Fayetteville, Arkansas, gets a little bit of snow just about every year. But today we had an unusually large amount. Last week’s snowfall was nothing compared to this. I heard reports on social networks of up to 25 inches of snow in Northwest Arkansas. I couldn’t get my car out of its parking spot, so I couldn’t go to work. But I did trudge out into the snow to take some pictures. I found it to be knee deep in most places. My knees aren’t 25 inches tall, though. Here is what I saw. And by the way, if you like these photos, please be kind and click the “like” button.
Creative Commons is a neat thing. I wanted to make a map of states that have concealed carry reciprocity with Arkansas, but I didn’t want to draw the map myself. So I started looking for a map in .SVG format so I could edit it in Inkscape. I found this map on Wikipedia:
I took my camera to Smoke & Barrel in Fayetteville to take pictures of people watching USA vs. Algeria in the World Cup. Here are some of the pictures I took.
I got up at 4:30 this morning and drove out to Boxley, Arkansas, to get some sunrise pictures of elk before they moved off into the woods. I got a new 75-300mm lens, and I thought it had auto-focus, but I can’t seem to get the auto-focus to work with my Nikon D3000. Manual focus is difficult. What looks well-focused in the viewfinder turns out to not be so well-focused on the LCD after taking the shot. I don’t think this is the greatest lens, but it might be me. It’s a Tamron 672D. Maybe I’m doing something wrong with the auto-focus. I’ll have to research it further. For now, enjoy this gallery of elk. Comments are appreciated.
It has been raining nonstop for a few days now, and the forecast is more rain for a few more days, so I haven’t been taking any pictures. Here are a few more from the first game of the SEC Softball Tournament on Thursday, before it started raining. Comments, criticisms, etc. are very welcome and appreciated.
Kentucky pitcher Chanda Bell and first base player Samantha DeMartine at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey.
Kentucky pitcher Chanda Bell at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey
Kentucky pitcher Chanda Bell at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey
Kentucky pitcher Chanda Bell and first base player Samantha DeMartine at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey
Kentucky pitcher Chanda Bell and first base player Samantha DeMartine at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey
Kentucky first base player Samantha DeMartine makes an out against LSU’s Cassie Trosclair 5/13/10 at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Photo by Daniel Veazey
Kentucky pitcher Rachel Riley, first base player Samantha DeMartine and LSU’s Ashley Langoni at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey
Kentucky pitcher Rachel Riley, first base player Samantha DeMartine, and an unidentified LSU’s Ashley Langoni at the SEC Softball Tournament in Fayetteville, Arkansas 5/13/10. Photo by Daniel Veazey
So I learned that I needed to turn up the ISO so I could turn up the shutter speed so I could have sharper action shots. I went out today and turned the ISO all the way up to 1600. The aperture on these two shots was f5.6. The shot of the guy was 1/1250 shutter speed, and the girl was 1/2000. I noticed some grain when I was color correcting and cropping in Gimp, but it wasn’t too bad. It was cloudy today. I think if it was sunny, I could have dialed back to ISO 800 and maybe shot with a little faster shutter speed. This was at Wilson Park in Fayetteville, Arkansas. Comments are appreciated.
I am completely head-over-heels in love with my new camera. I want to do nothing but take pictures now. I’ve started a Panoramio account and I’ve been uploading to it and Picasa. Here is some of my latest stuff. It’s Lake Overcup in Morrilton, Arkansas.
I was happy that the water was very still. Here are some more photos I took today. There was a tornado in Scotland, Arkansas, last week and I headed over there to see what I could see.
I used my cell phone to make a video with boogie2988, one of the more popular people on YouTube. We were having dinner at Sunrise Cafe here in Fayetteville, Arkansas. So when I got home, I wanted to upload my video to my channel on YouTube. When I copied the file from my phone to my computer, I saw the file type was .3gp. “What is .3gp,” I asked myself. “Surely YouTube won’t accept such a file format.” I tried playing the file on my computer. I could see the video, but there was no sound. Mplayer tried to find a plugin on the internet, but to no avail. I decided to try ffmpeg to convert the video to .mp4, just to see if I could. I used WinFF, which is a graphical user interface for ffmpeg. The file converted, no problem. The sound was coming through now and everything was good.
So I uploaded the video and YouTube did its usual “processing” thing for several minutes. When the video finally went live, I watched it and the sound was playing at the right speed, but the video was playing twice as fast as it should have been. Here is what it looked like:
I was not happy, but Boogie is a popular guy and my video was already getting lots of views, so I left it. This morning I thought to myself, “What if YouTube does accept .3gp files?” So I tried uploading it and it worked fine:
The moral of the story here is that I shouldn’t try fixing something before I check to see if it’s even broken. Comments are greatly appreciated!
Here in my town, Fayetteville, Arkansas, is a nonprofit called Seedling Film Association. I attended their St. Patrick’s Day celebration with Christopher Spencer of Ozarks Unbound, and good times were had. Cassie Self (I think that was her name, but I’m hard of hearing) described the association as a networking group for connecting talent to other talent. Arkansas State Representative candidate Bill Ramsey, D-Fayetteville, made an appearance. One highlight of the night was the “Leprechaun Limbo” contest:
