New Toy
Got a new toy on Tuesday. It’s a Canon Digital Rebel XT. We sprung for the EF-S 17-85MM f4-5.6 IS USM lens. I’m hoping this dramatically increases the quality of photos appearing on ohmyhead, but don’t hold your breath. There are photoblogs out there that are strictly pinhole or Holga photography, which I admire very much. It takes a creative mind to come up with new and consistently interesting photos, especially with such limited tools. Well, our new toy is quite unlimited, but the person takes the picture, not the camera. It’s just a tool to display the talent, right?
On the financial side, I justify the purchase by telling myself it will pay for itself in film/developing costs. Yeah, I keep saying that. Someday it will be true.
Technical stuff:
The guy at the store tried to talk us into getting the Olympus Evolt 300, which includes two lenses, a self-cleaning sensor (they’re really pushing this hard as a selling point), and a super ugly design. It turns out that the ISO 800 and ISO 1600 settings on the Olympus are “boost” settings, and most reviews said 800 was pretty bad and 1600 was “unusable.” The amount of grain, or “noise,” was intolerable. Hence we chose the Canon. We figured we would be taking enough low light pictures, especially of kids, that it would come in handy. Also, we won’t be switching out lenses often enough to worry about a dusty sensor too much.
Digital cameras automatically store information about the photo in the stored image file, such as shutter speed, aperture, etc. This can be automatically displayed on the web site. Well, through the course of writing some code to display this data, I found that some of the digital images from our other mini digital camera was missing this EXIF data. Turns out it gets wiped out by the program I wrote to upload the images to the site. It wasn’t really my fault, but the problem is that I would have to go back and re-upload all the images for which I want this data displayed. Well, I ain’t gonna do that. I’ll probably implement some EXIF data extractor for the photoblog, and be careful how I upload all future images.
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Umm, yeah, I’ve been meaning to tell you about the quality of the digital photos on the site.
Shya!
That’s a great new toy! I can’t wait to see the fruit. My Dad spent have of my inheritance on the Nikon digital SLR, and he loves it. It does save a little bit on image processing, but mostly it has drastically increased the number of shots he takes when he goes out. He came to TX to see family for a week and took 2500 pictures. No joke.
2500?!? That is crazy! Let’s break it down. 2500/7 = 357 per day. Figure an average of 16 awake hours in a given day, minus the one it takes to download the photos from the card media, gives 15 hours of shooting time. 357/15 = 24 per hour. That comes out to an average of just over one picture every three minutes, assuming the photos are taken every waking hour of every day of the week. *blink* *blink*
In other words, sounds just like any dad who just got a new digital camera.
Hey, I like the new camera as well. It captured me a couple days ago.
http://nate-land.com/jackattack/2005/06/guest-photographer-from-ohmyhead.html
Okay, maybe it was two weeks. I remember the 2500 pictures part, but maybe that includes the week before his trip, too. My Dad definitely takes more pictures than the average person, but 24 per hour does sound excessive.
I will say this though, my Dad is famous for getting memorable pictures of people that refuse to let their picture be taken. One of his tricks is to pretend like the camera isn’t working right, and tell the person that there’s no film in it, and snap 6 or 8 pics of them before he says, “Oh, that got it, now its working again.” Pretty much, if there’s a camera in his hands, its too late, he already has a picture of you.