On yesterday morning’s jog I didn’t take my camera along, and so I missed a shot of a pair of gigantic raccoons who probably would have let me walk up on them, considering the way they watched me go by from just a dozen feet or so.

This morning was a ride day, so I packed the camera along, vowing not to miss anymore raccoons, but there were none to be missed. I did catch a rabbit eating in someone’s yard, and a minivan with a “Kennedy/Johnson” campaign bumpersticker. That struck me as either wistful or snarling, depending on where you find yourself on the left end of the political spectrum.

I also found a free automobile engine someone left out on the curb. If you need one, I’ve plotted its location precisely.

I initially thought my rides would be longer and more ride-as-task-oriented, but this morning I really liked just gliding around the neighborhood. I was out the door just after 6:30, so it was still very quiet. I could smell every patch of flowers I rode by. Any animals I spotted were sort of relaxed … just hanging out and waiting for the hairless apes to start making everything noisy and smelly.

On the run days, I’ve decided to pick back up with the Couch-to-5k routine from Cool Running. My big exercise issue (besides doing it at all) is always the same: My brain remembers doing stuff my body hasn’t been able to do for a while, so I always hit any new attempt at regular exercise hard, then I wear myself down or strain something or give myself shin splints and quit “to mend” only to never go back to it.

The initial two weeks of Couch-to-5k are going to be mightily frustrating, because I’ve got the cardio to deal with that and more. But running involves an additional toughening, too, and I definitely don’t have that. It’s the sort of thing I don’t want to just gut out, either. Running pains seem to have a way of gathering momentum then manifesting too late to adjust bad stretching, warmup or intensity habits. At least, that’s my experience. I’ve had three major running phases in my life, and I’ve screwed up the acclimation stage twice, once after only a brief layoff from jump injuries. It has hurt a lot to get through that and keep going.

So … a few frustrating weeks before I get to more extended run times … then more frustration until I’m just doing my 5k. By the time I get there, though, we’ll be living 10 or 12 blocks away from Wilshire Park, where there’s a nice dirt jogging trail. Just in time to make impact injuries less of a concern as I lengthen my distances.

I’ve been only haphazardly collecting the GPS data for any rides I take, which is sort of how I do when confronted with a task that has lots of little pieces. It takes me a while to integrate all the bits into something like a whole. This morning, though, I started a new morning ride-or-run routine; and that helped me put a bunch of things together.

Since I don’t have a ton of time if I get up at 6:15, it’s less an intensive fitness thing than just a “get started right” thing. I’ll be taking my camera along, too.

So, some tech details:

I use Garmin Training Center to get the data down off the GPS, then import it into TrailRunner, which exports Garmin’s files to Google Earth. From there it’s a simple matter to annotate the route, add any photo waypoints I care to, and upload the whole thing to the maps directory on the server.

I’d mind all those steps, I guess, but there’s some benefit to each piece of software. TrailRunner, for instance, does a great job with route planning, and Garmin’s software is good for simple historical stuff. I like having routes in Google Earth because tilting the view and turning up the elevation relief gives me a much better sense of the actual elevation changes involved than squinting at a scanned topo map.

All that comes together in a kml file, Routes and Runs, I can share via Google Maps. Today’s entry has my morning route and a snapshot of the McLoughlin Bridge on the Springwater. The little camera icon links to the picture stuff.

Today’s ride was less than six miles round trip. Saturday was a big bike day, though … two round trips down to Clackamas of 11 miles each, one mid-morning and one in the afternoon. The first ride was solo, the second I was towing Ben. That little trailer and little kid make a pretty big difference.

I bought my first digital camera about seven years ago. It was a Canon Powershot S10 that shot at 2 megapixels, felt like a brick and had no concept of how to handle the combination of direct sunlight, red clothing and human skin tones. I got some shots out of it that I was pretty happy with, and it was pretty fun to play around with, but a lot of the time I felt like I was struggling with its inflexibility. Sometimes its firmware just wasn’t up to something, and it’d get pretty frustrating to use. Its zoom was pretty limited, too: just a 2x.

So several years ago I had a reaction to that and picked up a film SLR … a Minolta Maxxum 5. I liked how crisp the camera’s response was, loved getting back the satisfying thunk of the shutter, and really loved the flexibility I had with lenses. I was pretty spoiled by my time with the S10, though … it was a hassle to scan negatives, pay for development and deal with the delayed gratification or inability to run through experiments quickly.

So just before Ben was born I picked up a Canon Powershot G5. That was a pretty easy camera to be happy with for a while, especially while Ben was a fairly static subject. It had good optics, some real flexibility (it felt more like a nice rangefinder than a simple point-n-shoot), and it took a few lens adapters that boosted its paltry 4x zoom. It also shot in RAW, which is a feature Canon has taken out of the Powershot line altogether in what appears to be a move to squeeze people willing to drop $600 MSRP for a point and shoot into the $750 Digital Rebel series, where they can begin the process of learning how unhappy they’ll be with a kit lens and pop-up flash.

The G5s big problem was how slow it was. Painfully slow. Sometimes a full second from lining up the shot to the camera recording it. For the bulk and its poor speed, it was pretty limiting. It required a lot of patience in anything other than ideal lighting. I also wasn’t a fan of the proprietary battery. I’d still say, though, that it’s the best digital point-n-shoot I’ve owned.

I traded the G5 for a Powershot S2 IS. The S2 is a pretty sweet superzoom. Fast, nice video mode, big (12x) zoom. I liked it a lot. It took AA batteries (so it was easy to power in a crunch, and cheap to power with an investment in some decent rechargeable NiMH AA’s). The biggest objection I had was that the lens was a hair slow for available light shooting (though shake reduction mitigated some of that) and the optics weren’t very sharp. Not bad, but they reflected the tradeoffs a general purpose megazoom is going to have to make. Not very flexible, either, when compared to the G5. Limited image controls.

When the flash broke on the S2, it was cheaper to try another camera out, though, so I upgraded to the 8 megapixel A530. It’s very flexible, does o.k. in low light with a steady hand, and produces sharp pictures that are easy to work with. My big complaints with it are that the controls for the autofocus/autoexposure point are clumsy and hard to manipulate, and unlike the S2’s EVF you get a crappy viewfinder or learn to live life shooting from the preview screen (which is, at least, foldout).

What I’ve been waiting for for years has been a digital SLR I could get into at about the price I paid for that Powershot G5 and stock with lenses. I came close to getting a Digital Rebel when the S2 flash broke, but backed off at the last minute because the price wasn’t quite where I wanted it, and because Nikon and Pentax both entered some new products that looked interesting (the D40 from Nikon and the K100d from Pentax).

Going dSLR

Going into vacation this year, though, I wanted to go ahead and upgrade. I found a good deal on a Pentax K100d kit with a hefty rebate and both an 18-55 kit lens and a 50-200mm zoom. I augmented that with a 50mm/1.4 prime and I’m thrilled.

The big selling points for the K100d:

• Reasonable price for a camera with a good pedigree and decent kit lens.
• In-camera shake reduction plus backward compatibility with most of Pentax’s lens collection. Other camera makers tend to put shake reduction in the lens. It’s a worthwhile feature to have, especially when you’re not a big fan of the popup flash that comes with most entry-level cameras.
• Uses AA batteries, not a proprietary rechargeable or expensive lithium non-rechargeable. I’ve got a set of rechargeable Energizer AA’s, and I shot with them for two days before hitting about 25 percent charge. I’ve got a backup set of Energizer lithiums (rated for around 400 shots) in case the rechargeables ever drain on me.

There are other fit-and-finish things I like about it. It feels substantial without being too big or bulky. The controls are easily accessible, so it was easy to learn to feel my way through adjustments with the camera up to my eye. Adjusting the autofocus zone is really easy. It has a preview mode that works either in the viewfinder as a traditional film SLR, or in the preview screen as a static exposure. I wasn’t sure of the value of that at first, but lining up a few shots on a gorillapod that was clinging to a rail taught me the value of being able to peer around to the preview screen instead of lining up through the viewfinder now and then. It also has a nice automatic post-shot preview that offers the opportunity to chimp for up to five seconds and optionally discard the photo on the spot.

The two things I’m not the happiest with are resolution (it’s a six megapixel camera) and some of the “beginner-friendly” stuff floating around in there. Its default shooting mode, for instance, involves a bright and contrasty image tone setting. It also has some gimmicky in-camera editing controls (sepia tone, a “softening filter,” and a horrific “slim” filter that squeezes or widens the picture to “slenderize” subjects).

Six megapixels is plenty for an 8×10 or even an 11×14 print, so I can’t complain too much. Especially comparing the results I was getting out of the 8 megapixel A630 in terms of noise. The thumbnail of the full-size details opens to a useful comparison of the k100d and the A630. That’s not completely fair because I was pushing the A640 to its max ISO to get the shot. But the point is that I don’t have to push the Pentax above 200 ISO, 400 ISO max, to get a much cleaner shot in similar lighting conditions. The wide open aperture on the Pentax shot contributed to some softness. Considering that it fired at a shutter speed of 1/90 at f1.4 at 400 ISO, and the Canon fired at 1/20, f3.2, 800 ISO, however, you can see that pixel counting is only part of the picture. I could have shut the Pentax lens down a stop or two and still had a well-exposed picture with better focus of both subjects. I know which of those two shots would make the better print. Here’s a link, by the way, to the picture that A630 sample came from. It’s reduced to about a third of its original size, but you can see that the issue with the noise still stands.

Anyhow, the beginner friendly stuff is also simple to toggle off (you can drop the pop-y image tone for a neutral/natural setting unless you’re shooting in one of its specialty settings like “landscape,” “moving subject,” or “portrait,”) or just ignore (the in-camera editing filters). Frankly, I’m not so conversant in SLR shooting that I can think of what I’d replace those things with, so it’s not that bad. I don’t think a tradeoff has been made so much as Pentax has bolted some stuff on that makes it easy to sell the camera as a high-end point-n-shoot you can print from directly without needing to edit in Photoshop or iPhoto or whatever.

Glass, glass, glass

The thing that makes the camera, though, isn’t so much the body itself as the Pentax SMCP-FA 50mm f/1.4 prime I bought for it. While the kit lens Pentax supplies is fine for general purpose moderate wide angle/zoom/macro shooting, the 50mm prime is ideal for available light indoor shooting. That picture at the top was taken with it, and the camera/lens barely broke a sweat: 200 ISO, f2, 1/50.

The picture of Ben with Cherie was shot at ISO 400, f1.4, 1/90. I regret not giving up a shutter stop or two, because Cherie’s a bit out of focus and I missed her lightpoints as a result, but I couldn’t be happier with the general sharpness and tones, the relatively low noise, and being able to ignore the flash for that sort of impromptu portrait. Most of the pictures I take around the house are in that sort of setting, and the lens is perfect for that.

So anyhow, that’s that. I’ve been waiting for a dSLR to strike me for a few years now, and one finally has. I’m glad to be collecting lenses for it because I know that if I outgrow the body at some point (man was the k10d tempting) I’ll still have good glass. I’ve still got a lot of room to grow, though, so I know I’m going to be content for the foreseeable future.

Tags: pentax, k100d, photography

Glad you asked!

Sadly, I do not know the answer and am too lazy to look it up, so I’ll tell you what I’ve named it. It’s The Wall of Asses at Mandalay Bay. Probably it’d be more accurately named “The Wall of Boobs and Asses at Mandalay Bay,” but boooooob doesn’t have the punch of ass.

Ass! Ass! Ass!

Feel that staccato punch? Rat-a-tat-tat!

The Wall of Asses!

I have isolated a number of behaviors you can engage in while passing the Wall of Ass:

1. You can ignore it. Most popular by far. There’s a 20-foot-tall wall with illuminated asses and boobies buried in it, arranged to imply some sort of creepy “graveyards layered over graveyards” setup, so I better ignore it.

2. You can look at it but offer no comment at all. Not many people go this way. Most people taking this option seem sort of furtive. Wouldn’t do to linger overlong on the Wall of Asses, lest you get made as a leering perv, or someone from Choice 3:

3. You can stand in front of it giggling, then have your picture taken in front of it. That triggered a few incidences of reaction 4:

4. You can stand off to the side sneering at the people giggling at the perfectly normal 20-foot-tall wall with illuminated asses and boobies embedded in it. Yokels! Haven’t they ever seen this sort of art in whatever benighted little Iowa burg they’ve driven here from?

5. You can sit quietly on a bench-like rock thoughtfully placed across the way from the Wall of Asses and take pictures from the hip with a carefully neutral look on your face, so’s not to invite judgement from the sophisticates who know better than to think anything at all of a twenty-foot-tall wall of illuminated boobs and asses.

Back to the burial motif … ugh … creepy.

Like someone dismembered a bunch of people (or perhaps like someone liberated a bunch of asses and boobies from their bodies) and stuck them in the dirt with those little “Japanese garden” solar-powered walkway lights you can get at Home Depot.

I don’t have the time or energy to try to turn this into some kind of “See!? That’s what’s wrong with Vegas!” thing, because that’s not what’s wrong with Vegas. If all this place had to answer for was gratuitous and vulgar ass art tucked into the less well travelled corridors connecting its conference centers and food courts, nobody would want to come here. And there’d be something wrong with every mid-size metropolis that ever coughed up money to some hack with a yen for stainless steel cubes or curiously deformed and jagged implications of winged creatures.

“Hey, man! What are you making?”

“Oh, it’s just a public sculpture of some gangly waterfowl made out of rusty rebar … and children.”

“Huh. That’s neat … the children … their lips are pulled back from their teeth in what appears to be severe pain … or maybe they’re baring their teeth at the giant rebar birds? And their teeth are very well defined, I might add.”

“Thanks.”

“What do you call it?”

“The City Builds a Monument to Its Sadness.”

“Cool.”

So anyhow … “Las Vegas: Day Two” or whatever alternate title you’d prefer.

Canon PowerShot S5 IS: Digital Photography Review:

Finally we have the update everyone had expected at PMA, the new PowerShot S5 IS digital camera. The S5 IS features an eight megapixel 1/2.5″ (5.8 x 4.3 mm) CCD sensor and a twelve times Image Stabilized zoom lens. Unfortunately this lens, while offering long reach with its maximum 432 mm equiv. FOV doesn’t improve at the wide end with the same 36 mm equiv. FOV as the S3 IS. Improvements include Face Detection (for AF, AE and Flash in shooting mode and red-eye removal in playback), a 2.5″ LCD monitor (up on the S3 IS) and a flash hot-shoe. Still no RAW support though.

Well, that’s that. I had this hope that maybe the S-series would pick up RAW, but it was a slender one. Pity. I was happy with having RAW support in my old G5, and I’d like to be able to pick up a new camera that could do that without having to make the move to an SLR and the attendant problems of expense involved with lenses and bulk.

Or maybe I’m just complaining. So much is about the glass, and as much as I like the S series for how much it crams into a small camera, the optics reflect its generalist approach. I keep coming back to the notion of picking up a low-end dSLR with a decent kit lens and a truly awesome prime. I think that puts me into either the Canon or Pentax camps.

I was going to get Ben to sit in front of the Christmas tree so we could get a picture of him looking festive and pleased. This is what you get instead.

He was kinda worked up after a period of anxiety about the lights not working (”they need batteries, dad”) and not being allowed to handle certain ornaments (”it’s not fragile, mom, it’s not!“), so by the time I got the camera out and put it on its mini tripod he was in no mood for any of it and had taken to running in circles around the house.

At some point, when he’s feeling sort of sedate, we’ll bribe him with food and capture some image to commemorate the first Christmas he’s really aware of. For now, though, there’s the blur.

We also spent some time the evening we got the tree out at the Portland Speedway looking at the drive-thru Christmas lights. Probably the less said about that experience the better, but there will be pictures soon and I’ll try to be appropriately jolly.

My Powershot S2’s flash died, which made me sad, so I replaced it with a Powershot A630 and consoled myself with a Joby Gorillapod to make it more fun.

There’s definitely a tradeoff element to the new camera. I’ve had my eye on a DSLR for a while, and we almost decided the S2 getting broken might be a catalyst for making that move, especially since Canon up and ruined the Powershot G7 and because the S2 tends to produce images a little on the soft side, even with the image stabilization. But after spending a week obsessing on affordable DSLRs, then getting sticker shock from the price for good lenses, I decided there are still too many budget tradeoffs involved to make that move quite yet. I need to save enough to afford the kit lens and a nice prime.

For now, though, between the holidays and a trip or two to see family in the next few months, it’s more important to just have a camera that can take pictures indoors and someday be the second camera for a DSLR.

I actually went out and bought a Panasonic Lumix DMC-LZ5, feeling virtuous for saving a lot of money, but an afternoon of using it indoors convinced me it isn’t the camera for me. The menus and overall usability are nice and smooth, and I loved the feel of the camera in my hand. But it did weird crap like take two seconds to bring the LCD back when it used the flash (perhaps to recharge the flash more quickly/not encourage the user to try to get another flash shot before it was ready) and its low-light performance was way too fussy to provide pretty bad results. I also wanted a bit more control of stuff that camera was not designed for.

The Powershot A630 I settled on set me back some more scratch (though still under budget), but provides a lot more flexibility. It doesn’t have half the zoom the S2 has, but it’s also smaller and lighter, which will be important when I finally get a DSLR and a few lenses.

In a lot of ways, the A630 reminds me of the Powershot S10 I had several years ago, to the extent it feels solid in the hand and tends toward the “advanced point-and-shoot” point on the continuum when compared to the “prosumer” point the G-series is going for. At the same time, it has a lot more control than the S10 did, and it has that flip-out/rotating LCD, which makes it behave more like my old Powershot G5 in terms of what I can do with it. And it’s much faster than the G5. If it shot RAW, it’d be perfect for what I’m after.

Oh, it also runs on NiMH or plain old alkaline AAs, which means no proprietary batteries to worry about. On more than one occasion, the G5 and S10 both ran out of juice because they were accidentally left on or got turned on by hitting something in my bag. In each case, that’s it: you’re done if you’re somewhere there are, say, gas stations but not camera shops willing to charge your new battery while you wait. With AA’s, you can always pick up a four-pack somewhere, and it’s cheaper to have two or even three backup sets stuffed under the seat.

Anyhow, seems like a nice enough camera, and it passed my mensies test.

Oh … and a quick note on the Gorillapod: its flexiness is really nice, but it’s also a minor issue. If you want to use it in conjunction with a timer, set the timer to five or ten seconds. The Gorillapod still has the shakes for a few seconds after pressing the button. If your camera doesn’t have IS, that’ll be an issue.

Tags: cameras, powershot a630, photography, cameras

Cthulhu License Plate,
originally uploaded by sigsegv.

via reddit is a picture of the one redeeming thing in the entire state of Virginia (blanket qualifiers for family, friends, the Blue Ridge mountains and Monticello apply).

So, last night I was at the Barnes & Noble, fresh off last week’s purchase of Scott McCloud’s Making Comics. I like the book, but it sort of lacks if you’re not a very experienced artist. I plopped down in the aisle in front of the Wall of How-To-Draw Manga Titles and flipped through a few, because I could use some help learning how to look at comic art with a more analytical eye.

I spent five or six minutes with the Chris Hart guide to drawing Chibi, which entertained me a lot for whatever reason. While I was leafing through it, I thought of Chibithulhu, so I picked up a copy of FLCL, which has some styles I liked, and stopped at Michael’s (the craft supply store) on the way home to buy some drawing pencils and pens. He needs a little tentacled cat companion or something, but since the month is winding down and since I put some pressure on Sven to share a bit of his monster-month-inspired creative wealth, I figured I’d chip in something.