Diddlbiker makes a wishlist

One can never be too early (except with getting up for work), so Diddlbiker decided to make a wishlist. It came into my mind when I was walking to my car after the photography class, together with one of the other students. He told me how is Canon G5 was a great camera, but absolutely sucked if you wanted pictures with bokeh. Actually, he said it differently, but the end result was the same. He then went on to tell me how he's thinking about upgrading to a Canon 5D - which is where I told him to get a cheaper body (a 20D, for instance) and spend the difference on lenses - after all, one can never have too many lenses.
I then went on to ramble about that I only needed this one lens, and then maybe another one, and another, and...

So I thought about a little wishlist of things I still want in my camera bag:

• Bean bag. Works good as an improvised stablizer, and I need something to fill up my sling bag - right now my camera shifts around in the bag sometimes.
• Macro lens. No clue what to do with it, but I want it anyway.
• Wide angle lens. Haven't done research, but I'd prefer something like a 12-24mm lens. Minolta's 17-35 mm is quite good, but I'd like to have a wider angle than 17mm.
• A 500mm reflector lens. Just because I think reflector lenses are cool!
• Larger memory card. Preferably 2 GB. Never hurts to have one. Or two.
• Image tank - or something similar.
• A high quality tripod. Bogen/Manfrotto or Gitzo.

Somehow I have a feeling that the beanbag is the most likely one I'm going to get...

Like a deer in the headlights...

Coming out of the parking garage last wednesday, and the whole herd of local deer was fouraging outside.
So I parked the car, grabbed the camera and started shooting. Only to find out that I still had it on time exposure for night shots: 30s.
Luckily, the deer were still there, so I was able to get two more shots. Then I sat down on my knees to take a better picture, and that frightened them away...

Diddlbiker has psychic visions

...well, not really. But today's headlines did give me a vision of what is going to await us: government to set mileage rates for big suv's. What's the deal? Car manufacturers are forced by law to produce on average cars that have a certain mileage. The cars have been split up in categories, and basically, for every 10mpg guzzler you'll have to produce two or three 30mpg economy cars.
There is a catch however, utility vehicles - since they are used for business - are excempt from this rule. And yes, that's the same Utility as in 'S.U.V.'. This means that in practice manufacturers are forced to build fuel efficient cars, except for their biggest and heaviest vehicles. Guess where the real bad milages are?
This is going to change with a new law, effective in 2007, and going into full effect at 2010. It will impose milage rates for 'big' SUV's as well. How big? Up to 10,000 pound. And this is where Diddlbiker gets psychic. The Hummer, Ford Excursion and the Chevy Suburban already weigh close to 9,000 pound. So, what would you do as a car manufacturer? Increase the space in the car, push more electronic crap in the car, and give it a bigger engine, basically that what your customers want, and push the weight over 10,000 pounds, or being faced all of a sudden with the need to replace those 6.5L engines with smaller and more efficient engines?
It's not really hard to guess what the answer is.

DMV does it again

My lovely wife went through the fun event of getting the car inspected. That means visiting the local DMV, the one organization that manages to get even the biggest guys on their knees and weep.
There was something 'minor' wrong with the car - apparently, the emergency brake wasn't strong enough, something we can fix ourselves. But that wasn't the only reason that the car didn't pass inspection. My wifes name is hyphenated on her drivers license, but not on her insurance card.
It's a good thing that the DMV is so on top of things like crossing i's and dotting t's. But it would be nicer if they start by fixing the knee deep potholes on route 80, and start ticketing those &^#$*! who switch lanes without using their blinker, or who move their car to the middle of the road before making a right turn.

And the winner is...

Diddlbiker jumped head-over-heels into the whole bloggin thing. Years and years ago, when I was a speaker at the Nationale Office Dag conference in Holland, organizer Henk Wildschut emphasized about our presentations: pictures! pictures! People love pictures!
Clearly, I like pictures, too. So my blog needed to show pictures. That means that you'll need a picture hosting service. Now, I could say, "long story short, picpile, but I'm not doing that - that's what's blogging all about, right?
In did some quick research on hosting pictures and came quickly to the conclusion that there are actually three different categories of picture hosting services:

• Free, no deeplinking (example: Walgreens. Very limited, and usually the only way you can show people your pictures is by some kind of email invitation. Not good. I still have an account, though, because there's a Walgreens around the corner and the whole point of their photo service is the fact that you can print the pictures.


• Free, deep-linking allowed. This, of course, is what picpile is all about. A 100% free service (not like the pay-sites crippled unless you upgrade) with reasonable accesibility and excellent deep-linking options. The price, as I have learned: not super reliable. I'm okay with downtime, I'm not okay with three days of downtime - and then not being able to upload pictures for another two days. Another problem is that I was never able to figure out how to give somebody a link to a gallery. "Fred, I have pictures of your son's birthday party, you can check them out here" never worked. Well, I have the Walgreens site for that (and you can print them from there as well), but it's inconvenient.


• Pay sites. The downside is clearly paying money, but on the other hand, it means that the provider has more financial space, is reliable, and you don't get commercials mixed in with your pictures when people view them (picpile has the nasty habit of throwing in commercials of pretty randy date matching sites). Paysites also have a very rich feature set. But, you will have to pay some money (usually around $25 per year, although I saw a British site that charged GBP 45 per year...) and I AM Dutch, so I'd rather not spend it if possible.
  

So, for a while I was happy with picpile, but then the service became less reliable, and the fact that you couldn't move the pictures around to different albums after posting was another hassle. There are other free services, but TANSTAAFL, and they're usually limited in the amount of storage space and/or bandwidth - something you'll run out of eventually. So I've decided to invest some money in a subscription service. Originally I wanted to get a Pbase account, but in the end I deciced to go for Flickr. Just like Pbase, Flickr has the ability to show Exif data. And although Pbase still has an appeal to me because it is clearly more oriented towards serious photographers, two things made me decide to go for Flickr: the community idea - everybody who's looking at my pictures can comment them, and the vendor. Flickr is backed by Yahoo. Yahoo is really, really big, but lost the search engine war with Google. So they're going into the niche market of communities, where they're really big in. And Flickr is one of their flagship products. That means, in my opinion, that Flickr's feature set, already rich, will just grow more and more in the future. And it's a great place to put your pictures, of course.

Weekly Weight

weight loss
Originally uploaded by diddlbiker.

Today was another weight watchers day. Diddlbiker lost .6 pounds this time. I may still be ahead of schedule, but the margin is getting less and less.
Either I should stop eating chocolate cookies, but I just blame muscle gain due to daily exercising instead.

Flickr

This is a test post from , a fancy photo sharing thing.

Diddlbiker got himself a tripod

I wasn't planning on buying one yet, but the assignment in the photography class didn't leave a lot of room (at least not if you want nice pictures), so I went to the local Best Buy and bought the cheapest full-size tripod I could find.
Granted, I prefer a Bogen/Manfrotto tripod, but I also prefer a Beech Bonanzo for my daily commute (Teterboro - Morris County Apt) over my current means of transportation, but sometimes the nice solution is just out of reach.
So I opted for the $50 POS tripod instead. I have no illusions over it's quality and stability, although it is performing fairly well so far. The price to be paid, of course, is weight - it weighs about a ton!
There are some features on the tripod that could have been left out. I have no illusions on the accuracy of the bubble level. And playing around with the tripod taught me that, yes, the tripod is not level, Now How Are You Going To Fix That, Son? What is nice, however, is the quick release which is now semi-permanently fixed to my camera. And, as cheap as it is, it fits the Golden Rule: a cheap tripod in your possesion is better than an expensive one that is not.

So, how much better is it? The picture on the right has been taken with the camera held in my hands. A five second exposure is way to much for the camera's anti-shake and the result is, to put it mildly, 'blurred'.With the tripod, the picture gets a lot sharper - before I know it I'll be shooting my daylight pictures with the tripod as well! So I learned a couple of things in the last two nights:

1) With long exposures, just cover the lens with your hand when a car comes off the parking lot (and ruins the exposure with its headlights).
2) Digital (at least my) camera's display reverse reciprocal behaviour. Film tends to get 'slower' with longer exposures. A 10s exposure @ f/10 should be the same as a 40s $ f/20 exposure, but reality is that you're better off adding a full stop, making it a 60 second exposure. With digital, it's reverse: a 2.5s, f/10 exposure is slightly darker than a 10s, f/20 exposure. We're talking about 1/3 stop or less, but it is still a difference.
3) Everything in photography seems to be reverse from what is intuitive. The only use for on-camera flash is outside during daytime (fill-in flash), tele-photo is used for close-ups, and in the dark you're stopping down to get longer exposure times.
But I do like the tripod.