Author Archives: Donncha

I walked from Bennigans on Michigan Avenue up to the John Hancock Building. Unfortunately, that was way too far as I meant to go over to Navy pier and meet Martina. I backtracked along the lakeshore and it was a nice evening..

This is the old Carbide & Carbon Building, dating back to 1928. The tower on this building has real gold leaf on it!

This is the view looking south along North Michigan Avenue.

This is taken from the side of the Wrigley Building. It’s almost 90 degrees to the prvious photo. This photo was hard to work on. Auto-levels wanted to add a green hue to the sky. so I manually adjusted it somewhat.

When I finally found my way to Navy Pier I wandered up the pier hoping to get a shot of the City Skyline. Alas, boats were moored, but I got a shot of this sailing ship against the bright lights of the city.

The Sony Talk forum has a thread on taking photographs of fireworks. With the 4th July coming up I’m sure there’s plenty of people in the US interested in this. I’ll certainly have my camera on the Lake Front to capture the spectacle in Chicago!
Basic idea: Get a tripod, F5.0 – F8.0, couple of shutter speeds from 2 seconds up to 10.

Mark lists several online photographic magazines that updated in the last couple of days. There’s some excellent content here. Well worth looking over!

When you get new memory cards for your camera make sure you format them first. I took about 20 photos at lunchtime and one or two were good enought to go up here, but Linux refuses to see the card, saying,

# mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera
/dev/sda1: Input/output error
mount: you must specify the filesystem type

Time to format the card..
Update! I’m glad I went searching first. The Digital Camera Support for UNIX page is a comprehensive listing of digital cameras that are compatible with Linux and BSD. It lists the Sony DSC-F717 there and says you can use the usb-storage device, or PTP mode to access it. You can use gphoto in PTP mode and download photos using a nice GUI!

The 717 has a histogram showing the composition of the image seen through the linse. I know what it represents, but wasn’t sure how to manipulate it or use the information it presented to me. This tutorial on EV Compensation certainly helps and provides example shots to illustrate!

Mark Goldstein has an excellent blog here. Although he does concentrate on the high end, where I have no chance of joining for a good couple of years!