In 1999, I used to eat lunches in Novell’s offices (now eBay’s headquarters). In 2000, Dave visited me and I showed him all the crappiest food in the valley. In 2001, Dave came to the Valley and we decided we needed to visit corporate cafeteries, because the only thing you got free in the valley, post bubble, was caffeinated beverages.
That was Lunch 1.0 and it sucked.
Then Mark got fired from Google and started inviting everyone to have lunch on Plaxo.
When I was in Costco the other day, I noticed that Pentax’s dSLR was undercutting the Nikon D50 kit by a couple bucks. Then, I read today that the Pentax *st DL with 18-55mm kit lens dropped another $200 to $599. If you figure the lens is about $100, we’re at $500.
Wow!Continue reading
A fun discussion on Flickr pointed me to this site that contains a quiz where you guess images as “fake†or “photo�
The site is sponsored by Alias, they have been the king of 3D graphics for many years now. I remember visiting my friend at Alias/Wavefront’s offices in Santa Barbara (back when they were a division of SGI) and seeing all the movies posters up on the walls there—each one had parts that were rendered with their software.
If you take the quiz and get a 10/10, there is a 4 question bonus round.Continue reading
DPReview posted that Canon built their 30 millionth EF lens. This is quite a feat since they only introduced the mount in 1987 (a new mount to go along with a new “EOS” body which added Minolta’s auto-focusing ideas into their previous auto-exposure (AE) design), just under twenty years ago. This is great stuff!
For reference, Nikon built their 30 millionth in 2001 and introduced that mount in 1959, or just over forty years.Continue reading
Here is a question I received today:
We’re planning to buy the 35mm film negatives from our wedding photographer, and we would like to have them scanned into digital format (as a back-up, and so friends/family can order prints). A friend of a friend offered to help us out—and “scan them at 16-bit resolution†for free.
Does that refer to bit depth (i.e. 65,536 colors) – or something else?
Would 11″x14″ prints from a “16-bit resolution†scan look ok?
I hate how nearly every discussion that mentions Canon and Nikon in the same breath degenerates into a pissing contest. Yes, I’ve been guilty of this myself, but I like to think my rants are of a different quality than mindless cheering of “my team.â€
Having said that, I wanted to piss on another troll here in my blog, because of something I read in this Flickr thread. It is typical of many things I’ve seen spouted.Continue reading
Zeiss today announced the much rumored foray into Nikon SLR cameras with the ZF lens series for the Nikon F-mount. (Previously Zeiss only made interchangeable photo lenses for Contax.)
These lenses are manual-focus prime lenses. In particular a 50mm (Planar T* 1.4/50 ZF) and 85mm (Planar T* 1.4/85 ZF) lenses. Probably much better constructed than the 50mm f/1.8 Nikkor that is my most used lens. Of course, the $100 price point is hard to beat, even if I give up 2/3 of a stop.
It will be interesting to see if Zeiss will be able to carve out a niche in the prime lens market without the corporate advantages they had in the Contax line.
I hope so.Continue reading
I was playing with the video features in Caitlin’s new iPod and found it very easy to use QuickTime Pro to make iPod videos. For fun, I exported my OSCON “Building Liquid Websites with PHP†talk to the iPod (download, 139MB).Continue reading
After I read that Microsoft quietly discontinued support for Windows Media on Mac OS X, I didn’t know what to make of it. Just another free app for the Mac that Microsoft is discontinuing—guess MSN Messenger is next on the chopping block.
As a consunmer, it reminded me that I needed to install a Windows Media Player solution on my computer again, as it begins its arduous recovery from a drive failure. At work, many people zip around video and given the platform predelictions here, many times that video is something in Windows Media. Well, I guess that leaves out Windows Media Player X 9.0.
Now normally I would download the latest MPlayer or VideoLAN Client to do this, but that always seemed a kludge. Oh, they have their uses, but I mostly I’m talking about a one-trick WMV playback-pony. Luckily, the article pointed out a solution I had bookmarked and forgotten about: Flip4Mac WMV.Continue reading
Someone asked on Flickr how you get waterblur in your photographs.
You can go into aperture priority stick and stop down to f/22 to get waterblur, but you are hitting the diffraction limits of the lens and losing sharpness. (Remember, if you have a polarizer hanging around, it doubles as an 2-stop ND filter. If you have a pocket digital camera, your sunglasses can be a filter in a pinch.)
ND filters and a tripod are your best bet. A neutral-density (ND) filter allows you to experiment with waterblur on a sunny day:
