Photo 365 - Day 137 (Geek #6)

Day 137 (November 16th, 2010)
Title: Geek #6

Well, we have finally come to the end of Name That Thing 2: Geek Week, and I don't know about you, but I had a great time!  Had a lot of fun guesses and emails about this series of photos and I can tell you now, that Name That Thing 3 will be coming soon!  I've been asked: "Where do you want me to guess?" and you can do so any of the following ways:

If you are on Facebook (and are my friend) you can comment on my daily update
If you see the photo here on the Blog, you can comment on it here (comments are open for everyone)
If you see the photo on my Flickr feed, you are welcome to comment on them
If you see the photo from my Twitter feed you are welcome to send me a message via Tweet
And, lastly, if you want you are also welcome to email any comments (or guesses). 

So, there are many ways you can guess or comment on any of the photos you see (not just the Name That Thing series, but any photo!). 

Yesterday's photo was (as I warned), tricky.  No one, not even my Techno-geek friends got it right - although a few got close.  We also had someone on Twitter get really close as well, so bonus points for all of you!  Yesterday's photo was of a: Jumper!  Also known as a "computer circuit bypass".  Basically, its just an old switch, which is rarely used on computers today.  In essence, it was used to complete a simple circuit on either a motherboard, daughter-board (such as separate video card, or modem), or drives (hard drive or CD-Rom).  Without getting too technical (I know, too late), in the "old days", and we are talking about a millennium in computer-years (12-15 years) you had to tell the computer what everything was by using these little jumpers (technically, the jumper is the little white thing and it is basically a small piece of metal that completes an electrical circuit of the two leads/polls that is covers). 

Imagine you had two sets of polls, if you had the jumper over the first set that would mean "1", if you had the jumper over the second set it would mean "2" and if you didn't have the jumper over either of them, that make the computer insane and go all "Stephen King" and try and attack people by taking over blenders and Vroomba's while yelling at them in Norwegian.  So, you can see that jumpers are important.  Now, everything is automated by software, so generally blenders are safe now.  If you ever pop open your computer, you still might see one or two jumpers, and for DEAR God, just leave them be!  I'm just saying. 

Now for our last photo for the Name That Thing 2 series.  This is probably a Geek Level 2-3 shot, but it was really fun to get.  Lets just say power tools were needed but I think you will enjoy it! 

Let the guessing begin! 

 

Note: Its not normally red, that was just the color of the background I used in my light-box.  

Photo 365 - Day 109 (Linked Together)

Day 109 (October 20th, 2010)
Title: Linked Together

This is from a small necklace of Theresa's, that I thought just looked cool.  It's not a very large or 'loud' piece of jewelery, but its got some great colors.  All of the gemstones are muted (re: they don't have that 'Bedazzled' look), and the enamel painting uses a lot of dark, rich colors (like the green in the photo).  The total non-chain portion is only a couple of inches long (perhaps 1/2 wide), but this close-up makes it look huge! 

I've also starting using some different methods of shooting these pictures, and I'm hoping it comes out well.  First, this is my first attempt at using RAW format (converted to JPG so I should share it here).  For those photo-novices (which still includes me), RAW format basically means, the camera does not do any compression on the file when you take a picture - it just takes all of the data that the sensor collects, dumps it into a huge file and lets you "develop" the shot later on the computer.  In theory, this is nice because it means you, as the photographer gets to select all the variables on how its compressed (compression is another way of saying: "make the picture file size smaller, but makes the quality of the picture worse").  Its more work, but you have much more control over what the final picture is going to look like as well as more options to fix "iffy" shots. 

Its also the first time that I've used a background to shoot against.  The "green" background I used because I thought it complimented the green color of the leaves, but at the same time gave it a nice "old" feel. 

I'm sure I'll get better with both using RAW format and backgrounds in the future, but for my first attempt, I'd give myself a B-. 

Enjoy!