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.

Hi All!

We’ve finally received the tripod collar for our newly acquired Sigma 170-500mm lens. Unfortunately the sun hasn’t been cooperating since so I don’t have any good shots taken with that lens to share. So I thought it might be nice to take a few shots of the lens itself mounted on my K20D on our tripod. That way you all can see what it actually looks like. I used Christine’s K10D to take the shots.

It is quite self-evident that the lens is a monster, and for proper photography I feel one really does need to place on a tripod. Hand holding it can be OK in good light, but the arms get tired quick!

Anywho, here are the pics!

… this time!

Actually, these are a couple of sample shots with our new (second hand) Sigma 170-500mm lens. So far I think I’ll be happy with it! Both sets of shots have been post processed, with some cropping each. As well, a 100% crop is included for each to show how much detail is being resolved.

The first shot is of a training aircraft that was flying above our heads, between 1,000 and 1,500 feet AGL I estimate. I was somewhat careless with the sharpening so it looks grainy. However, you can see how much detail I can bring out in that shot. As it turns out, ZLE is one of the aircraft that belongs to Christine’s school.

The other is obviously of the moon. Chris and I were out in the back yard (otherwise known as a small patch of grass!) and Chris showed me her shot of the moon. I thought it was a great idea and took one myself. Now this is handheld, so I’ll try to improve on it once we get the tripod collar for it.