Damn hoodlums August 29, 2007
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentOnce again Joe and I went out shooting, and in an odd repeat of last year at a go kart track he got kicked out of some place. Actually we both did. Apparently people don’t take kindly to you photographing their construction site which has no markings, warnings or security. Who knew? I realize that if someone were up to no good there’d be a problem, but we weren’t exactly inconspicuous with headlights on our noggins and flashlights and flashes going off repeatedly. I’m pretty sure if you were up to no good you’d be less obvious about it, but I guess that’s just me.
They seemed more concerned with missing things and people getting hurt than anything else, which I can understand. Hopefully they’ll put up some signs or something to keep people out, which I’m sure won’t work at all will work well. If they had something up it would have significantly decreased the chances that we would have gone in there. The funny thing was that we saw several other students wandering around there, including one girl who just seemed to be walking around while talking on her cell phone. I can’t really complain though, the guy who shooed us off was polite, unlike so many security guards.
Since we didn’t fall and knock our heads off on some jagged I-beam I’m sure we’ll live to go somewhere else questionable just for the sake of taking some photos.
I really want that 24mm TS-E lens now!
That construction site would be a great place for paintball or capture the flag or something.
NJ Weekend August 28, 2007
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentI had certainly hoped I might do some shooting while I was in NJ this past weekend. I did, just not as much as I would have liked. I find myself constantly over-critical and negative of most things I do shoot and this past weekend was no exception. I was really unimpressed by the place I went Saturday with my friends. We were in Dingman’s Ferry, PA and the weather did not cooperate. We got there far too late in the day for good lighting and the sun just burst through the trees and created trouble spots all over the place. I really didn’t come away from there with anything I liked, not yet at least. I’m still looking at and trying different things with the photos but generally speaking after the first 30 seconds I know whether I’ll be doing anything with them any time soon.
I actually shot more that day when I got back to my grandmothers house, but even then I talked with her too long and the nice setting sun had mostly disappeared already too so I had very diffuse and cool lighting to work with, which I don’t mind for some things.
While it’s hard for me to decide if I really like them yet, I have some photos from Saturday at my grandmothers that I’ll at least hang on to for one thing or another. Three that I kept are below, although two are quite similar (the droplets on the leaves) and they’re really not that good. There was no real way to get a good angle or composition that I really liked with the droplets but I half knew that before I started. At least they look cool, I figure!
I had originally intended to head back to Rochester early Monday morning, but given the combination of my inability to wake up these days, a meeting I wanted to make it to at 1PM and the construction on 81 in PA, I decided to head out Sunday late afternoon. A car mount for the camera would be really nice sometimes!
Rochester @ night August 20, 2007
Posted by tcbp in : Photography , add a commentLast night I went down to the Ford St Bridge area to get mugged with Joe. We also took a few photos of the city. Dinner wasn’t sitting well with me and that’s all we wound up doing unfortunately. I decided to finally take a first stab at taking a panorama of Rochester and it came out ok but I don’t really like that particular vantage point for a pano after reviewing the stitched image. I think somewhere on the north side of the city would be much better and of course I’d like to wait for some better weather. A cloudless sky can be a little boring.
This image is stitched from five separate photos in PT Assembler. I expect to put up more as I visit more cities. I intend to take a pano of every city I visit just for fun.
Click here to see the big panorma (5000×2134, just over a megabyte)
Add more pixels, please.
Posted by tcbp in : Rants & Raves , 2 commentsMore pixels make the camera better, right?
I’m getting dismayed by the fact that marketing has seem to overrun good common sense at the camera companies these days. Perfectly good cameras like the G9 are coming out with 12 megapixels now and that’s just stupid. That camera, in particular that sensor, shouldn’t need more than 6mp, in fact it would make the camera better.
It’s even worse because for if a moment it seems like the megapixel race might be over, they start doing the ISO thing. But now it seems they’re going to do both as the same time, a guaranteed recipe for disaster. 12.1 megapixel and 1600 ISO in a 1/1.7 sensor; now unless I’m mistaken (and I may be, I had to wake up way too early today) that’s a pixel pitch of at best 1.9 microns. That’s pushing it too far. Sensitivity, efficiency and dynamic range for a sensor like this are all going to suffer. The noise is going to be high! Noise reduction might make it look better but it smooths out the details and what are you left with? A camera that is probably equivalent to 6 megapixels of useful image data on a good day. One could do the calculations by making some assumptions and figure it out, but it doesn’t matter.
I’d like to see manufacturers start focusing on better lenses and larger sensors. Move to lower resolution, there’s no practical need for sensors like this in these cameras. More resolution can be better, but it isn’t always.
Perseid Meteor shower August 14, 2007
Posted by tcbp in : General , add a commentIt seems to be a recurring problem for me this summer. Every time there’s something I want to photograph the weather chooses to interrupt my plans. The 4th of July was a hazy mess, and the Perseid Meteor shower over the weekend was obscured by clouds. It looks like I’ll just head back up to the lake soon or down town or somewhere else and get some shooting in, maybe this weekend.
bad weather August 5, 2007
Posted by tcbp in : General , add a commentHaving been in Cincinnati since Friday, it sure is disappointing to have it be so hot and humid. It’s enough that I don’t want to go out and shoot, and there’s not a whole lot to shoot inside that I really want to do either. Even if I went out to shoot, it’s been so hazy (even at night) that I won’t get the kind of results I’d like. Unless the weather changes significantly I may write off shooting for this trip entirely. All I’ve taken are a few snapshots with my point & shoot.
I knew this was a possibility, August in Ohio is muggy. I just hoped it would be better. At least the time with the family is well spent.