Category Archives: Cool Links

Software or Hardware?

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For a long time I collected Motorola radios. I soon realized a “trick” — a lot of them had the same ‘guts’ and just had different software controlling them. If you cut the little “stopper” off of the channel knob on the channel knob and changed 2 bytes in the firmware, you had a 16-channel radio.

The higher-end radios were even more seriously software-dependent. The price of a radio could go up hundreds of dollars (thousands when new) depending on the features it has. But it turns out that the whole series had the same hardware, and various features were loaded via software. (This was actually publicly-known.) Soon, people realized how to suck the software out of one radio and drop it into another radio, and suddenly most hobbyist-owned radios had just about every feature possible.

I’m getting out of the radio trade, though. I began by getting a lot of two Canon digital SLRs off of eBay. The two cameras were very similar: both, in fact, had the same sensor. I kept the 10D, which was bigger and had a solid-metal casing, and sold the 300D, which was smaller and had a silly silver plastic case. Mine has a bunch of features that the 300D didn’t: ISO3200, the ability to control flash brightness, and a whole mess of “Custom Functions” that let you fine-tune things, to name a few.

It turns out that I was more right than I realized about them being closely related, though. There’s a firmware hack that brings a lot of the 10D functionality to the 300D. (All the ones I mentioned and then some!) Of course some features are missing: you can’t select autofocus points, for example.

But it’s interesting to learn that model differentiation via ‘crippling’ features in software is more prevalent than I’d once believed.

Shirt

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Rusty and I usually don’t see eye-to-eye on style. But when he sent me a link to this shirt, I knew he was onto something.

Granted, it’s not out yet. But that doesn’t mean I’m not going to be ordering one. Not only is it “geek chic,” but it’s functional, too: I often wonder if there’s a good WiFi signal in various locations.

As an aside, tell me that this doesn’t fill a need in your life. And seriously, I’m buying this. Which makes me wonder… Bluetooth is 2.4 GHz, too… Will it false-alarm my shirt?

The Latest & Greatest Cameras

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Canon and Nikon are like the Coke and Pepsi of the photography world. And if you have a Canon camera, the lenses for it won’t work with a Nikon camera, and vice versa, so you’re effectively locked into one or the other.  I’m a Canon guy, so I don’t really follow what Nikon’s doing much. But it turns out that Canon and Nikon have both just recently come out with amazing cameras.

Nikon just released the Nikon D3, which as some awesome features:

  • It’s got an orientation sensor that shows you how ‘level’ the camera is.
  • Dual CompactFlash cards, and you can use them several ways: double your storage, mirror them (I should note that CF card failures are probably far rarer than hard drive failures, so this is insane reliability), or store RAW images on one and JPGs on the other.
  • HDMI output.
  • ISO6400 as a standard feature.
    • ISO is how sensitive the camera is to light. A higher sensitivity lets you get pictures in darker settings, but raises the amount of noise (grain, essentially “static”) on the image. Most consumer cameras go ISO100-400. I can shoot up to ISO1600 without much noise, which lets me get a lot of shots I otherwise wouldn’t. I also have “ISO Expansion” unlocked, letting me bump up to ISO3200 when necessary, but at the expensive of pretty grainy images.
    • ISO6400 is the highest before you unlocked expanded ISO!
    • It goes up to ISO25600. Please excuse me while I drool. Unsurprisingly, ISO25600 is extremely noisy, but at the point, no other camera on the planet would even be able to take the picture, so some noise is an acceptable compromise. What interests me, though, is that, short of ISO25600, it’s really not that noisy. Look at the gallery of this site. Those first two pictures are ISO3200, which I find really hard to believe: they look flawless! ISO6400 is perfectly acceptable, and really, ISO12800 isn’t bad. I wouldn’t use ISO25600 if I could help it, but you’d probably only be using it when all the other photographers put their cameras away because it was too dark to get shots.

Of course, a camera like that is meant more at the sports market, where speed is essential. Canon just announced something for the other ultra-high-end market: studio photographers.

The Canon 1Ds Mark III was just recently announced. What’s remarkable here?

  • It’s 21 megapixels, and it’s 21 megapixels on a full-frame sensor. Digital photography actually surpassed the ‘resolution’ of film long ago: if you were to take pictures on the best film and blow it up as much as possible, you’d get more detail if you used a high-end digital camera. But at 21 megapixels, Canon is closing in on medium-format cameras. Seriously, 21 megapixels.
  • Two neat ways to manage sensor dust (the sensor builds up a charge that causes dust to stick to it, which ends up showing up on pictures):
    • “Dust mapping,” where you can use software on your computer to map out the dust.
    • A high-speed (ultrasonic?) vibration of the sensor, which keeps dust from sticking. A few other Canon cameras offer this, too, but it’s still very new.
  • A fairly big image buffer, something I wouldn’t expect on a 21 megapixel camera… And 5 frames per second, which beats my 10D.
  • An optional wireless add-on.
  • As an aside, check out the photos page and check out how obscenely wide the 85mm f/1.2 lens is.
    • And now imagine… 85mm f/1.2 lens… On the Nikon camera… ISO25600… You could probably see in the dark?

In conclusion, I need to win the lottery. 😉

Mmm, bacon.

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It’s amazing what the Internet has unleashed. Today I stumbled across a mention of the Vosges Bacon Chocolate Bar. It was an amusing typo, I thought: it almost sounds like a chocolate bar with bacon in it. My roommates have long joked about my love for bacon. (A local pizza place offers a dish known as the “heart attack,” which is a calzone stuffed with mozzarella sticks and bacon–its name is well-deserved. But ohhhh is it good.)

But it turns out that I hadn’t misunderstood anything. It is a chocolate bar with bacon in it. Sitting on a hot tip like this, though, I knew I had to act fast, so I sent the link to the Snack Maniac. Barring the Maniac’s ghostwritten entry, the Internet had gone a whole month without any snack updates, so I’m proud to take credit for leading to the first update in a month. So proud, in fact, that I may have to take todays “Hero of the Day” designation away from [deep breath] the man suing to keep his amputated leg that he stored in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed but was inadvertently sold when he missed his rent payments and is now used by the guy who bought the smoker at an auction as some sort of bizarre exhibit in his backyard[deep breath], and instead give it to myself… (The Hero of the Day designation, not the amputated leg stored in a barbecue smoker in a self-rental shed.)

Having recently resolved that I need to focus on eating healthy, I was thrilled to learn that the Snack Maniac was sending me a bacon-chocolate bar of my own. And while I confess that I don’t have the experienced palate of the Snack Maniac, I’ll be sure to post an update on how it tastes.

News Article of the Day

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A man in South Carolina is in a desperate legal struggle to get custody of his amputated leg.

If the piques your interest… It’s not the strangest part of the story. You see, the man lost his leg years ago in a plane crash, and stored his leg in a barbecue smoker in a storage shed, but failed to make his rental payments, so they sold the smoker with the leg inside. The new owner charges people to see the leg inside the smoker, and refuses to give it back to the man from whence it came.

Today’s Hero of the Day secures a solid spot in my list of daily heroes.

Prints

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I saw some mention of BigPhotoHelp.com as a good place to get prints. It seems that they’re a smaller business with some nice printers, as opposed to a giant corporation. And yet they’re cheaper than the competition. (And they don’t offer tacky crap like coffee mugs with your picture on them.)

I did a little Photoshopping to get my skyline photo to be an appropriate format (it’s a bit cropped, so I added some white space on the bottom with text). It came to about $20 shipped Priority Mail which is a steal for a 20×30″ image even before you include shipping. (Now I need to find a cheap 20×30″ frame!) Their little wizard suggested that 19×29″ (how ironic) was the upper edge of what would still look sharp, but I went for 20×30″ anyway. We’ll see. (Actually, it was a few experiments in one — I used an obscure font for the text, which looks great but may not reproduce well. It does show up in their preview fine, though, so I think I’m golden.)

Lens Rentals!

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I came across Glass and Gear today, a lens rental place. Unknown to me at first, they’re in New Hampshire. I chatted with the owner a bit via e-mail, and am pretty impressed. The 85mm f/1.2 lens is amazing. (For $3 grand, it had better be.) It’s often touted as one of the best lenses for portraiture.  (There’s also the 50mm f/1.2 if 85mm is too long.)

I then did some more searching, and realized that there are a lot of lens rental places out there. This place has the “Bigma” 50-500mm lens for just $49 for a week. Much more expensive, but there’s also the 600mm lens if you really need the best of the best.  And at $300 a week it’s not cheap, but they even have the Canon 1Ds Mark II body, currently the best camera Canon makes. 16 megapixels, full-frame, for a mere $7,000.  (The 1D Mark III is also incredible, but is aimed at sports photographers and the like; it can shoot at an incredible ISO 6400, a self-cleaning sensor, and it can capture so many photos a second that many have referred to it as a “machine gun” camera.) They seem to be the only place with good lighting rigs, too, for studio photography.

There’s also RentGlass.com, which has a Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens, for a mere $24/week. And the 24mm tilt-shift lens.

Oh, there are also super-macro lenses. It might be worth comparing prices on anything you’re going to rent (and looking for reviews: I haven’t done that yet!), but I was just surprised to learn how much is out there. Of course, being the first ones I found and practically a neighbor, I think Glass & Gear would be my preferred vendor. When the foliage gets a little nicer and I’m home for a nice crisp autumn weekend, I think I’m going to have to try an 85mm f/1.2 to get some good family portraits, and something like the Bigma to finally get some good moon shots.

Military Intelligence

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Rusty, who doesn’t actually use his own blog because he is a lazy slacker, sent me this link last night.

Apparently,

  • The architect never noticed that he had just designed an enormous swastika-shaped building for the U.S. Navy.
  • The U.S. Navy never noticed, until it was too late, that their architect had designed an enormous swastika-shaped building for them.
  • People on the ground were oblivious to the fact that the building was shaped like a swastika. (I, for one, notice the shape of buildings?)
  • There aren’t, say, fire exit plans posted everywhere in the building depicting the building as an enormous brick swastika.

That said, Hitler did forever destroy our ability to use what’s probably a good layout for an office complex.

Wow

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These photos are some of the most amazing things I’ve ever seen. And I’ve seen a lot of amazing photos.

As you look at more and more, you realize that there’s clearly heavy post-processing being done, e.g., Photoshopping details in, and generally doing more than just ‘fixing’ things up a little. (Some clearly get a bit unnatural, but most are realistic, just too consistently perfect.)

It’s spurned a bit of debate on the DPReview forums about how far is too far. And I think I’ve changed my tune a bit: you can go as far as you want, it’s just that at some point your cross over from “Wow, you really brought out the details in that shot” to “Wow, you manufactured a great image!” But then there’s the in-between, where you can’t quite be sure how much was manufactured and how much was just an amazing shot.

In any case, you owe it to yourself to check out the photos. And maybe book a spot on the next flight to Java.