Archive for August, 2009


First Woodworking Project

Filed Under: General, House and Home by samuelk — Leave a comment
Saturday August 22, 2009

One of the things that Cary didn’t like about our kitchen was the spice cabinet. We kept our spices in a narrow cabinet above the stove. The cabinet was rather deep, and had only three shelves. The problem with keeping small spice jars here was that the smaller jars were stacked on top of each other, multiple rows deep. So finding the right spice required pulling other spices out of the cabinet.

So as my first woodworking project, I thought I’d make a spice rack for Cary. Here are the plans I drew up in Google Sketchup after talking with Cary about what she wanted in a spice rack:

spice_rack_02

This is a pretty simple design consisting of two vertical pieces of 28.75″ x 3.5″ x 1/2″ wood sides and six shelves. The bottom two shelves are 3.5″ x 1/4″ x 12″, and the rest of the shelves area more shallow 2.5″ x 1/4″ x 12″. I also used 3/16″ diameter dowel rods as a sort of “lip” at the front of the shelves, just to keep stuff from sliding off. I’m not sure what kind of wood the dowel rods are made of, but the rest of the wood is poplar.

I decided to round off the top edges of the side pieces just to make the top of the rack a bit more interesting. Here’s a close-up of the half-way decent curve I made with a jigsaw and some preliminary sanding:

IMG_7281

I planned to take more in-progress pictures, but I don’t think they would have been very interesting. Here’s the final result:

IMG_7283

I’ll probably get around to painting it eventually, but I don’t think it looks too bad as it is.

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New Camera . . . Eventually

Filed Under: General, House and Home, Photography by samuelk — Leave a comment
Thursday August 13, 2009

I’ve been using a Canon Digital Rebel EOS 300D since around 2004, and I’ve taken a few thousand pictures with it over the years.

I decided that it was time to get a new camera, but which one? That’s not the kind of purchase I take lightly. It took several months of research before finally settling on the model I wanted.

I had thought about upgrading from the EOS 300D to the newer Digital Rebel T1i (the 500D), but then I found out about the Pentax K-7 which was just released in July. Normally, this camera would be outside my price range, but because the company I work for has a business relationship with Pentax, I can get employee pricing for some of their cameras. That put the K-7 within my budget and allowed me to get a few accessories.

Saving several hundred dollars is nice.

Unfortunately, the K-7 is in high demand right now, so it’s technically back ordered. I have no idea when I’ll actually get the camera. I received one of the lenses and a battery grip a few days ago, but they’re not really useful without a camera body.

With the special pricing, I managed to get the following equipment for less than the retail price of the K-7:

  1. Pentax K-7 Camera (body only)
  2. Pentax DA 55-300mm Lens
  3. Pentax DA 18-55mm Weather Resistant Lens
  4. Extra D-LI90 Lithium Ion Battery
  5. Pentax D-BG4 Battery Grip

I thought long and hard about which accessories to get with the camera, and I think I’ll make good use of all of the ones I got.

I really like the idea of a battery grip. The Pentax battery grip adds some extra bulk to the camera, but it enables the camera to run on AA batteries or an extra lithium-ion battery (in addition to the battery in the camera itself). The grip also has a duplicate shutter button so that you can easily snap pictures with the camera turned sideways. It’s a handy feature to have.

The 18-55 lens is often called the “kit lens”: it’s the standard lens that is usually included with a consumer-level DSLR camera. It’s versatile, but doesn’t provide any real telephoto capability.

Having the flexibility of multiple lenses will be great. An 18-55mm lens (which is the standard lens included with most consumer-level DSLR cameras) works great in most situations, but not for taking pictures of wildlife. The 55-300mm lens will give me the zoom I need. Zoom lenses tend to make hand-held shots more difficult, but the K-7′s built-in image stabilization should help.

I’m excited to try the K-7. The reviews have been really good so far.

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