Today you get a pic from my last trip to Alaska. I rendered it in HDR using Light Compressor 2, a simple and affordable (~$3) alternative to Photoshop.
For you camera geeks, I picked up a GH2 during a short period of inexplicably low prices for the camera in December. I love my EP1 to death, but simple functions like turning focus zoom on/off with manual lenses and toggling ISO or bracket mode took too much work. The last straw came when AF died, even if the only auto lens that I use is the PL20mm.
In a word or two, the GH2 feels like it was made for me. There is a physical switch or button for virtually every setting I might need to change. I can choose ISO, switch between metering modes or single/conntinuous AF and toggle bracket mode without taking my eye from the EVF or my finger from the shutter. Along with AF that doesn’t take all week (when it did work) that makes me a happy camper. Alsotoo, picture quality is pretty good. Pics will ‘hit’ the blog when the Earth’s ecliptic makes it a little less bloody dark when I get home from work.
ETA: oh yeah, focus zoom. The click wheel is context-sensitive. In full manual mode clicking it switches between aperture and shutter speed. In aperture priority clicking it switches between aperture and exposure compensation. In ‘A’ mode with a manual lens on clicking it activates focus zoom. To turn off focus zoom, click it again or (HALLELUJIAH are you listening Olympus?) you can turn it off with a half shutter press. This is incredibly important since I shoot in ‘A’ wit or without a manual lens on.
Chat about whatever.
nastybrutishntall
How’s video?
Yutsano
Someone please get me through Monday without killing someone.
Egg Berry
You could provide links to those products you mentioned. Just a suggestion. What brand is a GH2?
Brachiator
Interesting photos. What’s a GH2?
trollhattan
GH2 is the top-of-the Panasonic µ4/3 line–having significant video features along with their big sensor. It’s well regarded, especially amongst those who don’t want to rig a dslr with the enormous amount of accessory crap you need to actually shoot video with a dslr.
Nice work by Tim F. here. Can’t wait to see big-chest puppeh shots!
Boo
Is that Russia in the background?
gaz
Anyone ever notice that to make a grilled cheese on sourdough it takes a surprising amount of spacial reasoning?
*I mean actual sourdough, where each slice is all funky and doesn’t match up unless you butter the proper side.
heh.
Edit: fingers betray me!
cmorenc
Today’s digital cameras at every level above $100 have become so good, and good digital processing software relatively simple to use at the levels most mortals will ever need for 99% of what they do (e.g. Photoshop Elements or Light Compressor 2) that it’s much easier to take great pictures than it used to be. All I need do is pull out my old shots from ten (early digital), twenty (film) and thirty (film) years ago to irrefutably prove the point. Of course, for those who really know what they’re doing and are really adept at using Photoshop, the advantage is even more.
ONE THING I’M REALLY GLAD OF: Microsoft didn’t create Photoshop and then try to substantially “improve” it. I’m ready to strangle them for the kludgy, awkward, needlessly complex mess they’e made out of Word 2010. It’s been over a decade since I’ve owned a Mac, but after all this time Apple still is light-years better than Microsoft at understanding how to make decently intuitive interfaces. There’s something in the culture at Microsoft that makes it extremely difficult for them to understand how to go about it, kinda like someone who’s a hopelessly bad athlete no matter how much they try to become a decent basketball player.
harlana
OMFG, i just heard about Romney saying he liked firing people, oh no he din’t!
trollhattan
“How hot/dry was it?”
So glad you asked. Why, in Texas 2011 was the driest and second hottest year in history. Curse you, Al Gore!
http://www.cbsnews.com/8301-201_162-57354420/2011-was-texas-driest-year-on-record/
harlana
what a wonderful, beautiful, exquisite sound-byte!
trollhattan
@Boo:
Heh, FTW.
Roger Moore
I don’t think this is a particularly great HDR rendering. There’s something obviously wrong with the tonal relationships, but at the same time there seems to be a loss of global contrast that makes the whole scene look gray and washed out. I think you’d probably get better results with one shot that’s well exposed for the interior, one that’s well exposed for the scene through the windows, and a good job of blending the two in Photoshop. A well masked blend like that is closer to the way our eyes see the scene than a HDR rendering is.
gaz
@cmorenc: Photoshop is an adobe product. It runs on the PC and the apple.
It doesn’t have anything to do with apple’s anything…
I don’t even know why you brought it up
Tim F.
@nastybrutishntall: Video would be splendid, if I used it much. Other users say that it could be the best video SLR(ish) camera in existence. The ETC mode (ldoubling the effective zoom level without artifacts) is supposed to be very useful.
Trakker
I love photography and have a Canon SX10IS p&s superzoom which gives me a lot of flexibility when shooting. Imagine my disgust when I found that my new Samsung phone takes marvelous pictures and is always in my pocket when I spot that perfect moment when the light on a perfect subject is just right. What’s this world coming to?
srv
Glenn Beck has a coffee table accident. It’s unclear if any pretzels were involved.
What are we going to do w/o Glenn and Sarah this year?
EconWatcher
For any of you weak souls who may share Tbogg’s interest in Shakira, you really have to check out his Friday posting, in which he updated his Shakira loop for the new year. I left a shaken man.
JGabriel
@srv:
Take photographs of their action figure dolls in perplexing sexual positions.
.
Tim F.
@econwatcher: the new gif is not seamlessly recursive and therefore does not encourage slack-jawed stupor as did the old one. Not that that ever happened to me personally.
Southern Beale
Wow. Have y’all read this over at Little Green Footballs? Looks like Breitbart and Dana Loesch are going after Charles Johnson now:
Go over and read the whole thing, the post explains what’s going on better than my excerpt.
mdblanche
I saw my mother over the weekend and she told me about a problem a friend of hers has been having.
This poor woman bought a dog about a year or so ago. The normal price the breeder charges is $2000, but she paid a $1000 premium to get the pick of the litter. Then she was told every puppy in the litter but one had died. The surviving puppy was hers if she wanted it, but she’d still have to pay the premium. Oh, and it was deaf.
Several weeks ago, her dog bit her. She hadn’t done anything out of the ordinary that might have set it off, but she still hoped it was just some freak occurrence. Then the dog bit her again, badly enough to require stitches. She had her husband put them in so that they could avoid having to tell any ER staff about the dog lest they alert the authorities. This has now happened several more times, each bite bad enough to require bandaging. Having had a variety of strange medical ailments with her own dogs, my mother gave her friend the name of a couple of behavioral specialists who might be able to help, but warned that there’s probably not much they can do to help in a case like this. The woman is beside herself and doesn’t know what to do, but the thought of having the dog put down is not an option she’s ready to consider.
It was after being told all this that I realized that Mitt Romney will never be elected President.
Southern Beale
I nominate “Emoticon Of Privacy” to be the next rotating header meme on the front page.
abject funk
Is that the old mine at Kennicott?
Southern Beale
@srv:
No pretzels involved, but the story says he was “bending over a coffee table.” Um … was Jeff Ganon there?
Hill Dweller
A recent audit shows Chris Christie(R-Cinnabon) cost NJ nearly 300 million dollars when he scrapped the Hudson River rail tunnel project in 2010.
Calouste
@gaz:
I especially wouldn’t bring up “Apple”, “usability” and “photo/video editing software” in close proximity after what Apple did to Final Cut Pro.
trollhattan
@Southern Beale:
Lawdy, when he flipped sides he really stirred up the winger hornet’s nest. Creepy stuff.
trollhattan
@Calouste:
I read about their little stunt–shiny unhappy people, left in the lurch. Adobe is threatening to deny upgrade pricing to CS suite owners who don’t own at least V5, when they drop V6 this year. I’m hoping they reconsider and decide to not mimic Apple (since I–cough–have CS4).
cmorenc
@gaz:
Because within the past 24 hours, I’ve used products from all three: Microsoft (word), Adobe (Photoshop elements) and Apple (fooling around with their iPad). My main point was that both the hardware/firmware of digital cameras and digital photo processing software have made it immensely easier to take good pictures over the past ten years, for which I’m grateful the wretchedly inept (at making it user-friendly) people at Microsoft weren’t deeply involved. Because if they had dominated the image processing software market from early-on the way they seized control of operating systems and office software, they would have made a mess of it. Thank you Adobe.
I threw the example of Apple in there simply to show how awkwardly difficult software design isn’t at all inevitable, despite the underlying complexity some of its capabilities involve. I probably should have stuck with Adobe’s Photoshop, which despite the underlying complexity of much of what it does, manages to do a pretty decent job of being intuitively easy to use, at least at basic levels. Apple might have done even better with it, but Adobe did do all right IMHO.
trollhattan
@cmorenc:
I guess this makes for a complete threadjack, but Lightroom can replace 90% of what once had to be done in PS or other photo processing software, in addition to being a solid photo database. PS is a high end bitmap graphics editor that happens to handle photos. I still use it, but much, much less than in the past. Sadly, I’m now forgetting where half the stuff is between sessions.
Mind. Waste. Terrible.
ruemara
I have a stupid n00b question for programmers. How would you start charting out a project of bringing, say, a small guide to city services from print to a web app, then say, a mobile app. I’m trying to figure out a break down of specific department to the service and then the contact info, but I’ve never done this before by myself and really, all I’m supposed to do is turn on a camera, frankly.
JCT
I have the original GH1, Tim — one of my favorite m4/3s by a long shot. I ended up using the video to make some video tutorials for my lab, extremely capable.
The G3 is a real nice 2nd body.
I’m just hooked to the viewfinder.
Gin & Tonic
Somebody help me out here – I’m not understanding the 4/3 love. If you’re going to drop a G on a camera, why not get something that can work with 30+ years of C or N glass? Is it just the video? I don’t shoot nor care about video, I’ll admit, so maybe I don’t understand. But I don’t see the spot between pocketable “rangefinder” sort of camera and a DX DSLR, especially at the $800-1100 price point.
Tim F.
m4/3 cameras work with 100 years of N, C, P, L and Z glass, plus any obscure maker that you might think of. Adapters for anything from Leica screw mount to closed-circuit video camera are available on eBay for about twenty bucks each. It means that someone who has accumulated a collection of glass from who knows where can use all of it.
Tim F.
Very sharp of you. It is. I have some gorgeous pics from that trip.
Gin & Tonic
@Tim F.: OK. But why not just get a DX DSLR?
TaMara (BHF)
Tim F @ top: I was just wondering what kind of software I should get to go with my new camera! Thanks for the info.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
Basically, the µ4/3 cameras provide a nice compromise between a DSLR and an advanced compact. They’re quite small compared to Canon and Nikon DSLRs, especially when you factor the lenses in, but have a much bigger sensor than the advanced compacts and the flexibility of interchangeable lenses.
Also, too, the advantage of older lenses with APS-C DSLRs is overstated. The old film lenses have focal length ranges that were chosen to make sense with a 36x24mm frame, not with a ~23x15mm frame. You wind up with a less than ideal choice of focal lengths. Most obviously, there’s a serious lack of good wide angle choices. To get a really wide angle on an APS-C camera, you need something 16mm or shorter, and the only film lenses in that range are huge, expensive, and look bad on digital sensors. Less obviously, there’s a surprising lack of good portrait length lenses with nice portrait bokeh. There’s no proper equivalent of a classic 85mm or 105mm portrait lens. Those old lenses often look great on a full-frame DSLR, but then you’re talking about at least $2K and a much bigger camera.
Woodrowfan
OK, so what is that a photo of? I want to know details about the site, or what I am looking at, not the camera that took the photo… ty
Gin & Tonic
@Roger Moore: OK, but 18×13.5 doesn’t help with the latter. And even if they’re small, you can’t stick them in your pocket like an S95 or something. I’m just not seeing the sweet spot at a $1k price point (with only one lens). And maybe I’m just trying to avoid buying yet another camera, as I already have far too many.
Is there a market, now, of people who want to spend that much and haven’t, yet?
Scamp Dog
@ruemara: It’s a bit of a vague question you’ve asked. I have a tiny bit of background in iOS development, so take this with a grain of salt, but you probably want to talk to a user interface/web design person, not a programmer. We programmers just do well on the fiddly, geeky internals, and tend to make engineer-friendly interfaces.
Tim F.
@gin & tonic: you sound like someone arguing a brief. If you don’t want to replace your DSLR then don’t. It really is not worth my time to argue against a series of false assumptions. When you turn out to be wrong on lens availability, price (I paid a lot less than $1k for the most expensive m4/3 body plus a lens) and size (my EP1 with the 20mm pancake, a fantastic lens, fits in a jacket pocket) then you will bring up maximum print size, depth of field, continuous focus tracking and whether you can get large aperture zooms. Enjoy the camera that you have.
ruemara
@Scamp Dog: Ah, ok. I am starting from negative numbers here, so I need to be educated just to get to absolute zero. UI design theory it is. Now I know where to start from.
Gin & Tonic
@Tim F.: I’m not arguing a brief, I’m trying to understand.
EIGRP
Has anyone considered a Lytro? I think the technology behind the camera is pretty cool.
Eric
Tim F.
Your not understanding is predicated on mistaken assumptions. A new EPM1 costs about $500 after tax. An EPL2 costs about $250. I can use any lens in existence. When I travel, my EP1 and its whole kit fits in my single checked bag like an afterthought. Walking around fit in the same pockets that you would use for a LX5 or a Canon G12. I frequently carry my camera hen i would or could not have a bulky DSLR. But again, there is no reason why you should feel pressured to buy a camera if you already have one that you like.
befuggled
I have a DSLR and a GF1. They’re different tools with different uses. The GF1 I typically use more like most people nowadays use their cel phone camera. I take it when I run errands with my wife, I take it to work, etc., etc. When I went out Sunday afternoon to take photos, I took the DSLR. I love ’em both.
Dream On
@Calouste: Hell yes, you are beyond right. Final Cut Pro turned from a challenging mammoth software to a toy-car of a system.
Gin & Tonic
@Tim F.: A world I clearly don’t know much about. Thanks.
Roger Moore
@Gin & Tonic:
My point wasn’t so much that the µ4/3 makes good use of existing lenses as that APS-C makes bad use of them. If you shoot mostly at 135mm equivalent and shorter, you may discover that your ideal APS-C kit doesn’t include any old film lenses, or that there are lenses that fit your focal length wishes but that they’re unnecessarily big and/or too slow.
Consider, for example, somebody who likes street shooting with the classic combination of a 35mm and 85/90mm. On film, you could go with a 35/2 and an 85/2 or 85/1.8, and it would give you a fairly nice compact kit. If you try to get the equivalent on a Nikon DX system, the best you can do is a 24/2.8 and a 60/2.8 Micro, which manages to be both a stop+ slower and 125g heavier than the equivalent film kit. On µ4/3, you could go with either the 17/2.8 (slower but closer to 35mm) or the 20/1.7 (faster but a little longer than 35mm equivalent) and the 45/1.8, and either pair of lenses would weigh less than the lighter of the two Nikkors by itself. If you want a really tiny system camera, it’s hard to beat µ4/3.
Porco rosso
Got any pics of McCarthy? My unlawfully wedded spouse’s sister has a cabin there by the old power plant.
HeartlandLiberal
I just bought the Pentax K-5, their current top end consumer camera. So far I am positively impressed. I already have two earlier generation Pentax digital SLRs, the D100 and the later D10.
I am still amazed at how much lighter the K-5 is, plus it is slightly smaller than the previous generation D10. (I skipped the K-7 model in between.)
16.3 megapixels, ISO capabilities that seem like impossibilities, plus Pentax finally addressed the issues of speed in this model, it seems. I mean, really, I cannot even imagine a claimed ISO 80 to 51,200 equivalents. Seven frames per second burst shooting capability, plus it will shoot HD video. Each video is limited to 8 minutes length, but that is a function of the SD and SDHC card file structure and its addressing limitations.
I have attached a new Pentax 55-300 telephoto zoom (that would be about 70-450 35 mm equivalent.) It is 4.5-5, so not a super-fast low light lens, but so far it seems very capable.
Paul in KY
@Southern Beale: For those who have not read it, ‘The Turner Diaries’ is a recruitment pamphlet (I won’t even call it a book, it is not worthy of being called a book) for disaffected losers to hopefully ape the ‘Turner’ person & start killing untermenschen.
I can see why he is pissed.
Paul in KY
@mdblanche: She needs to file a complaint with the Better Business Bureau & maybe get a lawyer.
Sounds like they ripped her off with some kind of defective, inbred animal.
gaz
@Calouste: heh.
Frankly I don’t waste my time with video editing. I wouldn’t get paid for it, and probably am no good at it.
But I’ve heard of final cut.
And I heard that Vegas was better – so I’d probably start there.
Right now, for the very few times I need video editing, I tend to use Sound Forge. It’s not really designed for it, but generally I just need to splice things here and there.
gaz
@cmorenc: Shorter cmorenc:
I can barely use computers, so I think I’ll start a PC vs Mac flame war.
gaz
@ruemara:
First, decide which devices you will target. You said website, and you said mobile. That’s too vague.
Pick a list of at least half a dozen web clients you want to support: Example: IE8+, Firefox 4+, Safari, Chrome (latest), iOS, WAP/WAML? – (WAP is the non-smart/shitty mobile web device).
Also, decide what server environment you are going to use.
For such a simple site, Linux+Apache+MySQL+PHP (aka LAMP) system is probably adequate. For larger, more complex sites, I’d recommend Python (if you are using *nix servers), or .NET if you are using windows servers. You probably don’t need anything that fancy though.
If you want to Gant chart a project, you’ll need to (after determining the above, talk to a developer – and get a timeframe – if you want the project to go smoothly, DOUBLE any estimate the dev gives you out of hand). Better to under-promise, and over-deliver, but doubling all dev estimates usually means the project will be delivered around the time you say it is.
Frankly though, you sound a little out of your element, and over your head. You should enlist a peer that has handled software projects before.
Based on your very rough idea of requirements, with a talented dev – I’d say in broad strokes, for the purposes of a back of the napkin calculation, you could very conservatively estimate time like so: take EVERY page in your printed manual, allocate 2 days for it, and add a week to the total. <— not very reliable, better to involve a dev as I suggested above.
gaz
@ruemara: Adding, none of what I said is to be taken as gospel. I simply don’t know enough about your project to come up with anything more solid than the above. But hopefully that gets you started – and at least thinking along some productive lines.
JR in WVa
@mdblanche: The dog breeder is without ethics, and should be responsible for the insanity of the inbred dog. The dog should be put down immediately, before it bites a 2 year old and does terrible damage to its face.
What does this sad but all-too-common story have to do with the presidential election?
Tripod
The right question is why anyone would buy an entry level dSLR. Mirrored systems are not quite dead yet, but the eulogies have been written.
Death Panel Truck
@Tim F.: Why didn’t you say that in your post, so I wouldn’t have to peruse 36 comments before getting an answer to what the fuck you were photographing?