Fnord.

From JR, of course:

127.
To me the great divide is between the talk-
ative and the quiet. Do they just say every-
thing that’s on their minds, even before it’s on
their minds? Sometimes I think I could just
turn up my head like a Walkman so what’s
going on there could be heard by others. But
there would still be a difference. For inside
the head they are talking to people like them,
and I am talking to someone like me: he is
quiet and doesn’t much like being talked at; he
can’t conceal how easily he gets bored.

Today’s thought-provoking aphorism, courtesy of my man JR.

14.
When a jet flies low overhead, every glass in
the cupboard sings. Feelings are like that:
choral, never single; mixed, never pure. The
sentimentalist may want to deny the sadness
or boredom in his happiness, or the freedom
that lightens even the worst loss. The moralist
will resist his faint complicity. The sophisti-
cate, dreading to be found naive, will exclaim
upon the traces of vanity or lust in any motive,
as if they were the whole. Each is selling him-
self simplicity; each is weakened with his fear
of weakness.

(Click for source)

I had a couple of things in mind for the new toy when we got it:

I’m still working on both. Right now, the Apple device page lists three Fuji cameras; the S6000fd is not one of them. It may be possible to pass camera files through the Fuji software and thence into Aperture; I don’t know yet.

HDR is more interesting. To get images like this:

or this:

you take a series of images at different F-stops, and then use software to combine them into a single image. (There’s much more detail about the theory and such on Wikipedia page.) Best case is if your camera supports exposure bracketing. In that case, the camera takes 3 or more images, with the main exposure bracketed by plus or minus 1 or more f-stops. According to this page:

To get good results, it is important that each one of the source photos are taken with a sufficiently different exposure in order to properly cover the dynamic range of the scene. Taking three photos separated by two EVs (i.e. two full-stops), or five photos separated by one EV, will be sufficient for most outdoors scenes.

(This page lists support for auto exposure (AEB) bracketing by camera.)

Anyway, the S6000fd does have AEB, but only +- 1 f-stop. Seems to be minimal for HDR. So this camera is not ideal for it. Not that I’ve gotten it to work yet, need to try the tripod and fiddle a bit more. Then again, images like this seem like they’re worth the effort:

You can find a ton of examples of HDR on Flickr.

So overall, no joy on Aperture (yet) and mostly research and fiddling on the HDR side. I posted this to spur interest and see if anyone else is doing similar things.

(Pictures swiped from Amazon; link goes there.)

We got this looking for a SLR-lite, with good optics, skin tones and image quality. A couple of relatives already have the camera and vouched for it enthusiastically. The review on Imaging Resource was good, and for 318$ it was a great deal.

You also need a chip, make sure and get type H (Wikipedia) and not type M - M is 3-4x slower! We got this 2GB chip which is enough for both pictures and video.

I also recommend a UV filter as a lens protector, and I personally wanted a polarizer for watch photography. I found a combined set for $17 that I like; its a standard 58mm screw mount.

I also got a card reader for my laptop that fits into my ExpressCard/34 slot. I got this one from Kensington:

It’s six megapixel, 10x optical zoom (manually driven, which I like), both automatic and manual. Has a nice face detection algorithm, does 640×480 video at 30fps, and has a good CCD sensor. (As opposed to the less-expensive CMOS.) The lens opens out to 28mm-equivalent, which is wonderful for indoors and such. The macro and super macro do very well, and with my new macro lightbox I’m getting good watch pics.

I’ll skip the detailed feature list, see the Amazon or Imaging Resource links for those.

You can see albums from the camera here, here and here.

Bottom line: I like it. Recommended.

Former co-worker, known on Teh Intertube as ghort, has lost a lot of weight. This is good. He’s now looking very very Euro, at least I’d say so. Check this out:

PS Pic from his flickr page

Yep, more pictures of Anna!

Enjoy! There may be some dups from the last set, sorry. I’m a bit tired for some reason.

From Karen and Terri, a nifty picture of a sphinx moth. (Click pic for full-size)

Really should just show them how to post and setup an account, eh?

From Karen and Terri, of course…

Yes, we are very fortunate, and yes we know it.