Thomas De Maesschalck’s blog

I went outside tonight to take a couple of new shots of the moon. The shots I took tonight with the Canon EOS 450 + 55-250mm IS lens are a bit better than those I shot earlier this week. I used my tripod and the EOS 450’s Live View feature to magnify the image 10x to try to get the focus right but it wasn’t easy as at 250mm and 10x magnification the image was very shaky, each small camera movement made the image bounce for seconds.

First shot is how it rolled out of the camera, second image shows you how it looks after some Photoshop post-processing:

I just took a couple of shots of the moon with my Canon EOS 450D and the new 55-250mm IS lens. This shot was taken without a tripod and I did some post-processing to improve the sharpness. The photo features quite a lot of detail but unfortunately it didn’t turn out as sharp as I hoped. I’ll try to get a couple of better photos when there’s a full moon.

I haven’t blogged a lot lately so here’s a quick weekend edition update on some stuff.

Work
Income is starting to go up a bit but still a lot lower than last year. I hope it picks up again as we head into the shopping season.

Dollar rally
A bit more positive is the huge rally the dollar made since July. A couple of weeks ago one dollar was worth slightly less than 63 euro cent but on Friday it was worth around 70 cent – that’s a gain of more than 10% in just a couple of weeks time. I hope the dollar continues to rally but I’m not sure how the markets will respond to the bailout of US home mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. The US government will nationalize the two troubled lenders and invest $100 billion in each firm to keep them solvent. This is the largest bailout in US history and it might cause selling pressure on the markets.

Movies
A quick overview of some of the movies I’ve seen in the past couple of weeks. Last week I finally saw the new Batman movie. The Dark Knight is a very good superhero movie but it’s overrated IMO. I don’t really understand why this movie ranks third in the IMDB Top 250, I rate The Dark Knight 8.5/10.

Last month Carmen and I watched Horton Hears a Who, I give this animation movie a 7/10. I also saw a Flemish thriller called De Indringer this week, this movie is about a father who’s looking for his missing daughter. For a Flemish movie it was alright, I give it a 7/10. Action movie Taken has a (slightly) similar subject, it’s about a former secret service agent who goes after the bad guys who abducted his daughter. Taken is a pretty sweet action movie, I give it a 8/10.

A week or two ago I also saw the Dune mini-series, combined the Dune mini-series have a runtime of almost 9 hours. Not everyone will like the Dune mini-series but if you’re a fan of scifi it’s definitely worth it. Dune is the second film adaption of Frank Herbert’s Dune novel while Children of Dune is based on the Dune Messiah and Children of Dune novels. Here’s a Wikipedia snip that briefly explains what Dune is all about:

Dune is set in the far future amidst a sprawling feudal interstellar empire where planetary fiefdoms are controlled by noble Houses that owe allegiance to the Imperial House Corrino. The novel tells the story of young Paul Atreides (heir apparent to Duke Leto Atreides and scion of House Atreides) as he and his family accept control of the desert planet Arrakis, the only source of the spice melange, the most important and valuable substance in the universe. The story explores the complex and multilayered interactions of politics, religion, ecology, technology, and human emotion, as forces of the Empire confront each other for control of Arrakis and its spice.

There are also a couple of video games based on the Dune saga but except maybe a demo of Dune 2000 I never played any of them. The story of Dune is pretty interesting and I’ve started reading the original Dune novel, some people regard the Dune series as the best scifi ever written.

Körperwelten
Next week I’m going to Körperwelten (English: Body Worlds), a German exhibition of real preserved human bodies and organs. This should be a great opportunity to learn more about the human body.

Photography
I still need to post a couple of pics of my new 55-250mm Canon lens but the weather has been quite bad lately so I haven’t really had the opportunity to take some nice shots.

It’s the start of the month again and one of the things I do on the first day of each month is add up all the (preliminary) earnings figures of all my income streams to get a rough view of how much money I made last month.

I started doing this about a year ago but the last couple of months haven’t been that great. I just calculated the numbers of August and like I feared it was one of the worst months I’ve had in a long time. Compared to the same period a year ago income is down by about 40 percent .

Traffic hasn’t dropped that much and the main reason seems to be that advertisers are spending less money. There are probably several reasons for this but I believe the economic slowdown in the US and Europe is likely one of the main factors.

It took ages but my Canon EF-S 55-250mm IS lens finally arrived today. This complements the 18-55mm IS lens I bought together with my Canon EOS 450D a couple of months ago.

 I’ll post a couple of sample pics this weekend.