You bought a new camera? Oh goody! Oh look, there’s a newer version with shiny new features! Doh!
Get over it and take great photos! Read more in this essay by Mike Johnston.
Category Archives: Photography
National Geographic Pictures of the Year 2004
Several amazing photos here! Wow!
Canon EOS 20D – compact flash corruption
I’m still not sure what corrupted my CF cards. I did a simple test this morning. I set the quality to RAW+L which produced about 10MB of data for every photo.
I quickly filled the CF card without incident.
Afterwards I removed and replaced the lens in case that caused the corruption but it still worked fine. I don’t know. 🙁
Anyway, here’s a list of Canon EOS 20D and compact flash card timings. I have Viking CF cards. Third from the bottom! Boohoo! I need faster media!
XMOVIE – uncompressed movie player
My Panasonic FZ5 creates uncompressed quicktime movies. Unbelieveably Mplayer can’t play them!
Thankfully Xmovie does!
BTW – the Panasonic records at up to 30fps, and is great for recording snippits of concerts like I did last night! 🙂
The Gypsy Kings in Cork!
We went to see the Gypsy Kings play in Cork last night. It was a great concert but we were slightly disappointed that they didn’t play their older stuff that we knew better. Still, they got the crowd hopping, and I’ve never seen such a mix of young and old at one concert!
GIMP Preview – the why and what of it
A recent thread on the GIMP User mailing list asked about why previews are so small, and why the “main window” preview isn’t available everywhere.
Replies were soon forthcoming. It seems that plugins can’t preview their changes in the main window, but built-in tools can.
Carol Spears even offered a small tutorial explaining how you can increase the preview size in plugins very easily!
Seagull
First of the RAW images I took over the weekend at Sherkin Island. Forgive the grain, this was shot at ISO 400 under difficult light and the gull was flying directly outside our hotel room!
So far I’ve imported a few photos into the GIMP using UFraw and to be honest I don’t think shooting in RAW made much difference. I’ll reserve final judgement until later when I’ve had more experience with converting.
I ran into the same trouble I had before with corrupted shots. Looks like one of my CF cards is fscked. I’ll write to 7dayshop where I bought the cards, whatever good that’ll do me.
Running fsck.vfat returned lots of errors about clusters. I formatted and I’m running a test for bad clusters now. It didn’t find anything but I’ll run some more tests over the next few days. Meanwhile, here’s some more info on compact flash break-downs to digest.
I copied about 900MB of data back and forth to the CF card without a hitch. It might be a camera problem? They’re Viking Interworks 1GB cards. Anyway, I found two places, here and here that have reasonably priced cards.
Wideangle lenses for small sensor APS-C DSLRs
Good overview of wide angle lenses available for DSLRs. Expensive though, anyone want to buy the Canon 10-22 for me?
Canon 20D & RAW
Here’s a long thread which has almost convinced me that I should shoot RAW this weekend.
If I wanted to batch process I can probably do something like this:
for i in *.cr2
do
dcraw -c $i | ppmtojpeg > `basename $i .cr2`.jpg
done
RAW files are known to be much bigger. File sizes?
$ du -csh *
6.7M img_5881.cr2
24M img_5881.ppm
31M total
$ du -csh img_5879.jpg
4.0M img_5879.jpg
4.0M total
Shooting in RAW costs me almost 3MB of space per photo. I’m game to try it but the advantages will have to be absolutely amazing if I’m going to use it!
Last Of The Sun
Down in Robert’s Cove on Monday night. It rained steadily on Tuesday and it’s been showery since.
