wiredfool

A cat, handheld at 1/4 sec. I’m surprised that the cat stayed still for that long. Especially since this was the third in a sequence.

We’ve had this new camera (digital rebel) for about a month and a half now and taken somewhere north of 3000 pictures in that time. Even with the low end zoom that comes with it, (f3.5-5.5, 18-55mm, plastic) we’re getting good natural light shots of Ben.

It’s taken a while to get the hang of the focus point selection, and to make sure that it’s matching the composition of the picture. Typically for portraits that means that one eye needs to have the focus spot. Quite a challenge with a moving baby. I’ve found that the focus seems to be a little to the front of where I would think that it should be, but it’s hard to really tell without seeing images at full size, and by then I’ve sometimes forgotten exactly where I had the focus point. Perhaps I can hack something up with the exif data.

I’ve also noticed that the auto white balance for tungsten is leaving images distinctly warm. That may be an issue with the interior colors in the house (shades of terracotta, wheat, cream, and yellow) overwhelming the color bias and shoving it farther into the warm range. Or it may just be something that I need to figure out in custom white balance or post production.

I’m pretty impressed with the image quality at ISO 1600. Of course, I’d prefer less noise, but that’s pretty much a given. I suspect that one of the things that Moore’s law is going to help is to lower noise at high sensitivity, maybe in 5 years we’ll see usable 3200 or 6400 settings. I think the next outlay with this camera is to get a 50mm prime lens, since that’s going to give me another stop to play with in far less than the 5 years it will take to get an upgraded sensor. I will note that I think I’ve developed a pretty steady hand after years of trying to take lo light pictures with an Elph that only does ISO 100.

One thing that’s straining under the load is my image workflow. Sometime next month, we’ll pass the total number of images that I took with my old camera over it’s 4 year lifetime to date. I need better image archive/photo browsing software, and file system folders and imagemagick don’t do it anymore. (well, at least without a week or two of additional hacking). The trickiest thing is that there needs to be centralized storage (on the media server, the fancy name for a 4yr old debian box that now has another big drive on it, and space for 2 more) and mac laptop control and image posting. I have seen something that might work, I think it was livejournal’s photo management software.

Very Green.

Not so green.

White Christmas

This is a large percentage of the non-Ben related pictures from the vacation.