This weeks photo is an Eddie I took whilst trying out a fast prime.

It’s hot a whole lot different to any other Eddie photo but I love this one because the lighting somehow seems perfect, and depth is great and it looks somehow soft and pleasant in a way I can’t even explain.

On time this week, woohoo.

This was taken in Minehead, Somerset… I believe.  Anypoop, it was taken through the glass of a shop window, there’s a trick to this, you have to have the lens flush with the glass so that no light gets between the glass and the lens, but you have to be careful not to bang it so that everyone in the shop turns round and go all hey! on yer.   Dunno what this model is mind, it looks like a cross between a zeppelin and a bi-plane.  Who knows.

Finally got around to buying an Extension Tube for my camera. An Extension Tube is pretty much a way to do macro shots with your existing lenses. You attach it to the camera like a normal lens, but the tube is really just that, a gapping hole with the bayonet connection on its end, connect the normal lens to that, mounting the lens further from the sensor, which somehow brings the focus length closer.

Here’s the photo thursday taken with it, a strange miniature figurine. Scary.

I’ve been wanting the Olympus EX-25 for yonks and only just got around to nabbing one. Most of the fun with it isn’t with the images but the bonkers-ness. There are many trade-offs to using an extension tube rather than forking out for a dedicated Macro Lens. You lose Auto-Focus, which is understandable because I doubt the camera would be able to cope with how freaking sensitive the focusing is with this thing on. Just spinning the focus ring what must be a nano-metre goes right through unfocused to focused and back to un-focused so much you can’t even tell what it is! It also requires massive amounts of light, with this thing on the DoF is incredibly shallow, you need to crank up the F.Stop to the max (to the smallest aperture).  Couple that with the loss of light inherent in the extension tube and even in daylight you may end up with just a photo of black.  Therefore I’ve found I need the big ol flash gun mounted at all times.

Another thing that is really difficult to get your head around is what the zoom ring does, it kinda seems inverted somehow. For instance at say 100mm you can be a distance from the object that you might expect from the macro mode of a compact camera. At say 30mm you can get so close to the object that you risk bashing the glass of your lens into it, at 14mm (the widest my standard lens goes) you can’t get close enough, the object would have to somehow merge into the lens like some strange atomic gloop.

Here, is the box to an xbox game, I’ve taken the box with a lens without the extension tube so you can see the whole thing. And then I’ve take it with the tube attach to show how close you can get. Pretty close eh?

This week it’s Cliff’s Cabs. Aaah, good ol’ Cllff’s Cabs. If you’re ever stranded down in Watchet, Somerset get on the blower and give Cliff a try, he’ll whisk you off like a princess.  E-300 with Sigma 30mm f/1.4 lens.

Is it thursday already master? Another somerset affair awaits you…

I like to think that this chap playing the.. um clarinet? Is probably jesus himself!

Forgot to post yesterday Sir.

This was one of the first test photo’s I made when I got a fast prime.  It’s of a model mini cooper in the living room.  I was pleased with the composition as it kinda looks like the mini is about to drive off, and the big low depth of field makes the mini pop out of the image quite well.

I’ve gone mad and bought more stuff for my camera.

First I bought a flash, ‘cos the built in one is too harsh and there isn’t much you can do with it.  Also, for some reason you can only push the shutter up to 1/250 when using the built in affair which ain’t no good with my shaky knuckles.  I bought the Olympus FL-36 which is their mid-level one.  Also to go with it I got a Sto-Fen Omni-Bounce.  Which is a peice of frosted plastic you shove over the flash to soften the blow.  Other neat things you can do is rotate it so that it bounces off walls, but I haven’t quite mastered the art.  I’ve no idea what I’m doing really.

When the flash is in the neutral position you can hear it moving some optic around inside its skull as you zoom in and out of things.  No idea what thats all about.

The other piece of nuttiness I’ve gotten is that lens I wanted.  I couldn’t resist it, it was eating me up inside.  It’s a lovely looking object, got a sort of matt look to it, and boy is it heavy.  Thing is at first I was totally dissapointed, I couldn’t even get it to focus on the right things. I even took a photo to demonstrate the problem I was having, and opened a support ticket with the store I bought it from.  The photo is here, and the deal is, I was focusing on where the spoon meets the ruler.

But after using it more I freaking love it, it’s like a game.  I don’t think it’s faulty but that it’s more um, quirky.  I might have sussed it, I shall now talk a load of crap.  I think that there aren’t enough stops around the focusing mechanism for the shallowness of the depth of field.  So I reckon the trick is, take a photo, see if the spoon is in focus, if it isn’t shuffle yer feet forwards or backwards a tiny tiny bit and have another go, hoping the new position will fall into a possible focus position.

Did that make sense?  I haven’t a clue.  Tell you what though I just love the photo’s I can get from it.  As usually Eddie is my subject, with this lens I can make really soft pastelly portraits of him that make him look verging on the sexy!

Some photos taken with it. 

I want a new lens for my camera bitch.

The friend who got married the other day bought a canon 400d to take on honeymoon pro. First thing that struck me about that camera compared to my e-300 is the speed of the menu, it’s really zippy, whereas mines more of a “down - pause - down - pause - select” affair. The big thing though is that along with the standard kit lens he also bought quite an interesting fixed-zoom lens. They are sometimes referred to as a “prime” lens, for reasons which are lost on me. But the advantage is that not having to cater for zoom allows the manufacturer room for other things, including a really big aperture. You’re able to take photo’s indoors with no flash and only ever a minor increase in ISO level. So of cause, I now want one.

Problem is, canon owners have the luxury of a back-catalogue of lenses stretching back to the stone-age, there’s thousands of the damn things. The lens mount my olympus uses, called the “Four-Thirds” standard was developed purely for the digital age and as such there’s only a modest selection to choose from so far.

Olympus don’t seem to care to create the sort of lens I’m after, luckily Sigma make their lenses for all the current crop of mounts including the four-thirds standard, which is what my camera uses. They have just the lens I want! The Sigma 30mm f1.4. But it’s freaking expensive, around 380 USD and goes for around 270 quid over here.

I could by an OM lens pretty cheap, which work on my camera using an adapter. But you lose Auto-Focus which ain’t no good.

I’m guttered actually because I had a winning bid for the Sigma on ebay but some crazy fool out-bidded me right in the last minute, I was just seconds too slow increasing my bid. So now i’m pissed off at myself for not using a bigger maximum bid in the first place.

Bought a Tripod today, Scott Kelby told me not to get a cheap one, but this was only 50 quid, yet it’s the brand he recommends. So is that good or bad? It’s pretty damn fine actually, it’s light and has a ball head. The legs and that seem stable enough but the the quick-release socket where the camera goes has a tiny tiny amount of give and I’m wondering if it’s enough movement to shake when the shutter goes. Dunno.

I was listening to a mac podcast the other day and they brought up a subject I hadn’t given much thought to. It’s all about security, a boring subject, especially where the mac is concerned because it’s almost a non-issue but there are some surprises.

The Mac has 3 user levels where security is concerned and they are almost impossible to compare to the 2 windows provides so I won’t even bother. The do anything security level is “root” which anyone familiar with unix will know about, if you are logged in as root you can cause huge huge damage such as reformat the hard drive.

Next is admin who can modify most desktop level things without hassle, but can even do root level stuff by giving an application permission to escalate the user level. An admin only needs to give their own password to do this.

The least privileged user is “standard” who can access their own files and that’s about it. But, they can provide an application with admin access by providing the application with an admin’s username and password.

With a fresh installation of Mac OS X, after you have given the welcome sequence a username and password to use the machine with you will be logged in as “admin”, this is the default user-level and all would seem well because the OS hasn’t given you any rhyme or reason to change things. Well, this podcast mentioned that this is really dumb, in fact there is even a flaw with the package installers, they can, if they wanted escalate your user-level to root without even prompting. I’m actually quite shocked at this, if you use your mac day-to-day as a standard user you will have no such risk, it is impossible for an app to escalate to root without you giving it an admin’s login details.

I’ve dropped my account to Standard and I haven’t had any problems or naggles at all so I recommend everyone to do this. The only hassle is that when you do something like drag an app from a DMG to the Applications folder you will need to provide the admin account details. Ack, it’s not bad though, I can live with that quite easily. Also, when you are a standard user threes a gotchya with the terminal you should know about. Standard users don’t have access to sudo, so when you read a tip that says things like do “sudo defaults penis.plist erect = 1″ you will need first to poop “su admin” where admin is the name of the admin account.

I love the Apple Keyboard to bits, it has in my opinion a perfect tactile feel, a good compromise between noisiness and jellyness. But, it’s also a good example of Apple design that absolutely has to be treated with kid-gloves if you want it to stay looking prestine.  It has a translusent case, which looks great for the first week and then begins to show everyone your eating habits and problematic hair lose.  I’ve only had this particular specimin a few weeks and look at it already!  Hey, that photo was of the whole keyboard and I cropped it to an inch of its life to show the yuck and it still looks clear, despite the knockers I love my camera, imagine the damage I could do with a macro lens!   Actually, I want a telephoto lens before a macro, the most affordable but still OK four-thirds (thats the standard of lens my camera uses) is 200 quid, but the couple I’ve watched on ebay have gone for the 120 quid mark.  Mmmm, still not an impulse buy.  damn.

I had already lost a bit of blogging fever because my cyclical in style depression is looming around the place, it’s really annoying, at the moment I’m waking up thinking to myself “ooooh, I fancy working on that coding project I’ve got going today” and I spring out of bed, read my webfeeds and then take Eddie for a walk.  Then when I get back and sit at the comp something comes over me, everything slows down… no thats not right, ugh you see this is the bit I find impossible to explain.  But yeah, my mind clouds over and I sit here for some minutes and then think to myself “fuck it, i’m going back to bed.”  Still, at least it isn’t bi-polar, did ya see that doc Stephen Fry made about it?  Twas fascinating.

So that was the first reason for bloggy slackiness but then my Cheap-assTM hosting went tits up.  They had fireworks from a hard drive and it turns out they don’t have much in the way of mirroring going on… that’s why it’s Cheap-assTM.  Felt like days passed before I could post anything, and even when the site came back the databases took a further day or 2 to be restored.

And to make things even more irritating they haven’t restored one of my databases properly, my listmania one where I catalogue shit, and is now a pretty damn vast database has been restored without the UTF-8 encoding intact.  So all them foreign films have now got titles like “La Vie Un Gar^&$son, Mons^&£@^n”.  I’d email Cheap-assTM to restore it again… properly, but I figure the chances of them managing it now are probably nil.  So I’m just going to have to go back to the last version I have of it locally, which is about a month old and merge them somehow.  It’s most annoying.