For some reason that I don’t well recall, I was in Wellington City at 7am one morning, and while walking to work (on Waterloo Quay, at the time) I took this marvellous photo of the sun rising over the harbour, and the dockside.

Unfortunately I don’t have technical camera specifications for this particular shot, however I do know that it was taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S5600 Digital.

A cloudy sky, back lit, silhouetted trees against the black and white background.

Unlike the last photo I blogged, this is a purely black+white shot, taken as part of a set intended to be panorama’d.

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 1/30s, a Focal Length of 12.8mm and an F-stop set at F/3.6, on ISO200.

For the longest time, I’ve been somewhat of a purist with regards to my own photography. A “Take the photo, leave the photo alone.” type approach. More recently, however, I’ve been leaning back towards the idea of touching photos to gain a different feeling – whether it be cropping, framing, or in this case, selective colouring.

This is another shot from the EMU campus here in Harrisonburg, this time shot in colour, and selectively tinted so as the light is in colour and the rest of the shot is black and white. Generally when I do things like this it winds up looking tacky and/or cheesy, however I’m quite please with the turnout of this one.

Taken with a Fujifilm Finepix S9600 Digital, Shutter Speed 1s, a Focal Length of 17mm and an F-stop set at F/5, on ISO200.

I thought it was time to give a glimpse of my media-space before I get too far. Starting from the left, the white box is my wife’s – it’s all DVD’s, it also has my NZ DVD player in it, waiting for me to buy a step-up transformer for it. To the right of that, on top is the TV, bought for us by Kelly’s sister and brother-in-law, topped with some of my card games. Below that is a DVD player and a VCR ($10.50 at a thrift store, works fine!), to the right of that is a 17″ monitor, below which is Telly – my P3 server. It is a Pentium 3 running at 866MHz, with 512MB RAM and a 160GB PATA hard disk. It runs Debian, and doesn’t do much at this point (although it has a bunch of my files, and an IRC bot that I use). Below Telly is the stereo, thanks Katie.

Behind the black to the right of the right-hand speaker, is the 550VA UPS, holding all the PC’s online and surge protecting everything else. The black, for reference, is a CD wallet containing all my music CD’s, 130-odd, and Cookiemonster, a presently unused Dell Latitude C610 – Pentium 3 Mobile, 733MHz/1Ghz, 256MB RAM, and an 80GB hard disk.

Right of that is the desk. 3 Computers here – The Dell is a Celeron 2.4GHz, 512MB RAM and I believe a 40GB Hard disk, this is the wife’s, however she has the laptop so it connects the other machines around the desk to the wireless upstairs. It also runs another IRC bot, that links two channels across two networks. (See http://www.livebravely.ca/)

Above the Dell, are 2 external hard disks connected to the white PC beside it. They are 160GB (Silver) and 320GB (Black) and are mostly used for backup and video editing. The white PC is the Windows Desktop, it is an Athlon 3200+, 1GB RAM, 320GB Internal PATA hard disk, running Windows XP Pro. Above this is another Dell Latitude laptop, this one a Pentium 4 Mobile 1.8GHz, with 512MB RAM and a 40GB hard disk, it is in testing as an Asterisk PABX (phone system) server. To the right of all this is just storage for various cables.

Don’t say it, I already know. I’m a geek. Or a nerd. Or both. Or some combination. However you choose to look at it.