Malweth’s Metablog

This past weekend we went to the Edaville Railroad near Plymouth, MA. The place is fairly small - the drive being the small railroad that takes you around Cranberry bogs to see lots of Christmas lights (a sort of luminescent-topiary). It’s well worth taking the train after dark (I don’t see the draw during daylight nor year-round).

The food stands were expensive, but very high quality (I had a chocolate apple). This was probably my best picture from the outing. (95mm 1/160s @ f/8 ISO 200). The Depth of Field (DoF) was better in the chocolate apple picture (linked above) (50mm 1/200s @ f/3.5 ISO 200) but this one had better pattern and depth (endless-looking-ness).

The lights were also interesting subjects:

The castle (50mm 1/100s @ f/1.8 ISO 400) was my favorite lights shot. The goal here was to capture these using a 50mm prime (f/1.8) on a moving train! These were at ISO 400, but more was required to get the pure black background and more pinpointed lights. Keeping the standard EV of -0.3 or -0.7 results in a longer exposure (easier to blur) and too-bright lights which bled too much, also making a fuzzy visage. The ones that came out well were all at EV -1.7 (Aperture Priority mode).

The one thing I did like was the diffusion effect caused by the train. A warm train in < 50 degree weather means foggy windows! This allowed the lights to bleed somewhat, but in a more organic (not over-bright) way. This picture had the perfect amount... (where I shot through the windows made a big difference)!

Finally, one interesting effect I had: A longer exposure that had a tree passing by (50mm 1/3s @ f/1.8 ISO 400 EV -0.3):

Merry Christmas!

Bill Phillips suggests building up in steps (hardly a new idea, treadmills have had this for years) when strength training. In other words, adjust your effort throughout the training. On an effort scale from 1-10: 1, 3, 7, 2, 4, 8, 3, 5, 9, 4, 6, 10! (or its like).

Could this be modified for Tsumego study? Example:

• 20 Easy Problems
• 5 Moderate Problems
• 10 Easy Problems
• 10 Moderate Problems
• 1 Hard Problems
• 5 Moderate Problems
• 3 Hard Problems
• 5 Moderate Problems
• 6 Hard Problems (TOT: 10)
• 10 Moderate Problems (TOT: 35)
• 20 Easy Problems (TOT: 50)

The time for each group of problems should be around 1/3 of the total time used. Assuming about a half hour:

• Easy Problems: Average of 5 seconds each (4:10)
• Moderate Problems: Average of 30 seconds each (17:30)
• Hard problems: Average of 1 minute each. (10:00)
• Total (31:40)