As many of you amy already know, Cindy and I have been talking about starting our own photography business. Well, we are getting closer and closer to having it all up and running. As we mentioned before, we are donating our services and a print to a local Charity Art Auction. We have also printed up some nice looking business cards and we now have a pretty good looking website coming along. Take a look: www.LearnStudios.com. Please visit, take and look, and let us know what you think…

-Matt

Not long ago, Rosie asked us if we would be interested in donating to a charity Art Auction that she is involved in. We agreed to donate a framed print of one of our images and a studio photo session. Right now we are in the process of figuring out what print we are going to donate, please go here and see what we are thinking about and vote for what you would be most interested in bidding on for a Charity Art Auction.

Other than that, Cindy and I have been very busy recently. This includes selling our townhouse and figuring out where we are going to live when we have to leave the house… Look for more details in the future when we know more…

-Matt

So the question on the table is what do you get when you mix Soda with Mentos (the fun candy). The answer is in the image on the left, a large erruption, atleast when you have the soda in the bottle still, because that helps to contain the reaction. Basically the Aribic Gum in the Mentos (which is also in other candies like Twizzlers) causes all the cabon dioxide in the soda to come out, very quickly. The result is a lot of gas trying to escape, and when it is in a bottle, there is no palce to go thus the entergetic reaction.

After seeing some video of this on the internet, I decided that I wanted t osee for myself and we took an opertunity at work to have a little fun. What gets Chemical Engineers more excited than watching a reaction like this? Talking about some of the other fun activities they have done to get a “bang”.

Take a look at the full sized image here

-Matt

PS - Sorry about not posting recently, this past month has just been busy. I have all sorts of pictures, stories and then some which I hope to add soon…

As you might be able to guess, Cindy and I are both big into photography! We have been shooting with our Nikon D100 for a while now, I have had it for about 2 years. Nikon has released a few new camera models since then, the D70, D50, and D2x but the first two were a little lower than what I wanted and the last one was just too expensive. Finally in the begining of November, Nikon announced the release of a new camera, the D200. This is what I had been waiting for…

Cindy was sweet and went ahead and pre-ordered one for me, which is good since new ones are still hard to come by. So a few days after the official release date od December 15th, I finally got mine! Ohh, this is a great camera. It is a little bigger and heavier than the D100, but that weight helps make it feel a little more solid.

I could go on for pages and pages talking about the differences and the great new features of the D200, but it has been done soo many other places on the internet that I am not going to bother. Needless to say, more pictures taken from here on out will be with the D200. We are still kepeing the D100, because as we grow our photography business, it is always good to have a backup, and also it is nice to be able to have us both taking pictures at the same time. We are really starting to get a good camera outfit, nad hopefully it will help us to persue our hobby even more!

-Matt

Shutterfly: This is the service that I used before. The book came out fairly nicely, some of the images did not turn out as well as I expected. In the photo book layouts, they have lots of options, but they do not offer a full page image (so I can design a full page in photoshop and then upload that). Overall fairly happy with this service…

York Photo: I have not tried this provider, but they seem to get lots of good reviews for print quality. They also do not have a full page layout option, options are quite limited for page layouts. They do have poster prints, 20×30 for $13.99.

Photoworks: I have not tried printing from this service. They do have a lot of layouts in the photo book, including a full page image. They do not have a lot of options for cover style and such, but most places do not either. Price is in-line with other places.

Snapfish: This is odd, but this seems to be the exact same store as york photo, the pages all have the same sample images and such. I am guessing that either this site or the other one got bought out by the other one and they are running the exact same service off of both sites.

Imagestation: This is a service prvided by Sony… the interface for creating a photo book is slow, but it is the most feature rich that I have seen. I am leaning towards using this service for my next book project…

I found a good site that does a lot of reviews of these type services, part of TopTenReviews.com. Their reviews can be found here.

-Matt