Ya, so I was just tooling around one day… thinking about what it would take to capture decent shots of fish in my aquarium.

Needless to say, with low light levels it poses a challenge. I’d tried with f2.8 lenses but still found light lacking. Soooo…. decided to break out the manual focus Pentax A 50mm f1.7.

Managed to come up with this… my favourite being the first one.

It’s amazing what f1.7, shake reduction and little luck with manual focusing can achieve!

I’m slowly going through my large collection of unedited RAW files… trying to sort and process the keepers and dump the losers…

Anyhoo, a few more cat shots…

Hello all!

I’m in the process of slowly but surely going through old pictures I took, and have come across a specific set.

In early March I took a trip to visit my friend John. He lives in Thompson, Manitoba. I used to work in the area (Nelson House) back in the summer of 2000 (I think?). Anyway, March is far different from the summer time, needless to say, and it was cold! Well, I’m still working on those shots, but here is a couple of joke shots I sent John before heading up…

… I tried on some of my old winter gear from when I lived in Thunder Bay, Ontario and decided (at Chris’ suggestion) to take a couple of “getting ready” shots.

All I can say to the cold is… BRING IT! (Of course, for fun we took it a bit far… I still a Canadian, and the cold doesn’t scare me that much!)

OK,

Finding out that Dad is coming to town lit a bit of a fire under my butt. Today I managed to get further with the TV mount installation.

I placed another 2×4 on the mid-right side to give more area to attach the subsequent drywall that I put up. Finally, I cutout the drywall and installed the mount. I’m really happy with the end product and think it probably went as smoothly as I might have expected. The mount is level and flush, and feels rock solid. I’ve got no doubts about how strong the whole thing is.

The really nice thing about this mount is the fact that it can extend far enough away from the wall to make connecting things easy, yet is very solid and the gutts retract back into the wall, keeping an overall profile that is very tight to the wall. I can certainly say that I’ve spent many a moments simply admiring my work. Not because it’s better than anybody else’s necessarily (I’m sure others have done far better and far more quickly) but because I did it for myself.

Here’s one happy camper! With any luck, my friend Duffy will come over tomorrow sometime and help me lift the TV onto that thing. A Pioneer 5010 is not a cheap piece of technology, and I really don’t want to see that coming down!

RadMan

Well,

I’ve got to say, one thing I’ve had a slow time with is getting our TV mounted above our fireplace. I guess it’s been a combination of building up the nerve to follow through with, building the confidence to trust my own work, and getting the right tools for the job (ie: a mitre saw.)

Anywho, I’ve included a couple of pics of what I managed to get accomplished so far (as of yesterday). To summarize, I pulled the old framing out (it was garbage for structure) and installed new 2×4 studs that have been tied into the joists above. That ain’t coming down! I then attached 2×6 jack studs to both shift the mounting right a bit (to centre the installation) and to flush up the new framing with the old at the far edges. All in all I’m very happy with the strength of what I have built.

I also installed ABS pipe, 2 inch, to act as conduit for the speaker wires (rear surrounds) as well as the power and HDMI cables for the TV. The cables will pop into the inwall mount from beneath before plugging into the TV.

The holes in the conduit are to help pull the cables. I have now learned (through trial and error) that placing a T-intersection (even a downstream bending one) causes problems for pulling wire. I won’t be repeating that mistake again. Learning experience this was. I will close it all in, but should one need to pull new wires and run into trouble, we won’t have to pull the whole wall apart later, just a section.