This week there has been over 10C temperatures in Southern Finland, and the sun has been shining. Downside has been that there has been too much dust and other particles in the air. Our garden is also waking up, as the crocuses (pictured) show.
Category: photography
Digiscoping
Digiscoping is the art of taking photographs using a ‘scope’ — typically a birdwatchers’ field telescope. This is something that I have also been interested, admittedly less because of birds, than for the affordable option for super-tele-objectives that are required if one aims to capture far-away or small details in landscapes. Yesterday I got my “fat pipe”, model Yukon 6-100×100 Variable Power Spotting Scope (pictured; a budget deal from the local Kodin Ykkönen warehouse). It came with a camera attachment that fits with most models, so I fitted the scope with my EOS 350D (external battery back removed, to spare in weight). The first photo trip experiences were somewhat mixed: Continue reading “Digiscoping”
Freezing sunrise
After couple of days of Northern wind and freezing temperatures, we noticed a really beautiful sunrise today while going to baby swimming in Nokia Eden Spa. It is damned how you never have your camera with you when you need it (these are pale shadows, really, taken with my E70 camera phone).
Eye-Fi firmware upgrade worries
I am not sure if others are experiencing this, but after the recent February firmware pushed to users by Eye-Fi Inc., our photo uploads have started to fail: “Receive interrupted” are the frequent error messages. It looks they introduced something called “smart boost” in this upgrade, maybe that is the culprit. It appears to use your PC as some kind of cache, and since the Eye-Fi Manager software here is installed to a Vista machine, there might be compatibility issue. Dunno — weird they broke the product/service.
See: http://www.eye.fi/blog/2008/01/31/new-eye-fi-smart-boost-upgrade-and-ritz-camera-news-at-pma-08/
Edit (Feb 8, 2008): I have reached the helpdesk of Eye-Fi and continue to look into the source of this issue. My current suspect is that the new firmware does something a bit differently, in a manner that disagrees particularly with the DD-WRT firmware that I am using in my LinkSys WRT54G router (a Linux based, open source project). Currently with the Fonero Wi-Fi router I am able to reach much more reliable results. Will continue trying and testing… (Btw, if you are interested in tweaking DD-WRT, check out this post: http://lifehacker.com/software/router/hack-attack-turn-your-60-router-into-a-600-router-178132.php.)
Raw Shark Texts
It has long been my tradition to indulge in my old love during holidays — meaning reading fantasy and science fiction. This time Santa brought me a surprise hit: The Raw Shark Texts by Steven Hall. Part Memento style whodunnit, part love story, part fun exploration into what constitutes “information” and “life” — a bit like some classic cyberpunk texts but with a fresh twist. Excellent!
Eye-Fi card magic
IMG_2171.JPG
Originally uploaded by FransBadger
I ordered from the US a new invention: a SD memory card which has Wi-Fi integrated within its miniature shape. It arrived yesterday, and I was a bit surprised that the system actually seems to work: the couple of test photos I shot were automatically copied to my laptop and also directly into Flickr over the air. This is very handy and removes the regular hassle with cables and upload programs. The only downside is that the automatic upload does not filter or edit the photos in any way, and that the SD card does not fit into my SLR camera (CF card is needed), so this is not solution for everything, but a nice step in any case! Link: http://www.eye.fi/
Day of the dead
Night ride
Originally uploaded by FransBadger
All Saints’ Day is Pyhäinpäivä in Finnish, but I like to look how the pre-Christian times resonate in this kind of celebrations. Samhain, and Day of the Dead (Vainajainpäivä) are some associations to this direction. It seems that there is some controversy around Samhain as the ‘Celtic New Year’ (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain ). The first day of November is nevertheless when Marraskuu starts in Finland — ‘marras’ an ancient word for death. Thus: drink well, eat well, remember the dead and be glad while you are alive!
More pics in: http://www.unet.fi/pics/2007-11-03-pyhainpaiva/ and in my Flickr account: http://www.flickr.com/photos/fransmayra/
Full HD
Full HD
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Samsung M86 ‘Tulip’ 37″ television (LE37M86BDX/XEE) was our choice for our living room. A “full HD” television is also suitable for game sessions, and even for that photo editing stuff in the living room, close to your family. 1920×1080 resolution is enough for many things, but the distance from the screen to the sofa is of course different as compared to the typical PC screen use situation. I still need to learn more about fine-tuning and calibrating a HDTV screen. Here is a nice “dummies intro” into television tweaking, using THX test patterns from a commercial DVD. This screen is not perfect (is there such a thing?) but it should work for us for some time now and into the future, too.
Our sleeping baby
Our sleeping baby
Originally uploaded by FransBadger.
Reading the gesture: a fighter spirit, perhaps? (I will be posting more family photos in the future to my Flickr account and to the pics folders in my own server.)
Wonderful world of home video
Stricken down by a persistent summer flu, I have got time to browse the Internet in bed and tweak my system. Particularly the VNC remote desktop has been open a lot (upgrade of my server into Ubuntu Feisty Fawn did give some nasty errors and sorting them out has taken days — and the mail system still does not work). On more positive side, we finally got the digital video camera that I have been thinking about a lot. Originally I considered an AVCHD camcorder for the hi resolution benefits, but after looking a bit into the downsides (and price) of that technology, I decided to go for SD instead. The corder we got is Sony DCR-SR52E, a 32 meg hard disk model, which we picked up mainly for the interface: a touch screen and good usability makes this a nice choice for those occasional family clips. I have now tested the image quality and bundled software a bit, and (after some Vista specific upgrades) everything seems to be ok now. Projected to the large screen of my media room from a processed and compressed archive DVD the screen is blurry, but directly plugged into the living room television, I get sharp and colourful image. Some more tweaking is still needed to see what is the optimal way to archive. (These HDD camcorders use MPEG2-PS standard for recording, which means compression taking place when compared to DV tapes.) There would already have been some MPEG-4 camcorders on the market, aimed squarely at Youtubes and other net videos, and I suppose much of delivery to our extended families will also take place trough such online services. (Much easier for everyone involved if I send an email link rather than organise an entire evening of home video watching 😉
frans goes blog 
You must be logged in to post a comment.