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On Megapixels ·
Suppose you’re interested in buying a camera. If you look at the ads and reviews, the first thing you see right beside every single one is its megapixel count. The camera makers want you to think that more is always better, which is wrong. But the community buzz is starting to be “more is worse”, which isn’t really right, either ...
Nice Camera Bag ·
I’ve been carrying cameras around for a while in a bag that I hated; awkward to open, awkward to get into, ugly, big outside and small inside. So the other day I picked up this little canvas National-Geographic-branded bag made by Bogen Imaging, model NG-2343 ... [5 comments]
Nice Ugly New Camera ·
A few weeks back, I bought a Pentax K20D and now that I’ve taken 500+ pictures with it, I suppose I should say a few words. To illustrate, photographs of garbage ... [2 comments]
Photo Notes ·
Remarks from the photo world, interspersed with uplifting Hawai’i snapshots. It’s about emotion, not just technology ... [9 comments]
Service in 2008 ·
What happened was, I wanted to buy a Ricoh GX00 and, in North America, there’s only one place to do that: Adorama (gotta love that name), a New York camera store with online pretensions. It didn’t work out well, but while we don’t know yet if the story has a happy ending, it certainly has a silver lining ... [6 comments]
Compact Camera Talk ·
Last month at the Moose Camp, I gave a short talk on high-end compact cameras. I whipped it up in a few minutes, made a links page, and the whole thing was well under ten minutes. It was fun. It turns out that Bruce Sharpe was in the audience with a video camera, and he polished up and published it under the title Northern Voice 2008: Best Compact Cameras. The quality is remarkable, particularly when you consider that the whole exercise cost Bruce approximately nothing. If anyone reading this is interested in a point-&-shoot with pretensions, they might find it useful. But here’s what’s interesting: in a world infested with videobloggers, any public utterance, no matter how off-the-cuff, is, potentially, an audiovisual publication. A permanent one. [2 comments]
Purple Raindrops ·
Three pictures of droplet-studded violet crocuses. Spring sunshine is lovely, but there are things to like about spring rain too. With some camera commentary ... [2 comments]
Tab Sweep — The World ·
Yes, I’ve been posting fewer substantive original pieces here. Working on a couple of things that aren’t very public, and also feeling itchy because what was radical three years ago has become conventional wisdom, which leaves me feeling empty and in need of something radical. Today an amusing antique camera, Iranian video, where we went, nine days of winter, and what happens when everything’s free? ...
On Pentax ·
More news for the photo set. Well, the proportion who care about DSLRs, prime lenses, and so on. OK, really only the sub-sub-subculture that follows the products from Pentax. With a few introductory remarks as to why you might be interested if you tend to photogeekery. Everyone else move right along ... [9 comments]
Photoworld ·
Here’s some reportage from the photoenthusiast side of the brain, including a shot by an actual real professional (and the difference shows), Ricoh rumblings, calibration, conversation, pictures by four different cameras, and two pictures of camera gear. I can gang together nearly-unrelated topics in a great big post like this because photo-hounds will read all of it and nobody else will read any; so efficiency is maximized ... [6 comments]
Shinjuku Cameras ·
I didn’t have to take off for my first meeting till eleven, so I cruised into Shinjuku around 9:30 to see what I could do about the slow-camera problem. Which turned out to be about perfect, since it’s Yodabashi’s opening time; so I got a leisurely look at the stuff with help from the staff. I gather the normal Yodabashi experience is wall-to-wall crush ... [10 comments]
Thinking About Cameras ·
I’ve been shooting with the 40mm pancake almost exclusively for a half-year now, and I’m not going to stop, but I’m really itching for something better ... [11 comments]
Tab Sweep — The World ·
The tabs build up as fast as I cut ’em down. This sweep is half photo-stuff, but I also have Second-Life humor, an Art-Rock conundrum, and what happens when you can’t write any more ... [7 comments]
Photo Tab Sweep ·
Lots of interesting discourse out there in the photogeek world, girls and boys. Here’s your lightning tour, this one dominated by Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer, currently about my favorite photoblogger; high quality stuff and a nice light tone ... [1 comment]
New 21mm Lens ·
Still in the grip of Prime Lens Mania (“prime” means no zoom), I ventured into the wilds of eBay and picked up a Pentax smc 21mm P-DA F3.2, in theory the perfect companion to the 40mm “Pancake”. With illustrations and a cat-blogging bonus ... [6 comments]
Tab Sweep ·
Perhaps a little more all-over-the-map even than is usual: GPLv3 clarity, Functional Pearls, raina bird-writer, Java credits, framework programmers, and hacking my Canon ... [4 comments]
Lensing ·
Two pretty pictures of Western Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera Ciliosa) blossoms, taken with very different lenses; for both camera and flower geeks ... [3 comments]
Tab Sweep (Non-Tech) ·
With notes this week on hippies, raconteurs, the M8 controversy, and a dead Russian ... [10 comments]
Canon A710 IS ·
A couple of contributors wanted me to say something about the little Canon I bought in late March. So here are some notes ... [1 comment]
Photomagic ·
It’s about the beauty in the volleyball players’ faces. While this is admittedly about cameras, even if you don’t care about sports or cameras, you owe it to yourself to go check out this slide show, which an astounding piece of reportage, damn the medium. For the camera geeks, the slideshow is illustrative material from Rob Galbraith’s write-up on Canon’s all-out assault on the state of the digicam art with their EOS-1D Mark III. But that’s not the magic. The magic is from The Online Photographer, a highly recommended photogeek blog, in particular the “Featured Comment” from Matthew Miller down at the bottom of So You Thought You Had Good Buffer Depth, and it asks a question: Why does a digital camera need a lens, anyhow? A lens is an expensive inflexible analog computer that locks you into one focal-length setting. If you capture the photons hitting the front of the lens, shouldn’t you be able to figure out the best focus later? Or has Mr. Miller got something wrong in the basic physics? [11 comments]
I work at Sun Microsystems.
The opinions expressed here are my own,
and neither Sun nor any other party necessarily
agrees with them.
