"New" Bike

Tracy and I got our motorcycle licenses two weekends ago. And last weekend, I looked at and made an offer on a used 2004 Yamaha R6. We picked it up on Monday. Also on Monday, a coworker lent me his tilt-shift lens to play with; he's planning to sell it back to B&H Photo/Video because he doesn't use it very much. Which means you not only get to see some pictures of my "new" bike, you also get to see some examples of what you can do with a tilt-shift lens.

The bike is in great shape - if you're talking about the engine & drivetrain. The electrics are a bit of mess, however. It was used as a race bike, so the engine is new-ish (rebuilt a couple of years ago), the clutch is new, the chain is new, the brake rotors and pads are new.... You get the idea. But since it was used as a race bike, things like proper headlight operation and turn signals weren't terribly important. And it's missing its horn (or so it seems). So even though we've ridden it up and down the street a couple of times, we can't even get it inspected yet (because it would insta-fail).

So we took off the cowl assembly yesterday so I can a) sand down and repaint the rusty stay (iron-looking tree-like thing at bottom right) and replace the bit of the wiring harness that sits up in the cowl (because it would seem that the relay for the headlights is bad, at least). I got an extra wiring harness for the bike, so swapping in a new bit of that is "easy" (as in, I don't have to buy it). Here a picture of the disassembled cowl assembly:


That picture was taken with the tilt shift lens tilted so that I could "lay the focal plane down" across the table. With normal lenses, the focal plane is always parallel to the sensor. This works great if you're taking a picture of a person, or a bunch of people standing side-by-side, but poorly if you've array stuff on a table and want to take a picture from any other angle than straight down. But tilting the lens, the focal plane is tilted relative to the sensor, allowing all the pieces on the table to be in focus. For comparison, here's the same mess of pieces taken straight on (no tilt):


Now, because these images are so small (low-resolution), the difference isn't terribly noticeable. To make the effect clearer, I pulled out two details in each image: the first is of the tach (at the bottom center of the image) and the second is of the cowl, below and including the "nose" where the windshield comes to a point. Here they are not tilted (straight-on):



The lack-of-focus on the cowl is pretty clear. But check out what happens when the lens is tilted:



Now both bits of the image are in sharp focus. Pretty cool.

As for the rest of the bike, it doesn't look like much at the moment, since the plastics (fairings) are all pulled off so we could get to the electrics (there are turn signals in the back, too, after all). I'll post some pictures when everything is cleaned up and put back together. I'm hoping it won't take too long!

Third Snow

So I completely missed blogging about the first huge (for Virginia) snow we got this winter. It fell on the 19th of December and, across 36 hours, dumped some 18-20 inches of snow. That's a lot for here. Then, last weekend (the end of January), we got 10 inches. This weekend, we got some 12-15 inches. If it had been colder (it was right above freezing during most of the snowfall), I'm sure we would have gotten more.


At the top of the entry is a panorama from the my patio door. Above is a panorama from my front door. The branches down on the left are the top of my thundercloud plum. I'll probably have to take it out; there's not much left now. The other branches are bits off of the white pines on that side of the house. I think it's time to take them out, too. Below is a 360-degree panorama taken on the street. Photoshop insisted on making the across-the-street-neighbor's house the center; I didn't feel like arguing with it.


We took a walk this morning, after finishing clearing in front of the car (we'd kept up with the snowfall, so that wasn't too bad, except for when the plow came by). The cherries by the dance studio on Commonwealth Rd looked about like they do when in bloom:


Here they are in a panorama with some more of Commonwealth Rd; Westfield Rd is in the center of the image:


David and Tracy had a mini-snowball fight back off the road. Tracy threw the first snowball:


David, of course, had to get her back:


He then decided that jumping into the snow would be great fun:


We walked over to the park near my work. It was easy going on part of the track, where lots of people had smoothed it down. But off the beaten track it was significantly more work. Here's Tracy, on the nice track:

D.C. Honeymoon

We took a short honeymoon to D.C. after our wedding to see Cavalia and to get out of the house for a short while.


My goal with this picture was to use the ND filter to turn the sprinklers to mist. It didn't work (they're too regular) but it did remove the people walking around outside the Capitol.


Another photo with the ND, both to remove the people and to smooth out the surface of the duck pond.


A sleepy duck. She didn't care how close I got, so I was able to frame her pretty tightly. Great detail on this photo.


Tracy said this duck was doing yoga. I love how much light there seems to be on the purple stripe on her wing. It's as if it's translucent and backlit.


Fountains in the National Gallery Sculpture Garden. After this we started going into the museums and by the time we came out, we were so hungry, we weren't at all interested in trying to take pictures!