That last Election post is coming… for now here’s a quick link to a slideshow I worked on over the long and lonely Valentine’s weekend, documenting the Hackathon competition, which is an all-night coding marathon that EECS participate in instead of Valentine’s Day.

http://www.dailycal.org/article/104399/for_the_love_of_code

Life is full of little small choices, and then there are the big decisions.  Namely, 70-200mm f2.8 on a 1.3x crop or 400mm f2.8 on a 1.5x?

I recently had the opportunity to shoot a couple of football games for the paper I work at, The Daily Californian.  It was my first time shooting football game, and as someone who’s generally not been very good at sports photography, I was definitely a bit nervous.

Both games I shot were in pretty good light – the UC Berkeley/California vs. Michigan State game started at 5pm, so it played from daylight through to just about dusk in the 4th quarter.  The Washington State game began at 3pm, so it was pretty much daylight except for a bit of (rather nice) sunset light at the end.

Sunset at halftime at Memorial Stadium, UC Berkeley

Equipment analysis – Week 1 vs. Michigan State

The biggest difficulty with football with regards to equipment is covering action that happens over a vast expanse (over 5000 m² of field area) that can be traversed by speedy athletes in a matter of seconds.  So while you might be sitting nice and cozy with a 300mm lens that perfectly covers the action mid-way across the field, all of a sudden the quarterback can fire off a deep pass or the running back finds a hole and flies off, and you’re stuck without the ability to get the shot.

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DP Decal Class on week 1 (Fall 2008) - excited and ready to go!

Hi everyone, and welcome to CameraSex/ShutterSounds, a blog on all things photography.  This has been a dream pet project of mine for some time, and after several tried and failed attempts using blogger and an old personal xanga, I feel like I’ve finally got the infrastructure set for it to succeed.

So what’s this blog all about?  I’ve had a keen interest in photography and specifically digital camera technology for awhile – as an electrical engineer I just have a natural tendency to take interest in and figure out the ins-and-outs of one of my most-used tools.  You can expect some how-to’s, shot walkthroughs, some technical explanations, market news, and what will probably be my favorite topic, product analysis.

In addition to simply expounding my own thoughts on the photographic world, I’m hoping to use this blog as a forum for discussion.  One of my other photo-related activities is instructing a digital photography class at UC Berkeley (the “EE98/198: Digital Photo Decal” at www.photodecal.org).  At the moment it’s a fairly basic photographic science class, and with the usual 12-week schedule, there’s not much room to expand into more advanced topics, so hopefully this can also be a platform for touching on some more advanced topics that I normally wouldn’t get a chance to visit.

Stay tuned – insights, analysis, and interesting articles to come!