Writings & Photography of Derek Dysart, some dude you’ve never heard of.

Allen Murabayashi, CEO of PhotoShelter, recently did an interview of me for their site regarding my recent sale.  Looks like the piece is live now.

How Derek Dysart Sold an Image for $5000 Through PhotoShelter

Yeah, I was on vacation last week. Just a quick shout out to anyone who has sent me a message (email, Facebook, etc,) this week.  I do plan on getting back to you, I’m just pretty slammed with stuff at home and work right now. I’m also going to have to edit images one of these days, since I am running out of space on my cards. I hope to be back up to speed by the end of the week.

Adorama is about to kick off its third iteration of 100 in 100 - 100 photo tips in 100 days.  I’ve followed the previous two fairly closely. Not hanging on every day, but catching up every week or so. Lot of good information for sure, both for the casual point-and-shoot user as well as the SLR crowd. 100 in 100, Part III

They are also covering Photokina where it is rumored Canon might try to come back on Nikon. Time will tell I guess.  I’m in the market for a telephoto and waiting to see if Canon releases any new lenses.

Dusted off the 50mm prime to play with DOF. I had the ladder out originally to change some light bulbs. This shot was at f/2.8 which was enough so you can read the whole label. At f/1.2 you literally could only read half of the label.

Our current gas grill is on its last legs. I’ve rebuilt the inside of it a couple times, but now some of the places where I’d attached new "grill guts" are so rusted, it’s time to put it out to pasture. It has lived a good live and provided my family with grilled meat goodness for many years.  Besides, there is a natural gas hookup right on our patio, so we decided in was time to invest in a new grill and ditch the LP tanks.

I didn’t do a ton of research, I knew I’d wanted a Weber gas grill for a while now. Everyone I know that has had one doesn’t even think about how long it has lasted, they just keep on going. We ended up deciding to get the Summit S-650.  It wasn’t exactly cheap, but it offered a larger cooking surface.  Our last grill was pretty small, which made made grilling for more than say 4-5 hard. It also has a rotisserie built in which we could see using.

No one in town stocked the natural gas version of the grill - one appliance store had it in a warehouse down in Chicago, but we still were stuck ordering it, so I looked online.  I found it through a company in Pennsylvania call RAC Enterprise.  They got high marks on most of the shopping review sites I checked and they had it in stock with free shipping for several hundred bucks less than anywhere else. Normally I would pay a bit more to shop locally, but in this case, the appliance store was a chain not headquartered here.

Here is where I get to my point.  The grill in its package weighs a little short of 300lbs. You don’t really ship that via the postal service or UPS.  RAC shipped it via FexEx’s LTL service (LTL stands for less than truckload).  FedEx is really smart, since the fastest route from Pennsylvania to Milwaukee is evidentially through California:

I wouldn’t have thought that, but then again, I don’t work in logistics for a living. The grill was supposed to be delivered last Monday (8/18) but now it is anyone’s guess. RAC has been helpful, but they can only do so much. My ticket to seared meat perfection is in the hands of some truck driver out there on the interstates. If you’re out and about somewhere between Wisconsin and California and see a FedEx tractor trailer, let them pass.  They are running late enough as it is and daddy’s got steaks to cook.

UPDATE:  I contacted RAC to see if they had a number for FedEx LTL since there wasn’t one listed on the tracking page. I also pointed out FedEx’s choice of route, how they must know a shortcut or something. I didn’t get a response back from the generics "sales" or "info" address like usual, the president of the company, Rocco Ciavarella Jr, e-mailed me personally and said they are in contact with their account manager at FedEx to find out where exactly my grill is and why it got routed at the main Pennsylvania terminal to California. He also appreciated my humor in the situation.

Either way, I know RAC had nothing to do with it, they put the box on a truck and it’s up to FedEx to deliver it.  That said, RAC Enterprise is a class act.  So many other online stores just say, "contact the shipper" when they might as well say, "it’s not our fault" or worse "we don’t care". Not these guys.

The kids really wanted to plant pumpkins in the garden, so we did.  They promptly took over the entire garden area, but we have two that are pretty decent size.

Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I dropped my camera on the driveway this weekend. We took the kids to Zoo al a Carte at the Milwaukee County Zoo and I’d stashed in in the bottom of the stroller.  In retrieving it from the back of the truck, the camera rolled out and hit the ground.  So far, everything seems ok.  The body functions and the lens seems to focus.  I still have a ton of images to process off the memory card, but looking at the LCD and zooming in focus seems to still be sharp.

The other good news is I finished the first roll of film in the K1000.  I just need to get it processed and scanned.

Someone woke up on the wrong side of the crib after his nap. One of many meltdowns this evening.

If you’ve watched any of the Olympics, you’ve no doubt seen the masses of photographers covering the event. (All those lust-worthy white lenses.) Vincent Laforet is covering the games for Newsweek, and while I’ve known he’s been blogging about it, I really haven’t been keeping up with my feed reader lately (work has me pretty busy right now).

If you want a sense of what it’s like to cover the largest sporting event, go read his post that he filed on covering Phelps historic 8th medal win and the men’s fencing final. Looking at the photos he has up, he was in that scrum of photographers that Phelps climbed through to hug his mom and sister.

We took the kids on the zoo safari train at the Milwaukee County Zoo. 

This 1sec exposure with the on camera flash firing.  The only change I’d make would be to make the flash sync on the second curtain so the “ghost” trail isn’t as bad, but over all I’m happy with this shot.