Apparently when the big dogs switched from film to digital, in their SLRs, they kept the mirror. The mirror is basically necessary so we can see what we’re going to photograph. Then when you press the shutter release, the mirror flips up and the actually viewed image can be captured by the sensor, which is behind the mirror when it’s down.

We could loose the mirror, but then we’d either have no viewfinder, or we’d have to have a digital view of what’s being “seen”.

I know that’s a poor description, but it’s the best I could do with my layman’s understanding.

Enter, the mirrorless interchangeable lens camera, MILC. Yeah, I know. There are actually a few different names for these newfangled cameras, but “mirrorless” seems to be sticking.

Trey Ratcliff actually discussed all of this much better than I have even tried, on his blog, Stuck in Customs. Seriously, go read about it all there. Then come back, please.

Now that you know all about these newfangled mirrorless/3rd generation camera systems, I’ll get to my point. I picked up one!

Since I’m a Nikon guy, I looked first at the Nikon 1 series. The upcoming Pentax K-01 caught my attention as well. Honestly, I really liked what I read about both cameras. I believe that the Pentax K-01 is a better camera, and would have served me as well, if not better, than the Nikon 1 series.

However, the lower price of the Nikon J1 is what won me over. (That was a mistake. More on that later.) Plus, Nikon had just announced an adapter that would allow me to use my existing family of F-mount lenses on the new J1.

So I picked up a J1 package, with two lenses;  a 10-30mm and a 30-110mm. Both lenses have VR. I got mine at Costco, which threw in a 16gb sdcard and a case. Oh, and I chose the white model! (It comes in red and black as well.)

Right away I tried using it more often than my D7000, and various lenses. It was easy, I will admit. It still is. For most life photography, it’s just real easy to grab and go. Two lenses for everything from 10mm to 110mm. (FYI, with the 2.7 crop factor of this sensor, that means 27 to 297mm, in 35mm terms.) That’s pretty much everything I’d need! Yes the speeds of the lenses are a huge factor, and so are the relatively smaller number of easily reachable features. The lens speeds, I can adjust to working around. I simply bump my ISO when I can’t get a comfortable shutter speed. Also, the VR helps with the lower shutter speeds.

The best feature, to me, is the insanely fast autofocus. It just works. It’s automagical, and it happens even when you’re not pressing the shutter release halfway down. I love it!

The rapid fire is quite cool. I can shoot 10 fps, on the special fast mode, with some limitation. The focus becomes fixed, and is limited to a semi-manually selected focus point. But the regular rapid speed is 5 fps, and that’s with the live focus! I generally use this mode all the time. BTW, they call it continuous mode. I used this mode to help capture this shot of my dad, 4x4ing this past week.

Overall, I like the camera, and am glad I bought it. It will serve me and my family well for quite a while. I hope to be able to use it to instruct my wife in the use of more features, to get better photos. Eventually I hope that she’ll begin using it more and more, freeing me to acquire that Pentax K-01, or whatever fits the role even better.

The single largest problem with the J1 is not any one single feature, it’s a bunch of little frustrations. The smaller sensor, really isn’t a problem. The lack of a viewfinder, I’m getting over it. Even the lack of bracketing I’ve adjusted to using the tripod and exposure compensation.

The problem is that everything I want to do is 7 million clicks deep in a menu setting. The features I want are simply too buried. I thought that the big camera companies were hoping to convince dSLR users that these mirrorless cameras are their future. What I’m feeling is that Nikon doesn’t care about the J1 being useful for me, but for the pocket camera user, as an upgrade.

******

Side note: I wrote this post with MarsEdit. I had great hopes for MarsEdit. It sucks. This would have been 10x easier within the WordPress app.

I know what you’re thinking. And that’s sorta true. I did get the grip tape installed, and started hitting my street. But that’s about it. My legs were not ready to just get out and ride for great distances. They weren’t even ready to ride short distances! So I’m hitting the street almost every day, even if for just a ride around the block. My front foot needs a bunch of conditioning!

The Kracked Skulls Scimitar arrives as finished wood, but with zero decoration. I’m sure this is exactly the canvas most skaters are yearning to personalize and express themselves; myself included. My grip tape design was only the first step in achieving this personalization. The underbelly of my Scimitar also needed to reflect Trevor.

So, I tapped into my existing artistic expression, and decided to camouflage the whole thing! Longtime readers of my blog may recall that I tested this technique out with great success a few years ago, on my kids’ Nerf guns.

Obviously this will look fantastic on a skateboard! So I dug out those same spray cans of paint and started my plan. I never clear coated those guns, so I right away decided that a trip to Home Depot was necessary. Shopping for clear coat that wasn’t glossy was the first step. Yuck! I didn’t and don’t want glossy! There were several choices of matte and satin finishes in the spray paint section. While reading the labels I realized that something a bit more durable might be a better choice. That meant furniture paint. I found a spray polyurethane by Minwax, that I decided would be perfect for my purposes.

I set up in the garage, and stripped down the Ivory Yeti. With special attention to straight lines, I taped around the whole edge, to keep the camo relegated to the underbelly. I needed a little more tape for the base of the trucks, which I decided to leave installed.

My camo’ing process is simple. The same steps I used for the Nerf guns was applied here. I chose tan as the base color, and built upon that. This time, I went for a tiny addition, my initials. I masked them off by precutting some painter’s tape into very blocky versions of my initials, “TSC”. Rather than simply paint over the mask, I decided to use one of the camo steps. So I used the palm-like branch and the black paint to apply the paint for the initials.

I used the dark brown for the tiger stripes, and then went to work with the green and brown using the palm branch and the smaller pine branches. At this point, you’re done when you decide you’re done. Too little, and there are blank patches. Too much, and the whole thing becomes kinda muddy. It’s very subjective, however.

I gave it about 3 hours after I was done applying the camo paint before I put down the first coast of clear coat. Two more hours of dry time, and I applied the second and final coat. Then I went to bed.

Today, it’s killing me to wait, so ripped off the masking tape, and installed the Randal trucks. That’s not going to hurt anything!

I really should wait the whole 24 hours, meaning 11pm, before I ride it. I’m not sure if I have that self control. You’ll have to watch my Google+ stream, to see if I can make it.

The short answer is, no. But how do I get there?

Well I first had to set down some goals. In doing so, I also had to decide what I don’t want/need to do; like break bones or die. I really did start with all the things I don’t want to be doing, really ever. I don’t want to hit 30 mpg, bombing hills. Ever. I don’t really care to learn how to slide. Ever. I don’t want to be doing tricks that imply a learning curve that includes hitting the ground with various body parts.

Now that that’s covered, what do I want to do? I want to cruise, and increase my ability to ride and carve, for hours at a time. I want to set some longer distanced goals, and then achieve them.

Knowing this, my G+ friend Eric made some recommendations:

Cruising is a ton of fun, but learning how to handle yourself at higher speeds is a must, simply because it might happen.

When cruising, try riding one foot, turning on one foot, etc. Get familiar with it, you don’t need to do it with both, just do it with the foot that isn’t your braking foot. Explore your board, see how riding towards the nose or towards the tail effect the ride. Carve with your feet closer to the edge and see what happens.

This is the most awesome and practical advice! My pal James came over last night and showed me a few things that I expect will be quite helpful, and Eric’s words here fall right in line. You know, one thing that’s great about the skating community, is that there’s always someone better than you, willing to share with you some pointers to help you get to the next level. Love that! Too bad the Church isn’t always like that!

So what are my immediate goals? Well, first off I want to commit to riding every day. I can do it, even on work days! I want to get a simply path in my neighborhood that I can get out, and cruise. The layout of my neighborhood makes it easy to add another street as I get comfortable with an existing path. I plan to follow this method, until I’m ready to kick it up to my next goal; a one mile ride.

Let me first describe my new board:

• Kracked Skulls Scimitar, 44″
• double glass add-on
• Randal, 180mm RII 50° trucks
• Abec 11 83mm Flywheels
• Abec green bearings

That was the recommendation from Bill at Kracked Skulls. So I took it. It arrived with part of the trucks installed, so I had a little work to do. I got the trucks installed, then the wheels. I knew from the beginning that I’d want to design my own grip tape look, so I declined the clear grit/grip that Kracked Skulls offers as an extra. I had picked up a pair of grip tape rolls at One Way Boardshop, in Santa Maria, in preparation of the Scimitar’s arrival.

A few days before it got here I loaded up Illustrator and traced a photo of someone else’s Scimitar, from Google Images. Then I spent some time poking around Google images for some inspiration in designing my grip tape. Early on I decided that I was attracted to the idea of an argyle-looking design. It would be a repeating design, with at least half the board deck covered. In the midst of tossing those ideas around, I realized that I could really represent my affinity for Android, by tossing in a look of Andy. So I did. Take a look at the intended design…

Once the Scimitar was built, I printed out one of the diamond shapes, and the accumulated shapes for the Android logo. A center line, and parallel side lines, then a cross centered line, were my guides. Easy peasy! Cutting out the diamonds were easy with a new bladed box cutter. But the closer details of the Android logo needed a finer blade. An Xacto knife handled that nicely!

As soon as the grip tape was installed, I hit the street in front of my house. Being horribly out of shape kept me from doing much other than going back and forth a few houses away on both sides. Not to worry! I’ll be shredding the neighborhood in no time!

(Actual riding is seriously held back right now from a work-related staff infection.) (Yes, yuck.)

The finished Scimitar looks great! I’m quite happy with the design, and have had requests from online friends to make it up for them! Just today the family went on a bike ride, and I could have gone along on my board. I expect that in the coming days and weeks, we’ll be doing a lot more of that, all to my physical fitness delight.

If you need an explanation, you don’t know me.

Most of my readers are followers or friends of mine somewhere else; Twitter, Google+, or shockingly in real life. So in one of those places you probably already knew that I just got a new longboard. But why?

Well, I need to exercise. I hate to exercise. I hate running. Been trying to like it since last fall. Walking will work, but is boring. Swimming is cool, but too much get-in-the-car-and-drive-to-the-YMCA. When I look back at the periods of my life where I was in decent physical condition, I was exercising but exercising was the side effect of some other fun or cool activity or hobby.

A few weeks ago I was having coffee with my friend James, when this topic came up. He suggested longboarding. I said, “What’s longboarding?” Yeah, I did.

We ended up in the parking lot of Albertson’s/Starbucks with me test riding his bamboo longboard. Don’t remember the name, but remember checking the price online and being shocked.

That turned into me considering it as a possibility. Then I talked about it with my brother-in-law, an avid skater with contacts in the skateboard manufacturing community down in the CA Southland. His contacts started taking too long, and I had put aside some money to pay for it all, so I just bit the bullet and decided to get my own.

Some SilverFishLongboarding.com research took me to a thread on their forum just for “big boys”. (Shhhh, I am one of those.) I read a gazillion pages of big dudes discussing good boards for their girth and settled upon a Kracked Skulls Scimitar.

A short phone call to Bill at Kracked Skulls resulted in Bill telling me that he and I are similar in size, and he subsequently described the board he rides for cruising. That’s the board I ordered. That’s the board I now have. Yeah!

So, thus begins my journey into becoming a longboard champion. Whatever that means.

I noticed a pal asking for a cool new wallpaper, for his Galaxy Nexus, today on Google+. He wanted an argyle styled wallpaper, with the ICS color scheme; black and blue (#33b5e5), with white highlights.

I thought, “That’s easy enough.” I booted up Illustrator, and tossed it together. During the interaction I realized that others may want something similar. So, here it is!

I might toss together a few variants, just to make it interesting.

Here’s Eric’s screenshot of this wallpaper in action:

Here’s some variants:

Over the past year I’ve had one too many instances where some crappy spammer got their greasy hands on my code. I’m sick of diagnosing corrupt code within WordPress. Don’t get me wrong, WordPress is great! But when you self-host, you have to manage it all yourself. That’s given me all the control I’ve ever wanted, but also came the risk.

Well, no more.

I moved my whole site over to the cloud-hosted WordPress.com. I spent a part of Christmas afternoon getting my own domain pointed in the right direction too. With a slight adjustment, the blog is now at http://blog.trevorcarpenter.com.

I hope you like it!

I’ll poke around a bit over the next week or so, fine tuning the layout, and eventually putting together a nice header. And at the main domain I’ll be designing a nice clean landing page, I hope.

Tuesday, 12/27/11.

Let’s meet at 4 pm in front of the California Capitol building. This will give us plenty of time to gather up, before the sun sets.

Dusk and twilight shots around the capitol building can be wonderful. The downtown area is just loaded with great neon for some additionally great night life photography.

You know, I know that she was a war baby, but I can’t remember which one.

I’ve joined a cause. Yeah, I know…everyone has a cause. Well, this one I just could not pass up. Why? Because I get to grow my fantastic moustache in support!

You see, my wife pretty much hates the ‘stache. She doesn’t understand us. This cause means that she can’t make me shave it!

I started off the month of November, now more affectionately known as Movemeber, with a cleanly shorn face. The idea is that as my mo grows, it will help me raise awareness and hopefully some funds, for…well they say it better than I:

During November each year, Movember is responsible for the sprouting of moustaches on thousands of men’s faces, in the US and around the world. With their Mo’s, these men raise vital funds and awareness for men’s health, specifically prostate cancer and other cancers that affect men.

So do us men a favor, and head over to my Donation page and make…an…um…donation. BTW, you can even use your Paypal account! You know, if every one of you donated $5, I’d have like $15 or $20 in donations.

I’ll leave you with this awesome video, showing yet more support for Movember!