You may have noticed lately that I’ve been writing a lot of blog posts with pictures in them. That’s because I’ve been having a lot of fun with the Tech’s cameras! On Wednesday, I volunteered for an assignment to photograph MIThenge, the twice-annual phenomenon in which the setting sun is perfectly aligned with the infinite corridor. The sun rays come in through the huge class paned windows in Lobby 7 and seem to set the infinite ablaze with an orange glow. Unfortunately this time around, the atmosphere did not cooperate; it was too cloudy to effectively see the sun. Oh well… I did get to hang out with some friends for a while waiting waiting though! Here are two more pics that I took, before and after MIThenge:

The view walking to campus. A wide angle lense does a really good job making the point at making the point of showing where the sidewalk ends!

Cheers!

I recently joined the Tech as a photographer, and they have some really nice cameras! Tonight I went out to play with some of their lenses so that I’d become more familiar with them. Here are a few shots I took of MIT’s Lobby 10, Killian Court, and Boston:

Hey all, I’ve been taking some pictures over the course of the semester so far. They’re mainly random pictures of Boston and MIT, from just walking around and such.

Around the beginning of the year, I randomly decided one day to walk the bridge-loop (a path connecting MIT to BU and going around the Charles River). If I recall I was just getting over being sick, which is why I decided not to run the bridge loop. Here are a few nice pics of Boston I took:

Last week was the Head of the Charles crew race. Strangely enough, it was also snowing… pretty early, even for Boston! I took some pictures of the bizarre scene of lots of crew boats on the Charles, with snow simultaneously falling:

Cheers all!

Hey everyone! Well, it’s been over one month since my family cruise to Bermuda, but I’ve finally got around to uploading my pictures. Between my camera and my parent’s cameras, we took over 800 photos! I’ll spare you the agony (and spare the scripts.mit.edu webserver the space) and only show you some of my favorite pictures.

Here are the pictures!

Leaving the port of Boston. Can almost see MIT… if it weren’t for those tall buildings!

Inside the ship, in one of the main dining rooms. Our ship is the “Norwegian Spirit”

On nom nom nom nom…

Circling around Bermuda as we arrive on Sunday morning

Elbow beach – nice and sunny!

Small cars and mopeds were everywhere on the island. Awesome!

The view of the Dockyard from the ship

A beautiful sunset, also from the ship

Check out those sunset-colored crepuscular rays!

A long exposure view of the town by the dockyard, at dusk. One of my favorite pics

A glass bottom boat! These things are pretty awesome. We went on one, and some of the pics are below. The bottom of the boat is made of glass, allowing passengers to look underneath and see coral reefs, fish, and ship wrecks. Floodlights mounted on the underside also allow for a great view at night. These boats are designed to operate in very shallow waters (the boat doesn’t penetrate very deep vertically down into the water), so it can go over coral reefs. Quality engineering!

Getting onto the glass bottom boat, right before dusk.

As the captain put it, “Welcome aboard, everyone! Part of our journey tonight will take us within the Bermuda triangle. Inexplicable anomalies have happened here as recently as several years ago. We’ll be sailing in dangerously shallow waters, where other boats have been destroyed. Also, it’s night time. Also, the bottom of this boat is made of glass, not steel. Sounds like a great idea, no?”

Another great sunset, this time from aboard the glass bottom boat

Looking through the glass! Check out some of that coral. The big black square is a floodlight.

Another glass-bottom boat; they all tend to circulate around the same area. In this case, we’re all checking out an old ship wreck called the Vixen.

We survived!

A lot of houses in Bermuda are painted pastel colors

The town of Georgetown, which has a reputation of being very colonial

British people are so stylish!

When we returned to our stateroom, we were greeted by a friendly towel monkey!

The grand centrum area on the cruise ship. Nice grand piano back there!

The pool deck

The bridge! Lots of cool measurement and navigation equipment in there. At one point, there was a rather extreme fog storm. You couldn’t see out those huge glass windows at all; it was completely white that day! Perhaps it was a storm from the Bermuda triangle, coming to eat us…

A clock in our room. Here’s a fun little science experiment! This is a clock we took with us from home, where it kept perfect time. We noticed however that when plugged in aboard the ship, the clock would consistently gain a few minutes of time each day. Strange, huh? Nope, we weren’t even traveling at relativistic speeds either. An explanation for this is that old digital clocks operate by counting the peaks in AC current, which is supposed to be standardized at 60 Hz. So every 60 cycles, the clock adds one second to the current time; every 3600 cycles the clock adds one minute, etc. Since our clock was gaining time however, that means that ship’s electrical generators systems aren’t operating at exactly 60 Hz; it’s a little bit higher! I measured how far off the clock went (using my watch, which is hopefully accurate), and measured that the ship’s AC runs at 60.148 +/- 0.003 Hz ftw. A bit too fast!

More on nom nom later on that night. There was plenty of this going on throughout the cruise I might add; I just refrained from taking pictures of absolutely everything I ate

A long exposure of the sea, taken at night

The ship’s main deck, on the last day before coming back to Boston.

Overall it was a great trip! We had a fun time, and luckily we didn’t even die in the Bermuda triangle. Cheers!

In all of the hectic flurry of studying for finals, declaring my minor, and choosing my classes for next year, I forgot to upload a few pictures that I took! Boston is quite pretty in the Spring when green, leafy things grow from the ground and on trees. Here are a few pictures I took:

And here are two panoramas that I took by stitching multiple images together (click for a larger view):

NASA has a really cool website, the Astronomy Picture of the Day Archive:

http://antwrp.gsfc.nasa.gov/apod/archivepix.html

Most of the pictures are absolutely amazing; I have the site in my bookmark toolbar for quick access. I’d highly recommend it!

I recently got a new bike that I’m planning to bring with me to school next year. I’ve been riding it a lot lately, and today I decided to post some pictures of the machine. Here they are:

Okay fine, so maybe I was just kidding about the V8 car engine … here’s a far-back view:

It’s a nice machine! I went on a somewhat longish mile bike ride yesterday that really got me to appreciate how mechanically awesome bicycles are. The above pictures show one facet why I’m minoring in MechE

In my last post, I talked about Windows Live Writer, which has a number of neat features for inserting images into posts, such as adding reflections, polaroid-style borders, etc. This was all pretty nice, but with some of the features, I had to do annoying little things to get the software to do what I wanted. For example, I had to manually disable hyperlinks to online web albums that the software automatically created (and I didn’t want). Additionally, the program didn’t give a lot of advanced controls; it appears to be designed for ease of use (although in all fairness the software usually did a great job without all the complicated knobs and twiddles).

I wanted to see if I could make pretty graphics like this on my own, with more control, and in a relatively easy manner. Luckily, I’ve been using a great, open-source (free!) image editing program called GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program). I’d highly recommend it! In addition to having a lot of great features comparable to Adobe Photoshop (without the price tag), it’s also highly extendable. GIMP allows people to write plugins in the scheme programming language (!). This makes it easy to do pretty neat stuff that might otherwise take longer if you were to use the more elemental features of GIMP. For example,  I downloaded three plugins today; one for rounding the edges of a picture, another for adding reflections, and a third for adding polaroid-style borders to pictures.

Here’s an example picture I made demonstrating the rounded edges plugin and the reflection plugin, used sequentially. The reflection on top isn’t a plugin, it’s a semi-transparent white layer at an angle superimposed over the image.

Here is a sample collage I made using GIMP. I used the polaroid-style border plugin, and the GIMP rotation tool.

If you compare the above collage to the one that was auto-generated in Windows Live Writer in my previous post, you might agree that they look pretty similar. Although it did take a lot longer to make the above in GIMP (minutes rather than seconds in Windows Live Writer), I had more control. And it was fun making these pictures

If you’re interested, I can point you to the GIMP plugins I used.

I’m testing a new blogging program. Instead of typing this post inside of WordPress, I’m using a program called Windows Live Writer, by Microsoft. It’s actually a pretty neat program… you can do a bunch of fancy, neat effects with them.

Check this out:

Or this:

You can also add other knarley effects, like rounded edges or reflections (but unfortunately not both at the same time). It’s a pretty neat program! It integrates nicely with WordPress and tries to emulate your current theme as well. I’m pretty impressed with it.

Here are a few more pictures I’ve taken this semester. They were all taken from around my dorm, looking across the Charles River – which happens to be BU. This is a pretty good picture of a part of BU’s campus. And thanks to a high school friend JK who goes to BU and gave me a tour, I actually know what a lot of these buildings are . A lot of times when friends and I go running, we end up around this area:

Road construction across the river at night:

The view from my dorm’s lounge: