by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 18, 2006 | Photography Equipment
I’ve often wondered about doing my own development of black and white film and full manual cameras but never succumbed to the temptation, till now.
This weekend I picked up a Kodak Retina Reflex IV camera, it’s in mint condition, original box and manual included. It’s missing a lens cap which might pose to be a big hassle as they don’t have what we now consider standard threads on its lens.
The camera is really amazingly built, the full mechanical operation is really impressive and while the ergonomics of using it is totally dismal compared to my Nikon SLR’s I think it’s quite manageable.
I bought it spur of the moment for GBP50 and just popped a color 35mm roll into it for some testing, the results aren’t bad at all:
So my intention with this is to go down the route of black and white film and do my own development, I probably won’t do printing since we have a really good negative scanner here and the printing equipment requires lots of space and a dark room and all that, things I don’t have.
More information about this range of cameras can be found on Wikipedia. The stall I got this one from had one of each of the 4 models made.
by R.I. Pienaar | Sep 15, 2006 | Photography, Photography Equipment
My trusty Nikon D70 has been in for repairs for the best part of a month now, it is suffering from the Blinking Green Light Of Death which is a pretty common bug in the first batches of D70.
It’s now around 2.5 years old which is pretty good going for me with a camera, yet Nikon is still fixing the problem under terms of the warrenty, the only problem is it’s taking some time.
So I picked up a Nikon D80 2 days ago, the body cost me 600 pounds including delivery and a 2 year warrenty, I also got a Nikkor 18-200 VR lens. I am especially excited about the lens as it was promised to be in the shops last November already but it never made it, I’ve been obsessivly looking for one but no suppliers have been able to get stock, 3 weeks ago I found one just sitting on a desk in a shop and immediately picked it up.
I am very impressed with both, the combination together is a really good combination and I do not regret the ยฃ1100 the set put me back for 1 second.
I’ve only taken a few shots with the D80, you can see them here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 30, 2006 | Photography, Usefull Things
Yesterday Flickr announced the previously leaked new feature, an integration of Yahoo! Maps and Flickr.
It is very slick, the integration between Organizr and the maps is way kewl and it does not suffer from the problem of making a mess of your Tags like some of the other options as it maintains an internal data structure.
Their map placing method isn’t too accurate but if you open up a photos properties you can type in exact coordinates which is nice. Searching for photos is now even greater, you can search for photos matching a keyword near a location, or simply explore photos at a specific spot which is great.
The problem is of course that they use Yahoo! Maps, it’s crap unless you live in the states. Resolution and street level maps in Europe and elsewhere leaves much to be desired. It is also much slower than Google Maps.
Today Flickr posted an update to their blog firstly pointing out the amazing uptake in use of this feature in the first 24 hours:
When we were doing our projections for how many photos Flickr members would geotag, we though that we’d hit Spiral Jetty a million in the first month, maybe even as fast as two weeks. Instead, 24 hours in, there were 1,234,384 geotagged photos (and now more than 1.6 million geotagged photos as I write this, about 9 hours later). Crazy!
That is impressive! they also acknowledge the Yahoo Maps problem and I hope they can work with the maps team to quickly address this, though I am not holding my breath, more likely is someone will take the new API calls that Flickr provide and write a mashup using Google Maps that uploads data into this new internal data structures.
I dragged a couple 100 photos onto the map, you can take a look at a map of these here.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 25, 2006 | Code
I previously blogged about a parser for pcap files that will show all SQL queries, you can now get the code for this tool here. It’s very simple, help is in the comment block right at the beginning of the file.
by R.I. Pienaar | Aug 24, 2006 | Uncategorized
I’ve previously blogged about Librarything and said I quite like it.
Feature wise it’s fine, I would have liked to also include my DVD’s etc but mostly I just want the book feature to work.
The authors have been introducing all kinds of new wonderful features like groups etc, but the site is incredibly unstable. Each time I want to go add a new book, I am subjected to 2 hours of downtime, maybe I just have bad luck, but tonight I wanted to add 2 books again and the site was down for a hour again.
No planned notices on the blog (ever) no explanations afterwards, its just down indefinitely. This time it lasted an hour or so. It’s like the image above is their actual home page and the working one is the exception to the rule.
Anyway, other things that annoy me, they have these blog widgets, for putting in your site, but they don’t have a API that has enough features, so I parse the blog widgets to build my current reading list, of course they can’t stop messing with the HTML in these widgets so things keep breaking. I know this isn’t really something that will affect someone who use it on their website, but still it’s irritating.
In that hour I used my backup that I made a while ago of the data (librarything have previously had a disaster where their machines failed, their backups failed and they lost data!) and just imported it all into Delicious Library. It cost me more, but it indexes books, DVDs, games, CD’s etc and it actually works. I guess you get what you pay for and it seems $10 or whatever I paid for Librarything just isn’t enough to actually get a working site.
