The wife and I hit San Francisco earlier this week and, you know it, I brought along a few cameras.
Forgetting the lessons learned from a few vacations ago I figured my D300 and a few lenses would be a good thing to shlep around and photograph with but I soon remembered that, oh yeah, it’s heavy.
Sure, my new love, the Nikon AF Zoom-NIKKOR
80-200mm f/2.8D ED (one of Nikon’s best kept secrets by the way) is unbeatable and didn’t fail to impress, but after a few miles on foot, nothing says “superfluous” like a 120-300mm equivalent lens taking up room in a sholder bag.
Ultimately I fell back on, and had the most fun with, just my trusty Panasonic LX-3 and of course the Leica M3. Read More >>
As a history buff living in the cradle of the California Gold Rush, I was ecstatic to find out about Clarksville Day, the one day a year old Clarksville is to the public.
Clarksville was formed during the Gold Rush and later was a transfer stop (at least for a few weeks, folks were vague about that) on the Pony Express route. It’s located just outside of what today is El Dorado Hills and like so many other areas in El Dorado County though you’re only a few steps off the main road, you feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.
Today there’s a new feature on SacTraffic.org, a toolbar courtesy of Sacramento Connect.
Sacramento Connect is a network of high-quality news providers and bloggers in the Sacramento region and is the brain-child of The Sacramento Bee*. Tying all the affiliated sites together is a toolbar you’ll see at the bottom of all the pages, including SacTraffic.
The toolbar will show traffic related stories from the Sacramento Connect network, allow users to search the affiliated sites and allow greater access to SacTraffic content from the other Sacramento Connect sites.
All it all, I think it’s a nice addition, but then I’m biased…
*Full disclosure: I’m a web developer with the Sacramento Bee and my group was instrumental in the development and deployment of Sacramento Connect and the toolbar.
Just so you know, sactraffic.org isn’t dead. I missed writing up a huge number of updates I did back in October, which is a shame because they included a lot of really cool speed tweaks and other updates that are just too numerous to list here now.
Anyway, I just finished another set of updates, though this time around the changes are more subtle. Outwardly I added support for geotagging the incident location in the Twitter updates so if you use a Twitter client that supports geotagging, the location of the incidents will appear with the tweet.
Behind the scenes I put in two additional changes. First I converted to Twitter’s OAuth mechanism for authentication, which should provide some more security under the hood and second, I switched to Google’s Closure compiler which provides better javascript compression than YUI Compressor which I adopted back in October.
Last, but not remotely least — and this was something I did back in October — the sactraffic.org code is publicly available via github under an OpenBSD-style BSD license. You can check out the code there and suggest changes.
On my desk at work, back in the ever present dust, behind the gargantuan 30″ monitor I inherited from someone who found themselves suddenly unemployed, is a kaleidoscope.
The lettering on it reads:
sacbee.com Charter Member July 15, 1996
There were once 7 of those at The Sacramento Bee but today there is just one: and it is mine.
All this brouhaha about newspaper’s “original sin” (see: Alan Mutter, Steve Buttry, Howard Owens, Steve Yelvington and lets not forget Jeff Jarvis for starters) got me thinking about those pre-historic online newspaper days. In looking back, I don’t see any singular “original sin” per se. If anything a Gomorrah-like den of iniquity perhaps, but no single point of failure.
Everything was new and we were pulling the whole thing our of our collective asses as we went (perhaps that was sin #1).
Man I’ve heard that quote a lot recently, especially in the online news arena. It sounds all impressive and high falutin’, you know, being a quote from Voltaire and all. The problem is the above quote is almost always uttered as an excuse for something less than perfect or good… mediocrity.
Now, some would say that this is an outgrowth of the traditional newspaper mindset where existing in a virtual monopoly state — where “good enough” was in fact all that was needed for 30% profit margins — for so long has dulled that mindset to the realities of actual competition.
I don’t know that I’d go quite that far (tho it is fun to theorize on occasion) but I do bristle at the quote. Online operations are exceedingly competitive — and are becoming more so almost daily with the advent of local news blogs and the like — so if there are people running around thinking we can aim low and still be successful, well…
Category: Photography /
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Since getting a 105mm Micro lens (its real name is AF-S VR Micro-NIKKOR 105mm f/2.8G IF-ED but yeesh…) I’ve been experimenting a lot with macro photography or in other words shooting reeally, reeally small things up close. Since, I’ve never owned a macro lens before, it’s been kindof a learning experience.
Early in my photojournalism career a Sacramento Union photographer once gave me some simple advice: get a hold of all the film you can and shoot it up. But as I’ve gotten back into photography, even when shooting digital which isn’t constrained by the limits of a 36 exposure roll of film, I’ve found it’s just sometimes easier to say to yourself: nah, I’ll shoot it next time…
You don’t make good pictures that way.
Tonight as the midwest-grade thunder cracked and lightning lit the sky up, I finally remembered those words and decided, no, it was going to be this time and I headed out into the rain.
Category: Mass Media /
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While I hesitate to pick up on anything with Media News stink on it, if you haven’t seen the memo posted to Romenesko about Media News’ new online “direction” it’s worth a read.
I won’t repost the whole thing here but I will pull out the interesting bits…
The wife and I hit San Francisco earlier this week and, you know it, I brought along a few cameras.
Sacramento Connect is a network of high-quality news providers and bloggers in the Sacramento region and is the brain-child of 
