On Imaging Tools

★ Posted on at 09:22 am ★

alfie

Alfie is always a good available subject to test camera techniques on and he always ‘smiles’ for the camera. Heh.

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Have started running again. Or rather, trying to get back into it. Did a 10 minute jog the other day, and am doing runs in the park with Alfie and I can feel my body not liking the sudden surge in exercise. There’s a few aches in the upper body muscles and tightness in the hamstrings, but otherwise, I’m feeling a little more energetic out of bed these days.

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Testing out Ken’s Sony NEX-5 with my manual lenses. This all started from reading a blog post of the NEX-7 and skimming the comments to find this video. Pretty impressive stuff with the video, which is also something I’ve started taking an interest in after seeing what modern cameras can do.

The allure of the NEX series is the quality of the images you can get from the size of the camera. It is something that is pretty portable but with the larger sensor format, you need larger lenses to cover the image frame, which pretty much negates the portability of the camera. The new feature that was added in a firmware update that I absolutely love is the focus peak function, and you can pretty much get things in focus on the first try (it’s been pretty hit or miss trying manual lenses on my GF1).

Like the above photo, Alfie’s eyes are in focus and the picture below is shot with a 50mm f/1.2 wide open. I generally don’t get the focusing accuracy with one try and this is what I managed while using the NEX-5.

curly flats pinot

So far the pictures are pretty much of static objects, and I’d really like to take the NEX-5 out as a regular camera just to test it out in far more challenging situations.

Seems like I’m smitten with the Sony camera, but the GF1 offers a few other items up its sleeve. The hot shoe for attaching an external flash unit to light subjects gives off a better image than pushing a sensor to ISO3200 or some silly number and getting flat contrast. The Panasonic pancake lenses also have decent quality plus autofocus in a very small package. Sometimes versatility trumps absolute image quality, and you note this with the millions of camera phone pictures taken that are shared around the world. Heh, my balance of preference to what I like to do with my equipment favours the micro 4/3 system in this respect.

Heh, I might eat my words down the road but unless there’s substantial usage, it would be hard to see which works better for me.

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So the Nikon D4 has been announced. Lots of improvements, probably great for professionals and gear heads swooning over the specifications. Heh, I still think the D3 sensor from 2007 is amazing and it starts to dawn on you that it’s using the individual parts of a system together coherently that makes for great images. In the end, what I like about photography is just making images and sharing it around to retain the memories of interesting moments.

On the Tech Front

★ Posted on at 07:48 am ★

soba and alfie

This was taken at a friend’s place during New Year’s eve. The other dog is Soba and both of them were always looking to go indoors when someone opened the door. As I was going out, I saw their expressions and decided it was too cute to let pass, hence I quickly grabbed the camera and took a snapshot.

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It’s been a while since I indulged myself in tech rants, so here goes.

I’ve been fiddling with the network setup of the HTPC with the NAS ever since I’ve had them, using an existing wireless G card, before swapping that over to a wireless N card, buying larger antennas for the router and the HTPC. They worked for a while before I started getting higher resolution files and 720p sometimes worked depending on the circumstances.

So I finally decided to get ethernet over power (EOP) adapters and 720p (high definition movie files) worked fine after that but recently it got a little flakey and after resetting them, it started working again. 1080p files will worked if they are heavily compressed but you’d be watching a slideshow with the higher quality stuff.

So I start looking at actual numbers and after some investigation, found that my 200Mbps EOP only manages a paltry 14-15Mbps on the HTPC. Wifi N with a strong signal will hit 20Mbps. I tried the EOP with a different computer and that also gave me 20Mbps. Heh, over gigabit LAN on my desktop, 300-400Mbps is easy. To play heavy duty 1080p files, you’d need a constant 30-35Mbps connection minimum to keep it stutter free.

So I’ve been looking at various solutions, like buying a uber long outdoor LAN cable to be hooked through the room to the centre courtyard. It’s the simplest solution, but it’s ugly. There was also a thought on rebuilding a HTPC with dedicated storage, and the 15Mbps is adequate for downloading and if it’s local, you won’t have buffering issues. Heh, then my NAS will be relegated to backing up photos, which have become a substantial chunk of the data I keep.

Heh, I had a running spec on the kind of HTPC I’d build, from a small mini ITX system to a slightly larger micro ATX one that would house media files. I’d want it to be low power consumption and was looking at AMD’s Brazos platform to begin with. That was pretty low powered but if you wanted to do any heavy duty computing, it does not cut the mustard, and I’d like to future proof things a little more this time (I thought SD content was adequate but you start noticing the differences after a while, not just the video quality, but the sound quality that’s baked into the file as well).

So here is the spec I’ve come up with that would be what I’d build for January 2012. An Intel Celeron G530 (apparently it consumes as little juice as the purpose built Core i3 2100T which has a 35W TDP) on a H61 board with 4GB of memory. It has built in graphics and also has hardware acceleration for decoding video files, so that’s a big plus. A 32GB SSD since I only need to run an OS off it. I’m still unsure about sticking an optical drive in as I barely touch my DVDs anymore and the Playstation is still around to play disc formats. All of that stuck into an Antec ISK-300-65. It’s a power brick so no spinning fans. The SSD is silent because there’s no mechanical parts so the only whirl you’ll hear would be the stock cooler and one case fan. It would be a zen computing experience. Heh, you know the current HTPC in the living room is on with the whirl of the PSU and case fans. It’s 4 years old and I’m sure it would last a couple more years easily but it’s always good to have a build plan in place (just because I’m a geek) so that I know what parts to get to instantly replace it.

Heh, the above parts were also chosen because I wanted to keep it really affordable and inclusive of shipping, it’s under $350 for the above setup.

For a HTPC that stores the media locally, the price goes up by a lot very quickly. There’s the Antec Fusion Remote case that fits micro ATX boards, has a built in IR receiver and I’d probably need to chuck in a couple of 2TB hard drives for media. The philosophy behind this build could probably take up another post but it’s not the way I’d like to handle it currently.

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These things fascinate me and there will be a whole new slew of products to be announced in the next week or so at CES (Consumer Electronics Show) so it would be interesting to see what other fancy gadgets they release.

Starting January – 2012

★ Posted on at 09:22 am ★

zinc cows

Was out at Heide Museum in Heidelberg for the new year. The cows were kind of cool, even if the weather was not.

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Heh, it has been a scorching few days and I have enough time with my computer now to bang out a quick post before it gets too hot to stay upstairs in the study.

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Managed to catch a glimpse of the fireworks while at a friend’s place for new year’s eve. Maybe I feel jaded and I can’t recall the last time I was excited about year end celebrations. Maybe life is in transition for me. Heh, have clients for the new year, so things are moving forward, albeit a bit slowly.

I’m just needing to live by two words at the moment, patience and perseverance. You sort of need one for the other to work together to pull it off. I need to be a little more focused in prioritising stuff for the new year. Always fun revisiting what I wrote for the years gone by, and 2011 was a little melancholic. I just want to make things right for 2012 and hopefully keep things good.

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Heh, I think we have plans for travel and other stuff. Nothing concrete at the moment. Like I said, focus on priorities. Time to do some proper planning and stick to it.