Posted in May 2008 …

May 02 2008
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Journal

We Now Have Boxes of Books for Amazon and for Charity

boxes of books

Friday was a book moving box lifting day. Today was order day and we processed and packed up all our current orders to ship out. This includes moving all the boxes to the car and then taking a visit to our book warehouse to lift more boxes of books, which is the photo shown here.  We usually collect all new books, clean them up, organize, and then stock them on the shelves both here at our business and here.  Today was hot, and required a lot of heavy lifting.  It is quite a work out to move 50-60 pound boxes every day for a good part of the day, but it also gets very tiring physically.

I took this quick image with my phone on our way out, these will be left for another day. For those of you who are unfamiliar with this particular blog, one of our Internet businesses is dealing in books. Deborah and I have sold books on Amazon for quite a while now and part of our daily routine is a lot of heavy lifting of boxes and boxes of books. It can be quite exhausting being that both our offices are up one full flight of stairs and each and every single book has to make its way up, then down.

Everything Else

Some new music did arrive today from my trading buddies over at LaLa. On this list for today was Robbie Williams, The Ego Has Landed (which arrived broken in half), and The Bravery with their self titled album. It was an exhausting day and I am looking forward to the weekend where there should be plenty of grass to cut.

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May 02 2008
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Photography

Auburn Raptor Center and Great Horned Owl in Flight

Sometimes when photographing wildlife you just have to be in the right place at the right time. This is no small owl, the Great Horned Owl is quite large, and their flight is so silent that I have seen them fly across a large pasture, right by my head, and never knew they were there until I saw the enormous wing span of this bird fly by.

Other times though, you would be best to make your own luck. This shot was taken at the Auburn University Raptor Center when my UAB photography class was invited to see the birds, and learn about wildlife photography while we were there. Proper technique in wildlife photography is important so as not to disrupt the animals behavior, but it also isn’t as simple as asking a person to turn and smile.

We have these owls all around our property here in Alabama. I would hate to have this guy bearing down on my head. His distinctive yellow eyes makes him look quite intense.

Other posts of note on the Great Horned Owl I found are: OWL: Great horned owls!, and Hatchling Great Horned Owl, if you ever have a chance, try to visit the AU Raptor Center, you won’t be disappointed.

Image Specifics

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May 01 2008
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Journal

Time Lapse Video of My Work Day :: What’s in a Day

Another beautiful day down here in the south. This is such a great time of year in this part of the country, but we all know it will be short lived. Hot scorching days are just ahead. Today was one of those days I didn’t have to go anywhere at all and was able to get some work done here in my office.

Welcome Video and Some Time Lapse

First thing I did this morning was finish up my welcome video for my blog pages. I had been putting this off for some time and finally got it done. Instead of me rambling on, after watching this from another blogger it game me the idea to use it in my video. I put this video together yesterday and finished it up today. The refresh rate on the parts where I am talking are not as good as I would have liked, but I think it worked out ok, let me know what you think in the comments below. This is the only time I am going to actually put this video in a blog post, but since this blog post is my “daily post”, this is part of what I did today.

That was pretty much my first try at time lapse but once I saw found out how to do it I was a little enamored by the whole thing. You can really find out a little more about yourself by watching some of these videos. First thing Deborah said was she didn’t realize that I was actually so left hand dominant, me neither.

Scott Fillmer Resume Endorsement Video from Scott Fillmer on Vimeo

Everything Else

I did manage to get in my 4 miles of walking today and a long day of general work. No wildlife today other than or normal neighborhood of squirrels. Something neat I found today blogging wise was this new application that will allow you to use video comments, called seesmic. You can see their latest post here, Thwirl with Friendfeed released, you can also sign up for their alpha test at seesmic.com. I am going to try their wordpress plugin and see how it goes.

Update: I ended up removing my time lapse from YouTube and haven’t been able to get it replaced yet, but I replaced it with the video above.

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May 01 2008
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Tech

May 1st is RSS Feed Awareness Day Get Your RSS Reader Ready

So, today seems to be deemed RSS Feed awareness day (or RSS Day) and I had been contacted several times about trying to do a quick post on rss (Really Simple Syndication) feeds. It seems that many people are unaware of the importance, or usefulness of an rss feed, so now is your chance to see what it is all about.

As far as a blog goes, it is probably the single most important feature of your blog, and as a reader, it saves time and effort. Each time a favorite blog of yours updates their content, it sends out a rss feed, which can be read through a free program like Google Reader.

Almost all blogs utilize an rss feed, and now you can generally pull a feed from just about anywhere. There are feeds for news sites, blogs, hobbies, just about anything with active content. This is probably the best video out there on RSS Feeds, so give it quick look, it can explain a feed better than I can. Don’t forget to sign up for my rss feeds, located at the top right corner of the menu at the top. As you look at the drop down, you will have a link to each blog I author, each with its own separate rss feed. In order to read the content of each post, you will need to subscribe to each blog individually.

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May 01 2008
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Photography

Coypu Nutria or Marmot or Prairie Dog Relaxing

Coypu or Nutria

This image of the day is a little different. This is a Coypu or Nutria, sort of like a beaver with a cat-like tail.

The coypu or nutria (Myocastor coypus) is a large, herbivorous, semi-aquatic rodent and the only member of the family Myocastoridae. Originally native to temperate South America, it has since been introduced to North America, Europe, Asia and Africa, primarily by fur ranchers.

This, not so little, guy just sat here with me for about an hour. Animals can be a lot of fun to photograph, if they cooperate, and they usually don’t. When trying out wildlife photography, best to use a very long lens if you can, at least a 200mm would be a good place to start. Isolate the background by using a very small aperture (stop all the way down to f2.8 if you have that fast of a lens).

The point of focus is almost always going to be on their eyes. You want the eyes to be in sharp focus and just let the rest of the image fall where it does. Even with the focus on his eyes here, you can see some pretty good detail in his paws.

If you can use a directional flash without disturbing the animal it will give just enough of a flash off their eyes to make them look more real, not like a wax figure.

Image Specifics

  • Body – Nikon D2X
  • Lens – Nikon 80-200mm f2.8, with a Nikon 1.4x teleconverter
  • Shot at f4 (due to the one stop loss from the teleconverter) @ 1/400 sec.
  • Film – digital @ ISO-100
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