Marcus McCurdy's Blog

I took this photo at the Gardens of the World park in Thousand Oaks. The place is a small park that has examples of different types of gardens from different places in the world. This waterfall was in the Japanese garden area of the park. They also have an Italian, Spanish, and rose garden. It is free to get in and is a nice place to visit for about an hour. Taken with a Canon XSi using a Sigma 10-20mm lens at 11mm f/13 1/8 sec iso 100.

This photo was captured in Virginia Beach. I liked the way the wooden path leads into the frame and it would be much better without the trashcan and orange poles. I could probably shop them out with the clone tool, but I would rather be taking more pictures.

I was in the drive through at Del Taco yesterday evening and they were tons of great flowers near the drive in. So, after I got my food I parked and took some shots that turned out pretty good. The sun was starting to descend so the light was pretty good for taking some photos.

This is an HDR photo of the mailbox outside of my house. I captured this shot at dusk and it came out pretty well. I’m not sure what that blue spot is in below the mailbox on the curb. I think I was getting some lens flare from the lights. If you haven’t heard of HDR before you can check out probably the most popular HDR creator here http://www.stuckincustoms.com/.

I took this photo of the power plant during a run at the beach. The power plant has an outlet for water that creates an artificial river that drains into the ocean that is pretty crazy to see. The river is about 20 feet wide and is moving at a pretty good rate. I got lucky and the plant started piping out some steam while I was nearby.

Wow it has been a really long time since I wrote a post here. I’ve been pretty busy lately with the holiday season and I’ve been traveling almost twice monthly for work, but still that isn’t really a good excuse since I can bring my computer with me. I’ve been posting quite often on Twitter though and I’m going to add my Twitter feed into the sidebar right after I’m done writing this post.

I recently got a brand new Canon EOS Xsi camera and I’m enjoying taking a multitude of pictures with it sometimes to the irritation of those around me. I did have a kind of perplexing problem with it though. The Xsi (also called a 450D) is rated to burst up to 53 pictures in the continous shooting mode depending on what quality you are set to. However, I could only get it to shoot 2 continous pictures in all the modes except for sports. I was able to find out after doing some research online that you have to disable high iso noise reduction in order to take advantage of the cameras 3.5 FPS. I don’t know why the HINR slows down the camera even if you aren’t set to a high iso, but disabling it enabled me to take rapid shots in program auto exposure, Av, and Tv modes as I expected.