19 posts tagged “photography”

Having a brand new camera body encourages me to take more photos during the weekend (funny that always works). Today, Leah and I went to the High Line after having brunch with some friends. From the Wikipedia, the High Line is

The High Line is a 1.45-mile (2.33 km) section of the former elevated freight railroad of the West Side Line, along the lower west side of Manhattan, which has been redesigned and planted as a greenway. The High Line runs from the former 34th Street freightyard, near the Javits Convention Center, through the neighborhood of Chelsea to Gansevoort Street in the Meat Packing District of the West Village.

Naples photos

Jul 26, 2009
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Philadelphia Experiment

Jun 17, 2009
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Leah and I went to Philadelphia on a weekend trip this past weekend. For me, it was two days of experiments. All of which are for our trip to Naples/Pompeii later in July.

Canon 50D

The 50D is a vast improvement over my old 10D, bought way back in 2003. The increase in pixel count is obvious, but it is other much more subtle features that impress me. First, the quick startup time from sleep mode. The 10D takes about 5-10 seconds to wake up, thus sometimes I would miss shots. The 50D wakes up and ready to shoot almost instantaneously. The LCD screen is of course larger but it is the colour rendition that makes me take notice. With 10D, the LCD is always too bright and colour too saturated. The screen is still slightly too bright but the colour is almost spot on so preview is actually accurate. The low(er) noise level on high ISO settings makes it, for the first time for me at least, viable to shoot indoor with ISO1600 without worrying about unusable image. Images are still noisy but at least it is manageable.

Kata DR 467

I've been using a camera hipbag inside my Oakley backpack on trips for a few years now. Mainly so it is not obvious that I'm carrying an expensive digital camera. While that worked fairly well, it was awkward to store and retrieve the camera as I have two bag openings to deal with. Alex Lindsay (from PixelCorp and MacBreak Weekly) on Twitter recommended Kata DR-467 for travelling with DSLR. I looked online as well as touched it for real in B&H before deciding to buy it. After this weekend, I was so glad I bought it! I can't believe I didn't get it earlier. The slide out compartment at the bottom for the camera and lenses are the best feature, making it very easy to store/retrieve camera on the go.

GeoCoder

I've always wanted to geotag my photos so this trip was a perfect opportunity to utilise the built-in GPS in my iPhone to try that. I found on the AppStore this free app, GeoCoder, which claims to make geotagging easy. It was pretty easy to use and I just needed to remember to start a 'recording' in GeoCoder at the beginning of the day and stop it at the end. I was afraid that it would drain my battery quickly but it turned out not to be the case.

I was pretty excited about this whole geotagging thing until I got home and tried to use the GPX files GeoCoder produces in Google Earth. Turns out the iPhone GPS receiver is not sensitive enough to pick up GPS signal when the phone is in my pants pocket! So all I have are a handful of GPS locations whenever I took my phone out for a quick Twitter check or the iPhone happened to have enough signal.

So GeoCoder is out for me for the time being.

For the Naples/Pompeii trip, I have considered using one of my iPhone case and strap it to the Kata's shoulder strap in order to get decent GPS signal for the iPhone. Or I can purchase one of the cheaper GPS recorder and use that instead. I'd probably still need to expose the recorder to the sky somehow though.

Quick hands on with Canon 50D

Oct 31, 2008
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Canon Brochue

Last night I went to a Canon sponsored seminar at Adorama to see the latest DSLR, 50D. I spent about 30 minutes in total playing with it along with various lenses, 70-200 f4 IS, 24-105 L, 24-70 L, 18-200 IS. Here are the features that really tempting me to upgrade from the old, trusty 10D:

Focus

The 9 points focusing is much better than the 10D since all of them are cross type. Even in the dim light of the room, the 50D latched onto sharp focus easily with no hunting. I even tried it on uniform colour wall in the dark corner and the 50D focus with no problem.

Continuous Drive

6.3 fps! Way faster than the 10D's 2.5 fps. And this is with 15 MP both RAW and JPEG, with 17 RAW and 60 JPEG buffer. This is the main feature that would be hugely useful for me, even if only for the once a year surf photographing session I go with Dan.

High ISO Performance

The new CMOS chip and DIGIC 4 processor allows much less noisy photo in high ISO setting, when compared against the 10D, but not 40D. The noise level at 3200 on 50D is approximately the same as 800 on 10D. 2 stops higher! And 12800 is still usable but quite noisy.

LCD and LiveView

The 3" VGA screen beat the crap out of the 1.25" screen on 10D. The LiveView on the LCD looks cool but I doubt I would use it often. What I find useful would be to see LiveView on the computer screen using the USB remote control connection.

Menu

Much better menu system and easier to use, thanks to the large, high resolution LCD. The joystick helps too.

Viewfinder

Nothing special here, apart from it being noticeably brighter than 10D's.

A more detailed review is now up on DPReview.com

PowerShell rescues wedding photos

Jun 22, 2008
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One of my friend reached out to me last week for help. The photographer she hired for her wedding had gone bankrupted. Since she has not gotten the album now she can't even get her wedding photos in either prints or digital form. All she has access to is the photographer's web site where the people can order prints from. She was hoping that I can somehow retrieve all the photos (~1220) from the site so that at least she would have digital copies of her wedding photos.

After poking around the site a bit, I found out that I was in luck. Sort of. All the photos are accessible but only in low resolution (500 x 366). But more importantly for me, the site developer had opted to have a nice AJAX interface and for some reason decided to include all the image URLs in the page!

So a plan of action quickly formed in my head:

1. Download the page source

2. Extract the image URLs from all the HTML/Javascript code

3. Download all the images, one by one

Initially I want to try out Automator on my Mac and see how easy it would be to do this, since this is exactly the type of repetitive tasks Steve Job told us Automator is perfect for! Unfortunately after poking around for 30 minutes, I quickly came to the conclusion that Automator is woefully inadequate for this task. So I turned to PowerShell on my Windows VM instead. Having used PowerShell 2.0 CTP a lot in my last project, I was able to quickly develop a script that extracts URLs from the page source, download the file, and save it to disk. In fact, the most time consuming part is to figure out the regular expression for URL extraction!

From start to finish, it took me around 90 minutes to get all the photos downloaded. If I didn't waste time with Automator and better at regular expression I think I can do it in 15 minutes!

Now my friend can have her wedding photos. She may not be able to print them out, but at least she can view them on a computer screen.

Tennis photos

Feb 23, 2007
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Serve

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Last Monday I brought along my camera to my weekly tennis match. My friend Dan took some photos of me while I played my match. I was going to return the favour during his match but I played a double match instead :-) I guess I'll have to photograph him next time we play!

More on Flickr but this one on the left showing me in mid serve with my foot a few inches off the ground is my favorite of them all.

I think if my coach in Hong Kong all those years ago when I was a kid see these photos, he would be proud!