About taking pictures
I was catching up on some of my newsreading when I ran across this article, with the quote:
I thought I’d make it into this desktop image as a shout-out to all you (male) PHP devs out there. (There was an old PHP image I saw about five years ago sort of like this…those of you who remember, know what I’m talking about.)
(Passing thought: this person has been a PHP developer longer than me.)
[Commentary after the jump.]Continue reading
…of my 2008 budget.
“Depth of field” huh?
A Pentax medium format digital camera. 19 or 31 megapixel CCD sensor with 1.4x crop factor in 645 format (44mmx33mm). Basically that’s twice the image area of 35mm “full frame” or .7x “crop factor” 35mm equivalent. Just saying this just shows the total futility of thinking in crop factors. Both use an offset microlens technology that first saw light of day in the Leica M8 to deal with vignetting.
Price (estimated): $7-12k. It’s Pentax so you know it’ll be much cheaper than that the Hasselblad H3D (48mm 39mp $32k, 48mm 22mp $27k and 44mm 31mp $25k), and the Mamiya ZD (48mm 22mp, $12k est.). On the other end you have the Canon EOS-1Ds Mark II (36mm, 17mp, $7.4k). Another reference point is film 645 format cameras are around $3k.
Also known are multi-channel readout, SDHC and CF media support (I hope they’re using UDMA instead of PIO). 1/4000s max shutter speed in a leaf shutter. Probably a max ISO around 800. The usual suspects: AE and AF lock buttons, bulb, MLO, cable releases, flash sync. Burst speed and buffer is unknown (a fast camera in medium format digital is is 1 shot in 1.5 seconds).
While we are dreaming wishlist: Pentax sensor-shift-based shake reduction in a medium format digital. I’d open my wallet this year if it had it. Seriously.
[Lenses for medium format cameras after the jump]Continue reading
This CrunchGear announcing the Olympus E-510 is the height of moronitude.
Basically he doesn’t like this 4-3 10 megapixel wonder child because it cost $100 more than the E 410 sister camera with only one difference: image stabilization.
“Now, who’s willing to pay $100 more for image stabilization?”
Let us deconstruct shall we?
[First blush on the Olympus after the jump]Continue reading
This is a shameless plug for my friend Andrei.
Andrei is writing something that forms the very essence of my future employment: PHP 6, and more specifically, unicode support in PHP 6. ICU in PHP is three meaningless letters about three other meaningless letters to most of you. I get that. Even though this meaninglessness stuff has 60% market share and powers sites like Yahoo!, Wikipedia, WordPress, Facebook… (The “Vote for Andrei” generator above was written in PHP. It powers the websites for JPG Magazine and Flickr below.)
So when I say that it’s really important to keep this guy happy, please believe me. Think about the last time that you visited to the above websites. You wouldn’t want them to suck do you? If your native language is not English, then you would want them to work in your country right?
Luckily, photography is infinitely more accessible than the stuff that pays the bills. So please, take some time off from your day of ignoring my blog posts to do the world a favor and vote for this photo on JPG magazine (and tell your friends to too):
It’s a great photo and utterly appropriate with the theme of the month. My only complaint with it is he should have gotten with the bandwagon on photos like this and LOMO’d the sucker beyond recognition. I can almost recognize what it is.
[Andrei and photography after the jump.]Continue reading
Gizmodo and others are unhappy that the new Canon 40D is the 30D with 10 megapixels and dust shake.
I have to wonder what the hell they were expecting?
[The 40D is a good camera after the jump]
It always annoys me when Gizmodo writes about digital photography. Mostly because they get almost nothing right.
Case in point: their article on today’s Lexar UDMA CF cards, which has three egregious errors.
First, I would believe that CF at PIO-5 (aka 133x) is already close to SDHC’s theoretical max speed and faster than any SDHC card out there, so it’s hardly “playing catchup.”
Second, there is already a camera that supports this card: the Hasselblad H2D and H3D. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if most of the MF digital backs support UDMA. Sure they’re expensive, but they are not “theoretical.”
Third, UDMA is supported in the newest CF reader from SanDisk. This means that you have a practical advantage today in download speed to an external reader. Who would have thunk?
I know if they had bothered to read an article I wrote last year, they could have avoided foot-in-mouth disease.
I noticed recently at Costco that they’re selling the Canon Rebel XTi with 18-55mm and the Nikon D80 with two lenses kit.
That’s silly. The D80 + 2 lenses (28-70 and 70-300) cannot compete against the Rebel XTi (+ 18-55) in a store like that. For one thing, they’re the same 10 megapixels. The D80 kit works out to be much more expensive (around $1200 vs $900). Sure there are differences, but the lenses aren’t even connected to the cameras so who is going to notice the larger and brighter viewfinder or better construction? And really, is this market going to care about those things? All your typical Costco buyer is going to see is that the D80 looks to be the same camera for a lot more, breaking the $1000 barrier is a big deal nowadays
It should come as no surprise that last time I passed by, the XTi was sold out.
Olympus released a whole slew of new cameras today, but I thought I’d pick up two because they have interesting approaches worth mentioning.
[Two cameras after the jump.]
Continue reading
I received a slightly over-direct e-mail from Nicholas at Copper Hill Images concerning a recent post I made about sensor cleaning.
I won’t post a private e-mail here without permission. The gist of it I’ll get into below but this is as good a place as any to leave some room to talk about sensor cleaning.
[How to clean sensors after the jump.]Continue reading
“…and Terry started taking pictures as Terry does with everything.”
—Cal Evans, Editor of Zend Dev Zone, in a Pro::PHP Webcast
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
