Category Archives: Photography

Jul 31

The New 30D’s Going Back

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I’d noticed on some of the test shots I did on the 30D, that there were a couple of dark patches. Very faint, but there nontheless and if you know what you’re looking for it’s very distracting – a hallmark of dust on the CCD. This isn’t something you should have on a brand new camera.

Now I’ve had my suspicions that this camera I’d bought from Leeds Jessops had been pre-owned (the seal on the box seemed to be taped back up when I bought it but I paid it little mind – lots of companies do that to check contents before selling), but this seems to confirm it. I’ve barely had 1000 pics off it and all of them have the same dusty bit.

For those of you wondering how I checked – whack the aperture right up (f28 in this case), point it at a blue sky and take a pic. The uniform colour shows the problem areas.

I’m not even going to attempt to clean it – it’s off back tomorrow.

Jul 29

Quel Surprise: I’ve Got A Canon EOS 30D

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Alright alright, I didn’t wait until Thursday – this afternoon saw me pop to Leeds to buy a 30D from Jessops. Spent the rest of the afternoon playing with it and stuff.

In case you chaps haven’t seen, btw – Fotopic.net are running 2-for-1 quota upgrade today (so 500MB for the usual price of 250MB, etc.). It’s on until midnight so by my reckoning you’ve only got another hour and a bit to go – link to upgrade.

Jul 27

Fame (Though Not Fortune)

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One of my photos from last Saturday’s Zodiac Mindwarp set is in the Wakefield Express this morning (this one I think – I left the copy of the newspaper in the car).

Rock on!

Jul 25

Canon Outlet Happy Bid Fun Adventure

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It looks like the Canon Outlet is confined to eBay, and thus subject to nutter price bidding (even using a sniping tool). How tedious.

Anyone got any other ideas please?

Jul 24

Broken Canon EOS 10D

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So, with not many days to go before holidaytime, right now isn’t the best time for my SLR to go pop.

Jon had it over the weekend for Clarence, and pointed out to me on Sunday that the Sigma 28-200 we use for general gig pics was occasionally having problems focusing and giving ‘error 99′ – general error meaning that a reboot is required, something I last saw using an older reverse-engineered Sigma lens. So naturally I blamed it on the Sigma and he switched to another lens.

I got the 10D back tonight, and since it was sunny popped into the garden to take some photos. All fine on the Canon 75-300 lens for a short space of time then it began failing to autofocus, going from one extreme to the other and back again. If I knocked it into manual focus it was fine – just seemed to be the autofocus (although to be honest it wasn’t making a good effort at working out lighting either, not popping the flash when it needs to). A trawl of the Canon forums suggests that there’s a general ‘issue’ with autofocus not getting quite right on the 10D, but nothing on this scale.

It seems I have a few options:

  1. Get this one fixed, something which won’t happen in time for the holidays and which has an unknown cost element.
  2. Buy a new 30D, something I was loathed to do given that the 40D is strongly rumoured to be coming out in September and that’s what I’ve been waiting for.
  3. Buy a 400D which will have the 10MP stuff and the DIGICiii processor, but which I’m not keen on (I borrowed Col’s last weekend and although it takes nice pics, it doesn’t ‘feel’ right to me, probably because there are less controls – I miss the back dial).
  4. Buy a refurb 10D from the Canon outlet which will probably be less than getting it fixed, and I’ll have it within a few days.
  5. I don’t take a camera on holiday – absolutely unthinkable!

Right now, option 4 is looking favourite, and if I don’t get success on that by mid next week I’ll go into a Jessops and buy a 30D – Nicky can get the 40D when that comes out. I hadn’t exactly budgeted for a 600 quid outlay right now however.

How sodding annoying.

Dec 27

Plotting Thumbnails On A Timeline Poster

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<%image(20061227-outputThumb.jpg|120|120|)%>I’ve been mulling over an idea for a while but a few days ago I finally got the impetus to write the script to build a photo timeline of our lives (313k JPEG).

Basically, what I’ve done is take a thumbnail from every day since 1st January 1999 and plot it on the graph. The top left is the start point (01/01/99) and each column represents a month since then. The end point is 31st December 2006 in the bottom right-hand corner. Obviously the script needs a bit of work but I don’t think that looks too bad, does it – it’s quite easy to pick out chief events such as Ellie and Ben’s births, our wedding, and various holidays in amongst the usual beer-a-thon.

The script itself is perl and requires access to the Fotopic fileservers so it’s not really a script I can make public yet, but I may recode it to use the toolkit API. Right now, you just give it a gallery ID, tell it what range of years to plot, and it spits out a large image – I may try and make it more flexible.

Update: I’ve altered the script to do truecolour jpegs (oops) and given it a black background – works a lot better than the palette-based foo.

Nov 03

Apple Offering Free Trial of Aperture 1.5

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Apple are offering a free trial of Aperture 1.5. Fill out the form and get a serial valid for 30 days. Cor.

Oct 24

Turning Photos Into Pop-Art

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Just been flicking through this morning’s assortment of Interesting Links, and come across this method for turning photos into pop-art. I’ll give this a go later and let you know how I get on, but it looks simple enough yet effective (and being honest I’m not short on photos!).

Update: I tried it quickly (took me about half an hour). Result is here!

Sep 06

Canon EOS 40D

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Reading over at Fosfor Gadgets about the upcoming Canon EOS 40D, I have to admit I’m more than tempted, even though the sole major upgrade from the 30D seems to be the CCD:

1.6x 10.1M CMOS senor (30D has 1.6x 8.2M CMOS Sensor)
Anti-dust feature
2.5 inch LCD (30D has 2.5 inch LCD)
9 focus points (30D has 9 focus points)
5 fps (30D has 5fps)
Compact flash based memory cards (same as 30D).

There’s links on Slashgear and Gizmodo as well. Maybe time to upgrade the 10D after all!

Jun 12

Build Your Own Canon Shutter Release Trigger

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This is cool, a tutorial on how to build your own Canon shutter release cable. It includes the relevant bits to wire it up to a serial port too so you can automate it. Very cool.