Holly sent me this photo:
And accompanying video:
Category: arts and letters
The origin on PHP trading cards
“…and Terry started taking pictures as Terry does with everything.”
—Cal Evans, Editor of Zend Dev Zone, in a Pro::PHP Webcast
Look on my cards, ye Mighty, and despair
Open Source Conference 2006, Portland, Oregon
Open Source Conference 2006, Portland, Oregon
Nikon D200, Nikkor 18-200mm f/3.5-5.6G VR
DxO (exp, blur, distorion, ca, vignette. noise, lighting)
1/15sec @ f/4, iso 250, 26mm (39mm)
BTW, Marcus Whitney is in the final deck which debuted at ZendCon and my guess is that the template from HP was probably inspired by Apple’s strange attempt.
[the origin after the jump.]Continue reading
Ringr
Ringo started out as Monster’s attempt at making a social network. This makes a lot of sense: like mashups, social networking can be seen as a possible disruptive technology threat to Monster’s core business: job search (a form of vertical search).
I’ve already mentioned job mashups in the past, but last year’s breakout success of LinkedIn shows that you can build a sustainable business model around job-related social networking.
In light of this I was shocked to notice the new homepage of Ringo:
Look familiar?
Anecdotally, this makes sense because the only person I know on Ringo uses it to share photos with me. From that and their clever spam of me—in a holiday promotional e-mail they mapped my friend’s photo onto an image in order to sell me a custom calendar—I would guess that photos form the majority of Ringo’s income.
But Flickr already rules this niche which is one among potentially many in photography: for a dump of your cameraphone photos there is photobucket; for professionals there is smugmug. This is not counting the fact that social networking sites like Facebook already have passable photo sharing built in and sites with interesting ideas like riya have abandoned photosharing for vertical search. Why make another Flickr?
But more importantly, Monster is a job site. Shouldn’t they be dealing with LinkedIn? Talk about losing your focus!
Leica and Aperture. Don’t you think it’s about time?
Some of you remember my my strange hack for getting the LX1 working in Aperture.
A year later, and I still have to do that. This model has since been replaced with the Panasonic DMC-LX2 (a.k.a. Leica D-LUX 3) which on paper sounds like this same trick should work for the RAW files. I don’t know, so I haven’t tried but this Flickr thread made me think.
This is total B.S. Why do I have to resort to using an Adobe product to get this to work at all?
[Why Apple should support this after the jump]
Photoshop CS3 Beta
Sent this to some of my friends two weeks ago…
I don’t know if I remembered to mention this but Adobe CS3 is in public beta. It requires your Adobe CS2 authentication to use past two days.
One big thing is that this version is native on Intel Macintoshes. According to the latest benchmarks it now runs slightly faster in the Mac OS X operating system than on Windows (same hardware).
Here is an article on some of the new features. One big one for us photographers is the new way of doing black and whites.
Continue reading
My christmas present
Well I’m stuck in the Bay Area for Christmas before I drive home to San Diego tomorrow.
What do I find but a photo of mine finally made the Flickr Explore frontpage!
Thanks for the Christmas present, Flickr (and Leviathor for pointing this out)!
[Finding yourself on Flickr after the jump]Continue reading
Hoya-Pentax
Catching up on some of my RSS newsfeed, I see that Hoya will buy out Pentax to create Hoya Pentax HD Corporation.
I think this makes a lot of sense, Tokina (a Hoya trademark) already markets Pentax-designed lenses for the Nikon F-mount and Canon EOS-mount. My next lens purchase is going to be a Pentax-designed Tokina.
Most of us think of Hoya as a company that makes really nice filters at a reasonable price. But they also are the Hoya, Kenko, Voigtlander and Slik brand names. If my eyeglasses lenses are any indicator, Hoya is a huge optics company.
With the backing of this giant and the introduction of the K-100D and K-10D, who else thinks Pentax will soon claim the #3 camera spot from Olympus?
Lens QWERTYUIOP
Ok so the deal is right now I’m looking at either a Sigma 70-200 f/2.8 or a nikkor 80-200 2.8. But I see there is the AF-D and the AF-S version of the Nikkor. I can’t find the AF-S anywhere on B&H or anything.. is this an older model? What are the pros and cons of af-s and af-d? Isn’t af-s for single shots and af-d for continuous shooting?
Please help as I’m pretty much a noob at all of this newfangled fancy lens stuff.. what with all the “dg” and “apo” and “hsm” and “d” and “qwertyuiop” lenses
The problem is the AF-S is now sold under 70-200mm, not 80-200mm which is discontinued. AF-S’s are a newer model.
Your first confusion is that Nikon has overloaded the “AF-S” term. On D70-level camera’s “AF-S” stands in contrast to AF-C and stands for single and continuous focusing (which is actually overloaded with two distinct focusing features that are separate on a Nikon D200-level camera).
On lenses, AF-D is actually now just “D” and stands for the addition of distance information delivered through to the metering system. This assists greatly in flash metering. In many new lenses this has been repalced with “G” where the aperture ring has been removed for a cost savings (and thus requiring camera bodies that can control the aperture electronically).
“AF-S” stands for an internal piezoelectric motor included with the lens, (Nikon calls this a Supersonic Wave Motor or SWM).
In this case you are thinking of a lens that would be tagged on the Nikkor group as 70-200mm f/2.8G VR and whose official name is the 70-200mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor, a lens I own and love.
In the older 80-200mm models, there are three that are tagged in the group: 80-200mm f/2.8D (the AF-D you allude to), the 80-200mm f/2.8D new (an improved design introduced in 1998 that allowed for faster internal focusing and added a tripod collar), 80-200mm f/2.8D AF-S (the AF-S you allude to). For the sake of completness there was also an 80-200 f/2.8 AF and 80-200 f/2.8 AI-s, but nobody shoots with those anymore.
[A breakdown of lens acronyms after the jump]
Nikon going full frame
The origins of this rant begin with a question about Canon’s camera roadmap that occurred during a Christmas party. It built up steam when reading Ryan’s excellent series on camera purchasing and overtopped my levies of tolerance when I was reading this thread on Flickr.
I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!
I’m tired about hearing about how Nikon is going to go “full frame” or about how Canon is going to crush Nikon with a cheap full frame camera.
This is magical thinking on behalf of Nikon or Canon owners. That or Chicken Little thinking if the order is reversed.
[The economics of “full-frame” after the jump]Continue reading
Buying a digital camera
With Christmas here, Ryan has been writing a series on purchasing a digital camera. I thought I’d link them for a number of you who have expressed interest:
- About $100 or less.
- Mid-range ($150-$350)
- dSLR alternatives: Why not to buy a dSLR and high-end non-dSLR digitals.
- Entry-level dSLRs and Entry-level dSLR models
- To Infinity and Beyond: professional setups
Here is my “series”:
- What camera should I buy?: on purchasing a pocket camera
- I’ll buy what he’s buying: caveat emptor on dSLR purchases
- That eternal question: SLR vs. bridge?: Deciding between a large digital camera and an entry dSLR.
- Considering an entry level camera: Purchasing your first dSLR.
- Is my camera “professional”?: What makes your camera professional?
You can see my guide is haphazard and a bit elitist. It’s also really dated—though I’m proud of how much of it has stood the test of time.
Still, it might be fun to compare and contrast our approaches/philosophies.