Now we're talkin'

Somebody's having a birthday. I think I know what they want. ...and it looks like this.

fleaBay has come up with a pretty good price (ok, it was like the 6th try, but these things are 'spensive at da store)
Sure it won't  be as sharp as the 50mm but then it's not like we have some kinda 25mpixel sensor either. Really nice range. Focuses pretty well. Great 'going on a hike' lens.

Well, that didn't last long

And here I thought the Fuji would be the be-all-to-end-all. Well OK, I'm not that stupid but I was expecting more than a year. Actually it worked fine except for some fairly severe noise problems when indoor shooting.
Guess what it got used for...mostly. It was especially bad at shooting music gigs. Bummer.
So M.C, a good photographer friend of ours got herself a nice Canon T3 and showed it to S. over dinner a couple nights ago.
This thing (link) is SWEET.
So of course S. had to have one 'right now' and I lucked out. They were on sale at Oregon Camera. $550 with lens after rebate type thingys. Craigslist is my friend, so the losses on the Fuji were kept to a reasonable ($40) level. Not to worry though, we'll burn through that money on lenses. Scouring fleaBay now for a F1.8.  Yep, the stock lens has only one failing: It' doesn't do very well with available light indoor shots, even with the anti-shake. Huh, where I've seen that problem before?
Edit: Two months later: Have a line on a F1.8, autofocus but no antishake. Well under $100. Hmmm, going for it.    Edit: two weeks later: Lens is nice. M.C. had to go and upgrade to a T3i. Photographer one-ups-personship, gotta love it. Wonder if that means we have an upgrade in our future too...?

Hold-Da-Phone, S drops the bomb

A new camera bomb that is. One FINE machine:
Just about every feature and/or capability you could want for under two hundred bucks.

Fuji Finepix S1800          

•  12.2-megapixel, 1/2.3-inch CCD
•  Fujinon 18x wide-angle optical zoom lens (28mm to 504mm f3.5); 
•  Dual Image Stabilization
•  3.0-inch high-contrast LCD -AND- Electronic View Finder
  
  

MessinWidYa

I finally figured out how to edit the default Blog templates.
NOW we have a photo related blog with, get this:
Bigger higher resolution Photos.

The post just before this is the first example. I'm trying to decide about re-scaling all the previous posts, but since we haven't gotten to any real 'fire for effect' photography yet, I'm not sure it's worth the bother.

Mo'Puter, Mo'Bettah Edit?

OK so here's the theory: With a 15MB RAW file size *per frame* and many projects likely to require combinations of several frames, I'm going to need a fairly well, gnarly computer to keep up. Besides it's a fun project and I already found some chump to buy the old one. So we do a little research to try and work out the best bang-for-the-buck in PC parts these days, order a few parts, and start hooking things up. Here's where it at now. Yes there will be a case to put it in, but not during the testing phase.

So far it's just your garden variety 4GHz 8MB Four processor core i5 based PC with a fairly quick video card. The real tweek to the system is those two little hard drive kinda things on the right. Usually the slowest thing in your PC, the thing you end up waiting on the most is the hard drive. PC's have been improving at a rate such that they're about 10x faster over the last 8 years. Hard drives have only improved about 2x. That's about to change.

The new Solid State Hard Drives (SSD) can, when correctly connected and set-up outperform 'regular' spinning type hard drives by a BIG margin.  Here's an example, the 'regular' drives are on the top and the new SSD's on the bottom.

This is the set of tests where at 2x to 3x difference they are CLOSEST, other tests like Random Read have the difference at more like 100x. It really does make a difference.
There must be a downside, yes?
You're right. They are of relatively small capacity and quite expensive. That seems to be changing quite quickly though.

His and Hers Camera Comparison

OK. This posting isn't supposed to be wonderful photography. This is just supposed to show you the difference between M's camera/accessories and S's camera/accessories. See if you can detect a trend.




So, the bag on the left is M's and the one on the right is S's. Hmmmm......



The tripod on the left is M's and the one on the right is S's.



The three lenses on the left are M's and the ones on the right are S's.



The camera on the left is (you guessed it) M's and the one on the right is S's. Have you figured out the trend yet?




The whole package together. Left - M's....Right - S's. You should see the printers!
Michael's collection (including his printer) runs somewhere around $2000 and Shannon's collection (including her printer) runs around $400. It should be interesting to see what the photos are going to be like!

First try at HDR

OK so HDR is High Dynamic Range imagery.
Basically it's the process of using different exposure values combined together in software so that very high contrast range scenes can be rendered on screen or print. There are some very bizarre images that can be created that way, but we're trying for something "Real as seen by the eye, rather than the camera."
The test image we shot the other day looks like a good candidate, the sun on high wispy clouds is about as 'highlight' as you can get and the brush on the far riverbank is pretty darn black.



Mary's River confluence, Canon 590IS, 37mm-eq, f8@1/400 ISO100 JPEG-Fine


Mary's River confluence, Canon 590IS, 37mm-eq, f8@1/100,1/400,1/1000 ISO100
Combined in Unified Color's HDR Photo Studio 2/64
It's arguably an improvement, the mid-tones on the beach are retained, the sky isn't as blown out and though you can't really see it at this resolution, the details of the brambles on the bank are more visible. At the same time I don't think it looks 'over-processed.'
Lens flare is accentuated somewhat, but some of the 'default over-sharpening' that the camera applies automatically is slightly reduced by the de-Halo processing step in this HDR software.
The shot still looks a little smeary due to a big nasty thumbprint that was on the front lens element. This is the first test shot(s) with the 590IS we got on eBay for 67 bucks and I hadn't checked to see if the lens was clean. How very embarrasing.
In the future we'll be Trying other HDR packages and will probably post those results.