REverberations - Photography

Land Update

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 13 Mar 2010 14:49:17 -0600

We're spending a reasonably amount of time just mowing our block of land, and the associated bills with no real benefit are driving us to focus on saving to move on there!

The first structure went up some time ago - I built a compost bin! Compost is rather difficult to move between properties, so our previous two have been left with a nice supply thanks to all our kitchen waste. There wasn't much point doing that again, so a bit of research and time later, and our land was no longer 5 empty acres.

We've cleared some of the fallen trees and turned it into firewood, discovering our local wildlife in the process.

Not long after we purchased the block, there was of course the question of how to tend so much grass. The answer was served up courtesy of an eBay-ed large commercial ride-on mower (diesel to run on 100% biodiesel, of course!) which we collected from the Hunter Valley thanks to the impressive grunt of the VW and a trailer we decided to buy to do the move ourselves. Both of these have proved great investments, even with a bit of repair work we needed to do to the mower.

Starting this coming week our fencing starts to go up. The neighbor we are sharing the fence with unfortunately started the relationship off on a less-than-optimal note by reneging on a deal we had, however this is hopefully behind us now.

The neighbor on the other side is a far different story - it turns out I used to work with him back at Strathfield Car Radios 13 years ago! One of those real small-world stories, and enough to completely overpower the let-down of the other neighbour. He fenced his block with the help of his father who lives around the corner, running an olive farm. This means he can borrow farming equipment as needed, although yesterday he had broken his slasher. The fact that he was slashing at given he has sheep on there shows just how much the recent rain has made the grass grow. Our block has sure taken some mowing in recent times!

For the fencing we have to clear out a section of odd fenced garden that is mostly in our property but goes into the block next door which we want to separate ourselves from with the fence, this is tomorrow's task.

The back fence is somewhat intact so we've asked the fencer to keep what he can to help keep our costs down, and I spent some time clearing away the blackberries and other overgrowth from the farm behind us with another new piece of gardening equipment we're going to need - a petrol whipper-snipper (using our electric one when the nearest power point we own is 3-4km away was proving a little difficult).

We have decided for reasons of cost not to fence the front for now, instead waiting for a final decision on where our driveway is to go (there's a drainage ditch which if we are careful we can drive across but this won't work in the long-term for delivery trucks, etc.)

Once that is done, we're pretty much done with the first phase of our project - get land and boundaries established. After that, the next phase begins - Services - where we get power, sewerage, water, hot water and phone available on the block in preparation for the following phase. This will be when we put up the barn with kitchenette, bathroom, heating, etc., then back in the caravan we purchased as cheap bedrooms and kitchen that we can sell later (currently sitting outside our rental property), and move onto our land!

Current hopeful plan has us there in spring, after the new baby comes along. We could be there far earlier but have to pace our spending according to our earnings.

I have a flickr set called Build on Razorback where I'm putting pictures of the process, and am also working on a more specific website to showcase our crazy plans as they evolve.

How to take better-than-average photos Part 2: Equipment

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 26 Sep 2009 09:05:00 -0500

You really need two cameras - one for the spur-of-the-moment always with you captures like I mentioned in Part 1, and one for when you have decided that whatever you are doing justifies having a better camera with you. For me that's often time with my family, visiting new places, and sometimes old places that I want to view in a different light.

For this second camera, you have already made the decision that photos will be taken, so I don't see that you want to skimp on the sort of camera you choose to lug with you just to save a bit of size. Your $200 point-and-shoot camera is no huge improvement over decent phone cameras these days, and you still have to make the active decision to pick it up and take it with you. If that's all your budget extends to, then save until you can afford $600 or so for a basic DSLR, and keep shooting with your phone camera in the meantime.

Here's the the three main reasons why your second camera should be a Digital Single-Lens Reflex (DSLR) camera:

Larger sensor size - The biggest problem with phone and point-and-shoot cameras is that the part of it which captures the image is physically too small to gather enough light to enable you to avoid using a flash. Smaller sensors are "noisier" than bigger ones, which means you get little speckles everywhere, especially in low light photos. NOTE: Do not confuse sensor size with megapixels! Megapixels (MP) mean practically nothing for the sort of photos most people want to take and print. My main camera is 6MP on a big sensor, which is infinitely superior to 10MP on a tiny sensor like most point-and-shoots have these days. I have no intention of upgrading in the near future, until I can get an even bigger sensor with a higher number of pixels.

Interchangeable Lenses - DSLRs separate the bit of camera that captures the image (the "sensor") from the glass in front of that sensor (the "lens") into two separately purchasable and interchangeable pieces. In your bag of photographic tricks, you really want to have a "fast" or "wide-aperture" lens. What this does is two main things - allows you to capture even more light at dark times, which is especially important to allow you to avoid using your flash, and at all times allows you to have your subject only in focus, with the background a nice blur. Humans like this in photos because it's the same way we see the world through our eyes.
These types of lenses don't exist for point-and-shoot or phone cameras.

Fast auto-focus - The best photos are of things that happen very quickly, captured forever visually rather than as a passing moment in time in your memory. The auto-focus systems on DSLR cameras are second to none, meaning that the camera doesn't get in the way of you capturing what you want while it "hunts" around looking for the object in the frame to focus on. This is hugely important with photos of children!

By the time you have pressed the button on your point-and-shoot camera, waited for it to focus, startled the subject with your flash, then seen it displayed on the screen at the back, I have 5 or even 10 good natural-light, in-focus images to choose between later stored on my memory card.

Laws of physics dictate a few things here too - you want to be capturing as much light as possible, so to do this you need a lens that lets lot of light in (which is what a wide aperture means) and a big sensor to store as much of that light as possible at any given time.

Upcoming technology like "micro four-thirds" seeks to provide a camera with interchangeable lenses and a sensor size bigger than point-and-shoot cameras but still physically smaller than DSLRs, however current incarnations lack fast auto-focus, and their sensor sizes are still significantly smaller than even low-end DSLRs.
To me these compromises don't make sense given that I've already decided to take my second camera along - I just think about what one or two lenses I might need in any given situation, put one on my camera and the other in my pocket or bag and off I go.

I've deliberately left my specific equipment until the end - unfortunately camera brands are largely not compatible with each other so you do have to choose a brand up front when getting into DSLRs. In all honesty you are best with either Canon or Nikon as they have the largest range of lenses available, and have the biggest userbase to swap lenses with and learn from. At the low end of the market they are no more than $100 more expensive than any other brand and this is a very small price to pay for their years of experience.
I chose Nikon for no good reason over Canon other than I have a pro photographer friend who also uses Nikon who gave me a few pointers to get started. Unless you do too, choose either, it doesn't matter in the long run.

I have a Nikon D40, their most inexpensive DSLR camera. The fast lens I use mostly is the 35mm f/1.8. Combined, these two were under $1000. Go and get something like this (today probably a D3000 and the same lens in Nikon, or a Canon with their 50mm f/1.8) and start taking better pictures! Nothing else is required other than practice to take your pictures from average to well above average.

Spend any extra budget on more/better lenses, not more expensive cameras. Your DSLR will be worth nothing in a few years and you'll want a newer one, but your lenses will keep on working and may even outlast you. Just connect your old lenses to your new (same brand) camera and they will work happily together, whereas your point-and-shoot and the lens permanently attached to it will be worth nothing and useless when you upgrade.

A quick note on what is known as "focal length" - a lens has a millimeter (mm) number which represents how much of the picture your eyes would see the camera is "zoomed" into. 18mm is a reasonable width for "normal" pictures of buildings, rooms, etc., through to 200mm which is for enlarging things far away. Most lenses are "zoom" lenses which offer a choice of more than one of these focal lengths (eg. a range like 18-135mm), but not all. Specifically, the fast lenses I use (which are the ones I can afford!) are not zoom lenses, as they have only one focal length like 35mm or 50mm. These are also termed "prime" lenses.

I find 35mm a good useful focal length for the camera I use. 50mm is a bit more difficult to fit everything in that I want for many shots.

Purely for interest's sake (none of the following gear is really needed, and you don't actually need zoom lenses at all - that's what your feet are for!), I also have for other use:

18-70mm lens - this is a well-built zoom lens with great image quality and a wide aperture at full zoom (f/4.5, which is quite a bit more light getting in than most other similar lenses at this range which are only around f/5.6). I use this second-most often when I want the versatility of a zoom. I purchased it second-hand off eBay for about $200 and repaired it with information I found online.

55-200mm lens - this is for visiting zoos and things where your subject is far away. It has image stabilisation for reducing shaky pictures that you often get when zoomed in a long way, and cost about $250 new.

50mm f/1.8 lens - I got this fast lens before the 35mm f/1.8 was available and still use it for portrait shots where I have time to focus manually (It won't autofocus on the D40 or other low-end Nikon DSLRs like the D60, D3000, or D5000). It cost about $200 new and takes technically the best pictures of any of these lenses.

External angle-adjustable flash - For the situations when you really really want to use flash, at least bounce it off the roof so you emulate natural light with one of these. Cost me $65 brand new. Note that I use this far less than I thought I might have - I just got better at increasing ambient light and use fast lenses.

Remote control - Handy cheap little remote shutter button that's much easier to use when taking self portraits than running around setting the timer.

I used to have a 18-135mm lens - This is a handy travel lens which Liz took overseas. It zooms further in than the 18-55mm but is quite a bit bigger and heavier and if you are picky, the images it captures aren't as good. Cost about $280 used. I used it so little that I sold it - the compromises in weight and image quality just weren't worth it to me.
(If you have piles of money and don't mind the weight, get the $1000-ish 18-200mm instead, it's fantastic).
I still have as a spare the 18-55mm lens - this lens was practically free with the camera, so you get it for your $1000 total kit price too. It's light and remarkably good, but the 18-70 is better.

How to take better-than-average photos - Part 1: Techniques

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 08:11:00 -0500

I've had a number of people recently mention that they are impressed with the photos I have online, and to be honest heaping more praise than I really deserve. I did do a 1U Photography course at high school which helped me understand the basics, but I'm certainly not professional. (If you are, then you will find the rest of these blog entries a vast simplification. Please feel free to suggest improvements I can make.)

With the rise of people being able to simply share photos online, it has become much easier to spot some basic mistakes that people keep making, and I thought I'd throw some simple advice out there so that you can hopefully take "good" photos too.

Always have a camera with you - This is a variation on the photographer's mantra "the best camera is the one you have with you". The idea is that the whole point of photography is to have photos of interesting subject matter, and you'll always be able to grab these photos if you have a phone camera of some sort. (You could also lug your bigger camera around with you, but this is far less likely to happen in practice).
In reality today, this means get a decent phone with a 2 or 3 megapixel auto-focus camera. (If you have kids, get one that records video too.) This will produce acceptable images in daylight and crappy ones which still trigger the memories of the event at other times.

Think about your composition - If you're taking lots of photos (and you should be! Plan to throw lots of rubbish ones away), you won't have time to edit them all in Photoshop later (I don't even have this program). As you are about to press the shutter, think to yourself "could this be improved if I move the framing around a little? What about if my subject is off to one side, looking across the frame rather than straight at me, smiling? What about if I was a bit closer or further away?"
Some people bang on about the rule of thirds and "power points" but all you need to know is that putting your subject away from the middle of the frame will make your photo more interesting than right in the middle like most people do.

Vectors - and this is one that I did learn at school - look for interesting straight lines in your photos. Both solid lines like a gutter or a side of a building, and imagined lines like the line somebody's gaze is making. I find this is probably the single biggest factor that will make you move from "mediocre" to "good". Try it for a while each time you take a photo.

Don't use a flash - Really, flash photography just looks plain ugly compared to natural lighting - the subject is super-bright while everything else goes dark. There are a number of ways around using a flash, but the simplest and cheapest is just to think - turn on the lights in the room, get your subject to move so that they are bathed in whatever ambient light there is. Of course, better equipment can help too (see below).

All of that said, eventually your phone camera isn't going to cut it. You'll reach a point where you have a very interesting subject but poor technical image quality, and you want to improve the latter. Let me stress however that the former is more important to get correct first!

That's why I've made discussions about equipment a separate post, over at Part 2.

(It should be noted that I may in fact owe my father and both my grandfathers a debt of gratitude for some photographic skill as they all are/were fantastic at it. My brother now even makes some of his living from photography.)

Fully Sick

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 15 Jun 2009 08:05:42 -0500

We're all feeling rather ill with cold-like symptoms (Liz is quick to point out they are not flu-like, and having dealt with suspected swine flue cases in quarrantine at her work I guess she'd know).
This has brought a return to the horrible nights of no Phoebe sleep, although worse because she screams for her mum who herself needs about a week of sleep.
We're mostly through this, having had Phoebe sleep through from 7:30 until 4am today, which is a huge improvement so we aren't complaining (much). Unfortunately we've missed a few occasions due to not wanting to go anywhere to spread our nasties around - sorry those we had to cancel with.
There are recent pictures added, with more coming soon (especially now that my new Macbook has a built in SD card slot, and I'm having a great deal of fun with the new 35mm 1.8 Nikkor lens ! ).

It's quiet in here

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 17 Aug 2008 00:20:49 -0500

So make sure you aren't missing out on the updates which are happening pictorially via my Flickr Photostream.

The first additional lens has turned up for our new camera - a Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D.

One of the things I've always love and missed since I last had a (film) SLR is shallow depth-of-field, like in this picture of Alina or this one of Dad and Phoebe. You just can't get that with point-and-shoot, and you get less of it with the 18-55 kit lens that came with our camera which only goes down as low as f/3.5.

On our D40 the 50mm lens manual-focus only - it's great fun getting back to that sort of raw photography. It's also great for low light - I've never been a fan of flash and this makes it unnecessary in many situations.

A 55-200mm telephoto should be arriving on Monday, giving pretty much a full versatile set of lenses for most occasions.

iPhoto Libraries in mythgallery (mythtv)

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 20:19:46 -0500

Here's some information about a personal coding itch I scratched recently, on the off chance that it helps someone else out there. Certainly my Google skills didn't turn up anyone else who had solved the same problem.

Problem Description
You have a Mac somewhere where you use Apple's excellent iPhoto to manage your huge digital photography collection.
However, you don't have (and most likely don't want) a spiffy but locked-down and feature-light Apple TV to display them on your TV, instead preferring the excellent and far more versatile open-source mythtv.
Mythtv has mythgallery which displays pictures from a normal filesystem reasonably well, but the poor thing has little to no understanding of the complexities of Apple's "iPhoto Library" on-disk layout. I'm talking Albums basically, plus an understanding of "Originals" versus "Modified". I just want it to be how it looks in iPhoto, but on my big LCD screen in front of the couch, controlled with my myth remote. Is that too much to ask??!

Research/Analysis
Can't find anyone else with this issue so figure "how hard can it be?". Not very, it turned out, at least to get something working, if ugly.
The perl Mac::iPhoto looks like a good place to start, but since it hasn't been touched since 2003 it certainly doesn't do anything much useful on my current (7.1.3) iPhoto Library.
It uses Mac::PropertyList to do the parsing of the xml file, which doesn't seem to work either. After much fiddling it looks like the AlbumData.xml file in the iPhoto Library actually is invalid - it doesn't have the proper header. First hack Mac::PropertyList to accept the dodgy header, but later decide to keep that standard and put the hack into my script instead.

Design
Decide to make a directory next to the iPhoto Library which is full of symlinks pointing into the actual library. Directories in this tree will correspond to Albums in iPhoto, and the links will be named such that the alphabetical order used by mythgallery corresponds to the order in iPhoto.
Try and get this working on the linux box and also via Samba but in the end it's simplest to run the code and create the symlink tree on my mac and then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree across to the linux box.
Don't use samba, it stuffs up the annoying ":" that iPhoto uses in paths, at least for me. rsync handles it fine, it's not even that Mac-specific one to my knowledge, just whatever is on my Ubuntu box.

Code
You'll need Mac::iPhoto 0.1-timg, which is the modification of 0.1 available on cpan to work with iPhoto 7.1.3, and Mac::PropertyList 1.31 from cpan. I guess I should put my code on CPAN, but just wanted to get it all up here for now.
Once that's available, you will of course need the actual iPhotoToDirectories script. It's all hard-coded - but you wouldn't have made it this far if you couldn't edit it to work in your situation :)

Operation
You'll need the same directory structure on both the mac and the linux box as the symlinks get created on the mac but are de-referenced on the linux box.
Once it's all in place, run iPhotoToDirectories on your mac whenever you want. It takes a long time, so I wouldn't script it. Maybe an overnight cronjob if you keep your Mac on all night. I don't so I just run it when I remember.
Then rsync both the iPhoto Library and the symlink tree to the linux box.
Finally, chmod -R a+rx the linux directories if the uid on your mac is different from your myth user.
And then, assuming mythgallery can navigate to that symlink directory, it should work and the browsing should be significantly more useful than it was before browsing the raw directory.

Known issues

Mac::iPhoto's parsing is amazingly slow, ie. ~30mins for me
hard-coded paths
ampersands (&) in album names break things
empty albums should be not put into output
sorting could be much improved
would be nice to understand Events too, hmmm...
lots more UNknown issues, for sure. Let me know!

But hey it works! And with a full-time life that's enough for me right now.

New Camera

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 30 Jun 2008 14:17:23 -0500

Last time I bought a camera, just in time for our Honeymoon to Eastern Europe, I briefly considered a Digital SLR camera. However at the time, what you could get for your money plus the added inconvenience of having to carry all sorts of gear around swung me to the high-end of the point and shoot market instead. The Panasonic I ended up with has been a great camera, and as a one camera to have it or it's more modern siblings are a great choice.

Time moves on though, and I now have 5MP auto-focus with flash in my pocket at all times thanks to my Nokia N95 phone, and increasingly I simply can't differentiate in my image editing software whether the pictures were taken with the Nokia or the Panasonic.

So, in the interest of higher quality pictures of Phoebe (and many other things, of course), I jumped at the possibility of a real proper DSLR for under $600, the Nikon D40. To be honest I wasn't completely convinced that I'd be able to tell the difference in the image quality, but the first batch off the memory card proved otherwise. I'm really happy I went with it, and now both Liz and I have to learn even more about how to make the most of the new toy.

I found this site invaluable in learning all about these sorts of cameras, and showing me that even the entry-level DSLRs are now fantastic cameras - what really makes a difference is the lens.

So, now it's time to be very selective and work out what extra lenses are the most sensible to purchase.

Some examples of the pictures to appear soon, of course.

Rolling Over

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 28 Apr 2008 09:04:55 -0500

Just a quick post because last night Phoebe managed to roll herself over! (I know, if you're not a parent, it's not exciting. Don't worry, I used to feel the same.)

From her back to her front, during her 'nappy-off' time when she's quite a bit more mobile, but obviously a little more care needs to be taken by us parents during this time!

More pics online from Therese and Antony's excellent wedding at Luna Park too. Best Wishes to them both and congratulations on a great day. Thanks for including Phoebe.

Phoebe Tests Flickr Video

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 15 Apr 2008 12:16:48 -0500

Wedding Photos

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 06 Jan 2008 15:17:23 -0600

Yes, this rightfully belongs in the amazingly slack category, but I've put our profesional wedding photos online!

In my defence, it was a year later that we actually got the digital versions, but that still makes me over 10 months late...

Belinda & Bryce's Wedding

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 08:01:37 -0600

Had a great day out yesterday at Belinda and Bryce's Wedding. It was at times a bit of a stretch for us but worth it to see all our friends and of course wish the happy couple best of luck for their future together.

I took plenty of photos at the ceremony. Perhaps not as many or with as much talent as Chris - the photographer from our wedding who's work so impressed Belinda and Bryce that they booked him as well.

Will trade money for sleep

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 16 Dec 2007 07:33:18 -0600

But I don't think you can do that.

Actually, to be honest, it's getting better. Partially because Liz isn't waking me up during the night, she's just doing baby things by herself. This is nice of her, but not really fair, and I'm trying to get her to involve me more, but at the end of the day, since there is no feeding schedule yet, it's highly likely that Phoebe will need a feed anyway, so Liz will be involved eventually.

We had a bit of a scare last week with both of the girls going back to hospital for a couple of minor complications, but they seem to be mostly working themselves out. Our gut instinct that the local doctor's advice was rubbish proved well-founded after speaking to the hospital's top paediatrician.

Still going well with the cloth nappies, especially so since we got our new washing machine. And dishwasher, and big TV. Yes, we aren't supposed to be able to afford such things with a new bub and me off work, but that's the magic of 12 months interest free, and some times you just have to get things at the right time.

I've re-jigged Phoebe's homepage to point straight to the photos for now - less hassle for me to manage when we're between other things. Photos continue to appear there as we add them!

Things

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 26 Oct 2007 09:15:32 -0500

Well, you can probably guess from the slackness in blogging I'm showing here that life has been busy. The most obvious reason is of course the baby who is showing all signs of being healthy, and arriving early December. The midwife thinks possibly earlier, but we'd rather it not because she is away until the end of November.

There's modern cloth nappies galore here now, and buckets for dirty ones, plus of course clothes, wraps, furniture, car seat, pram, you name it. I've heard it described as the biggest consumer spend a couple goes through (after housing), and it's truly scary what some companies tell you that you 'need' to have.

We've been to birthing and parenting classes and spent countless hours reading stuff online so apparently we now know all, true experts in the field. Except it will of course have no bearing on the reality of actually having a child to look after 24 hours a day.

It was interesting to compare out situation to others in the class though - we're much better off and more prepared than several others, so that gives us a bit of hope.

Trying to organise a couple of short holidays before the due date too.

Some other quick point-form news:

Rain. Yay.
I did the Spring Cycle and home again, personal best time. Then we slept most of the afternoon.
We have a new home phone, this one is VoIP from MyNetFone. Pretty amazing deal, recommended.
Renovations are all done, except we need some new blinds now. Thanks to our parents for helping out with bits and pieces.
The car had it's one year (and first!) service, no problems found. We also have some fuel containers to stop us trekking out to Marrickville all the time. It's going to get a lot less use now that Liz has finished work.
Had a fair few gigs with both bands recently, two of which have been the best gigs we've done with the respective bands. There's few more before the end of the year (and my free time!).

Recent Photos

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 25 Sep 2007 13:20:11 -0500

I've uploaded a few various photos to my Flickr account showing some of our recent wanderings around the place.

Live Green Festival

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 24 Aug 2007 13:42:18 -0500

The City of Sydney is running a Live Green festival tomorrow, I'm going to try and make it. Have to get off my lazy bum and cycle in, I've slackened off a bit with the recent nasty weather.

Everyone's photos of the festival (including mine hopefully) will be on Flickr, which is cool in itself.

Not Enough Happy Posts Recently

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 24 Jun 2007 21:12:36 -0500

So here's one. You may not have yet discovered Cute Overload.

If not, the best introduction I can think of is this post.

Always a great site for a lift when you're in a less than 100% mood.

Greek Photos Online

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 06 Apr 2007 21:49:24 -0500

Have done some more photo editing and have put some of the best Greek photos online here.

Hens / Bucks

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 12 Feb 2006 12:36:32 -0600

Not feeling too bad today after yesterday's rather extended and great fun Hens and Buck's night. Thanks to everyone that made it along to help us celebrate our respective last weeks or so of "freedom".
I'll let the photos speak for themselves.

Edit: Dad's photos of the day are up over here.

Pictures

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sun, 15 Jan 2006 10:34:40 -0600

Down a bit on the left are some pictures I upload now and then. Previously they were just static images, but I've changed over to the Flash version of the Flickr thumbnail viewer. This is because it shows much more than just the last three pictures I've uploaded, and in a way that grabs your attention a little more.
If you don't have a Flash plugin for your browser, this link may help you grab one.

By the way, there's plenty more pictures in there now too. Just click on one and start browsing, or you can view them all.

(Yet another) New Camera

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Tue, 10 Jan 2006 06:58:38 -0600

Originally we couldn't work out how to budget it in, but we have found ways to purchase a nice new camera for the upcoming honeymoon (less than six weeks away - so excited!).
Let's get the obvious line out of the way - I'll try very hard hard (and Liz will never stop reminding me, I suspect) not to leave it on a train this time.
For what we wanted to spend, and the size we were prepared to lug, the clear winner was the Panasonic DMC-FZ5. 5 megapixel (lots of detail captured), 12x optical zoom (to see things a long long way away) on a high quality Leica lens, full manual controls (to have lots of control over how the pictures turn out), and just the right size to sling over your shoulder.
Yes, we already have a digital camera - but at 3 megapixel, 3x optical zoom and no manual controls it was going to be a bit limiting, although admittedly it served us quite well for the second half of the trip last time.
Some pictures to come, obviously.
The other option would have been a Digital SLR of some sort, but while that would have given us technically a superior camera, to get the same sort of zoom range would have required spending over three times as much as we did on this, and then having a huge pack of gear to carry full of lenses and the much larger camera.

Google Earth + GPS = Bliss

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 18:08:50 -0600

Google Earth really rocks our world. It is the killer app - especially since I stumbled across a non-official Mac version :)
Before Liz and I left for our trip to Europe last time, my over-kind work mates gave me GPS. This was a fun toy to carry around the place, but the true value has only just been made apparent to me.
You see, anywhere we were, we could make a waypoint, kind of a "we were here" mark in space. Now, many years later, I managed to get my brain in gear enough to work out how to get those waypoints over to the ultra-fantastic tool that is Google Earth.
The results are totally engrossing - witness here the original photo of where Liz and I sat on top of Mount Errigal in Ireland, and as we had enough fore-thought to make a waypoint to prove that we actually made it, here's how it looks in Google Earth (kmz).
Homework for the reader - use that kmz link (which should load in Google Earth), and fly around, comparing it to pictures before and after the one of Liz and I linked above (use the arrows above each picture). Remember that the highest-resolution data isn't even available for this particular location - others look far better.
We can do this for so many places we stayed, climbed, visited or just wanted to remember that it is now amazing seeing this information overlayed on the planet.
Edit: Sorry, comments disabled on this post due to spam. I guess that's the price of being noticed...

Reuters Pictures of the Year 2005

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Fri, 23 Dec 2005 12:59:41 -0600

I'm not the world's biggest fan of big media, but they do keep some good photographers on their books. Check out some impressive pictures of world events over here (flash-only).

Camera Phone Lenses

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Wed, 07 Dec 2005 10:28:56 -0600

I've said it publicly to a number of people before, but this story reminded me I haven't posted it here.
I would pay good money for a 3+ mega pixel camera phone, where good optics could be optionally screwed on. Kind of like a mini-SLR. Most of the technology needed for a decent consumer digital camera can already fit in a camera, if it isn't already. But there's no substitute for good optics. I have heard of "liquid" lenses which may be substitutes, but right now I'd be prepared to have to attach a small-sized lens to my phone if I wanted to use it as a decent camera, as long as I didn't have to for quick pub shots, etc.
Don't forget, I'm talking about consumer snaps, not professional or even prosumer.

Update 8/7/2006: Looks like someone was listening. Pity it only appears to work with old phones - I'm actually in the market for a new phone in the next month or two.

Steam Trains Pt I

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Mon, 26 Sep 2005 10:57:20 -0500

Yesterday Liz and I (and a few others, it turns out) had Fun Day Out On A Steam Train, Part I.
This was part of the 150 Years of NSW Railways celebrations, which means that pseudo-Trainspotters like me have lots of things to look at.
For Part I of our celebrations, Liz and I took in a relatively tame Steam Shuttle from Central to Hurstville. Of course, living one station South of Hurstville meant that we had to get a slow slow Cityrail train in to Central first, then the shuttle back almost to Penshurst (it went a bit further past Hurstville, to the end of the third track) then into Central again.
It was great fun, and the best part was the looks on people's faces as we steamed and tooted past them - both the older members of society who would remember when this was a normal occurrence and also the younger members who would never have seen such a beast outside of Thomas the Tank Engine.
Around Central there was a static display of lots of trains and rail cars and things which we had a wander looking at. Ross that I work with was there also, snapping away like myself and so many other people. From Skyping them in the evening we found out Jono and Penny were wandering around the place also.

There were also some old busses on display, which we rode around the city a bit past the Powerhouse museum and on to Mortuary station - another relic of a bygone era.
We had a quick look around there before wandering up to Surry Hills to the Porterhouse for the best Sunday Roast with pints since we had many many of them all around the UK. A long lazy afternoon was spent sipping, reading and trying to convince our stomachs that the huge piles of food we had just thrown at them should be processed.

Interesting observations:

Liz noted that around 95% of the hard-core trainspotters had facial hair, mostly greying beards. I'm half way there!
The trip from Central to Hurstville and back was completed in around the time it takes CityRail trains to cover the distance one-way. And it's not just the stations, the trains went quite a lot faster in the clear than timetabled trains do. This was riding on 150+ year old technology!
A souvineer history book I purchased noted that air conditioning was first introduced in the 1920s in America, and the 1930s here in Oz. The projected timetable for getting all Sydney Suburban trains airconditioned is currently 2010.

There's a few photos of this adventure on my Flickr photostream, which you can also see to the left of this post. If you're a RSS user, put this in your reader to see new pictures when I upload them.

Part II is a day-trip to Robertson at the end of November, which we hope to have a few friends along for as well.

Sydney 3 - 2 Central Coast

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 17 Sep 2005 10:32:37 -0500

Went to watch a game of soccer/football last night at Aussie stadium. It's been a large number of years since we did that. Cheap seats, but still undercover, and a rowdy crowd just up from us proved to make it a great fun night.
This is all in the "new" A-League that Soccer Australia is hoping will make people here finally take interest in the game at a professional level in this country.
Considering that before the season Sydney FC were tipped to win it due to the bigger fanbase and better players, we aren't doing all that well so far.
The worst leaf by far taken out of the English Premiership book however is that you can't watch the games at home unless you have some form of pay TV. Also media here isn't interested in reporting about much that isn't league. At least the cost of cheap seats at two home games a month is cheaper than pay TV, so that may end up being the best option.
Edit: added a couple of photos to my Flickr account - check them out on the left.

Flickr

webmaster@reverb.com.au (reverb) — Sat, 03 Sep 2005 21:55:18 -0500

I'm playing around with Flickr, an online photo-sharing site.
All of my photos are stored in iPhoto, and there's a great plugin you can load into it to give it the ability to upload photos to Flickr from right within iPhoto itself.
So, it happens that about an hour after I had finished a gig with The Honeymakers today, I uploaded a couple of pictures and within five minutes other people somewhere had viewed them. You can find photos based on "tags", so for example I tagged these photos as "jazz", "music", "saxophone", etc. Anyone who searches for these keywords will find my photos, along with those of anyone else who has used the same tags.
Also, if you scroll down this page and look on the left you'll see the latest three photos I have put up on Flickr, without having to leave this page.
If you already track my RSS feed, you may also like to add this one, which will give you an entry every time I upload a photo.