Monthly Archives: January 2011

More Thoughts on the GF1

★ Posted on at 08:30 pm ★

tree stars

Just added some pop to the photo to get the psychedelic colours. Sometimes you just mash some presets together and you come up with an interesting picture. No idea what these leaves are called, but it reminds me of a maple leaf, and something I’d like to grow in my own backyard.

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These days I really want to just pick up my camera and keep shooting. Heh, the GF1 is that fun to use, especially with the 50mm f1.2. You get these dreamy backgrounds with just a little focus on the subjects to highlight it yet not overemphasise it.

Also shot an entire birthday party with just the 20mm pancake slapped on. Reviewing the photos, I realised a few things. I am not as shy with asking friends to pose for photographs. There are also times I will just snap away, without feeling self conscious that I’m stealing a shot. The LCD screen on the back has given me new ways to frame photographs. Propping my hands forward while taking a step back allows me to view more possibilities, as opposed to being hidden behind the frame in the viewfinder. The 20mm forces me to change locations just so that I can get a better view, and this also brings out alternative views.

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So the GF1 is a success in what I wanted it for. An unobtrusive camera that I can use for casual social occasions and I have learned to compensate for its shortcomings. No high ISO? Just shoot the picture and convert it to B&W. The grain from the image naturally blends into the image. In any case, one can cheat with a f1.2 lens. No high speed focusing and not that great continuous shooting? Anticipate the shot of what you want to get and surprisingly you will end up with some decent candid shots. The not so great colours from the GF1 has also pushed me to spend a little more time post processing, as I was generally pleased with what came out from the D300 when imported to the computer. This process has also yielded surprising results.

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I really want to push boundaries this year, and while it’s been a bit slow, I’m slowly making progress.

New Web Spec

★ Posted on at 07:46 pm ★

20110119-1-4

Not sure what they are called, even if they resemble roses a little. I have become quite familiar with what I can do with the GF1 and while manual focusing is still a challenge, it’s much easier now compared to using the D300 viewfinder to determine focus. You could use Live View to get the same effect but having no mirror flapping during the exposure is one of the key advantages of the GF1 when using manual lenses.

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Spent the last couple of nights reading stuff regarding the relatively new HTML5 and CSS3 specifications. The last time I was so enthusiastic about any of this was in 2003, when I was still in uni and doing web applications. I was the one on the team that made our webpages look good. If you think the following paragraphs are going to be about geek talk, you are definitely correct and should tune your browser to another channel.

Heh, while my Photoshop and Illustrator skills have declined over the past few years from lack of use, my understanding of using markup to render webpages has stuck to me like how my other Chinese dialects have. I can read and understand it, even if I can’t write it properly but that’s what Google is for, and when you have a reference guide, you could probably hack something together relatively quickly.

Looking at the new spec for both toolsets above required to design web pages, I like that things have been simplified over the years, and I no longer have to worry too much about browser wars and supporting standards. Back then I switched from Internet Explorer 6 (which blew Netscape out of the water with its startup efficiency and more support for features) to the first renditions of Firefox. Firefox was the first to properly support the CSS2 spec and they advertised it as such, so designing web pages for it was a joy and one often had to hack around the code to get it to display the same with Internet Explorer.

As I stopped updating the design of my website (I just checked last night and the current format was last updated in August 2009), I stopped caring about which browsers I had installed to test web page renders. I currently use Chrome as my default browser only because it is the fastest of the lot and displays most pages these days properly. I have Firefox as a backup for some websites as Chrome does crash on occasion. Internet Explorer has been relegated to downloading an alternative browser when I have a fresh install of Windows.

Anyhow, back to the present, the new spec allows for a lot of extra layout and design options. I recall the early days when I tried dabbling with Flash and Actionscript for dynamic, animated websites. CSS and Javascript killed that for me as they did much of what I wanted, without a bulky Shockwave download to your website (that plus how Apple iOS devices don’t support Flash and even the current mobile handsets that do get a big performance hit from it and reduced battery life, which on its own is a discussion for another day). HTML5 and CSS3 offer a lot more and a lot of what I used to do with background images like text shadows and rounded borders can now be implemented as code using CSS3.

It’s been a long time since I’ve sat in front of the computer writing code, but I’m excited at the new tools available and this is probably what I will occupy my evenings with over the next few weeks. An overhaul of the website was one of the initial list of things to do for 2011 and no better time to start it than now.

Project Start

★ Posted on at 09:04 pm ★

20110119-1-2

Was out on a walk with Alfie this evening and you get great light during the golden hour when the sun is low along the horizon but not quite setting yet. Bought a Nikon lens adapter for my GF1 when I got it last year so I stuck the 50mm 1.2 on it.

Saw this scene and knew I could isolate the foreground from the background with the shallow depth of field. Wanted to take advantage of the light reflecting off the grass in the middle. At f1.2, contrast isn’t great, so I brought the colour back with some adjustments in post processing.

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I’ve been wanting to do a photo book for the past couple of years. Prior years I have just printed the photos on my printer and stuck them into a sort of scrap book. This time round, I feel more confident with my photos from the trip to China and with at least a theme surrounding the photobook, I can limit the selection of images. I have over 300 images to choose from, but would like to keep the book to under 100 pages. Heh, there are many things I’d like to do with my photos, and there’s an image I’d like to do a large print of, but slowly exploring my options on what online services to use.

Hope to get this shipped before the end of February. It’s a start at least.