All posts by Christopher D. Bennett

Equipment

Sony Alpha DSLR SLT A35

True few people will care about such things, but I feel that every once in awhile, I should write about my equipment. I recently bought a new camera. It had been about 3 years since I bought a camera, so I was well past due.

Since the last time I bought a camera Sony had released a new line of camera that replaced the reflex mirror with a transluscent mirror. I was immediately intrigued and when I got my ducks in a row and decided to purchase a camera I decided to give one of these new revolutionary cameras a try. This is what it looks like:








Here is the first picture I ever took with the new camera:




I don’t want to bore you with too many technical details about the new camera, but here are a few:

Imaging Sensor Pixel Gross: Approximately 16.5 megapixels
Anti Motion Blur: 6-image layering
Auto High Dynamic Range: Yes
Sweep Panorama: Yes (2D/3D)
Face Detection: Off, Auto, Child Priority, Adult Priority (up to 8 faces detectable)
Smile Shutter Technology: Yes – Off, Slight, Normal, Big
Still Image Mode: JPEG (Standard, Fine) RAW, RAW+JPEG
Exposure System – Metering Modes: Multi-segment, Center-weighted, Spot
Exposure System – Exposure Setting: Auto, Auto Advanced, Program Auto, Aperture Priority, Shutter Priority, Manual, Sweep Panorama, Continuous Advance Priority
Exposure System – Scene Modes: Portrait, Macro, Sports, Sunset, Night Portrait, Night View, Handheld Twilight
Exposure System – Picture Effect(s): Posterization (Color), Posterization (BW), Pop Color, Retro, Partial Color Red, Partial Color Green, Partial Color Blue, Partial Color Yellow, High-Key, High Contrast Monochrome, Toy
Video Mode: AVCHD

There are obviously a ton more technical details, but that should cover it for now.

Blogging, Naima

Lightbox

As most of you know, I’m an anti-Apple kind of person. It isn’t the products themselves I’m against, it is just that Apple people drive me up the wall. However, there is one instance where I actually do have a small amount of envy for Apple people. That is that they have Instagram and I don’t.

While Instagram is allegedly coming to Droid in the near future, I didn’t want to wait for it, so I’ve been experimenting with Lightbox the last week or so as my primary phone camera app.

Here are some of my Lightbox camera phone pictures:


All Lightbox pictures are posted on Twitter and eventually the occasional picture may be posted on Facebook.

Art, Basketball, Event, Iowa State, Music

The Archives: Edition Fifty-Eight

The images below come from the following folder:

Backup/My Pictures/New Folder

The majority of these pictures come from a concert my friend Mike’s band (Lesser Known Saint) had at the M Shop.










































I remember telling Mike after the show how much I loved watching him “dance” on stage. He got mad and told me he wasn’t “dancing”, he was “thrashing”.

Lesser Known Saint was still patrolling the Twin Cities area until recently. I understand that they have broken up now and are pursuing separate projects.

Next week’s folder will be:

Backup/My Pictures/People/Display Pictures

Carla, Mom, Naima, Self-Portrait, Self-Portrait Project

Self-Portrait Project: Week 2

I continued this project for one full week, until January 15th.

On that night, my Mom’s health took a very drastic change for the worse. Enough you know at least some of the details of where we were and where we are now, that I won’t go into them here. Maybe at some point in the future I will write about everything we have been through since her diagnosis with lymphoma two days before Thanksgiving through the three miracles we have seen through the process up until where we stand now: no cancer.

However, I think that story belongs as a book, but I’m not sure who would publish the story because nobody would believe it any way.

If you want a good resource for following my Mom’s health, here is a good resource. It is a CaringBridge blog set up by Carla. It isn’t updated daily, but it is updated every couple of days.

Charlotte Bennett’s CaringBridge

She will most likely be at Methodist Medical Center for at least another week. While the cancer is gone, her stomach is still pretty messed up. She is getting her nourishment through an IV and they will have to do a procedure so that she would be able to continue to get nourishment at home before she is dismissed. I would say that nobody knows at this time, what the treatment will ultimately be for her stomach, but while she is in the hospital, you can send her a card through this website, free and easy:

Send Charlotte a Card

Also, Mom has shown some interest in learning about the internet and therefore I have setup an email account for her. She won’t be able to read any of your emails until she gets home from the hospital and I won’t pretend that her emails will be private (so if you send her an email just gushing about how she raised the most awesome young man, I will read it) until she grasps the concept fully, but she will read them at some point.

Here is her email address:

charlotte@photography139.com

Now back to my own self-absorption.

I have restarted the Self-Portrait Project. I can’t say that I will continue this project, but I would like to think that we are in a good place with my Mom right now.

I may try to go back and fill in some of the backdates of blogs that I haven’t filled out over the last couple months. But I make no promises. I haven’t done a Personal Photo Project in weeks. In fact, since Mom was diagnosed, I’ve taken maybe 200 pictures total. 190 of those pictures are of Naima.

However, I have bought a new camera and I hope that it will jumpstart some creative juices. So maybe I’ll pretend like I took pictures for a Personal Photo Project back in December, when in reality, I took those pictures in March.

I also started posting pictures I take with my phone through an Instagram knockoff known as Lightbox on Twitter. I would provide you a link to see the pictures on Lightbox’s website, but you should really be on Twitter, shouldn’t you?

Here are the self-portraits I took through January 15th:



01/09/12 11:12 PM


01/10/12 11:56 PM


01/11/12 7:43 PM


01/12/12 10:14 PM


01/13/12 3:01 PM


01/14/12 11:35 AM


01/15/12 8:31 PM

We’ll see how consistently I’m able to post in the future. We’ll see…