Why dSLRs (and not pocket cameras)? [The entry kit dSLR Part 2]

(Article continued from part 1)

Bigger in photography means, faster, better, stronger (and more expensive).

Many people will say the only advantage of a digital SLR is that it gives you the flexibility of interchangeable lenses.

I think that’s bullshit.

If it was true, then the days of the dSLR are surely numbered—EVIL has arrived. EVIL, for those of you who don’t know, is an acronym so new, it doesn’t have a Wikipedia page yet. EVIL stands for “electronic viewfinder, interchangeable lens” and they are a new class of camera I’ll talk about another time. Suffice it to say, EVIL will not replace SLR photography—in the same manner that APS-C has not yet dethroned 35mm (much to my surprise). Besides, a lesser-performing EVIL camera costs nearly twice as much as the kits in this article.

I believe the biggest advantage can be found in its name: Single-Lens Reflex.

In order to have a single-lens design, in order to house a reflex mirror, the dSLR has to be big—and bigger, in this case, means faster, better, stronger (and more expensive).

Marie the shooter

Marie the shooter
Elite Cafe, Pacific Heights, San Francisco, California

Leica M8, Carl-Zeiss Biogon 2,8/25 ZM T*
1/45sec @ ƒ2.8, ISO160, 25mm (34mm)

This portrait of Marie and her new Nikon D5000 entry dSLR kit was taken by an APS-H camera, which sits between APS-C and “full frame” in size. Even though this is taken with a wide-angle lens (25mm), you can easily see she really pops from the background.

From your art classes, you may have learned that perspective helps a 2D image show the 3D dimensionality. In photography, another tool, in addition to perspective, is focus via depth-of-field. Focus helps draw the eye, through the visual clutter, to the subject. This tool is nearly non-existent in a pocket digital.

By the way, the lens used in this photo is the highest resolution lens in its class ever produced—the parts that are in focus are really quite sharp. Computed depth-of-field is about half a foot (20cm).

Continue reading about Sometimes bigger is better after the jump

Posted on by tychay 7

All hail the entry kit! [The entry kit dSLR Part 1]

Yesterday, a friend was interested in purchasing a dSLR at Costco and asked me which he should buy: a Nikon or a Canon. I get asked that a lot.

Costco dSLRs
Costco, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Olympus E-P2, Lumix G Vario HD 1:4.0-5.8/14-140 ASPH. Mega O.I.S.
1/60sec @ ƒ4, ISO250, 14mm (28mm)

From left to right: The Nikon D3000, the Nikon D5000, and the Canon 500D (called the Rebel T1i in the U.S.).

The higher pricing is because Costco usually sells supersets in order to be above the manufacturer minimum advertised price but still yield a decent value to the consumer. For instance, the Nikon D5000 kit contains not only the 18-55mm VR lens, but also the 55-200mm VR lens, a camera bag, two Nikon school DVDs, a book, and an SD card.

The Canon 500D is the most expensive of the trio because Canon and Nikon avoid competing head-to-head by interleaving price and features in models. The 500D sits between the Nikon D5000 and the enthusiast Nikon D90. The 1000D (a.k.a. Rebel XS) was introduced to compete between the Nikon D3000 and Nikon D5000 price points and wasn’t for sale the day I took this photo. (Update: Last time I was at Costco, the Canon 1000D, Nikon D5000, and Canon 500D were for sale. During the writing of this series, Canon introduced the 550D)

“Uhh, the Nikon D3000.”

…

“Well that’s because they stopped selling the other dSLRs there.”

“Yeah, I noticed that. Why was that?”

“Partly because the Canon 1000D is old. Everyone expects it to be updated.”

“It’ll be updated?”

“Most likely if Canon wants to sell any cameras. It’s been a year and a half, which is a long time to have a camera in that category. The D3000 just came out.”

…

“You know what camera I really like? The Nikon D5000. In fact, I ordered one the other day. It’s arriving this evening.”

Nikon D5000 kit
South of Market, San Francisco, California

Olympus E-P2, M.ZUIKO Digital ED 14-42mm 1:3.5-5.6
1/60sec @ ƒ3.5, iso 12500, 14mm (28mm)

Actually, this was purchased for Marie, not myself.

It sounds strange that someone who owns a Nikon D70IR, Nikon D200, and a Nikon D3 would purchase an entry level Nikon dSLR. Over the next week, I’ll explain why by going over the Why, What, How, Where and When of a good first dSLR purchase.

And don’t worry. While my experience is with Nikon, I won’t give the short shrift to the other brands.

Table of contents

  • Why dSLR?: Why a dSLR produces better images than a pocket digital
  • What dSLR?: Don’t buy a dSLR that is too much dSLR for you
  • What dSLR? (2): The Pentax, Sony, and Olympus dSLRs and about entry dSLRs compact size
  • How DSLR?: The Canon and Nikon dSLRs, a big spreadsheet, return policies, and what I bought
  • Where dSLR?: About first lenses and things to buy with your first dSLR purchase
  • When dSLR?: About books, videos, and classes

(Article continued in part 2)

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Posted on by tychay 11

Camera replacement batteries

There was a time, a camera, even professional ones, needed no batteries at all. In fact, you could buy a new one until as recently as 2006.

I have such a habit of purchasing a spare battery for any camera that might become my primary that I once purchased an EN-EL4a for my Nikon D3.

Normally I only buy the manufacturers approved batteries, because there are a lot of stories floating on the internet about exploding Li-Ion batteries, and because ever since Sony introduced the infoLithium, many manufacturers introduce an extra “smart” feature with circuitry where the lithium battery informs the camera about its age and charge, and I figure why risk it?

Nowadays, 3rd parties have done a good job of figuring it out, so I decided to take a dip.

Olympus replacement battery
South of Market, San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-WX1
1/30sec @ f/2.4, 240, 4.3mm (24mm)

I purchased an Olympus PS-BLS-1 3rd party from Amazon. I haven’t used it yet. Olympus, unlike Nikon, has been using the same battery design across most of their Four-Thirds and Micro Four-Thirds camera line.

Another reason for this purchase is the Olympus PS-BLS-1 holds 1080 mAH of charge, while this replacement is rated at 1800 mAH—almost twice as much!

Continue reading about the what, where and why of spare camera batteries after the jump

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Who puts the P in LAMP?

Received this yesterday:

So I’m thinking of starting a new web project and was wondering if I could seek your advice. My tendency is to use PHP since that’s what I know and have used most in the past. Though, after talking to a lot of folks (namely Googlers…go figure), I’ve been encouraged to instead choose Python.

Seeing as you’re my favorite PHP Terrorist I was wondering if you have any specific thoughts on the subject.

I still need to write another article on Python, but the short answer is I think if it’s web, PHP is probably the better choice.

“PHP is the shortest point between two distances on the web.”
—Me, tongue-tied at a talk

However there are some mitigating factors to consider:Continue reading about Python vs. PHP for web after the jump

Posted on by tychay 8

1500 Lines of Code

Original article posted to PHP Advent 2009, Click to jump to discussion. Happy Holidays to you and yours!

Even the best of us can only write 1500 lines of code a day, so we need to make those lines count.

There were so many great articles in PHP Advent this year, that I couldn’t think of a good topic—I like to believe my peers stole all the good ideas this year… 🙂
Continue reading about Read about 1500 lines of code after the jump

Posted on by tychay 14

bebo recruiting math

Bebo Logo
Image via Wikipedia

I got an e-mail from a recruiter at Bebo looking to hire me into the same position I had at Tagged. This caught my eye:

ABOUT BEBO:
Bebo (www.bebo.com), Located in San Francisco; with over 40 million registered members viewing billions of pages monthly, it is the largest social networking site in the UK, Ireland, and New Zealand, and the third largest behind MySpace and Facebook in the US. Officially launched in July 2005, received the 2006 Webby Award People’s Vote as the best social networking site in the world.

Our people can boast demonstrated records of success in viral online marketing and social media, having come to us from such companies as Google, Ringo, Tickle, BirthdayAlarm, Friendster, Organic, Yahoo, and MTV.

From its $15M initial round of funding back in early 2006 (from Benchmark Capital) Bebo has enjoyed positive cash flow since day one.

Our recent merger with AOL will bring tremendous opportunity by combining Bebo’s fast growing user base with the social graph of AIM and other assets.

Third place in the U.S.—really?

Facebook US rank: 3
MySpace US rank: 5
Tagged US rank: 108
Hi5 US rank: 288
Bebo US rank: 394
Friendster US rank: 534

Hmm, Tagged passed Bebo just after they got bought out by AOL for $850 million (and while I was working there) and Friendster right before I left. Given that Friendster passed on hiring me twice—that’s the sweet taste of satisfaction! 😀

Depending on the metric, you might make a case for it being #4, but to displace Tagged? Really? Not to mention, completely pissing on the hard work I did there. 😉 Besides this slight isn’t exactly going to make me jump ship from my new job back to my old one—just with a different color scheme.

Continue reading about Remembering bebo after the jump

Posted on by tychay 6

Twitter's Retweet API

Twitter
Image via Wikipedia

Apparently, I’ve gotten the beta for Twitter’s new Retweet feature, so I thought I’d use this moment to rant a little bit about the Twitter Retweet API.

The Retweet API is actually a set of five API functions, and, as per Twitter’s horrible documentation habit, they’re spread across one namespace (“statuses”) but two different classes: “timeline methods” and “status methods.”

I’m not sure how I have the retweet beta UI, but traditional retweets aren’t reformatted automatically for me (the first entry is a retweet). *sigh*

Continue reading about Things that annoy me about retweet after the jump

Posted on by tychay 1

TumblrPad

(Full disclosure: I work on Automattic, which makes software and services in the same space as SixApart.)

Image representing Six Apart as depicted in Cr...
Image via CrunchBase

Today, TypePad announced the launch of TypePad micro, which I found out about from John Gruber’s somewhat snarky tweet.

This marks the first time (to my knowledge) that SixApart is embarking on a free hosted blogging service, so it was definitely worth a look, especially given some of the things we’ve worked on, have recently got working, and will work on at here at Automattic. Besides, free is the price I like 🙂

Registering for a new account (especially with the Facebook Connect integration) was so easy, I thought, “Wait! Where is my Staples button?”

 

It only took seconds to create this blog using the default look and feel.

The blog, though there is some confusion as to the URL, has an aesthetically pleasing layout. It certainly seems to share a lot of influences from Twitter, WordPress P2, Pownce, etc. but the biggest influence has to be Tumblr.

Continue reading about Thoughts about TypePad micro after the jump

Posted on by tychay 7

Vivanista

(Disclaimer: I work for Automattic which contributes to the development of WordPress, WordPressMU, BuddyPress, and bbPress.)

At this month’s Bay Area WordPress Meetup, there were four interesting talks. One of which wised me up to the Zemanta WordPress plugin, which I’m using now, any content creator (or Another Search Startup) should check it out—it’s quite clever.

But the presentation I want to focus on in this article, was Annie Vranizan’s Vivanista demo.

The Vivanista homepage

Vivanista is a social network for women focusing on philanthropy. Even if you don’t have a passing interest in such things, the website deserves a look, it’s quite an attractive website and built in record time—a couple of months.

Being a vertical, this is mostly the territory of white-label social networks, and more recently, Facebook. In fact, if you look at their team, it reads more like a group blog than a company.

That’s because it is.

What makes Vivanista so interesting is that it is built on WordPress MU blog publishing platform in combination with Andy Peatling’s BuddyPress plugin.

Continue reading about More about how Vivanista was created after the jump

Posted on by tychay 8