Blog
02/02/2008
Wow. It's February already! Isn't time flying! Well not much has changed here. Work, work and more work. The staff situation here is a bit silly really. The fact that the largest ski resort in the USA cannot attract enough people to fill all it's positions is frankly ridiculous!
Well it's continued snowing here. The total for the season now is somewhere well past 250" so we could well be heading for a record season. Unfortunately it's been incredibly cold. Frostbite has struck on numerous occasions. It's kind of like getting repeatedly sunburnt and I don't think it's doing my face any good whatsoever!
It was Australia Day last weekend which resulted in a pretty big party up on the mountain. Thankfully the sun was out all day and we were able to BBQ quite happily up at Belle's Camp.
I got my scanner the other day. I got a refurbished Epson 4490 direct from Epson for a pretty good price so I've spent the last couple of days scanning pictures. I can quite proudly say that the faith I put into medium format has paid off. The scans I'm getting are truly awesome and easily exceed what you would get out of even the most expensive DSLR and this is with a fairly basic scanner! I have put some of the up in the gallery but to be honest they can't show you how good the scans are due to the limited size I can post on this website. Suffice to say the TIFF's I'm getting from 6x6 scans are around the 250Mb size mark! The scans are here...
I also stumbled across an article on the web the other day about the Photomerge function in Photoshop CS3. Now I didn't know it even existed but since reading the article I've experimented with it and the results are incredible! Certainly makes stitching together panoramas easier! I've included a few of these in the gallery and they can be seen here...
Other than that I'm still chasing Fuji G617's on Ebay. Hopefully I'll get to snag one soon. I'm also looking into getting a Fuji GSW690 as I've been so blown away by the medium format scans that I definitely think it's the way to go for landscape photography right now! See you all soon...
01/12/2008
It's 2008! Happy New Year everyone! It's still snowing out here, it just keeps coming. This is turning into an epic season! So what's been happening since I last updated this... Well, I got pretty drunk at New Year and last week at the first Lift Ops party of the season. Both resulting in incredibly long days at work the following days! A couple of weeks back I got the snowmobile stuck at work twice in one day due to some big winds moving in causing massive wind drifts of snow on the mountain.
The other day I ordered and received a new lens for my Bronica SQ camera, a PS 40mm wide angle lens. It's pretty sweet! I also got the roll of film back developed from the pictures I took in Bath way back in October and the results are awesome! When I ordered the lens I also ordered a light meter so I can use my Bronica a lot more regularly. Given the results from the film I got developed I certainly intend to take it out with me more and it's just reaffirmed my idea that medium format is still leading over digital in terms of image quality. I'm currently investigating a good flatbed scanner with film holders to scan the films I have and I'm also watching a couple of Fuji G617's on Ebay as I've saved enough money to afford what I deem to be a reasonable price for one so I'll let you know how that turns out...
Picture udpate for January can be viewed here...
12/27/2007
So I've been typically useless at keeping this thing up to date. The first thing I'll say is Merry Christmas everyone!! Another Christmas has passed, I hope you all had an enjoyable one! I spent mine at work and it feels like I've done nothing but work since I've been here. We're still horribly short staffed so it's been pretty hectic! It's also been snowing a lot. In fact, it's pretty much snowed non-stop for the last two weeks which has certainly helped to turn this season round from it's slow start! I've posted some pictures in th gallery to show how much the scenery has improved! They can be seen here...
12/13/2007
Phew! What a couple of weeks. We got snow and lots of it! This resulted in a massive opening of terrain and due to the lack of staff, massive amounts of overtime. I'm having a day off today having just worked eleven of the last twelve days. I'm pretty tired now and kind of over training new operators! I hope to go riding tomorrow as I really haven't done much of that on my days off yet! I would love to share interesting tales of the season so far but to be honest there really isn't much to tell mainly due to the massive workload. Hopefully this will calm down soon as we get more staff. I've added a couple of pictures from the day we opened the back bowls. It was a beautiful morning and you can see the views from my commute to work here...
11/30/2007
Well it finally started snowing! We had around a foot a couple of days ago and we're under a Winter storm warning with anything up to two feet expected over the next couple of days. I've offered to do overtime tomorrow as we're opening a whole bunch of lifts thanks to the snow we received. I went to the World Cup skiing at Beaver Creek today. To be honest, it wasn't that exciting but it was an opportunity to get some more experience with the camera, the results of which can be seen here. Yesterday I had the longest day ever as I went to Glenwood Springs to renew my driving licence. This basically involved waiting a very long time for the Greyhound to take me there, a very long time to get served in the DMV and a very long time waiting for the Greyhound to take me home! Well, at least I got my licence so it wasn't a wasted trip.
11/23/2007
So here it is, the blog! My first blog. Not sure where to start really so... I've been in Vail a couple of weeks now and there's no snow. That's really the big news. We opened a couple of days ago with one lift serving one run. Hopefully things will turn around soon because everyone's kind of anxious to get up the hill and get things going. I've only got one day of riding in so far but to that's OK because there's nothing to ride anyway! The flight over was pretty awesome. I had three seats to stretch out on! I've put some pictures from the flight in the gallery. It was Thanksgiving yesterday but it didn't really seem worth the hassle of uploading the gondola to get my free dinner for something us Brits don't even celebrate! Nothing else to report really. I plan on going riding at Beaver Creek tomorrow so maybe I'll have some more exciting news then...