oh bt dubs: pictures

Meh.

Italy's got food and people.

They're better drivers than any American.

Tourists think I'll steal their bags.

not sure what else to share.

Oh-- so I tried to take a night bus to the downtown, but got on the one going away from, rather than towards the stazione.

The bus drove for a bit, stopped on the side of the highway, and the busdriver left. I'm sitting there for a while-- called Mel (and lost all my credits because I forgot it was an australian call), and eventually the driver came back.

I go up to him with this map and I say "Dov'e qui?" (where is here?) and he looks at my map for a moment and with his pen points to a space about five inches above my map.

Shit.

He then says something with the word "dov'e" in it and I'm not quite sure what he's talking about. He then repeats "Dov'e" and I say "statzione" and point to the station on the map.

He then thinks for a moment.... and starts the bus up.

He then did his return route 40 minutes ahead of schedule because of me. Awesome.

Amo italiani.

Uhh-- don't know what to post about.

I usually make posts when I'm sitting around with nothing to do. Or have whatever to reflect on.

You know-- being emo or whatever.

Uhh-- Lack of internet access means I never have any dead time on the internet-- so i'm like frantically checking email or doing something else.

uhh.. the now: present tense verbs in italian. spending time with the australian. Still enamored.

Girls.

A Post about Lenses.

Because they're always on my mind, and to kill time before Mariko comes downstairs.

So there are like 3 things that makes a lens unique from other lenses: maximum (and sometimes minimum, if it matters) aperture, focal length (and if it's variable, ie a "zoom lens"), and random extra features.

Aperture refers to how wide the iris of the lens can become. It is displayed as an f-stop number. the lower the aperture, the wider it is, so f/1.4 is wider than f/3.5. The number refers to some mathematical calculation I don't understand.

Maximum aperture grants you two important qualities, the extremeness of out-of-focus elements and the 'speed' of the lens, or rather the wider your aperture, the faster shutter speed you can use. A wide aperture lets you use less light than you would need normally, which basically means less unwanted blur from camera/subject motion, and lets you take good photos without a flash, which is always a plus when you don't want that to distract people.

The wider your aperture, the narrower your focal depth becomes, and so with a very wide aperture you could have the eyes of a portrait be in focus yet have the tip of their nose and their ears be blurred, which is pretty cool. Wide apertures are what let you take a picture of someone and have everything else in the room be blurry, enhancing the attention given to your subject in the photo's composition.

Next comes focal length. It's displayed as a number in milimeters. The smaller the number, the wider a shot you can take. When looking through the lens of a camera, consider the corners of the picture. Imagine straight lines coming from the camera sensor, projecting to the corners of the picture that the camera is framing. From above, this will look like a triangle, with the flat side at one end being the physical area the camera is observing, and the corner toward you as the camera itself.

A focal length of 18mm would let you take the picture of an entire room, where the focal length of something higher like 100mm would be zoomed in so that you could only look at one object at a time in the room. The longer the focal length, the less objects are distorted based on physical proximity. This is important to consider when taking pictures of people with a wider lens, since whatever body part is closer will seem freakishly large, unless the person is further from the lens.

Zoom lenses can work within a range of focal lengths, usually noted by something like "18mm-100mm". Prime lenses are lenses which can only work at one focal length.

Because of the simplified structure, prime lenses can have much wider apertures than zoom lenses. So from the inflexibility of a prime lens, you are afforded the ability to take better pictures at that specific focal length.

As a general rule, the more a lens can do, the more it will cost. So you could feasibly buy a lens that does 70-200mm at f/2.0, but it will cost you out your ass.

Lastly there are little extra features like Auto-Focus (and AF-S magic with Nikkor), Vibration Reduction and weird glass properties that reduce light from smearing around.

So when I go out today I can either use my 50mm f/1.8 which would be cool for taking pictures of stuff around 5-20 feet away or my 18-105mm f/3.5-5.6 which will still be able to take decent photos in day-light and be better for taking pictures of stuff I can't walk up to.

it's almost noon. wakeup, b.

First breakfast in Europe

Besides the one on the plane, I guess.

And other first meals which were all either on planes or that one shitty sandwich I made myself last night and ate while walking around the sketchier neighboring side streets near the hostel.

Went to breakfast, sat next to this Australian girl named Melanie. At least I think that was her name. I'm probably going to forget her face because every girl over here pretty much looks the same to me: gorgeous.

Mariko seems dead tired-- which makes sense because when I was trying to wake her up at 9am it would've been around midnight california time.

When I was sort of sleeping last night I could hear the door opening and someone moving about the room. When I looked over they had opened one of our lockers. I thought it was someone robbing us but at the critical moment before leaping from the bed to tackle them I realized it was just Mariko grabbing her computer at like 4am (6pmish ala Cali?). She'll probably be rid of jetlag by tomorrow morning.

My laptop charger + eurodapter works out.

I'm sitting in the Lounge's lounge, sitting on a couch under this big TV, so there's like five people staring above my head. They speak french.

I've been gradually uploading every single picture I've taken to Flickr where I now have unlimited space. I'm planning on trying to figure out Flickr's definition of infinity as soon as I can. So far? over 2 gigs.

Sleepless

Got like 3 hours of sleep.

Mariko came in.

Things feel stabler now that we can plan stuff out together.

Uhmm... don't know

Here's us, post 24 hour sleepless marathon.

Gonna drink , get some rest