I love my new raincoat!
This is from a couple of weeks ago.. but it’s such a cute shot. William got a new raincoat – and he couldn’t wait to try it out and go splashing in some puddles.
William and his new rain slicker
This is from a couple of weeks ago.. but it’s such a cute shot. William got a new raincoat – and he couldn’t wait to try it out and go splashing in some puddles.
William and his new rain slicker
One nice side benefit of having a new child arrive twelve days late is that you have lots of time to sit around and wait. I was able to make use of some of that time to get some work done on my Whitewater restoration.
My latest project is the restoration of the upper playfield. Like the rest of the machine – it was pretty dirty and needed a lot of work. All ramps needed to be replaced, lots of metal parts needed polishing and regraining, and Bigfoot needed some TLC including a bath and some fur regluing.
The underside of the upper playfield
Once everything was off the playfield, it required a good sanding (of the backside) and a good polishing (of the front)
Lots of magic black dust on the backside
That’s better!
Reassembly is going pretty slowly – so far, I’ve got all the lamps on the backside, all the ball guides regrained and some reattached, and the upper flipper rebuilt. I’ve also got Bigfoot back in place after a bath, lots of hot glue, and some stiching.
Bigfoot is back!
My next project is to build up all of my new Pinball Inc. reproduction ramps. This will require moving all hardware from the old ramps to the new ramps, moving the decals to the new ramps, and adjusting everything to fit. The new ramps are almost twice as thick as the old ones – and they don’t always fit.
The new Suicide Canyon ramp from Pinball, Inc.
I also acquired a new set of clear plastics from Orbit Pinball – I’ve got to get some riveting done on the indicator sign before I can mount that.
You can see the rest of my restoration pictures at Smugmug: (link)
No, not a Dobro (see below):
… a DROBO (see below):
What’s a Drobo? Well, according the manufacturer.. it’s “The World’s First Storage Robot”. Basically, it’s a really cool really big RAID array thingy.
Basically, I’m not afraid to shill for schwag – so I’m trying to win the weekly contest from the “This Week In Photography (TWiP)” podcast. The contest is for a free Drobo – and to enter the drawing, you have to link to the TWiP site.
It’s actually a really good podcast, and one I just stumbled upon. They do a pretty good job of keeping it fun and informative – though I wish they’d talk about Aperture (from Apple) a little less. Not being an Apple user, I’m not real interested. The other 95% is great, though..
So – here’s my link in a post, and my link in the sidebar: This Week In Photography
It took her twelve extra days to get ready to make her grand appearance, but at 4:00 this afternoon – little Elizabeth Elaine Teskey joined the human race.
As a proud papa, I can’t help but show her off:
Baby Elizabeth in her first picture with Daddy
The vital stats?
The entire T3sk3y clan – and William couldn’t be more thrilled!
See the rest of the pictures over at teskey.smugmug.com. Here’s a direct link: (link)
… and still no news.
Thanks to everyone checking here and calling for baby news – but there’s nothing to report other than a pretty solid false alarm last night. It was actually believable enough that we had my father-in-law come out to watch William. In the end, it turned out to be just another false alarm.
Watch here for updates!
It’s been a while since I’ve posted a raves posting.. so here are ten things that I’ve run across recently that ROCK (in my opinion):
1) The BlueAnt Z9 Bluetooth headset. I’ve been through a few headsets.. this one WORKS. It pairs well, it has good audio quality, and the noise reduction does a good job at filtering out road noise. It’s really tiny, too – I have to be careful to not put it in a pants pocket and run it through the wash.
2) Survivor: Fans vs. Favorites. I’ll admit that I’m a sucker for some reality TV – and the season of Survivor that wrapped up last night was one of my favorites yet. I sure didn’t predict the winner – but I guess I can’t argue with Parvati’s game. It’s just unfortunate that a couple of my favorites went out early due to injury or treachery (Penner, James, & Ozzy)
3) Good stylii. I lose about one stylus a month for my phone – so I buy them frequently. I got stuck with some really crappy ones after my Washington trip and it was hell during the four days it took to lose or break all three. They really sucked due to bad build (tips fell off, one broke in half) and not fitting – a single flick would send them flying. I now have good ones with built in pens.
4) The Skyfire mobile browser. If you’ve EVER tried to use a sports site like foxsports.com or any other big complex page from a mobile browser, you’ll understand this one. Skyfire preloads the page on the server, then sends a low-res picture to the mobile. When you zoom, it sends just the chunk you are looking at. It’s still in closed beta – but it looks promising!
5) Classic Playfield Reproductions and Pinball, Inc. Without these two making playfields, plastics, backglasses, and ramps – restoration would be a lot tougher!
6) Theories that I figured out years ago. I’ve always said it would rot to be an activist because you walk around torqued off about something all the time. That’s a bad way to go through life. Somebody else agrees with me: The Economist
7) Lemonheads. Yum.
Adobe Lightroom. I resisted initially – I’m now a believer. It’s the shiznit for organizing, managing, and preparing digital photos.
9) The Spring Biking Class at Balance Fitness: I got a six week riding class at Balance Fitness from my wife for my birthday. No, it’s not spinning. It’s actually on bikes on trainers indoors. All I can say is that worked hard enough to nearly vomit six weeks in a row – then I set a personal record (PR) my first ride home from work. For those interested – 26 miles in 1:24:00. That’s a full minute faster than my best time.
10) Herald of Leshrac: Stealing land, flying, and growing? Sign me up!
(NOTE: Part two in a three part travelogue/review of my private photo seminar with Jon Cornforth)
In the weeks leading up to the trip, I found out that I would have to squeeze a business trip to Edmonton in right before my photo seminar. I had originally planned to fly in to Seattle directly from Minneapolis on the night of Thursday, April 10th. Instead, I had to fly to Edmonton late at night on the 9th, have my meeting during the day, then fly from Edmonton to Seattle by way of Vancouver on the night of the 10th. I met my friend Ross (who I was supposed to fly with) at the airport.
This also meant that I had to bring a lot more stuff than I planned. In addition to my photo and camping gear, I needed all my stuff and some nice clothes to visit a potential client. My bag slipped in right at the 50 pound weight limit!
After having a nice dinner and a good night’s sleep at my friend Beth’s house, Jon arrived right on time to pick Ross and I up. He arrived in his truck towing his camper – our home for the weekend. We threw our gear in the back of the truck and headed towards the peninsula.
The trip out to the peninsula went by very quickly – the conversation was pretty lively, and the teaching began almost immediately. Right off the bat it was obvious that even if we didn’t learn anything – it would still be a fun weekend.
Stopped in the Sol Duc for lunch and our first lesson
Our first stop of the trip was the Sol Duc rainforest. We stopped near a nice stream and went to the camper for some sandwiches before starting to shoot. Jon (who I think was still trying to probe our capabilities) talked to us about framing, depth of field, shutter speed for water movement, and eliminating distracting elements. We also learned the art of ‘Cornforthing’ the scene – or how to make sure that distracting twig isn’t so distracting.
Jon checking out a scene in the Sol Duc
When you shoot in a rainforest, you really WANT rain – or at least clouds. In bright sun, you get nasty hard shadows and really washed out colors. Within a short period of time, the clouds broke revealing bright sunlight which would stick with us for the remainder of the trip. Fortunately, we were able to get some keepers before the sun got too strong.
Mossy Tree and Rushing Stream
After leaving the Sol Duc, we headed for La Push to set up camp on the beach for the weekend. We pulled in late afternoon, got the camper set up, and headed off for Second Beach for a sunset shoot. It was about a mile hike through the woods to get to Second Beach – and a real pretty hike at that. Once we hit the beach we had to scramble over a very large pile of logs that had washed ashore. There were numerous warnings to stay away from the logs during a high tide – I can’t imagine them all bumping around!
The piled up driftwood on Second Beach
After scouting the beach a little, we set up to shoot the sea stacks. While we were setting up, we got a primer on shooting sunsets. We talked about spot metering and how to use it to determine which graduated neutral density filter to use, we talked about the use of hyperfocal charts to set focus, and we learned the importance of a bubble level.
I set up with my Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 lens and a HiTech 3-stop hard line GND being held in a Cokin holder. I got everything balanced, set my camera for f/22 to get maximum depth of field, waited for the light to get just right, and started firing.
Sand patterns made from receding tides
One other interesting lesson I picked up was that you could judge the quality of the light and the scene by whether or not Jon was setting up to shoot. This was a real consideration for him since he’s shooting medium format film – and it’s about a dollar every time he hits the trigger.
It was interesting to see how important Jon’s preaching about preparation and composition turned out to be – the magic light lasted for only a few short minutes. It was short enough that if you weren’t ready to go when you saw it – it was too late!
Second Beach at Sunset
Once the sun went down, we hiked back to the car in the dark and went back for dinner. Once back, Jon made us a great pasta & meat sauce dinner in the camper and we washed it down with some good wine. We spending a little time editing pictures before turning in for the evening.
It was as we were turning in that we discovered that we got our wires crossed during planning – we had no bedding! When we were setting the trip up, we mentioned that we might bring sleeping bags if we needed to – and we never went back and straightened it out. Jon naturally assumed we were bringing bedding so he didn’t bring any. I ended up sleeping under Jon’s daughter’s pink Dora the Explorer sleeping bag – and Ross bundled up in fleece. Fortunately it was going to be a short night.. we had a 5 AM wakeup!
Coming up soon – Part Three! Until then.. all of my pictures from the trip are here: (link)
Nowhere is this more true than in pinball restoration. Even when you’ve got some of the ‘big ticket’ items done – there is still an amazing amount of work left to complete.
I hit a big milestone last week in my Whitewater restoration project – I finished the lower playfield. I ended up backtracking a little because I received some sorely needed replacement parts from the guru of Pinfooties – Bryan Kelly. I had to remove the disaster drop ramp to replace a JB Weld’ed ball guide – and I had to remove the apron to replace an epoxied ball trough.
The lower playfield restored and reassembled
For most machines, this would be the 50% completion point – and the rest would be cabinet work. On Whitewater, there is an upper playfield that is densely encrusted with ramps, gates, wireforms, and a furry bigfoot guy. This will be a sizable project by itself. I’ve been cleaning my workbench area in preparation for stripping and rebuilding the upper playfield and I should be ready to attack it very soon.
I had planned on pulling the lower playfield off the rotisserie and putting it in storage while I worked on the upper playfield – but I decided to mount the upper playfield and build around it when the time comes. The risk of breaking $100 ramps is too great when you are working on the entire upper as a unit. This will make the restoration a little tougher but a lot safer.
Here are a couple more beauty shots showing off the lower playfield in its restored goodness:
The pop bumper area showing lots of new parts
The Lost Mine area showing new mountains and targets
The Disaster Drop area normally located underneath the upper playfield
The rest of the restoration pictures are located here: (link)
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