Someone asked me to take some portraits of them soon and I didn’t really have a lens that can do the kind of thing they’d want. A recent discussion over at Flickr suggested the Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D as a good lens to get, I picked one up from a store in town for GBP80 which was very very cheap.
I’ve been using Desktop Manager on my iBook to get Virtual Desktops going on OS X but it’s been suffering a bit since Tiger came out, you have to use their Alpha release which is dodgy to say the least.
Most annoyingly it doesn’t always save preferences, so I use command-f1 to get to desktop 1 etc, but this setting does not save, so each time I reboot I have to manually reconfigure the whole thing. I could stand it and wait for a fix when the alternatives was a $50 product from somewhere.
Now however the wonderful people at You Software has a promotion on their product You Control: Desktops so instead of the usual $30 it’s now $10. I do not know how long this offer is for, it certainly isn’t well published or anything.
I bought a copy of the software and am using it at work and home – the license allows for multiple installs as long as only one is being used at a time – and am very happy with it, does nearly all I would want. I’d strongly recommend it, you can’t go wrong at that price!
I uploaded my first picks to Flickr on the 14th of June so thats just over a month ago.
I obviously was pretty much sold on it back then already since I uploaded 700 photos in the following few days, but now I am realizing other things about Flickr that was not apparent during my poking around on it leading up to the uploading of photos.
Mostly the things I’m realizing are about the community on flickr, people really do contribute, comment, make suggestions, post to the forums etc in a very friendly and accommodating way. In short it’s one of the best photo communities I’ve taken part in.
Some stats on my photos hosted there:
| Number of Views: | 10380 |
| Photos with comments: | Difficult to say, > 100 |
| Photos that’s been marked as Favorites: | 73 |
| Photos with > 100 views: | 6 |
| Number of Contacts: | 71 |
| People who list me as Contact: | 59 |
There are some other interesting stats but I think this paints the picture, when I had my photos on a Gallery hosted on my own machine I got loads of hits as well but nothing like on Flickr and those hits were mostly driven from Google and very much a hit-and-run type scenario. No-one left comments or anything, I never had any kind of interaction with those viewers, it’s very different on Flickr and that’s the major selling point.
Flickr has the concept of contacts, you add them, they get a mail that you’ve done so and they can see your photos and choose to add you as a contact too. There is a special page that shows a stream of photos uploaded by your contacts and also an RSS feed. This is great for keeping track of peoples work instead of just following a blog since people tend to upload only their best to a photoblog.
Photos can also belong to groups, there are groups for anything you can imagine, so I tend to send photos to groups like People in Black and White, these groups also have discussion forums.
So to sum up, I’m very happy with the $24.95 I spent to get me on Flickr for a year, it’s been great and it’s changed drastically how I work with my photos, even in strange ways like making it easier to publish to my photoblog which means I do it more often. I’d recommend it to anyone looking for casual photo hosting for family and friends and for anyone interested in a community driven site.
I recently subscribed to The Digital Photography Weblog and I have been pleasantly surprised with the amount of really good stuff I came across there.
People often go on at me about my poor 6 mega pixel camera compared to their 7 or 8 meg pixel point and shoot and why I bother with this expensive camera with such low pixel count.
Well in this article they explain the difference between a DSLR’s 6 meg pixels and that in the shiny point and shoot or worse camera phones, check it out:
The dirty little secret of digital camera sensors is that they capture only monochromatic light intensity, and due to some technical wizardary (hack!) of putting colored glasses, can they guess what color might be relevant for that pixel. This interpolation, it is pretty messy – really – the good news is that larger sensors(SLRs) do a far better job of capturing the light intensity and thus color accuracy.
Well said, sums it up pretty well. They also point to a nice glossary of terms for DSLR’s.
I’ve taken up cycling again, its been a while since I last cycled anywhere – about 8 or 9 years – and I’m surprised to see I havn’t lost much in speed etc. I manage to do 20 km on a MTB in just over an hour and that’s with stopping and taking 99 photos too. Usually I average around 25 to 30km/hour which seems to be a pretty good speed to get in an urban setting on small back roads and paths.
I have one of these little bicycle computers but I find them a bit limiting, they are only really good for on the spot checks, no good for gauging improvement over time. So last night I took the GPS with and imported the data into OziExplorer which gives me much better view of what is going on. I can see average speeds between specific points of the route, elevation maps and with some add on tools even rate of climb/descent. I’ll store a track file for each time I go cycle and it should give me a good way to gauge if there are any improvement over time in my abilities.
The upshot of having the cycle is that I can get places at times that I wouldn’t have had the ability to get too before, last night for instance I got some great shots along the South Bank on the Thames Path.
For an idea of what OziExplorer gives me here is a screen shot of the track and also speed over distance. Click on it for a full size version.
