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

Sleepless

ps: the dude at the desk that i talked to a lot is named Neils.

Like Neil, regular Niel... but more than one.

Multiple Neils.

Sleepless

You know how grocery stores have people walk around and push inventory to the front of the shelf so everything lines up all pretty and whatever?

And some stores have like.. spring loaded stuff that keeps food in sort of this magazine cartridge that always pushes stock toward the edge of the shelf?

Well I bought some meat from a grocery-- they had the spring loaded kind on very flat, plastic-wrapped deli meat. This was a bad idea, because when i grabbed one, there wasn't anything stopping like eight to fly out. Also, they were packed so closely together that the corner of one package would then trip an adjacent thing of meat. Long story short, foreign scrawny boy, sleep deprived and looking all disheveled and whatever with a pile of meats around him. I made eye contact with this guy, and he started laughing.

Mannnnnnnn...

So now i have some meat, and some cheese, but no fridge. They have a communal fridge ground level, with communal kitchen, but it was packed last time i went there, and I am way too tired to try to be social. maybe i'll just sneak it upstairs and eat stuff there before it spoils (against rules of hostel)

Whatever.

Also-- attractive women everywhere. And they're all holding hands with funky-looking guys with nice shoes and sweaters.

Also Also: The flight staff on Amsterdam to Vienna was really intense. Everything was said in German, and then in English, and the English was perfect and with no accent.

The flight attendant who was taking food orders throughout the flight would remember who spoke what the first time around and would continue to flip between english and german instantly and with no trace.

Europeans are smarter than me.

Waiting in line for the amsterdam to vienna, i was behind this family of three that switched between some indian language, french, and english without warning. It seemed like they'd switch mid-sentence just because they could. Fuck.

drifting hard

Sleepless

ugh, so tired.

I still have to figure out money, phone, and food.

I don't really feel like going out and exploring, it is like 7pm in vienna now. It's cold, and.. uhh.. everyone speaks German, I am so obviously foreign.

When I was in transit and got closer and closer to Europe, I realized that they really all do dress very well.

And here I thought I could look special too. Now I'm barely coming up to par again. Something that makes me stand out: My shoes. Every man wears shiny leather shoes. They so legit.

This is my first take at jet lag. It's 7 here, noon in wisconsin, and I'm dead tired from not sleeping during the trip.

Maybe this is to my advantage because now I can just go to sleep at a normal time and have that be my sleep for the night to reset my schedule.

but I really want to sleep now... but I should probably wait till mariko shows up. Do that.

Stealing the hostel wifi to backup all my pictures..

Sleepless

way too exhausted to resum this right now:

sent to my mother

It's like 6pm and I'm at my hostel. They have free wireless internet in the ground lobby. I have 4 hours to kill until Mariko is scheduled to show up.

I managed to not figure out how to give the right people the information about my camera equipment. Also I somehow managed to not go through customs? Not sure if that's supposed to be possible. I think customs was optional, I asked them if I would need to declare something, and they asked me if I had fruit or alcohol, and I said no, and they said that I was fine.

In my earlier confusion in Minnesota I asked when I would be going through customs, because I thought I might have missed something. The woman gave me a puzzled look, which I later found out meant she thought I was a terrorist or something since the TSA pulled me out of line and searched through all of my stuff, frisked me, and then interrogated me a little bit about why I was asking about customs.

I explained the camera stuff, and they chuckled a bit and said that I should have gotten that taken care of before trying to board the plane.

I am convinced that TSA agents aren't really people. Fuckers.

I haven't slept since Monday morning. But I guess since it's around noon in wisconsin, I shouldn't drink caffiene and instead should try to fall asleep at a normal time here.

words

Got a fancy camera- blah blah.

Testing out the "Upload to blogger" function of Picasa.

pretty psyched that you can click on this for a huge version.

soon

My plane takes off in 28 hours.

I visit my grandmother in 24 hours.

I hug my father goodbye in 23.

I wake up tomorrow in 17 hours.

I go to sleep in probably 12 hours.

I (hopefully) know everything I'm taking in 3 hours.

My laundry gets done in 1 hour.

On Tuesday I will be further from my place of birth than I have ever been.

I have little anxieties about the trip here and there, like about if I get a tooth ache or mugged or whatever. Maybe they're nothing to worry about.

The other day I figured out how I can use the subway system in Vienna to get from the airport to my Hostel. I love subways now--public transit is so liberating. I want to say that it's even more than a car, because you still have to take care of the fact that you have a car when you use it-- parking, insurance, gas. Subways cost more per mile, but you don't have to travel as many miles when you're somewhere that has them, and I rather do that than look for parking any day.

I'm not looking forward to how long tomorrow will be, both in Wisconsin, and up in the air. This will be the longest I've ever had to sit in place-- I hope international flights have more legroom than domestic.

I hope I'm sitting by someone nice. I was really fortunate on my trip back from Madison. This cute girl from DePaul sat next to me. She was timid, and overly polite always apologizing for talking about herself whenever the conversation drifted toward her, things like that. Toward the middle of the ride she's telling me she wants to hang out next time I'm in Chicago. We exchange information, and now we keep in touch through Facebook. I wish that could be every day.

I'm drifting.

Later.

Made a blog

Made it.

Not sure if I'm keeping it. Still shopping around for the complete package thing.

Definitely don't want this blogger blog and my other blogger blog having some cross over. The other one is super silly.