Where Is Joel?

I lost lost of my lenses etc. for my camera in Portugal. It was a pretty expensive mistake and has me pondering what I’m going to do when xti dies. According to the internet, the rate I shoot at and how many shots I have taken he should have a solid 1-1.5 years left in him. That will put me square in the middle of canon’s next generation of slrs when I need to buy a new one. Coincidentally Sept. 1 canon is having a news conference on this very matter. The rumours have it they will be talking about their next group of 1.6x crop frames. Given that I shoot ef-s lenses and canon this is kinda useful to me.

Apparently they will be discussing the 7D, an upcoming little brother to the 5DmkII and the successor to the 50D, the 60D. I’m sure there will be more megapixels involved and to be honest I could really care less. I can already shoot poster sized pictures as long as I don’t do something disastrously wrong. The following are the things I *really* want:

1) Better auto-iso. I have no auto-iso and I *hate* screwing around with iso to take a shot. I played with the new auto-iso on the t1i, it’s nice, but if you want fast shots there’s not enough control. The Nikon auto-iso is just too complicated to ever even think of using. Give me something that offers a little of a) a little of b). Just let my camera get out of my way while I’m shooting.

2) Better low light noise control. Yeah, the t1i is *amazing* as compared to my xti but I think they can do better still. Stop pumping megapixels and start pumping clean noiseless iso levels. That’s *way* *way* more useful to me for what I use my camera for.

3) On that note. Better white balance at night!!!! No matter what I do with my xti all my night shots turn out totally orange. And the custom white balance is so well hidden you’d think they deliberatly did not want you to use it. Yeah, this can be fixed after the fact, but who wants to be screwing around fixing all of their shots???

4) Better auto-focus. I don’t know if it’s just me, but when I play with Nikons they just seem to nail the focus more often in auto-focus mode. If I want to be sure of hitting the focus I have to first focus on the center point then frame my shot after. Annoying. Particularly when I give the camera to someone else and they tray and take a shot and the focus just hunts.

5) Last but not least. The ability to totally turn off the ridiculous noise control. I have found looking at other people’s pics on their t1is that they all seem to just smudge out the detail in the middle of things like bushes while maintaining nice sharp edges. Even at low iso like iso 100… What’s up with that?

I’ve loved xti. Make me proud again canon.

I have a pet peeve.  And that is with stupid HDR photos  HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and is the latest “cool” thing in digital photography.  The theory and concept is reasonable and many shots taken using this are awesome. The thought is that at most exposure lengths most photos we take have under/over exposed parts and so if we merge several exposures together then we can recover the parts of the image that are correctly exposed from each to get a better image.  The following is a good example.  The first pic is a picture of a tractor properly exposed.

Properly Exposed Tractor

It’s fine.  But you’ll notice there are things like the barn on the right that are black.  We have no idea what is happening on them.  Enter HDR.  By taking 3 images at different exposures and combining them using software I get the following.

HDR Tractor

Now that’s nice.  We have recovered more detail and the image doesn’t look stupid.  This is more like or eyes perceive.  We can normally make out details like the lines on the barn on the right just by looking.  Also, the image doesn’t look stupid, just better than the normally exposed image.  Now this same software allows people to make images like this using the same technique:

Stupid

That image just looks stupid and it is things like this that give HDR users everywhere a bad bad rap.  There are many beautiful HDR images.  Please I implore you all, use HDR responsibly and don’t make things that are crazy or bad.  For the rest of us!

Saw the following lock on the high level bridge. A couple wrote their “names” on it as well as a heart, the date and the word “Forever”. Very cute.

Forever Love

I got my sigma 30mm back from repairs today. Very exciting. The above picture was taken with it. On the way to pick it up from the post office I ran across this garbage can that someone had tipped over and rolled down the street, leaving a trail of garbage.

In safeway by the U of A campus at 10:30 PM I ran across this lineup which went all the way across the store…  Yes, that is ONE lineup. Why were all these people shopping?

While crossing the high level a guy on the other side of the bridge got jumped. Fortunately the crowd around was able to pitch in a hand and subdue the attacker. The police arrived with a few squad cars *really* fast. Well done EPS!

Lastly, check out this cool car:

At first I tried to work.  I’m getting frustrated with the lack of me being able to find a paper about the subject I’m interested.  I decided instead to have a little bit of fun and maybe process an old photo.  I picked this one of James during the 25000 calorie eat off because I think it’s pretty fun.

I don’t really like the hall on the side, it kinda distracted from things. Because it is darker I just removed it with contrast using an overlay of the original image. Then I added some graininess to the picture, desaturated it, played with the black point a bit and called it a day. Not really what you’d call a gorgeous portrait, but it’s fun.

On another post processing related note, I was taking a pictures of my appt while moving out. It felt so empty without all the usual junk lying around so I kinda had this vision of the last lonely furniture lying in the middle of a room. I tried a few pics, but there was still too much stuff lying around. Try as I might, play with light etc. the best I got was the following really boring picture:

Photoshop is amazing:

I HATE HATE HATE these stupid screens. Yes, I understand that they make colours more vivid or some sort of mumbo jumbo like that but did anyone stop to think that people actually *use* laptops? We carry them around, not sit with them is some sort of dank dark basement. My Macbook is completely impossible to use anywhere that is bright light.
Yesterday while trying to take a picture of how the middle of the screen is brighter in bright sun than the rest of the screen I managed to take this. I actually really like the photo, but seriously, this is actually a picture of my LAPTOP SCREEN. … Take a moment to contemplate that… The following picture is a picture of the actual screen of my laptop. Someone try and tell me that’s good design.

Picture of my MacBook Screen.

Gotta say…  I don’t really understand it.  There is an option on your photo stream to sort by interestingness.  What seems to choose the interestingness is not how often a photo has been viewed, or comments, or anything rational, but rather some voodoo magic.  However it does seem to correlate over the long run with photo views.  Self fulfilling prophesy?  This from a flickr newb keep in mind.

I long ago ended efficiency for the evening, but I’m still not that tired.  Anyway, I got to playing with Paper Seans trying to figure out what the next Paper Sean activity for papersean.com would be.  No luck on that front, but I took this, which I think is kinda cool.

I think to one on the left feels left out

I drank too much energy drink last night to stay up and work, but when I couldn’t concentrate any longer I couldn’t sleep either. So I made this:

Let Me IN!

Was bored in the LRT today. Took this picture and the result was super noisy, so I made this… Now I should probably get back the the real work I need to get done!

The end of the line?

I really enjoyed this graffiti I walked by today. This person was very concerned about their lack of ability to park in alleys. I also enjoyed this ludicrous sign despite the fact there was no snow or ice in sight!

I can't park in the alley?!?

Silly Rabbit, Falling Ice Is For Winter