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.
Tag 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! 🙂
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!
Dust on my Sensor! Must Clean It!
There’s dust on the sensor of my 20D. I need to remove it. Here’s a few bits I found.
- Ken Rockwell has many tips, as usual
- This review of IMS DSLRClean looked very promising until I found the exact same one here too! Is it a paid-for product placement?
- Lots and lots of valuable information here.
Gulp! I hate the thought of wiping anything against my camera sensor!
Millennium Park loosens its photo rules
Looks like a win for photographers! Pro photographers who wanted to shoot in Millennium Park in Chicago had to have a city permit. That was only changed last month, so maybe I’m lucky that my 20D didn’t attract the attention of local security!
I would have loved to get a few shots of the Bean, but it’s being renovated and polished now, and was under a canopy. (via)
Digital SLR cameras: Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D70s
Good run-down of the Canon Digital Rebel and Nikon D70s in this article by Philip Greenspun.
Digital single-lens reflex (SLR) cameras are the standard tool for serious photographers. With the recent introduction of cameras such as the Nikon D80 and the Canon Digital Rebel XTi the market for digital SLR cameras has expanded tremendously. A point-and-shoot compact digital camera can offer reasonably good image quality but a digital SLR, which usually looks a lot like an old standard 35mm film camera and may use the same lenses, offers the following advantages:
* accurate, large, and bright optical viewfinder
* fast operation and large controls
* excellent image quality in low “available” light situations when it is necessary to use higher ISO speeds
* interchangeable lenses