On my way to the Twin lakes Java (an amazing Coffee shop at Twin Lakes, MI), I was overflown by a rather satisfied looking Bald Eagle. Satisfied, since he'd just finished off what looked like a rather large carcass of a rather unlucky hare. I screeched the car to a halt, jumped out and took a few pictures of him as he circled (!?) and flew past. Mighty pleased with myself for having bagged a good picture of a Bald Eagle, I looked through the pictures to realize to my horror, that I'd been shooting with the ISO set to "HI1". In Nikon's terminology, for the D60, "HI1" == 3200 and also "Avoid using". So there _was_ a reason I had to shoot at 1/4000 and F11 to get the correct exposure.
Feeling pretty silly, I returned and plonked down on the couch with the Rubik's cube in hand. Deciding that I had to get through the silly cube in better than my usual 1:20-1:40 minutes, I started trying to learn all 41 algorithms of the Fridrich method. Then, I came across one of the most useful webpages I've seen in recent times: http://www.freewebs.com/sirshazaam/f2l.htm
The guy has most painstakingly listed out every one of the algorithms for the F2L and has pictures of the cube, for each of them as well. Brilliant.
Having had enough, I attempted hitting the sack at about 6:45 AM, when I heard what sounded like a Warbler. Deciding that I couldn't sleep any more, I picked up the device of photographic expression and walked out. After stalking the fella for more than 20 minutes, I finally caught sight of this brown feathered chappy, chirping away in a brown tree. Perfect. Getting a clear line of sight of the guy was a tough job.
Having shot what I thought was an okay-ish picture and double-checking to make sure the ISO was not an obscene value, I walked around for a little bit, coming across another magnificent sight. Somehow, just somehow, I get the feeling that today's going pretty well for a start.
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Bird brained
The gear
Pictured, is my new D60 along with a bargain Soligor 90-230mm F4.5 manual, I got off eBay, for $20.
The other glass (not in the picture), is a humble Nikkor AF-S 18-55 DX VR.
The Soligor has been my lens of choice, ever since I began understanding the concept of exposure better. Shooting without any metering whatsoever and with a manual focus is a little daunting at first (especially so, for someone new to D-SLRs), but certainly not a major hurdle.
The remote control on the right, is a Phillips universal remote, that I've programmed to use as a remote trigger for the D60.
Deer chase!
I was driving up to Copper Harbor on a bright beautiful Saturday, when this Whitetailed deer running alongside the road, passed me from the left, crossed over onto the right lane and then sprinted along the road for a good half a minute.
Not wanting to confuse the Deer any further, I kept a good distance away from it, but stayed right behind it, while a friend dug my camera out of the bag. During those few seconds, my speedometer read approx 35 miles an hour and the Deer was almost always a constant distance from me.
Finally when I got my camera, I flipped the wheel to "P" mode, let the camera choose everything, zoomed to 55mm and fired off a burst of shots, trying to capture the chappy, while the sunlight was still on him.
Having had enough excitement and thrill for the day (its white tail up, indicating fear and alarm), the Deer decided that discretion was the better part of valor and vanished into the woods in a blitz.
Not wanting to confuse the Deer any further, I kept a good distance away from it, but stayed right behind it, while a friend dug my camera out of the bag. During those few seconds, my speedometer read approx 35 miles an hour and the Deer was almost always a constant distance from me.
Finally when I got my camera, I flipped the wheel to "P" mode, let the camera choose everything, zoomed to 55mm and fired off a burst of shots, trying to capture the chappy, while the sunlight was still on him.
Having had enough excitement and thrill for the day (its white tail up, indicating fear and alarm), the Deer decided that discretion was the better part of valor and vanished into the woods in a blitz.
The iPhone camera
The iPhone's much maligned camera, with a 2 mega pixel "resolution" sensor is actually capable of taking good pictures.
The controls on the camera ("Click") certainly don't rival even the closest point and shoot cameras. But it certainly has its charm. For one, it takes all the technicality out of taking a picture and lets you concentrate on composing your picture and just your picture. The downside of course, is that you don't get to choose any aperture, speed or focus settings. But seriously, its a camera on a Phone!
Picture on this post, is from the tram at the Minneapolis airport. Post processed with the Camerabag application, on the iPhone itself. Click on the picture to see my Flickr stream, with more iPhone pictures.
The controls on the camera ("Click") certainly don't rival even the closest point and shoot cameras. But it certainly has its charm. For one, it takes all the technicality out of taking a picture and lets you concentrate on composing your picture and just your picture. The downside of course, is that you don't get to choose any aperture, speed or focus settings. But seriously, its a camera on a Phone!
Picture on this post, is from the tram at the Minneapolis airport. Post processed with the Camerabag application, on the iPhone itself. Click on the picture to see my Flickr stream, with more iPhone pictures.
New photo gallery
It turns out, Flickr's 200 photo limit [1] for their free is actually quite measly. Especially if you're the type who likes to put up every mediocre picture online! To be fair, Flickr has a paid account, called Flickr Pro, which removes the 200 photo restriction.
I could create another Blogspot, or get a Tumblr account, all of which would let me upload pictures without restriction. Sure, searching and previews would be a pain, but then again, what in life is painless? Alternately, I could jut dump all pictures into a folder and let Apache just display a listig. Or I could add all new photos, to the already existing http://srichand.net.in/photos page. Or, I could just get a Flickr pro account...
Except of course, I already pay for a webhost, for http://srichand.net.in/ . I see little reason to pay up twice the amount I pay for it, just to host some pictures. Of course, the problem with http://srichand.net.in/photos is that, I'm running an ancient version of Coppermine. The thing I do not like about Coppermine, is its Album centric approach to photo management. Every photo needs to be in an Album, requiring me to create, learn and know an entire hierarchy of photos. I'd much rather prefer to have a "bunch" of photos and tag some of the pictures I like and mark some others as favorite. Of course, the ability to create "sets" (Similar to Flickr and Adobe LR2) is an added bonus. The other problem with Coppermine, of course, is its complexity. Somehow, just somehow, at first glance, its interface looks more complex than useful.
And so, I feel the need to move off Coppermine into a simpler gallery system. What do I need? The ability to preview _lots_ of pictures on one page (Certainly not a massive waste of whitespace, the way Coppermine does). A detailed "picture" page, that shows a picture, along with its EXIF data. And the whole AJAX thing, which I've shunned so far, is probably the ideal implementation detail here. It'd be awesome to move between pictures without reloading the page. The same goes for editing the Title, Description and the Tags of the photo, without going to an "Edit" page, for each picture. And yes, batch tagging!
I'm certainly going to look around some existing systems for a bit. I am already beginning to like the Plogger system a good bit. It might need some hacking to support what I want. If not, I'll probably just go get myself a Flickr Pro account anywho.
Image viewer for Linux
Terrible. That's the only word I'd use to describe my experience with F-Spot. Any image viewer that moves files around on the filesystem, without my explicit permission each time, is just terrible. F-Spot's instability is legendary too.
Google's Picasa 3 for Linux is okay for the most part. Except of course, Google's choice to override my Alt+Ctrl key binding for full-screen mode is irritating, to say the least. Anyone who uses multiple desktops on GNOME knows my pain. And of course, you can't upload to Flickr from Picasa directly.
KDE's Digikam has most of the right components in place. Except, that it wants me to look at my entire collection in a Folder centric view. I can't view all Folders at once.
Is there any other image viewer I should try out?
Also, WHY cannot image viewers standardize on tagging formats? I have to tag and retag my pictures each time I change image viewers.
Enough of ranting for today, time to get some sleep.
Mood: Arrr!!!
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