“When should I carry my Nikon camera” follow up

Here’s a follow up on my previous post on “When should I carry my Nikon camera”?  I suppose the best time to carry it is when I don’t have other things to carry like, a little boy.  I love my grandson, but you just can’t shoot when you have him.  He’s a handful as it is.

We went to the UH Men’s Volleyball match against University of the Pacific, but didn’t have my grandson.  Thanks Jason for watching him.  I took a few shots during the game, but nothing spectacular, as the Volleyball games are just not as exciting as the Basketball games.

It’s interesting, though, that the other sports don’t recognize the Kids Club like the Volleyball team does.  In my sequence of shots, you’ll see a few shots of the team entering the court, “high fiveing” the kids of the Kid Club.  It’s pretty cool to capture the players as they serve.  When you go back to see the sequence of shots, you get to see their expressions, and how they hit the ball.  It’s kinda like watching a golf swing.  In the sequence, you’ll see #16, Sinisa Zarkovic, an Outside Hitter, during his serve.  He is a very powerful hitter and server.  You don’t want to get hit by his balls.

One of the athletic “teams” should be the UH Cheering Team.  They put a lot of time into cheering for our players and spend just as much time on the playing field as the players.  They also have to practice like our players, and work on their strength, too.  In the sequence, you’ll see three shots of the girls lifted up by the guys.  That takes a lot of skill, practice, and strength.

The last photo in the sequence is Rubberband Man.  Rubberband Man, otherwise known as Alan Hackbarth, is a loyal fan of Men’s Volleyball and a former UH Football Player.  He entertains the crowd during the breaks with his antics in the stands, heckling the other team, and dancing crazy on the steps.  When you watch him, he kinda reminds me of Jim Carrey.

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Here’s a video of him.

 

When should I carry my Nikon camera?

When should I carry my Nikon camera?  That’s a tough one.  I always carry a camera with me.  It’s my iPhone5.  It’s handy to have my phone, camera, personal digital assistant, and more with me at all times, but sometimes you need that little extra to get the best shot.  For the most part, I can get away with just using the camera on my iPhone, but there are those times when you need to get up-close and need that higher quality image.

Well . . . last night’s basketball game between the University of Hawaii Warriors and the Air Force Academy Falcons in the College Insider.com Tournament, was one of those nights I wish I had my camera with me.  I was posting on Facebook, the score near halftime, when I grabbed a great shot of UH’s #42, Isaac Fotu, slamming the ball into the basket.  Yikes!  I was shooting with my iPhone!!  It was a great shot of Isaac, we were ahead 29-25 after suffering a 10 point deficit through most of the first half.  There was only about 2 minutes left in the half when this happened.  Dang!!

Here’s that shot, un-cropped, and then, cropped and sharpened with a black and white effect added.  Sick!!  This would have been a great shot!

UH Freshman Forward #42 Isaac Fotu Jamming the ball near the end of the first half against Air Force.

If I had my camera with me, it would have looked more like the bottom photo as far as crop goes.

 

UH Athletics, Men’s Volleyball

Aloha,

Now that I have a lot of time on my hands, we have been consumed in UH Athletics.  For many years, we have been supporters of the UH Football team and purchased season tickets every year.  Well now that I have been on unintentional “extended vacation”, I have more time than money, so we have been purchasing season tickets for other sports, such as Women’s Volleyball, Men’s Basketball, and now Men’s Volleyball.

Women’s Volleyball was great!  They have a terrific team and coupled with the fact that my wife taught one of the players when she taught at an elementary school, we have a reason to cheer for them.  At one of the last Women’s Volleyball games, we got to see a preview of the Men’s and Women’s Basketball players and were impressed with the Men’s Basketball team.  That prompted us to purchase season tickets for them as well.

Our grandson enjoys attending the volleyball games and cheering the team, but Women’s Volleyball has ended, so we said, let’s get Men’s Volleyball tickets so he can go to those games and cheer them on.  The Men’s team hasn’t been quite as promising as the Women’s team, but it has been exciting.

They haven’t had a very good season, but they have been close, many times playing five sets.  The last game against Pepperdine was especially good!  They won in three sets!  25-21, 25-22, and 25-16.  The first two sets were too close for comfort, but we won.  This was the first time in the season that they finished in three sets.

Here are some photos I took of that last game.  Our favorite players are #15, JP Marks, from Schwerin, Germany, and #16, Sinisa Zarkovic, from Belgrade, Serbia.

Shot with my Nikon D7000, shooting at Continuous High Speed, I sometimes wish it was speedier.  At full resolution it is capable of shooting at 6 fps.  You just can’t capture the shot you want at that rate.  Maybe I need a faster lens.  Shot with a 55-200 mm lens with f4-5.6, it’s just not fast enough.  The camera can be set at Auto-ISO, so I used that coupled with shooting using Shutter priority.  That seems to help as the ISO never went as high as 6400 to compensate.

Shot from the lower seats on the concourse in section C, close to the center.

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Over eating

Just discovered an app called Fat Booth for the iPhone.

Funny! Ever wonder what you would look like if you over ate and gained a lot of weight?!!

Here’s what he would look like after gaining weight.

 

The banana cell phone

Aloha!! I have not posted anything in a LONG time. After speaking with my brother the other day, I realized that I should post something. Up until today, my rants were satisfied by posting on that other thing called, FB. Here’s my newest post.

I’ve been a fan of cellular phones from the days of the “brick” style of cellular phones. It was an expensive proposition back then. With no competition, the companies were able to charge an arm and a leg. They were big and heavy, but it offered such a convenience unheard of at the time.

After my huge Motorola brick, I upgraded to something called a Simon. It was an IBM product, not much smaller than a brick, but it offered MORE unheard of capabilities. I first saw something similar to the phone when the IBM technician came to our office to repair our IBM computer. He needed to order some parts he needed right away, to repair our equipment. Out of his bag of tools, he pulled out this gadget that looked like a little computer. In those early technology days, I had a Radio Shack TRS-80, PC2 Pocket Computer, so this gadget the technician was using, interested me.

His gadget didn’t even have raised keys!! It had a touch screen that was almost as large as the gadget. As I watched, he typed on the screen the part number he needed and magically, his order went through. Essentially, he accessed a database on some server, the part he needed and and placed his order that way.

His gadget looked similar to the Simon.

The Simon was not just a cellular phone. It was a PDA (Personal Digital Assistant). Back then, you could only get a PDA from companies such as Casio and those were dedicated as a PDA only. This was a cellular phone with a PDA. It also had the capability of sending a fax to anyone. It came with a stylus that allowed you to WRITE on the screen. You could take notes on your phone at a meeting. Your appointments, and contacts were all on this phone. It was a cool phone. Back then, the largest cellular phone company was called Honolulu Cellular Telephone Company (http://archives.starbulletin.com/1999/04/09/business/index.html). The sales rep who went door to door selling phones used to come to our office regularly, because he knew that there were a lot of employees in our office, so we got to know him pretty well (although I can’t remember his name). He offered us an “upgrade” to this phone. Being an “early adopter”, I bit the bait.

Well, cell phones and technology has changed dramatically over the years, and now everyone and his brother has a “Simon” that we now call Smart Phones. I’ve kept up with the cell phone technology and have an iPhone 5. Cell phones now allow you to browse the Internet, take photos, download and run apps. You can do many great things!

These great toys (as I call them) come about because of the imagination of such great visionaries like Steve Jobs, and Bill Gates. The young minds and imaginations of these people come up with the greatest toys!

Here’s the next great invention!

 

Exploring my neighborhood

This evening, I decided that it would be a good opportunity to walk through my neighborhood for some exercise and to capture some images of Pauoa Valley.  Pauoa Valley is a small neighborhood nestled between Tantalus (Punchbowl Crater) and Nuuanu Valley.  It is a secret location that many people don’t know about.  Say you are from Pauoa and they will say Palolo or Pahoa?  No Pauoa.

In my effort to shoot these images, I stayed away from the “automatic” exposure mode. I shot everything in the manual mode, keeping in mind Ansel Adams’ Zone System.

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頑張って (がんばって) Ganbatte: Do your best

I’m not Japanese, but the word Ganbatte, which means “Do your best” is something that I believe in.  You must strive to do your best in all that you do.  I always strive to to my best.

If you were to ask my wife why I say I am not Japanese, she will tell you that I am 1/4 Japanese.  My grandfather was born in Hawaii and was adopted by a Chinese family and taken back to China.  He grew up to eat, sleep, and speak Chinese (Hakka).  He lived in the China countryside from about the age of 5 and did not return to Hawaii until much later in life.  While living in Hawaii one of the professions he held was as a Chinese school teacher.  Even my father taught at that same Chinese school.  So as far as my grandfather was concerned, he was Chinese through and through.  What we 2nd (?) generation Chins did not know until later was that he was Japanese adopted by a Chinese family.  That would make me 1/4 Japanese.

Sometimes, I wonder if that has anything to do with all the Japanese relationships that pop up in life.  My employment history included working for two Japanese firms, Marukai and Fujifilm.  My three siblings and I all married Japanese.  Matsubara, Muramoto, Okinaka, and Fujii are our links to the Japanese sides of the family, but I have no clue as to my grandfather’s surname before adoption.  The surname Chin or Chun or Chen or Ching all relate this Chinese character.

 

What does all this have to do with Ganbatte?  Nothing really.  Perhaps its just the Japanese side of me saying Ganbatte.  I just needed a reminder to continue in life with that philosophy.  My journey in life since March 2012 has taught me some new lessons in finding a new job.  My quest to be re-employed took some learning about what the job market was like today and how to write a resume that was worth looking at.  The job market is nothing like it was years ago when I was searching for my first job out of college.  Everything is done electronically on the Internet.  You create an electronic resume that you upload to the employer,  complete the application on-line, take tests on-line and get email confirmation of your application.

I’m really fortunate that I kept plugging away at learning to use the computer.  Who would have known that the gadget called an Apple //e or the IBM PC would eventually become the replacement for many of the things we take for granted today.  Publishers today are struggling to make ends meet because everything is done electronically rather than on print.  Technology has replaced the need to print including photographs.  Remember the days when the paper industry was struggling to keep up with providing paper for print because all the trees were being chopped down?  Thus, tree conservation became important.  Today we are able to automate much of the production work by computerizing.  The American auto industry learned from the Japanese to automate production to speed up production, minimize labor, and increase quality.  There’s no doubt that personally keeping up with technology was the best thing I could have done.  Everything I know was self-taught, thus perseverance.

Ganbatte!