Good Lord, am I still alive?

Wow, it has been SO long since I updated this blog. I don't even know where to start with updates. Lets see where my last post left off...

Ok, so after the Coldplay concert I finished up my last couple weeks or so of my internship and went back home for a week to get my drivers license renewed, and I brought my D7000 back with me with all of my lenses. I really do need to get back home to Colorado more often, I really do miss it quite a bit. The landscape if just stellar, so much more interesting than this flat stuff they call land here in Indiana. Even after 3 1/2 years here I still am slightly off-put by the lack of mountains.

Anyways, while I was back home in Fort Collins, the big city arts/music festival was going on, New West Fest, and there were numerous local bands playing at something like 8 different stages across the downtown area.

 This band was quite good, and they had a good gimmick going on with the zombie makeup. Pretty good stuff.

The next day we went hiking up Horsetooth Rock. A few mile hike with a pretty nice view of Long Peak at the top.

  

Also Chipmunk.














A couple days later my brother, my friend, and I went backpacking up the Poudre Canyon. We hiked up about 2 miles with our packs and set up a nice little base camp from which to explore around from.

My brothers SOG tomahawk was getting a bit beat up after spending a couple hours throwing it into a very old very dead tree. Really fun, though, and I was able to nail down 2 and 3 rotations. It lent a nice sense of power sending this heavy piece of metal flying through the air and hearing the "thunk" as it embedded into the tree.
Later we decided to go out on a hike, and literally less than 1/4 of a mile out from our camp we go around some trees and Bam! Moose! And not a little one, a very large Bull Moose. It is unfortunate that I only had my 50mm lens with me, or else I would have gotten some better shots of this majestic beauty.





Later that night we discovered a really awesome effect with an overpowered laser pointer and the fire.

Here are a couple nice result shots.





We tried some long exposure stuff later, but they didn't really turn out from me.

That was basically the end of the camping trip, and we didn't really do much more before heading back to Valparaiso for school.

Intermission:
Not chronological with the telling of this grand yarn, because GoPro just released this, but it is just awesome:

 

Be sure to watch it in 1080p if you can! Just stellar.

Anyways, School started and I got back into my Engineering classes. It is senior year, and it is a bit harder in ways, as the subject matter is a lot more confusing, but I have less homework.

I am taking:
Machine Design
AutomaticControls
Advanced Materials
And Senior Design.

Now, for senior Design I actually am in the greatest project group. We have to develop and build a remote controlled submarine for taking pictures underwater at a depth of up to 100 feet. I'll give more details in some future posts (hopefully).

Anyways, I got a job with my Universities marketing department as a photographer/ photo editor. It is basically one of my dream jobs! I get paid to go to all of the university sporting events and other happenings, as well as I get to use the large nice photo studio down in the basement. Yay 3 point studio lighting!

As "stellar" as our football team is, it is still really fun to go to their games and get nice shots like the two above. These were with my D7000 with my 80-200mm AF. I am getting so much better at timing and framing, and just photography in general. Yeah, I would go out and take some random pictures this summer, but that isn't the same as getting actual experience at an actual event. I'll probably post some more of my better pictures here, too, but I have to get them off the work computer still.

More event pics. I really should get those pictures off the work drive, as I have quite a few all right pictures that I really would like to have up here.














So as a result of all this, I bought my bosses D600. Full Frame beauty! I can definitely tell a huge difference in the Dynamic range and noise performance when compared to my Crop-Sensor APS-C D7000. I am So glad that I made the jump to Full Frame. The camera's performance in general, also, is also in general higher than the D7000.
Here are the specs on Amazon:
Nikon D600
And compare them to the:
Nikon D7000

The only thing that is slightly obnoxious about the D600 is that it seems to gather more dust on the sensor than my D7000, so I have to be more careful about changing lenses. There might be some issue with a slight gap in the shutter, it is something that has been seen in some models, and it might affect mine too. I'm not sure what to do about it, but I can deal with it in the mean time. The image quality is just so stellar that it makes up for it.

Oh, I almost forgot that all of my pictures are somewhere else:
Basketball with the D600
Engineering Building with the D600
Volleyball with the D600
Men's Soccer with the D600
These are all my pictures, they are just on the University Flickr page.  


This is the only picture that I currently have on my home desktop that I took with my D600, so it;ll have to do for now. I spent a couple hours messing with this on Lightroom 4.2 and Photoshop. Also, it is fortunate that lightroom 4.2 supports the D600, even though Photoshop currently doesn't support the .NEF files out of it.
Anyways, Picture.

24.3 Megapixel Full Frame Madness! 30 Megabyte files! Creamy Bokeh goodness! Beautiful.

And I'll leave it at that for today, I'm tired.

Thanks for reading,

Kevin

TV: Friends
Movie: Can't wait for Skyfall on next Friday!
Game: Skyrim, still...
Music: Mumford and Sons and The National
Food: Cheese Quesadilla