Friday, November 28. 2008
Digital SLR Upgrade - Part II
One of the facts that I forgot to mention in my previous posting was that the condition of the shipping box was not good, with a huge dent and small rip on the side that housed my new camera. So not surprisingly, after having the camera for less than 24 hours, it got into a weird state where the mirror was locked in the "up" position and nothing could seem to jog it out of that state (not even doing a full reset on the camera). After spending some time both on the Amazon website and on the phone with them, a new replacement was shipped out with overnight shipping the same day (with me having 30 days to ship the defective unit back) - unfortunately, that meant that the replacement unit would not be here for the Thanksgiving holiday, which is of course one of the two events this week that I was hoping to use it for.  After practically doing a donut getting into the work parking lot in a effort to flag down the UPS truck (another long story, but short version is that the local distribution centers were closed today, so unless I met the UPS truck at my work address {mistake on Amazon's part - it was supposed to be shipped to my home address}, the camera would be unavailable until Monday), I did manage to get my replacement camera in my hands. So now the race is on to see if I can shoot enough pictures between now and tomorrow morning in order to be confident that this new unit won't flake out on me at a one-year old birthday party for my cousin that I am shooting (sadly the replacement unit wasn't packed much better either {1 airpad only??}, but at least there were no huge dents or rips).  Fingers-crossed that it will work out ok.... |  |
Tuesday, November 25. 2008
Digital SLR Upgrade
| At my friend's birthday party this past weekend, one of the people there had a Pentax K100D. After playing around with it for a little bit, I sadly was reminded of probably how Pippin felt when touching the Palantir (sorry, non-LOTR readers ) as the overwhelming urge to upgrade my Pentax D-SLR strongly took hold. I have had my trusty Pentax ist*DS since 2004 and, thousands of photos later, it is quite safe to say that I have gotten a great deal of use from it (and will probably be keeping it as a backup unit). After spending quite a bit of time comparing (via reviews and forums threads) the Pentax K20D, Canon 40D and the Nikon D300. After weeding out the fan-boy rants and threads, the overall general consensus seemed to be that all three models would give you stunning photos; it boiled down to both cost and the type of photography that one would be doing. For sports-centric photography, the slant seems to be towards Canon (or Nikon), both for their lenses in the 300mm+ range and their fast 6+fps speed. However, for actual detail, Pentax was on par with both the equivalent Canon and Nikon models (or ahead of them, depending on which review you believe). For me, it basically boiled down to: "Is the occasional sports photography that I do worth tossing out all of my Pentax lenses and Pentax flash?" and the answer came back "No". Overwhelmingly I do much more family and outdoor/landscape shots, so the extra detail that I get with the 14.6MP Pentax (to say nothing of a weather-sealed body) makes more sense (even on top of the being able to still use all of my lenses). So, thanks to the goodness of Amazon Prime, I had my new Pentax K20D in short order. A couple of the features that I fell immediately in love with was the Auto Focus Adjustment to fine-tune some older Pentax lenses so they’d autofocus perfectly (settings for up to 20 lenses can be saved). Also, the K20D’s new image-comparison function allows me to call any two images up on the LCD screen, examine them side-by-side at up to 32x magnification, and cull bad images to free up memory-card space - nice!! I am still fooling around with the body-based shake reduction feature as well as the many others, so a more in-depth review will be posted shortly. (of course, I also happened to come across some very nice Pentax-centric PhotoBlogs (here and here) in the research process; with the Pentax official site having some stunning photos taken with the K20D). | |
Thursday, May 29. 2008
JAlbum 8.0 Released
| JAlbum, a slideshow generating tool that I have been using since late 2004 has recently released version 8.0. There are quite a few enhancements, including faster and more memory conservative image scaling, which I like, since my JAlbum would previously crash on large albums and much improved dragging and dropping. |  |
Tuesday, April 15. 2008
Adobe Lightroom 1.4.1 released
| Adobe has released LightRoom 1.4.1. This new version incorporates some bug fixes, including the issues that caused Lightroom Update 1.4 to be withdrawn (degraded import performance, incorrect EXIF time/date fields, etc). For the interested, here are the release notes. |  |
Saturday, April 5. 2008
Adobe Photoshop CS4: 64-bit for Windows Only?
| In a move that is sure to raise the hackles of Mac Fanboys (and girls ) everywhere, Adobe has dropped the bombshell that there will be a 64-bit version of Adobe Photoshop CS4, but only available for Windows and not Mac OSX (the tentative plan is to deliver a 64-bit Mac OSX version in CS5). ArsTechnica has an extensive post on the reasoning of this. |  |
Thursday, April 3. 2008
Adobe Lightroom 2.0 Beta released
| Adobe has released Lightroom 2.0 in a beta state. One of the potentially cool enhancements is support for multiple monitors. You can download the beta from here and an important note is that this beta is designed to run along side of the current 1.3.x Lightroom installation. If you don't already have a valid serial number for Lightroom, the beta will only be good for 30 days. | |
Friday, March 28. 2008
Adobe Photoshop Express Beta Released
| Adobe has released a beta version of their Adobe Photoshop Express, an web-based image editing tool. It is being touted as a striped down version of Photoshop, aimed at users who only need to do basic editing of images (therefore there are no layers for example). (Note: For those Firefox users, I have been having issues {on MacOSX only it seems - seems to work fine on WindowsXP} getting the sign-in page (both for new members and existing members) to render properly on both Firefox 2 and Firefox 3 beta - all that is displayed is a blank page - fortunately, the page renders just fine in Safari  ).You have to upload the photos to the site (and there has been some discussion about copyright issues over photos uploaded). Once that is done, you have the standard photo editing options which are broken into through categories: Basics (which includes: Crop, Rotate, Red-Eye, Touchup, Saturation), Tuning (which includes: White Balance, Highlight, FillLight, etc), and Effects (which includes: PopColor, Hue, Black/White, Tint, etc). Looks interesting although I definite want to put it more thorugh the paces. | |
Wednesday, December 26. 2007
Bibble Pro 4.9.9 Released
| For all of you digital photographers, it looks like Bibble Pro 4.9.9 has been released. New additions include support for newer cameras (including Nikon's and Canon's newest model) and tethering support for Nikons for the Intel Macs, including Leopard. |  |
Friday, September 14. 2007
Adobe Labs Lightroom: Version 1.2 Released
| For all you Adobe Lightroom users, Adobe Lightroom 1.2 has been released. In addition to adding camera compatibility, it has also has other improvements, including better XMP auto-write performance, as well as noise reduction for Bayer-patterned sensors. | |
Tuesday, July 3. 2007
Fête du Canada
Tuesday, June 12. 2007
MacBookPro LCD Screen: Finally Calibrated...
| My photography savvy friend was generous enough to bring in his Spyder2Pro monitor calibration tool. After a quick 10 minutes, my MacBookPro LCD screen was displaying those picture skin tones correctly. (Now I just have to get off my lazy duff and get one of my own). |  |
Friday, May 25. 2007
Pentax & Hoya Merger Announced
| Well, this is certainly surprising to me -- thanks to one of my coworkers, I just found out that Pentax is essentially being taken over by Hoya. It will be interesting to see what effect this will have on the Pentax camera line. |  |
Monday, May 14. 2007
Amazon Acquires DPReview
In surprising news (to me at least ), it looks like Amazon has acquired the DPReview site. Since DPReview is one of the sites that i use pretty heavily for camera reviews/info etc., I am keeping my fingers crossed that Amazon buying them won't mess up the site.
Here is the official press release over at the DPReview site.
), it looks like Amazon has acquired the DPReview site. Since DPReview is one of the sites that i use pretty heavily for camera reviews/info etc., I am keeping my fingers crossed that Amazon buying them won't mess up the site.Here is the official press release over at the DPReview site.
Sunday, March 4. 2007
JAlbum: Version 7.0.3 Released
Tuesday, February 13. 2007
New Camera Flash
After dropping my original Pentax 360 FGZ flash at my grand-nephew's birthday party (  ! ), it was a made scramble to decide upon a replacement flash for my Pentax *ist DS. After a evening of frantic research (since I was planning on acquiring a light meter, not a new flash), I decided on the Pentax 540 FGZ. Besides being a more powerful flash, it has the additional nice feature of being able to rotate 180 degrees, allowing one to bounce the flash off of the wall behind.(Now, if only I can avoid dropping this one! ). |  |
