Gone to See California — SIRNA Goodby.
Lots of construction going on around the UCSF South Bay Campus. What recession?
David's Images of the Day Photoblog
Views of science and technology from around the world
Lots of construction going on around the UCSF South Bay Campus. What recession?
I was in California to visit my team one final time before the South San Francisco SIRNA site shut down. We went out to lunch at Ambers, an Indian Restaurant. I took a picture of my team in front of the Contemporary Jewish Museum, just outside of the restaurant. I wished everyone luck in their future endeavors.
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The Sourland Mountain Preserve/Reserve is a local park in Somerset New Jersey. It is near where I live, so I often get to take photowalks to capture what is in season. I haven’t visited recently due to work and all of the rain we have been getting. Based on previous years, this should be a good time for butterflies and dragonflies. I had a chance to to a quick visit on the way home. I took the Nikon D700 camera and 28-300 mm VR that I often have with me in the car. In a little over 1 hour I was able to get images of Yellow and Black Swallowtail Butterflies, Hummingbird Clearwing Moths, a Praying Mantis eating a Hummingbird Clearwing Moth, A carnivorous insect (later identified as a Robber-Fly) that looks like a Dragonfly, but only has one pair of wings, and an orange Caterpillar. This is definitely a good time to visit, and I plan to return tomorrow with a macro lens and bigger telephoto lens.
I need to thank Hans for fixing the photoblog/website after the problems encountered after the security update. There are still some minor issues, but for the most part it appear that everything is working other than thumbnail images for new posts. If you notice any additional problems, let me know.
The other good thing today is that the Drobo Disk array that I ordered last Sunday arrived. I do wish that the Drobo folks had giving me a heads up on the shipping and expected delivery time (standard practice for Amazon, B&H, and most other online retailers). I was lucky to be home to sign for the delivery. The FedEx guy must have wondered why I was sweating so much, since I just got back from the Sourland Mountain Preserve. The delivery was JIT since I am running out of hard disk storage space. I have been using a combination of Western Digital 1 and 2 TB MyBook storage devices, but have run out of USB and FireWire connections to my computer. The Drobo 800i was easy to set up (with eight 2 TB Western Digital drives) format, and connect to my computer. I am now in the process of transferring the images from my previous storage drives to the Drobo disk array. This will probably take a few days. Once done, I’ll use the previous storage devices as additional off-site backup storage. Until this is complete and I have a chance to update my LightRoom database to the new image locations, I may be a bit slow with new posts.
GPS: N40 28.135 W74 41.962
CSX 8519 Railroad Locomotive. I had to stop for this CSX locomotive at two railroad crossings while driving home tonight. The second time I was in front of the queue and had the chance to quickly get the Leica X1 camera I carry in the car out and get a snapshot. Image converted to B&W with NIK Silver Efex Pro 2. Let me know if the image is too dark.
While reading the commentary on Thom Hogon’s site today, I saw that B&H (and other vendors) had received new Nikon 500 mm and 600 mm f/4 VRII Super Telephoto lenses and still have some available for sale. These have been in short supply for a long time, and may be in even shorter supply for an even longer time since the earthquake in Japan. I held out and did not place an order (and thus didn’t help the economy by spending nearly $20K). This was hard, since I missed many great photo opportunities while on the Semester at Sea, Spring Enrichment Voyage — Ultimate Travel Photography Workshop (UTPW-II) earlier this month. Several of the folks attending the workshop had the larger 500 mm and 600 mm lenses and were able to get some great images that made those of us with lighter kits (70-300 or 80-400) jealous.