Studio711.com – Ben Martens

Camera Phone vs dSLR

I bought my first film SLR a few years before digital cameras were a big thing. It didn’t take long for that to feel obsolete and I sold it. My digital SLR has gotten a LOT more use (over 30K photos taken so far), but I’m at the point where I’m finding fewer and fewer uses for it. The camera on my Galaxy S7 is incredible.

Camera phones have slowly been replacing our big camera for a long time, largely because of the huge convenience factor. Some of the previous phones have had reasonable cameras, but this S7 camera is quite a big step up. Many camera phones do well in bright light, but this one even does a great job in low light situations. A prime example is this shot that I took long after sunset when we were camping.


The camera app on the Galaxy S7 even has full manual controls. I can control ISO, shutter speed, aperture, white balance and more while storing the image in a full RAW format. That opens up a huge range of shooting options.

The dSLR is still my choice for action shots, zoom shots or when I really want to make sure I nail the picture, but when I forget the big camera, I don’t feel that sense of dread that I used to. How much longer before it starts collecting dust on the shelf?

benmartens July 12, 2017 Gadgets

Camp 4 Star Visit

Our area churches run a week long summer camp called Camp 4 Star. It has been around for a very long time. I met one alumni who was there in the 60s! Tyla and her siblings were campers in the 90s. It’s going on this week and Tim and Chelsea are heavily involved in keeping the whole thing going. They’ve been inviting us to come visit for years and this year we finally made it happen.

The camp operates out of rented space at Millersylvania State Park in their Environmental Learning Center. Driving up, I was struck by how much the whole setup reminded me of every summer camp you’ve seen in the movies. It’s awesome! They have 4 areas that each have 4 cabins and then a big main building with a full kitchen and some other nearby cabins. The camp holds 128 campers (plus staff) when it’s full, and it is full pretty much every year. If you want your kid to attend, register early!

Elijah had a blast watching all the big kids running around and playing with some other mini-campers (children of staff.) He got to ride around with Tim on the utility vehicle, swim in the lake and ride around in the canoe with Tyla and me. I think he’s counting the days until he turns 10 and can head down there for a full week of camping!

Thanks to Tim, Chelsea and the other counselors for letting us visit!

benmartens July 11, 2017 Travel

Glamping

While we were camping a couple weekends ago, we came up with a business idea. I don’t know what it’s called yet, but it’s our take on the ultimate “glamping” campground. Here are some of the features that we’d offer (for a small fee of course.)

  • When you arrive at the campground, we’ll set up your tent or camper while you relax in the bar.
  • There are two sides to the camp ground: one for people who want to party around the camp fire until the wee hours of the morning and one for people who want to get up early. There are different quiet hours rules on each side.
  • Don’t wake up early on your vacation. We’ll drop off a dutch oven on hot coals with an egg/sausage/bacon/potato scramble in it. It will be hot and ready when you are.
  • Did you buy a big fancy truck but never learn how to back your boat down the ramp to the water? Skip the pressure of everyone watching you and toss us the keys. We’ll do it for you.
  • Swing by the on-site butcher and pick our some steaks for dinner. We’ll even cook them and deliver them if you want us to.
  • You’ve watched a lot of Bear Grylls and Survivorman in your life, but you still don’t know how to start a fire. No worries! We’ll swing by and get one going for you.
  • You’re probably tired from all this pampering so let us take down your camp for you.

This is so ridiculous, I feel like this probably exists already in some place like San Francisco or Portland.

benmartens July 10, 2017 Commentary

Nancy’s Funeral

As many of you know from Facebook, Tyla’s mom passed away early Sunday morning and her funeral is today, but I know that many of you cannot attend so here is the obituary that will be in the bulletin.

Nancy Marie Brandt

May 25, 1956– July 2, 2017

In Memoriam

Born on May 25, 1956 in Lake City, Minnesota, Nancy Brandt was the youngest of two children of Jess and Marlys Dose. She was received into the Lord’s family through the washing of holy baptism at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lake City, Minnesota. Later, she confirmed her faith in the same church. She attended St. John’s Lutheran School and went on to Lincoln High school, graduating in 1974 to attend Dr. Martin Luther College. Nancy married Don Brandt on October 28, 1978 at St. John’s Lutheran Church in Lake City, Minnesota.

Nancy worked with special needs children at Lincoln Elementary as a teachers’ aide until she moved to Kirkland, Washington in 1991. She was a stay at home Mom until returning to work in 1997. Nancy worked as a preschool teacher at Calvary Lutheran Preschool and Kindergarten in Bellevue, Washington from 1997 to 2003. From 2003 to 2009 she cooked and served lunches in the public school system. In 2010, Nancy began working for Evergreen Speech and Hearing Clinic transporting records as a courier and organizing the archival of patient charts. In 2014, she was diagnosed with stage 4 metastatic breast cancer. Nancy stopped working in 2017 when her declining health prevented her from continuing.

Nancy Brandt is survived by her husband, Don, and their three children, Logan Brandt of Redmond, Washington; Tyla (Ben) Martens of Woodinville, Washington; and Megan Brandt of Kirkland, Washington; as well as her one grandchild, Elijah Martens. She is also mourned by her sister, Gloria Burmester. She was preceded in death by her father and father-in-law.

In lieu of flowers, the family requests that memorials be directed to Calvary Lutheran Church toward the roof replacement project. The church address is 16231 NE 6th St, Bellevue, WA, 98008. Alternatively, gifts can be directed to Evergreen Hospice Care. evergreenhealthfoundation.com/support-hospice

benmartens July 7, 2017 Family

Average Beer Ratings

I was talking to Luke recently and was surprised to find out that in his over 500 beers, he has never rated one 5 stars. That got me thinking about how we all use the rating scale. Here are some stats…

Row Labels Average Standard Deviation Max Min
Ben 2.91 1.03 5 0
Dad 3.54 0.70 5 0
Logan 3.22 0.80 5 1
Luke 3.18 0.78 4.5 0
Grand Total 3.24 0.87 5 0

The standard deviation column gives a bit of a feel for how much each user uses the full spread of ratings available to them, but it’s still a bit hard to visualize. So I took all of the ratings and rounded them down so that there were only 6 buckets (0-5). Then I calculated what percentage of each user’s ratings were in each bucket. So effectively, the histogram below is normalized across all users so we can compare apples to apples (e.g. I rate 39% of my beers a 3 and Luke rates 61% of his beers a 3.)

 

Obviously everybody has their own system for how they use the available ratings, but it does look like they are all close to a normal distribution centered around 3 which makes sense. I think I’ve written this before, but here’s how I personally use the ratings:

  1. 0 – Yuck. I’d pour it out if you handed it to me. (e.g. Bud Light Lime)
  2. 1 – I’d politely decline or hand it back if you offered me this.
  3. 2 – Sure, I’ll drink this but I wouldn’t pay for it.
  4. 3 – An average beer. I don’t have a problem paying for this but I don’t seek it out.
  5. 4 – This is a really good beer. If I see it in the grocery store, I’ll probably buy it.
  6. 5 – Epic beer. Buy it whenever you see it!

And since that’s how I do it, it’s obviously the right way to do it.

benmartens July 4, 2017 Geek

Heaven

Tyla’s mom, Nancy, has been battling cancer for three years and very early yesterday morning, we got the call that she had passed away. As adults, it’s a lot to deal with, but it has also been a big challenge to guide a four year old through it.

Who knows what really goes on in the mind of a four year old, but he seems to be taking this all in stride. For the past couple months, I’ve been preparing Elijah for the death of his grandma. He knew she was sick and we talked about how some day she wouldn’t be around anymore. That was hard for him to understand, but what he did understand that she was going to join Jesus in heaven. There have been a number of times when he has walked over to a crying family member, stood there quietly and said, “It’s ok. She’s with Jesus now.” Oh the faith of a child!

We are all comforted knowing that Nancy is in heaven right now. There are still a lot of tears as we come to grips with the fact that we’re not going to see her again here on earth, but the separation is temporary because we’ll be reunited in heaven. Nancy knew that she was a sinner and deserved only God’s wrath and punishment. But when Jesus died on that cross 2000 years ago, he paid for her sins and she believed that. The Bible says that anyone who believes and is baptized will be saved. It really is just that simple. Heaven is our free gift and requires zero effort on our part (thank goodness because I know I’d screw it up if any of it depended on me!) Reject that message and the result is much different.

If you’re in the area, you’re welcome to attend the funeral on Friday at 3pm at Calvary. Don’t expect to hear how Nancy was “a great person” or other common funeral quotes. Instead, you’ll hear something like what I wrote above: Nancy was a sinner like all of us, but when she died and stood before the judgement seat, God declared her not guilty, not because of anything she had done, but because Jesus had already paid the debt for her sins and she believed that.

benmartens July 3, 2017 Commentary, Family

Cape Disappointment State Park

Last weekend, we headed down to Cape Disappointment State Park in the very southwest corner of the state. Don, Nancy and Megan had a campsite for their trailer and Logan, Tyla, Elijah and I stayed a short walk away in a tent site.

This was only Elijah’s second camping trip in the tent and he did great! He went to bed around 9:30 every day (about 1.5 hours later than normal) and slept solidly all night until pretty far into the morning. It definitely gave me confidence to do some more trips with him.

The park itself was really nice. The beach was huge, sandy and perfectly positioned for beautiful sunsets. There are a lot of other parks nearby and we went across the bridge into Oregon to check out the 1906 shipwreck at Fort Stevens State Park.

The only major bummer of the trip was traffic. We left at 2pm on Friday for the 3.5 hour drive. It took us 5.5 hours (plus 30 minutes of stops) to get there. We only hit an extra 30 minutes of traffic on the way back but it all came in one big messy accident backup.

I was very impressed with the camera on our Galaxy S7’s. All of the pictures you see below were taken on our phones except for the shipwreck. It’s gotten to the point where I feel less and less of a need to lug the big dSLR around with us. It still has its uses, but I don’t feel nearly as bad as I used to if I forget to bring it along.

A huge thanks goes out to Don for doing all the heavy lifting when it came to meal times!

benmartens June 30, 2017 Family, Outdoors, Travel

Laser Cut Decorations

If you talk to Elijah, the first thing you’ll probably hear is that he is four now. For his birthday, Tyla came up with the idea of a Winnie the Pooh theme because that’s pretty much the only thing that Elijah watches or listens to these days. He had a Tigger shirt, a cake with all the characters on it and decorations around the house. Thanks to Tyla for putting that all together!

She also had the idea of having him hold a large 4 and posing for some pictures. Instead of buying one, I decided to cut it out on the laser. I did two of them with the top one also having his name cut out. I painted the top piece yellow, painted the bottom piece black, and then glued them together. The hardest part of the idea was getting a four year old to smile and look at the camera!

benmartens June 29, 2017 Family, Maker, Woodworking

Parental Albums

Are there albums or songs that remind you of your parents? When I think of my parents and music, there are pretty clear associations.

For Mom it was Chicago’s “Greatest Hits 1982-1989” album. I remember her putting that album on while she cleaned the house. (It’s not available on Spotify but somebody built a playlist to piece all the songs together.) I think she had this one on CD and we didn’t get into CDs until the mid 90s.

And Dad? I remember riding around in his Ford Probe listening to the “Happy Together” album by The Nylons. That one got a good workout. I know he loved the 8 track system in his Gran Torino Sport, but I was too young to remember the music that got played in there.

Random sidenote: The song “Happy Together” was used in Ernest Goes To Camp (easily the top movie of my childhood) and since Dad was always playing The Nylons, I assumed that they had written the song. Nope. It was from a band in the 60s called The Turtles. So now I get why they had to sing that specific song to the turtle to get it to unclamp from Ernest’s nose. Whew, took me a while (decades) to get that one. It’s the movie that keeps on giving.

benmartens June 23, 2017 Music

Marymoor Beer Festival

For the third year in a row, I headed over to the Marymoor beer festival. This year’s crew was the same as last year: Don, Logan, Tim, Luke and me. The big change this year was that Chelsea and Tyla were our designated drivers. THANK YOU to both of them for driving us and watching the kids while we sampled the delicious beverages.

We stepped up our game by making pretzel necklaces to help cleanse the palette a bit between beers. But otherwise we stuck with our standard plan: arrive around the time they open, sample some beers, eat some lunch and then finish up our sampling tokens.

There were 131 brewers at the event and they all had at least 2 (some had many more) types of beer to try. With only 8 drink tokens (and one set of organs to process it all), you can barely scratch the surface of the available options.

benmartens June 22, 2017 Commentary