by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 30, 2008 | Photography, Photography Equipment
I’ve a fairly short history with film, only started on it in September 2006 and it’s pretty much taken over for me from much of my digital camera work.
Since September 2006 I bought quite a few bits of film camera equipment, lenses aside this is what I have:
The most recent additions are the bottom two, they’re medium format cameras and something I’ve been intending to get into for a while. I bought the Seagull on eBay for cheap to see if I like the format and have some great results with it, especially considering it cost only GBP40.
So after loving the medium format as a medium I decided to get a proper medium format camera, I decided on a SLR rather than a TLR so got the Bronica SQA, it’s a square format medium format camera with interchangeable lenses, backs and finders. You can even buy Polaroid or digital backs for it to.
We took it out yesterday during lunch for a quick test and I love the shots we got, it’s lovely to use though it has no light meter so I use one of my hand held light meters, the shot below and ones it links too were all done with a 1 degree spot meter and metered using the Zone Systems.
I love working with the medium format negatives, they are roughtly 6 cm x 6cm each with big generous borders between negatives. This makes working with them so easy, easy to cut, easy to handle safely without touching the photos etc.
I found my developing results with them were much better than with 35mm, maybe I have just been more careful, will need to see when I do my next 35mm and compare.
Since using film my general photography has improved a lot, I now find that I am forced to spend a lot more time thinking about a shot, putting up tripod, metering it by hand, looking at every bit of detail of the photo to do the metering correctly etc, my % of shots taken to shots that I love is much higher than before and as a result even my digital photography has improved. I take fewer shots and get many more keepers. I think I’ll be doing film work till they stop making it.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 19, 2008 | Front Page
I just received the following in the post:
Thanks you for submitting your application for British citizenship. I am pleased to say that the application has been succesful and you will shortly receive a letter inviting you to attend a citizenship ceremony.
Hooray.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 17, 2008 | Photography
Flickr and The Library of Congress announced a project together to put a whole load of the Libraries photos up and to ask the public to create meta data for these photos – tags, notes etc.
This is a phenomenal achievement for Flickr in my mind, looking through these photos there are some really absolutely amazing shots showing American life in the early 1900s, depression years, the war etc.
I spent some time over lunch browsing some of these, the machinery, clothes, culture, cars, architecture, it is all just amazing I wish there were such a good record of the UK available to the public.
Some of the images are just great to look at like the one below from 1911, that’s a hand held large format camera, amazing.
Others show the truly amazing work that photographers did in those days and frankly makes me wish I can even come close to this kind of shot on my digital cameras.
Click on these images and look at them, they are phenomenally well done the richness and dynamic range of color in those shots far out paces the results I tend to see on digital. I wish self developing color slides wasn’t such a pain else I’d start doing medium format color transparencies right away.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 11, 2008 | Front Page
I am under contract to be systems administrator at a Social Media company called Handmade Mobile, their prime product is Flirtomatic (You might want to wait till you’re home from work to visit the site), a site for adults who just want to chat and meet fun people, it’s not a dating site in the normal sense it’s more like MSN with with some profile searching, pictures, etc added.
I got involved with them about 2 or 2.5 years ago they were having some issues and needed a re-do of their servers, network, etc. I designed a simple easy to manage network and put in servers built the way I liked them using Open Source technologies which I still maintain and administer today.
They’ve been making some good waves in the last while, 2 items I think are worth mentioning:
Back in September they set a in-house record for monthly WAP impressions with more than 100 Million WAP impressions in the month. One report on this mentioned that In March the amount of searches across all the major search engines combined done from phones were around 20 million, so this puts the 100 Million WAP impressions in a extremely good light.
Today I got news of another impressive bit of stat about them – A company called WatchMouse who specializes in monitoring web site response and stability did a test against 104 Social Media sites for performance, time to load the whole page etc. they also penalized your points for any failed loads etc.
Out of the lot Facebook were the worst, Flirtomatic though came fourth which I have to say I am very impressed by as Flirtomatic has huge amounts of photos on their front page compared to number 1 faceparty for example. Faceparty’s front page weighs in at a very light 44KB (1KB for the HTML) while Flirtomatic is 630KB (17KB for the HTML) so I think being 4th fastest given its bulk is great.
Anyway, kudos to them ๐
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 9, 2008 | Usefull Things
This is probably old news to most people but I need to remember this so I figured I may as well blog it.
I made a mysqldump that just takes all databases into a single file, already I want to kick myself because I know if I ever need to import it there will be troubles because the target database will already have the mysql database etc.
Really I should have used MySQL Parallel Dump that makes files per tables etc and is much faster but it didn’t exist at the time.
So how to pull lines 8596 to 9613 from this big file? It’s trivial with sed:
here is a sample file:
$ cat > file.txt
line 1
line 2
line 3
line 4
line 5
^D
$ sed -n '2,4p;4q' file.txt
line 2
line 3
line 4
The sed command just tells it the start to end line and also to quit processing when it hits the end line, really kewl.
