool is such a core system alongside FileMaker, both of which now run in our VMware environment, my management work load and stress levels should hopefully ease up considerably!

We still have a little work to do tomorrow - I’d like to automate a snapshot of the Oracle VM to a test VM that can be used by staff for building reports or whatever, though due to the way the database is tied in to the host IP, will need a little scripting. I’d also like to duplicate one of the application nodes and set it aside for testing the upgrade to PowerSchool 6. Is all positive stuff though, and giving me a lot of confidence in systems moving forward.

This was a long week, and an especially long Friday since we had the end of year barbecue potluck at lunchtime but then TAI didn’t get to skip out early. But, going to check my mail I picked up a copy of the Tundra Drums and recognized a certain photograph on the front page:

Very, very cool! I wasn’t expecting to get a front page photo published Really cheered me up. I got home, left if for a while, then actually sat down to read the paper, and then flipped open a two-page feature like page 6 which had another 4 of my photos, one whole page just of mine:

And the second page had one of mine in the bottom right too. Cool State of Alaska provided photo of the guy wading through with a kid on his back from a Yukon village:

Overall, a pretty cool issue! Very happy to have so many photos printed, think it’s actually all 5 that I submitted to them. Am quite proud to have so many published, and especially since they all look like they should be there too! I pretty much set out that night to make a certain set of photographs after Beth suggested what to look for with regards to what would work well in a photo feature, and managed to pull if off better than I hoped for.

To make things even sweeter, ’tis a 3-day weekend!

He’s a bugger to photograph with all the light in this room, and I’m not using the EOS 50D here (though there does seem a glimmer of hope on that note…):

Not quite as impressive as some of the aquariums I’ve had in the past, but it fills a nice little corner of my desk and adds a little interest too.