RainPacket's photostream  

Hi! I'm Rachel, also known as 'Sparks' to many of my friends. (A reference to the movie Contact; at the time, I was deeply into astronomy, and so the young-Ellie reminded friends of me. They started calling me 'Sparks,' as she was in the movie... and somehow it stuck, even years later.)

However, 'Sparks' was taken on Flickr, so here I get to be RainPacket. Packet because I'm a software engineer dealing in networking, and Rain because... well, I'm from Seattle, you figure it out. ;)

I grew up here in rainy grey Seattle, home of coffee... which I do not like. I am, however, an absolute fiend for tea; I have an entire cabinet full of various loose-leaf teas, and even some emergency-in-a-hurry teabags of last resort. I take my tea very seriously; I suppose that's some of my English heritage showing through. Though I also lived in Japan for a little while as a kid, which left me with a distinct Kansai accent when I speak the language, and a love for green tea.

I studied archaeology, with a minor in astronomy, until I realized that my future would be filled with interesting studies while I starved in an unheated one-room studio apartment, freezing as I tried to write out research grant applications.

So, despite my educational focus, by profession I am a software engineer; I am part of a small company called Cerulean Studios, who write a program called Trillian. I used to work on our Windows version of the messenger, but more recently I've become the developer of our iPhone and Mac OS X versions of the client. Beyond that, I also develop other software for iPhone and Mac OS X to do... well, whatever grabs me in my free time. My most notable spare-time app is a MU* client called Atlantis.

Outside of the tech world I am a would-be SF/fantasy writer, and an avid (albeit still-learning) equestrian; I ride English-style, originally hunter/jumper but I have since moved on to dressage. Bear with the occasional bursts of Many Horse-Related Pictures which are likely to come across my stream. Usually I limit this to the spring and summer, when turnouts look prettier and less muddy.

I also am a member of Vanguard, a cool collective of SF/fantasy authors and fans who have been meeting around the Seattle area once a month for more than two decades, as new members join and old ones sometimes move away.

As should be obvious by my presence on Flickr, I am also a hobbyist photographer. I started as a kid with an old Minolta 35mm my grandmother gave me, and filled several photo albums until I ran out of allowance for film. I do still have the Minolta somewhere, back at my parents' house. Several years ago I moved on to digital, though for the longest time I found myself seriously limited by the Olympus Stylus Digital 300 I was using. Don't get me wrong, as point-and-shoot cameras went, it was not bad! Not up to the standards of a PowerShot, but I have some pictures I took with it I'm relatively proud of.

But the Olympus' lack of control over... well, ANY aspects of the exposure really got to me. I couldn't even do manual focus, which drove me absolutely insane. Worse, the shutter delay was a killer for any action shots. Trying to take show-jumping pictures at the Masters in Calgary some years back was an exercise in frustration; out of well over 600 pictures for a given day, maybe 20 were worth keeping. Not because of composition, but because the horse had already moved on by the time the camera got around to actually firing!

The Olympus was eventually replaced a few years ago by a Canon EOS Digital Rebel XTi, and my old iPhoto workflow with Aperture. The difference was indescribable! I could finally start trying to take the shots I'd wanted to... though found there was always a bunch more to learn about exposure and cleanup. I'm not delusional enough to think the equipment makes me magically able to take better shots, but I /am/ able to at least attempt things I couldn't before. Nighttime shots, long exposures, action shots such as birds in flight, and so on. Things I just didn't have enough control over the Olympus to manage.

I later moved on to a Canon EOS 40D, and took up film photography again as well. The old Minolta has been replaced by a Canon film body (might as well use the same lenses!) and a Pentax K1000 I found at the Fremont Sunday Market and have been slowly picking up pieces for and getting polished up into perfection once more.

At present I shoot with a Canon EOS 5D Mark II, with the 40D as a backup body. I also shoot film (almost always black and white), though less often because it's getting harder and harder to reliably find the films I like. I'm hardly an expert/professional photographer, but I like to think that I've improved a lot in the past few years.

Hopefully you enjoy the photos!