Hoodman woes

My second D70 FlipUp LCD cap broke.

Hoodman started by making clever hoods for LCD displays. The most ubiquitous use of a Hoodman is when you see NFL referees peering under them during an instant replay review. In a recent DVD produced by Nikon, I saw Life photographer Joe McNally peering under one for instant outdoor 17″-diagnol image reviews. After the initial, “Gee, I wish I had a six-pack of SB-800s controlled by a Nikon D2X tethered via USB 2.0 to my Powerbook,” I thought, “neat stuff.”

I first heard about Hoodman when they made cloth and velcro shades in the early days of pocket digital photography. LCDs were really the suck back then—they make the Canon 5D’s LCD look exceedingly bright by comparison. People like me were often caught holding our hands up against the screen to review shots. The Hoodman was a great idea, sometimes it even came with a magnifier to make the small LCDs review much bigger.

It was only natural that when the FlipUp cap came out, I bought one:

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DxO Optics Pro 3.5 announced

book cover: Bridge to Terabithia

DxO Optics Pro 3.5 from DxO (email)

In November, DxO just announced they will be releasing DxO Optics Pro 3.5.

Maybe a bit of history is in order.

DxO started with DxO Analyzer package used by magazines and websites in order to evaluate the quality of lenses and cameras. Taking some shots of specialized targets at specific distances and camera settings, reviewers to analyze quantitatively things camera design compromises such as image sharpness, ISO noise, vignetting, chromatic abberation, and spherical distortion.
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My reading list…

book cover: Bridge to Terabithia

Bridge to Terabithia from HarperTrophy

In light of it being Banned Books Week, I went back to the ALA’s list of most challenged books in the last decade and I was surprised to see Bridge to Terabithia made the top 10. This book was first published in 1977 and was one of my favorite books growing up. A quick net search told me it was challenged (and banned) because of offensive language and satanism.

What a laugh!

The only thing satanic about this book is the number of reviews on Amazon. Since the “satanic worship” done in the book is a bunch of children play acting Narnia, one of the most pro-Christian fantasy pieces of all time, the irony is stunning.Continue reading

Corpse Bride

Last week, Bill, our resident Canon guy, mentioned that Tim Burton was working on a new stop-motion animated movie called Corpse Bride using Canon digital still cameras. The attention to detail and imagination in motion animation never ceases to amaze us.

Mark Jen sent me this article confirming the use of Canon digital still cameras and Nikon lenses.

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Building Liquid Websites with PHP

Okay because Apple upped my iDisk quotas, I’m putting up my OSCON talk there temporarily. Caitlin finished producing this talk last month, but I haven’t seen it because I can’t stand the sound of my own voice.

production Silver Keys Studio
video source HD and Keynote
size 104.8MB
run time 50 minutes, 32 seconds
format H.264 (Quicktime 7 required to play movie— free download)

You should: Right click-download this link or click on the image below.

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The future of Nikon DX

Canon has an EF-S lens series, which is roughly like Nikon’s DX lenses except they won’t mount on their full-frame or film cameras.1

  1. EF-S 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6 USM
  2. EF-S 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5 USM
  3. EF-S 17-85MM f4-5.6 IS USM

For comparison, here is Nikon’s DX line:

  1. 12-24mm f/4G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor
  2. 10.5mm f/2.8G ED AF DX Fisheye-Nikkor
  3. 17-55mm f/2.8G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor
  4. 18-70mm f3.5-4.5G ED-IF AF-S DX Zoom Nikkor
  5. 18-55mm f/3.5-5.6G ED AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor
  6. 55-200mm f/4-5.6G ED AF-S DX Zoom-Nikkor

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Identity 2.0

Identity 2.0

Identity 2.0, uploaded by tychay.

Joseph mentioned that Dick Hardt has posted his excellent Identity 2.0 presentation he gave as OSCON.

This is a great presentation with a excellent use of Lawrence Lessig simplicity combined with some of the new text effects in Keynote to emphasize it.

It is very easy to get the repetition/refrain that Dick uses for effect using Keynote. You simply put all the slides in an outline under the first slide of the string. Then option-drag the slide to the points in the talk you need it.

If he had more time, he could have used to new auto-build feature of Keynote to transition the slides automatically. But then again, it was somewhat amusing to see him tap away.

Lots of great ideas worthy of theft. 🙂

I promise to post my talk soon. I need bandwidth. I’m not rich like Dick.