Anyone who’s read this site for any length of time knows that Moose Peterson holds a special place in my view of photography. I respect his body of work, the sense of responsibility to the environment he displays, and frankly, his strong desire to inspire others to go off and find their photographic muse. Moose has recently joined the Twitterverse, and today I had an exchange with him.

Essentially, my take was that he was seeing a lot of product movement on Twitter, and was questioning whether there was any sense of community on Twitter. That’s a really good observation, and a really good question.

With that in mind, it seems like I could do more giving back to the photographic community, and I should. Now, I’m no Moose (as I told him today), but maybe I’ve got something to lob out there to the three or four folks who read one of my blogs. And like Moose told me, “there is even a possibility that from our community, we can infect others and then, well, anything is possible!”

As Darla says, true dat.

So here’s the deal. The photographic chatter is gonna move over to colin-wright.com. That’ll keep all that info in one place, and leaves The Deauxmayne for all the other technological nightmares I get myself into. And I’ll try to get more regular at posting material on “the other site” — setups for the things I’m shooting (especially with the new macro lens), my crazy backup strategies… who know what else might show up!

Thanks for challenging me, Moose!

OK, so I’m probably the last guy on the planet to figure this out.

I’ve been struggling with a couple of mail-related issues with my iPhone. I had been connecting to the same mail account with my iPhone as I have with my home machine. Every now and then, the two mail clients would collide at the mail server, and make one or the other not very happy. Nothing fatal, but nothing wonderful either.

However, the bigger thing was that I was getting spammed to death on my iPhone. The OS X mail app does a pretty good job (augmented with a few rules of my own) at keeping the spam at bay, but the mail app on the iPhone lacks the anti-spam technology that my home mail client enjoys. For a long while, I was getting almost no spam on my iPhone, but there was a cost — I was blocking LOADS of country-specific domains and IP address ranges that I would never expect to get e-mail from. However, I recently ran into an issue with a developer whose mail was getting /dev/nulled at my mail server due to the broad nature of my spam swatting. Once I turned that off, my poor little iPhone was exposed to hundreds of available Russian singles, pharmaceuticals that I didn’t even know existed, and information from so many banks that I didn’t know I was affiliated with. In a word, spam.

So how to fix it? Well, fixing it at the mail server would be the best answer, but as I started getting into that, I started discovering just how little I understood about mail transport mechanisms, and how much I really didn’t care to learn that much about them. With that off the table, that left doing something at my home-based mail client that would somehow filter my mail before it hit the iPhone. There’s lots of folks out there doing circuitous sending and resending between their mail server, Google’s GMail, and then back to their home mail servers. That also had a bit of a learning curve, especially when doing it from the mail server.

My last idea was to let OS X’s mail app filter the mail, and after it’d passed the gauntlet of simple rules at the server, and complex rules at the client, it could be forwarded to a super-secret special mail account for the iPhone to hit to get a less spam-filled mail flow. That worked…. except that every e-mail looked as though it came from me, which was a less than stellar solution, especially if I wanted to respond to mail from my iPhone.

I was playing with my mail rules again, trying to set up some methods to figure out which of them were working the best, and I saw a little drop down on my rule to forward stuff to the iPhone’s mail account. In addition to forward there was a “redirect message” option that would send the message along to the iPhone’s account while preserving the look and feel of the message, making it seem like it was sent directly to my iPhone. Wunderbar!

And a side benefit of this approach is that my iPhone and OS X mail app are each banging away at different mail accounts, so there’s no collisions at the mail server for either one. I like my technogoodies to have a smile on their little electronic faces!

Every few months or so, many of the Bernese Mountain Dog owners in The Lou get together at a park somewhere for a walk or picnic. One of our friends, Harriet, manages to reserve a spot, e-mail everyone, and basically act as our Julie McCoy to coordinate all the nuts of bolts of these gatherings.

Today’s event had a tremendous turnout, with over 30 Berners, and plenty of folks to go along with them. We met new faces, and re-acquainted ourselves with folks we’d not seen in a while. And of course, we played with the dogs. There’s been a lot of puppies born in/around The Lou over the last year, so fuzzballs and lanky legs were everywhere. And we all missed some Berners that, sadly, weren’t with us any longer.

Harriet’s girl, Amber, is now the grande olde dame of the group, creeping up on 11 years old. Even Molly is starting to creep into the eldest echelons — third oldest in attendance today. You’d never know it to see her run and play — she’s still like a pup.

A couple from Illinois has been talking with us about draft, and brought a draft harness for Molly to try on. She took to it like she’d been drafting all her life. We attached a lightweight backpack to the harness for her to drag around, and she did quite well with it, only occasionally looking behind her to see what the noise was. It was so cool to see her doing what the breed was bred to do. I don’t know that Molly’s got the obedience skills to get any kind of title on her, but I woulda bet against her getting a rally title, and yet I can see her Rally Novice title hanging on the wall across the den.

It was a great day, full of sun and fun, fur and spit — I can’t wait ’til next time!

Have you tried to buy a VCR lately? You’d think I was hunting up some dinosaur matter to create my own Jurassic Park. Wally World, Sam’s, Target, Best Buy…. no dice. Amazon has a few — a few — but it seems like most of them are through third parties, and I’m more than a little leary about buying something like that from some guy selling out of his garage through Amazon.

What’s the deal? There are hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of home video tapes out there that needs to be converted to digital media of some kind. Without a source player, those old VHS tapes might as well be fodder for skeet shooters… or 160KB 5¼” diskettes. With the recent demise of both of my VHS monsters, I’m left with about 40-odd tapes that I’d like to convert to digital media, and preserve off to something a bit more future proof and less prone to magnetic manglement.

I’ll get there, but I thought I should future-proof my plight, lest some wary reader sometime next week see this, and wonder how us cavemen got along.

Today’s experiment in macro land involves my Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens and a carpenter bee. The bees and I have had an ongoing feud over ownership of my deck for the last few years. My take is that if they think they should own it, they should help pay for it. They, on the other hand, march up and down the deck, buzzing us all day when we’re on the deck, enforcing a no-fly zone.

One of them was stunned in a small skirmish on the deck, and I knew I had an opportunity to photograph this bee under some controlled circumstances. Based on some material I’d read, I knew I could drop the little dude into freezer, and be able to photograph him without him squirming around so much. I extracted him from the freezer, and took him to the deck for a proper photographing.

The biggest thing I noticed was that there was a ton of condensation on the bee, especially noticeable on the eyes. I was also fighting a 20mph wind, which was making it tough to set up the shots. These images may not be the best in the world, but I’m pleased with my first foray into photographing these little guys with this awesome lens.

Last weekend, I had planned to continue working on converting some old VHS tapes to digital media, sucking them into Doc Oc. However, a couple of tapes later, I found that both my VCRs had become crusty from lack of use. One even had gained a taste for tape eating.

As punishment to them both, I dissected them.

Two days of dissection left me with two VCRs with the mechanical parts separated from their planars, and loads of things to photograph with my Canon MP-E 65mm macro lens. I won’t bore you with all the details on every discovery on the parts — there was nothing earth-shattering — but I definitely had a ball photographing this treasure trove of small electronic parts and gears.

Although I photographed many different types of small parts, my favorite images were those where I was capturing the different colors on resistors, some kinds of capacitors and glass diodes. I also dissected a DVD drive from one of the units, and got to play with the laser’s lens, which was a gorgeous color of blue.

My least favorite items? Well, surface mount stuff wasn’t as amazing as I was expecting. It was cool to capture things that small, but there wasn’t much beauty to them — little black boxes with printing atop. Give me regular ol’ circuit board components. They’re colorful, big enough to make for good lighting, and they create some neat images, especially in moderate density clusters.

Take a look at the clusters of photos below, and let me know what you think.

A typical morning start up for me…

Though the photo doesn’t show it very well, the hardtop and doors are off the Jeep (The Big Green Box)… And Im loving it.

Yesterday, it was 40 degrees outside as I drove in, and about 60 going to and from tennis. This is the weather that was tailor-made for running around in the open air glory of my Jeep!

Just a test to see how iPhone photos show up on the blog…

Move along. Nothing to see here.

Darla and I took a spin toward Babler State Park for an Easter sunrise service. I’d not been to a sunrise service before, so I wasn’t quite sure what to expect. Add to that that the service was delivered outside my own denominational orientation, and that added a bit of trepidation to the pot.

Despite the 35-degree weather — offset by some hot chocolate — the service was terrific. The sun just crested the hill behind the preacher as the service ended. Simply beautiful.

Follow that up with the best chicken-fried steak I’ve ever had, combined with the all the wonderful gifts of life represented by the celebration of Easter, and this Sunday was indeed a good Sunday.