My angry Mazda …

I happened to be following a Mazda 3 Sport after golf last Thursday (identical to mine except for the color – I rejected the white one in favor of the copper red one when I bought), and it struck me how my car looks like an angry anime character from behind. (Misplaced modified, not the rear of the anime character, but the rear of my car … you get my point.)

Now look closely …

Click on the face above to see the PDF describing how to draw anime faces if such thing interest you.

Perhaps an angry Pichu is closer to what I am thinking of …

Well, anyway … I thought it was interesting

Mixed messages …

Is it just me, or is this a bit of a mixed message?

No wood for me …

Not talking about little blue pills here, but rather Ikea’s inability to order the Numerar Oak butcher block counter tops in bar top size, as I wanted for my new kitchen counters. Here is what I am trying to build:

A healthy sized kitchen to be sure. The floors will be bamboo – already arrived, but I have delayed the installation until the patio door is replaced with a window, which happens in a week and a half. The cabinets will be Ikea, as they have a magnificent set of shallow drawer base cabinets for my pantry.

But the counters remain up in the air. These are one of the options, but as mentioned the left hand peninsula cannot be ordered for months yet.

Note: The above image shot yesterday at the local Ikea with an F550EXR carried in my front pants pocket. 200 ISO (!) at 1/30s and f/3.5. Keystoning comes from pointing the camera downward. The rest is quite clean and note the total lack of flare on the exposed light near the top. The hyperbole that surrounds this camera is just ridiculous.

So I continue to ponder … Quartz is my first choice, but would be 5 grand. Cough. Granite might be had for 2.5 grand. Cough. Laminate for $1200 installed. Not bad. Butcher block would have been a tad cheaper. Too bad …

What is really grabbing me right now is a porcelain tile counter with very large tiles (24x24 or 12x24) and matching backsplash. Total materials, even for really good tiles, is half the cost of laminate. Obviously, I would have to do the work myself, and it’s not like I don’t have a thousand other things to do … sigh …

ADOBE ACR 6.5 Supports F600EXR!

From the press release on DPReview …

Adobe has released 'Release Candidates' of its Camera RAW 6.5 and Lightroom 3.5 raw processing software. The updates cover 12 additional cameras including the Olympus E-P3, E-PL3 and E-PM1, Panasonic's G3 and GF3, Sony's NEX-C3 and SLT-A35 and Fujifilm's F600 EXR.

I put in a request a few weeks ago in their official community thread for such things and here we have support before a camera even hits the streets. I think I shall take the credit, thank you very much :-)

Earthquake!

So there I am at 1:51pm in a meeting in my office with our User Experience lead and suddenly I feel almost woozy. My chair and desk are swaying gently. I think I’m having some sort of psychotic break or something :-) so I am talking through it like nothing is happening.

Little did I know that our UX lead was experience the same thoughts and only when I finally said “earthquake” did she smile and say “I thought it was just me” … the problem was that our building is quite solid so nothing shook … we felt only a gentle swaying of the whole building. Also, we heard no rumble, which I distinctly remember the last time we had a quake when I was standing in my kitchen.

So … cool

Jack Layton – 1950-2011

I was absolutely impressed by Jack Layton as he rose to national prominence this past election. I saw him as a foil to Stephen Harper and to whomever the Liberals finally choose to lead that party (if they ever get it together again.) And as someone who could have been a great prime minister someday.

But sadly, his battle with cancer was lost very quickly this summer and Canada is left much poorer for that.

Update: Read his last letter to Canadians.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/story/2011/08/22/pol-layton-last-letter.html

Why so few articles in August?

Because I am refreshing the interior of my house. Ceilings (currently scraping the popcorn off the dining room ceiling), walls (repairs and new paint), floors (carpets upstairs, bamboo downstairs), some new windows, some new doors (some bad hinges and a couple of doors with small holes in them), and a new kitchen. If that sounds like fun to you, check yourself in for evaluation …

F600EXR – Not coming to Canada

Just found out from MSL (Fuji’s Canadian marketing company) that the F600EXR will not be coming to Canada. Bit of a bummer, but one supposes that the refresh was simply too minor to be worth all the overhead of launching a new model …

F600EXR … some further thoughts …

The F600EXR has generated a lot less buzz that its predecessor … but that’s a good thing. The let down for some people (not me) was pretty harsh.

But some people have come up with more new features, so I thought I’d fill in our body of knowledge on these.

Enhanced EXR Auto – 99 shooting patterns is supposed to make the EXR Auto mode make better decisions. I’m glad to hear it, as I thought it had some bad ideas in the past.

Focus tracking for subject movement detection – It is apparently capable of making very smart decisions for shutter speed / ISO based on subject movement. If the subject is not moving, it knows that low shutter speeds allow low ISO. And vice versa. But it appears that this is only going to work in EXR Auto, and that would be a major shame for users who like my settings.

Kaleidoscope flare might be gone – There have been some samples that should have flared and did not. A pre-production unit, but this issue may be addressed, which would be superb.

Rubberized body – This might be cool. Or not, depending on whether it is too sticky for pockets. Available only in black

Landmark Navigator – A much smarter landmark database that can lead you on a tour, I think.

And here’s one I noticed today …

Full HD Movie with enhanced brightness – If they have addressed the brightness problem, then they have sold me a new camera.

While processing my Lion King images, I realized what a great camera the F550 is … the ACR RAW support is incredible and this camera has wonderful detail at 1600 ISO. Very clean imagery. The F600 will likely be better if Fuji have been listening. Their feature list appears to address some of the hot buttons and these sample images appear to show that the lens is excellent and the flare is gone. If so, then GO FUJI!

There are some on the forums who are yet again pounding on Fuji for horrible image quality because their official samples show some clumping in the hair. Some even say that the image looks terrible downsized … like her hair needs washing.

I say bollucks … if you look very closely at her hair, it is obvious that the clumps are real … her hair is dirty. :-)

Also, the image was shot in HR mode, a mistake that Fuji and all reviewers seem to make. That adds to clumping of any hair that happens to be clean with very fine texture. And the downsized image is still pretty nice despite that …

Of course, one could always spike it up a bit …

Anyway … looks like a pretty nice cam to me.

The Lion King at the NAC – 26 July 2011

I’ve had very little time this summer for photography … processing takes time and I cannot see a point in making images that are not complete. The week from hell, where my kids and I gutted the kitchen completely and removed the majority of the flooring in the house delayed any chance of finishing the processing of the Lion King until this weekend …

I booked a couple of tickets and took my youngest to see the play. He had only seen one other play with me (6 Characters in Search of an Author at the Gielgud Theater in London) and we thought it a nice idea to do it again on my birthday.

I booked some decent seats, or so I thought. The second box on the mezzanine at the left side of the stage should have been superb. But it turns out that the stage box in front of us is at about the same level (they start rising at the third box) so we had our vision blocked by rails and heads. These are definitely the worst boxes I’ve tried … a warning to anyone reading this.

What was worse, the NAC has strict rules against images, so I had to keep the camera in my coat and shoot from chest level at best. Needless to say, getting a clear path while people are moving around is a nightmare. In the end, I managed about 26 decent images, with about half of them suffering slight motion blur. Too bad, so sad. You can see the entire set here, but I will show a subset of the better ones …

The setup was pretty typical for a ballet, but with the addition of a larger orchestra pit. At least, that’s what my eyes were telling me. This was actually shot during the intermission.

Note: All of the images in this article were shot with the Fuji F550 EXR. Every one is processed from RAW using ACR 6.3 and CS5.

You can see a guy standing in the front row and looking into the pit. The stage seemed very small and Karen mentioned later that she has seen it many times and the Ottawa stage is smaller and rather cramped when compared with Toronto and New York City.

The play starts and shortly we get a huge procession of animals down the aisles … several are in the audience as well, including one in the box across the theater from us. Very cool …

The elephant is huge and is the highlight of the procession … it is amazing that they can animate something that big with just a couple of people …

I won’t go over the whole story … if you have not seen the movie or the play, I urge you to rectify that asap. It is a piece of pop culture not to be missed. The music in the movie is stellar … as anything by Elton John would be in my opinion …

My first image of Scar is not great, as he was the first I tried capturing. It took a while to get used to such a nasty pose. So this one is blurry …

Here’s a decent shot of Mufasa and Zazu chatting … and you can see that I really struggled to shoot around the bars that held us in our cages along the walls …

My only closeup of young Simba I think … I really could not get many images in the first half. I got a lot bolder later …

Just before the intermission, when Mufasa dies, the little girl in the seat behind me (the box holds 4) sobbed for quite a while. It was sweet and sad …

After the intermission, I got a nicer shot of Scar, but without seeing his face.

I think this might be a battle scene later on …

Here are a couple of nice shots of Nala and Simba …

And one emotional image that shows how much acting goes into this production, even with all the costumes distracting us …

My favorite image of the night. This is the kind of image I like to capture at concerts and plays. I got a decent one like it at Mama Mia! and this one might even be better.

A nice image of Zazu and Rafiki …

And the bows …

The two Nalas …

The two Simbas …

And the whole cast …

So despite its rather small scale, the Ottawa presentation of the Lion King was still a huge treat. The singing is first rate and the costumes are magnificent. And the story, as we all know, as absolutely great.

Perseids a bust, but Jupiter is in its glory …

The moon is incredibly bright tonight … which is unfortunate since the Perseids peaks in a few hours. Total bummer … I saw nothing this year, although Nick mentioned that he and a buddy saw four a few nights ago. Such is luck …

Meanwhile, Jupiter is pretty high in the eastern sky by 2am these days, so I thought I’d shoot a few images and see what I could get. Remember that I managed to find my Kenko 2X teleconverter the other day and got a few decent moon images.

The usual setup … D7000 on Feisol 3471 tripod legs and Markins M20L ball head. Mirror up remote mode using infrared. Manual focus in VF first, then checked in live view at full magnification. I could see the moons already on the LCD :-)

I’ll spare you my struggles … it takes time to find what looks like it might be an optimal set of exposure settings … so here is the image I used:

900mm effective focal length
f/10
1/3s
6400 ISO

And here are the moons identified by using the Juplet.

I had severe flare at first and eventually I shined a very strong LED flashlight on the objective and saw dust and grease galore. Many a finger has printed that glass … I wiped it about 5 times before it came reasonably clean, but the final set of images were quite good. A bit of cross star glow, but that’s actually pretty normal with a bright light.

Anyway … a bit of fun, this combination.

Update: Here is the kit I used, shot by the F550EXR at 640 ISO.

A funny song on a sad topic …

I really hate corporatism and cronyism … and this seems to be a real specialty of conservatives and republicans these days …

Perhaps the London riots are just a harbinger of our fairly near future … and when the mob turn their attention to those with all the money, things might get really ugly …

Anyway, here at home the government is up to its old tricks again and ignoring legislation passed in 1999 calling for a plebiscite of farmers to approve the destruction of the Wheat Board, which has operated since 1935. They are going to hammer it without calling the vote.

So there are action groups that want to call the vote for them … and here is an amusing video to get the message out …

Fuji Announces F600EXR and F605EXR Upgrades right on time …

Fuji has been upgrading the long zoom family every 6 months like clockwork. The F550EXR (with F500 and F505 variants) were a truly massive upgrade on the F300EXR and those that came before. The new CMOS EXR sensor at 16mp and many new and improved features from bracketing to video made those cameras very interesting. Quality control hampered their acceptance on the major forums, but they still remain excellent cameras, especially when shot in RAW.

So along comes this new pair of cameras. Comparing them to each other yields exactly two differences:

1. The 605 has the landmark navigator, while the 600 does not
2. The 605 is a tiny bit taller, no doubt to make room for the improved GPS functionality

They are otherwise identical.

How do they compare to the F550EXR?

Well, there is a new black rubberized body as an option. And there is … landmark navigator I suppose. Otherwise, this is as minor a refresh as I have ever seen. The F200 –> F70 brought a nicer body and much longer lens, and unfortunately dropped the larger sensor. The F70 –> F80 brought an orientation sensor (!) and an extra megapixel, which hurt high ISO performance a bit. The F80 –> F300 brought the longer reach and nicer body with pop up flash. The F300 –> F550 brought a raft of changes and allowed the flash to be stowed when not in use.

This transition seems to bring … nothing.

More when I know …

p.s. There is a minor error in the DPReview announcement. They list 720p @ 60hz as a video mode, but that mode does not appear in their main page for the cam, not does it appear on Fuji’s pages.

A little birdy told me …

That my youngest still does not like his image taken …

D7000, 18-200VR, f/7.1, 1/20s, 100 ISO

Life will find a way …

A wonderful quote from Dr. Ian Malcolm … the professor of chaos in the movie Jurassic Park. If you have not seen that movie yet, please feel free to crawl back under your rock :-).

I noticed this little fella basking in the late afternoon sunlight and I just had to grab an image of it. The cam was set at 1600 ISO as I was shooting indoors earlier in the afternoon. No big deal though, as the D7000 is as clean at 1600 ISO as older dSLRs at 400 …

D7000, 18-200VR, f/7.1, 1/1600s, 1600 ISO

So how did it get there? Well, a bird shat on the roof and the rain washed the scat with embedded seeds into the drain pipe, which was clogged by the damage inflicted upon it by my eldest some time ago. The plant grew out through a gap in a seam ….

In other words, a fecal matter that emanates from a crack …

D7000 does the Moon … again …

Yes, I shot the moon again. Sorry. I just can’t help myself :-)

This time, though, I tried my most powerful lens combination after finally locating my Kenko 2x teleconverter. It had been moved in one of the purges leading up to the remodel I have begun by gutting my kitchen over the last week.

Anyway, I found it this evening and took the kit out for a test run … D7000 with 70-300VR and Kenko 2x. That makes for an effective focal length of 900mm at full zoom. That’s pretty keen … something approaching 18x magnification I would venture …

I shot this one at f/13 (to counteract the aberrations associated with a strong teleconverter) at 100 ISO and 1/30s shutter speed. This actually works out to an underexposure, but that’s ok by me as the D7000 has excellent tonal range in the shadows.

I used the tripod with mirror up, waiting the 30 seconds for the timer to expire each time. I only shot two images of the moon and this is the second.

I processed it quite heavily in order to pull as much detail as possible. I used various actions for clarify and local contrast enhancement. Clarify being a strong form of LCE with narrow halos.

I also used the “dramatic” setting of Topaz Adjust 4, dialing it back with the fade command to taste.

The result:

Click through to see the 800px version. There is rather a lot of detail available … I’m very pleased, especially when you consider that I used a consumer zoom with a strong teleconverter. Neither is really suited for the job, yet together they did alright …

Edit: Here’s the first image, which might actually be a tad sharper. I cropped it a bit less, so it looks a tad sharper from that too …