In Focus: Winter Cemetery

There's something very eerie about visiting a cemetery. Looking at a collection of all those that have lived and died before you is a fair stark reminder of your own mortality. On the other hand though, it is interesting to think about lives of those who lived before, the lives they lived and the history they made. Either way, cemeteries tend to be a place I stray away from. One very foggy morning, my wife decided to drag me out for a shoot at one of her favorite cemeteries. It ended up being a perfect time to visit as the fog really added to the atmosphere of the location. Enjoy.

In Focus: Seattle's Space Needle

For something that was essentially built as a tourist attraction, the Seattle Space Needle has become the iconic structure that defines the Seattle skyline. In fact, I would go as far to say that the Space Needle defines Seattle, at least in the minds of those people that don't live there. It's what people visualize when they think of Seattle in the same way the Golden Gate Bridge iconicly represents San Francisco. Either way, I had an opportunity to visit the Space Needle on the way back from Canadian Thanksgiving. Other than being kind of expensive, I quite enjoyed the trip up the needle and it made for some great photo opportunities.


The view from the top of the needle looking South.


A combination panorama and collage from the bottom of the Space Needle.

New Canon 50D - The DSLR that thinks it's a point and shoot

In what seems to me to be a surprising move, Canon today announced the newest addition to their pro-sumer line of cameras, the 50D. Now, I'm not really sure how I feel about this. Less then a year after the release of the 40D, Canon is releasing a camera that essentially competes with the 40D. Especially with so much anticipation for the 5D Mark II, it seems like a strange choice for them to up a new camera into this market space. They are essentially giving those individuals that were waiting for the new 5D an upgrade path that is significantly less expensive. Either way, the press release hinted at many new features and enhancements over it's predecessor. Some of them sounded very exciting and some of the seem less then promising.

Things that sound cool:

• 15.1 Mega Pixel - This is a huge update, especially considering the minimal jumps from the 20D to the 40D.
• DIGIC IV - New image processor is always a plus.
• Higher ISO - Up to 12800 ISO which levels the playing field a little with comparison to Nikon and the D300
• Upgraded LCD screen - 920,000 dot/VGA screen means even better resolution for preview and live view. This is especially interesting for me seeing I've always been a bit frustrated with the resolution of the preview screen.
• RAW in creative modes - Though not my style, I like to see that RAW is an option for those people that are still out in the creative modes.
• Improved Live View - Live View was a nifty idea but I never really used it mostly because AF was not very smoothly integrated. With the new Live View features, I'm interested to see if they made AF much easier.
  

Things that sound scary:

• Illumination Correction - Apparently this feature automatically evens the brightness across image a la a gradient filter. For JPEGs, these changes are written directly to the file. For RAW files, these changes corrected in post-production in RAW with DPP. What scares me is, personally, I wouldn't want the camera deciding where it thinks the line between light and dark is. Adjustments over the entire frame I can live with because you can predict and adjust for what the camera will do. Adjustments across only part of the frame rely heavily on the decisions made by the internal processor on the camera.
• 15.1 Mega Pixel - Shoving more pixels on the same sized sensor sounds like a recipe for noisy pictures.
• Auto Lighting Optimizer - Sounds a bit like they are photoshopping for you, which, for the same reason Illumination Correction scares me, scares me.
  
• Creative Full Auto settings - An interesting idea but this again feels like auto photoshopping.
  
• Live View face detection - This feature seems like it doesn't fit in a DSLR. I just can't imagine people holding their huge DSLR out in front of their face like it is a little point and shoot. It really does feel like Canon is trying to make Live View standard way to compose shoots with a digital camera but I just don't see that being feasible with a 2 lbs DSLR that is hopefully strapped to your neck.
• sRAW1 & sRAW2 - I never understood why someone would want to shoot in sRAW. It didn't make any sense to me then and it I don't understand why they would add one more level of sRAW.
  
• HDMI Output - This seems to be another feature that has been imported from the point and shoot line that really doesn't fit. To me, when I want to show off my pictures to others, I'm not going to be tethering my camera to the TV and showing them their. For quick preview with your family, this might be useful, but in the market that a usual DSLR is in, this doesn't seem necesary.
  

The new 50D really seems to me like an attempt to release a camera that appeals to amateur photographers that don't know much about DSLRs and advanced photography but want to get into that space. Also seems more like an attempt to compete with Nikon rather than releasing a camera that really does meet the needs of its customers. Either way, I'll be interested to see how this new offering shakes out. If anything, the new upgrades to the pro-sumer level cameras are a good sign of what will be coming with the new 5D.

Original Press Release
DP preview of the 50D

How about a drive?

Marin is a beautiful place to live. Sometimes I worry that living in a place that is so eutopia-esque will eventually make me soft (a-la that Baz Luhrmann song) but as good as things are, there are still things to keep me on edge. One of them is highway 1. Few things are more fun then attacking the curves of highway 1. Guard rails are usually optional and with views like this, it's often tough to keep your eyes on the road. Miss this turn and it's a good 300 feet down to the ocean. ^_^

Fun with fireworks and long exposures

Few things are more 4th of July then sparklers. They bring the kid out in almost anyone. The cool thing about growing up though is you get all sorts of new and expensive toys that can help making things much cooler. Until we picked up our first DSLR, I would have never thought about playing with the shutter speed on fireworks. The big advantage of having a camera with all this functionality is you have some many possiblities to capture interesting photographs. The photos below represent only two of the 60+ sparklers that we went through that night along with several more adult fireworks. First is my attempt at making a hostess cupcake swirl.
Of course, I had to be up-staged by my sister-in-law. A truly awesome rendition of a hostess cupcake.
Unfortunately, the booth that sold the fireworks were closed the day after the 4th so we couldn't try this again but it was fun while it lasted.

On the technical side, all shoots were done under shutter priority (Tv) at a shutter speed ranging from 4" to 15". ISO was up at 1600 to capture as much light as possible.

Fire and Brimstone

Sometimes you see a set of pictures that is so phenomenal that you just can help but think it's fake. (lol, omg Photoshopped! :p) This happens to be one of those sets.
This happens to be interesting in one of two ways. Scientifically, this is a great example of the electric storms that can occur around a volcanic eruption. The cause is the pretty much the same, but instead of ice particles coliding with each other to create static electricity, you have pieces of super heated volcanic particulate.
This is also an example of one of a phenomenal, once in a life time photo ops. These photos are immediately iconic and carry an impact that will far out live the lifetime of the reporter that took them. Unfortunately for him, it looks like they sold the writes to the pictures to Reuters.
Let that be a lesson kiddies, keep your friends close and your copyrights closer. :p

Best reference I found to the whole series of pictures.
http://www.flickr.com/photos/guano/2472173834/

Friends don't let friends use IE6

Internet Explorer 6 was released in August of 2001. At that time it was a substantial advancement in browser technology. Enhanced CSS support, better cooler DOM level control. Sure it wasn't standards compliant, but at that time, the standards were so unsupported that it didn't really matter because any progress was good progress.
But times have changed. Browsers have a evolved, computers have gotten more powerful and users have grown to expect more from the web. The time when standards were only a suggestion have passed. That's why, as a web developer, I beg of you, please do not use Internet Explorer 6. Don't let your family use it, don't let your kids use it, don't even let your dog use it. Even to this day, IE6 has a market share of about 30% on the internet. But, as web developer, the pain of having to deal with a 7 year old browser technology has cost me many a night of lost sleep.
So please, save a web developer, upgrade your browser today.

Young rocker

Wanted to do a quick photo post while I was still awake. Tonight I bring to you the a up and coming star in the rock and roll world. I just hope that rock won't be dead by the time he grows up.


Newest member of the Rock Band. He can't quite reach the base petal but you should see him on expert Blackened.

Sure, he can only say a few word but you should see him rock out on Timmy the Lords of the Underworld!

MegsPhotography.net, a study in absolute positioning.

Like I said, this blog will occasionally get nerdy. Tonight I wanted to talk about the new homepage redesign for www.megsphotography.net. Originally the website and domain were setup by our friends at KSnarf and since then, the only additions I've had time to do is adding a quick gallery exported directly from Lightroom to show off some work. Much is in the work in terms of getting the business up an running but we figured it was time to give the site a quick makeover. So last night, I dusted of Visual Studio and cranked out a new homepage for the site. And IMHO, I think it turned out very nice, ascetically and technically. Very simple, clean and very light weight. The homepage only has 5 requests for a total of 205KB (197 KB of that is the homepage image). In comparison, the homepage markup alone on the new site we've been developing at work is 160 KB. Oh, and it's compliant in all browsers (even IE6) :D. Even the transparent .PNG file that is the site name. Next step is to design the interior page wrappers to that we can have an actual "contact" and "about" page.

Fun in Prime Time

The other day, I got an opportunity to play around with a co-workers 50mm prime lens. With all of my experience being in lenses that have at least some zoom, it was interesting to have to do all the leg work myself. Of course, the trade off is an extremely fast lens. Spent most my lunch break with the camera all the way down in f1.4 and though the results were somewhat off, it was still a pretty interesting experiment.


Not sure what kind of flower this is but they are blooming in abundance in this area. Love the purple color. It interesting that at f1.4, the whole flower isn't in focus though.


Picture of Blacky from Blacky's Pasture in Tiburon.

First Post!!

Welcome to Mitch's little corner of the internet. This will hopefully be the outlet that Livejournal and Facebook just couldn't seem to provide.
The main topic for this blog will likely be photography but there is no guarantee that there would be small tangents into the world of programming, tennis, art and life in general.