Photography & Blog by Adam Montoya

Decided to post a photograph, that i captured yesterday, to the PDML (Pentax Discuss Mailing List). I titled it Train Wreck of a Marriage. This photo was far from my best photo that I took this weekend, but the subject matter is what made the photo worth something in my eyes.  There had just been a wedding, and the participants decided to go out back on the train tracks for some photographs. Kind of cool I guess, but the issue is that these tracks are used on a daily basis. I don’t think this bodes well for their marriage. The signs are every where. Yes, the stop sign.

These are my other photos I took on Saturday.  All were taken with my new (to me) Pentax-F SMC 70-210 lens. In some of these photopgraphs, I was seeing how the lens handled being used into the sun.  All in all, i am quite happy with the results.

Curtain Call

Augenblick: a moment in time

44 Pentax Photographers

(Including me)

May 7 – June 12th @  the DANKHaus German American Cultural Center

If you’re in the Chicago area, drop by and take a look. 

So about five years ago I acquired a cheap old Sony Vaio PCG 505G. It had 64megs of ram, and a 233mhz processor. The positive is that it was thin. So it was still useful for using the internet, and that is about it. I brought it with me on one of my trips to Rochester.  My Mom fell in love with it, and well… it kind of went on permanent loan to her.

Flash forward a few years and it became totally obsolete. Performance wise it had been left in the dust before 2001, but with the netbooks that are out these days, Its size advantage was gone. Plus I could not even tether with my cell phone because It was only running windows ME (the worst OS ever conceived).

My challenge to myself this year was to install Linux on the system and breath new netbook style life into this relic. What made this interesting is that the laptop has no cd drive. And only an external floppy drive.  It does have a 1.1 USB port. And that is how I got Linux (Puppy Linux to be exact) on the system. Thanks to a floppy image called WakePup2, I was able to boot to a USB image of the PL image and install. Shortly thereafter I was able to connect to the internet by tether with my cell phone. Since I know I can do that now, my next goal (next year) will be to place a PCMCIA WIFI card in it. When that is complete, this laptop will be an underpowered netbook.  Perfect for surfing the net with. Except no youtube…

I think i need to upgrade the ram to 96 megs as well.  I really do love linux.

So I spent my New Years eve at my moms house. I suppose I could of gone out, but the drunks on the road always scare me. Plus I knew I could watch a perfectly good fireworks show about 30 seconds from the front step.  After watching the show I finished bringing in the new year with Chocolate Stout and a pile of cocktail weiners. Ohhhh yeah.

Later in the day I finished the fireworks photos in the Lightroom 3 beta. I’m completely in love with this program, and will be purchasing it. The learning curve was low. Only thing I had to look up was how to change the aspect ratio of the crop tool. (Changing from 2:3 to 3:2) This program does everything I do in my own work flow, but makes it easier. From the spotting tool, to the presets..  perfect.

Here are a few photos from the last days of 2009 to the first minutes of 2010.