Carablogi.com

The Last Prom – Mark and Phoebe 2012

msyn — Sun, 20 May 2012 09:20:54 +0000

Gina and I can’t help but feel nostalgic and sad that this will be the last of our kids proms that we get to photograph and enjoy watching. The preparation and excitement will be missed. This years prom is at the Fairmount in San Jose. Only a week of school left and goodbye Leland High School.

For more Pics visit my Flickr Page

Pronghorn 2012 -The Lake of Monsters.

msyn — Fri, 18 May 2012 00:11:24 +0000

The biomass in Pronghorn Lake must be incredible! Between the 6 of us fishing the lake for two days, two fish were caught over 20 lbs and at least a dozen over 5 lbs. Overall we all caught in total hundreds of fish. That makes this lake one of the most prolific TROPHY trout lakes I have ever fished. Unfortunately, luck would have it that I personally did not land anything over 5 lbs but they were definitely in the lake and catchable! The weather was extremely cold and the wind didn’t help much either. Also there was a very bright moon in the sky every night but despite all the downfalls, I personally caught at least a dozen fish every day. I love the fact that most of the fish were caught on flies smaller than Size 16–primarily midge pupa. Small olive and black Copper Johns did the trick also. On another note, not as much streamer action as last year in October. Hot sticks on the trip were Wayne, Roland, Wes , Danny and Bryan–basically everyone but me! I will return to this lake in October and I can wait to see how it fishes then. I will be prepared.

On another note, this lake is about two hours from Eugene which is where Mark will be attending College at the University of Oregon. Ill be fishing this beautiful lake near Bonanza Oregon more often in the next 4 years.

Say Goodbye…

msyn — Thu, 03 May 2012 00:14:37 +0000

Last years half a dozen flies that Bob V. took to Christmas Island are somewhere in the South Pacific hanging off a Giant Trevaley mouth. This years dozen recruits look nervous and they should be. The blue and white rattled “Synheads” will be committing suicide in mid May in the waters of Kiribati.

New Boat!

msyn — Tue, 01 May 2012 06:23:31 +0000

The new boat is a 2007 Crestliner 1650 Sports Angler. It sports a 90 HP Honda with 143 hours on it and best of all it fits perfectly in the garage. I have some ideas about how to modify it for flyfishing. The previous owner was a troller. The boat has three batteries with a built in charger, a nice stereo, 5 nice seats, 10 in rail Scotty rod holder sockets (nice for anchoring cameras) and a nice bimini. And more. Best of all, there is room for 9 foot fly rods between the windshields and stern.

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The UFO over San Luis Reservoir 4-16-2012

msyn — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 06:12:18 +0000

I was surprised to see how many hits my silly fishing blog video –UFO Spotted over San Luis Reservoir–received in 5 days. A whopping 1500 hits. Someone actually downloaded it , re edited the fishing out of it and and reposted just the UFO part! When I pulled into the boat launch and spotted the object in the sky, it seemed pretty explainable and I took the footage thinking it would spice up a boring fishing video pretty much expecting it to be a weather balloon or a kite or something explainable. I didn’t get to look closely at it until the end of the day when I edited the footage. Today, I received a call from someone asking about the video at my dental office. From what I’ve seen, this video turns out to be the best picture of the object. It appears to be a giant pair of White Trouser with a black belt flying in the sky. At least that is what it looks like.

UFO over San Luis Reservoir — Raw Footage from Meng Syn DDS on Vimeo.

Out of curiosity , I googled UFOs, Los Banos, and San Luis Reservoir and discovered that I was not the only person who reported it. In fact, yesterday (the 24th) there were more spottings according to my dental assistant who lives in Los Banos and still no formal explanation posted by the media or government. The last thing on my mind last week was looking for a distraction and I really was into the fishing much more than the UFO. I decided to post the original footage with some to see if anyone recognizes the object. Here is a list of some other perspectives of “the object”.

UFO Stalker

The Merced Sun-Star Newspaper

The Los Banos Enterprise

National UFO Reporting Center

UFO Sightings Report

Youtube video of UFO over Gilroy Same Day

Skywatchers Network

UPDATE:

A pretty good synopsis of the days sightings

UFO Sightings Report blog

Mercury Playback in CS5.5 on Hackintosh with GTX 470

msyn — Wed, 25 Apr 2012 05:25:35 +0000

One of the reasons I built the Hackintosh was the ability to Dual Boot between WIN7 Premier Pro 64 bit with CUDA support and Final Cut Pro on OSX with a fast processor. There is no doubt that the the mercury engine is working on the Windows 7 partition so I decided to try the same render on the OSX side. Both Premier Pros seem to render equally fast on my test footage suggesting that the mercury engine is working in OSX.

Recently I spoke with an Adobe Premier Developer friend (the luxury of living in San Jose) about how disappointed I was with the multi camera features in the newly updated Final Cut X 10.0.3. I use to use Premier pro exclusively until the advent of ProRes for DSLRHD footage. We discussed how I liked the scrub-able thumbnails format in FCX and also how I prefer the ease of the color correction and stabilization features is OSX (as used in my recent UFO footage). He told me that all these issues are addressed in the new and improved CS6 soon to be released. CS6 will be optimized to use OpenCL-based AMD Radeon HD 6750M and HD 6770M graphics cards in Apple computers (and Hackintoshs) running OS X 10.7. Interesting to me is that the new CS6 Premier is taking from Final cut the things I use most like scrub able thumbnails, built in background rendering stabilization, and adjustment layers that empower you to adjust large ranges of clips all at once in a simple fashion. Plus there are the thing unique to premier that are definitely better than FCX like its integration with After Effect and workspace customization. It appears that this editor will soon be editing on Premier again. Especially editing many different formats at once –GOPro , Lumix GH2, Nikon D7000, Xacti and Iphone footage all on the same time line without pre processing to ProRes. Google whats new in Premier CS6 and be amazed. Its a complete rewrite with 50 new improvements. Time to come home to Adobe.

Phoebe and Mark – Junior Prom 2012

msyn — Sun, 22 Apr 2012 02:39:13 +0000

I just love shooting proms. I think this one will be my 7th event if you include Homecmoming dances. Shot with a Nikon D700 and a 24-70mm FX lens. These are my Favorites.

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UFO Sighting over San Luis Reservoir

msyn — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 06:45:55 +0000

I knew in my gut today would be different at the lake. The Solonar tables showed a major period from 6 to noon, the cows were feeding in the grass on the way up. It was going to be epic. the first weird thing I noticed as I pulled over the rise and caught my first glimpse of the lake around 6:45 was the lack of crowds, cars and wind even thought the Wind line indicated a 10mph NW wind, the lake was glass. Then I saw it–a huge reflective light in the sky across the lake above Portuguese Cove. I saw people pulled over looking at it but I didn’t really give it much thought till I pulled into the boat ramp at Basalt. I had my Lumix GH2 with a 14-140 lens so I decided to take some video of the thing in the sky. The enlarged frame grab looks like a giant set of white trousers. It was weird that the thing did not move with the breeze. I could see the wind generators spinning on the north side of the lake. The object did move but not with the wind. I watched it while I fished until about 8:00 and then I couldn’t see it anymore. It left. ET phoned home. Apparently I was not the only one who saw it.

The fishing was great today, I fished 6 hours and caught 10 fish casting flies and couple more trolling. The Bay of Pigs is starting to shape up. Early in the morning, a bunch of stripers chased shad into a the north cove of the Bay and the bait fishermen got limits early and left. I fished the shallow flats around the brush piles and got some nice fish. Also fished the coves north of the launch and found fish casting right to shore in 5-10 feet of water. The water temps is now at 62 degrees and the fish are pairing up. I saw numerous follows and small schools of stripers swimming in the shallows. Not all were agressive though. Fast strips with pauses on a rattled white and chartreuse marabou streamer tied on a jig hook.

UFO over San Luis Reservoir 4-16-2012 from Meng Syn DDS on Vimeo.

Mia Syn reporting for CALTV

msyn — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 20:29:54 +0000

Behind the scenes, two individuals who proclaimed that they work for Abecrombie and Fitch asked Mia after the filming of that piece if she would come to SF and be evaluated for an in store modeling position. Sounded kind of fishy to me so I researched it.

Seems this may be a way that they are hiring store people to work the floor. Jobs pay only 10 bucks an hour, but the possibility of working your way up and doing some serious modeling is there. My gut feeling is that she has more going for her with her aspirations for med school or post graduate education in physiology/nutrition or broadcast journalism. Remember when Abercrombie and Fitch use to be a Fly Shop? I almost took a job there in 1978 selling fishing gear for the summer.

University of Oregon – First impressions

msyn — Wed, 11 Apr 2012 04:16:23 +0000

There are no direct flights to Eugene Oregon from SF or SJ. Today, it took us 10 hours to fly from SF to Portland and then to Eugene. We probably could have driven it faster. Mainly because of the rainy weather, but its been a long time since I had such an uncomfortable trip on a plane. The first leg of the flight was in a 2 by 2 twin prop. A 300 lb woman took the window seat and compressed me into 1/3 of my seat for two hours. Also to add insult, she was in the wrong seat. I think there should be a law that if a person can not sit in the seat with the middle divider down, they should pay for two seats.–what a mess.

Listen up UC. If you don’t take Mark who is a “good” student, he will graduate from UO with a business degree and make it his mission to work for Nike in California and only hire DUCKS. And, though it will cost me an extra 80K in tuition, I will always resent my alma mater for not giving my son a shot at a UC Education that I have paid mounds of taxes for him to get.

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University of Oregon is a fantastic campus. Especially the business school. Walking around the campus felt like walking around Stanford or USC. Perhaps, it may be a perfect fit for Mark. If California UC’s don’t want him, than his destiny is at Oregon. Did I mention that there is a Cabellas less than 10 minutes from the school and the Caddis Fly Shop in Eugene is a bike ride away from the dorm? Sure would be nice if Marks ACL recovery was closer to home since it will take a year before he is normal again.

Interesting Facts about University of Oregon

Scenes from Animal House were filmed there.
Oregon student Phil Knight and former UO track coach Bill Bowerman founded the company Blue Ribbon Sports which later became Nike.
Walt Disney granted UofO permision to use Donald Duck as it sports mascot in 1947 when they started looking similar.
University of Oregon is a large arboretum with more than 500 trees on its 280 acres.
The university was founded in 1876
In 1995 UO started a surf club with its home waters from Coos Bay to Pacific City, aprox an hour drive.
UO has a Bass fishing Team
UO has a nationally ranked Parliamentary Debate Team
UO has 12 NCAA championship in Track and Field
UO won the Rose Bowl in 2011
Ann Curie graduated from UO School of Journalism and Communication
UO was ranked #101 for national universities by US News in 2012
UO Tuition for out of state students is 3X higher than in state tuition and the school takes less than 10% from the state.

I think Oregon’s star is rising. They’re doing the four things that improve a university– buying top professors, buying top students, building excellent facilities, and producing a winning football (or basketball) team. It’s the same game plan Stanford used in 1891, Duke in the 50′s, and USC in the 90′s.