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Best Buy is having a preferred customer sale December 8th and 9th. Hours vary if your shopping on line or in store In store the sale runs December 8 from 7-10 pm. Quebec 6-9pm.  Online the sale runs December 8 3pm (EST) until December 9 at 10am (EST).  Some good deals for Christmas present (nudge nudge, wink wink  husband of mine.) The preferred customer sale includes the following sales:  5% of  Tvs 10% off Mp3 Players 10% off all movies, music and dvd’s 10% of all digital cameras 100$ off all laptops over 1000$ 10% off portable navigation GPS Click here to check it......

There’s been lots of interesting forward motion in the photo-products space recently. I thought I’d summarize for the fairly-small set of readers who care about cameras and such, but aren’t obsessive enough to follow the daily news themselves. Also, I’ve tossed in some pretty winterdusk studies. Well, darkly pretty. The pictures are from a last-day-of-November walk around the block with my 2½-year-old daughter; her divagations and peregrinations leave lots of time for shooting. This was about 4:30PM, which at 50ºN latitude in November, means sunset is in progress. Opening Shots Want some pure lens porn? Here ya go. There’s quite a bit of buzz these days about HDR photography, which combines multiple images to produce often-startling results. I mostly hate the HDR shots...

Recently, the factor most limiting the quality of the pictures I take has been focus. When you shoot a few hundred pictures, a few will always constitute focus failures, but my fail ratio has been too high recently. I’ve thought about it and there are a few things wrong with my approach, but I thought I’d reassure myself that my camera and lenses were playing nice with each other. The nice folks over at the Pentax-Discuss Mailing List recommended focustestchart.com which has Nikon in its title but the product works fine with any old camera. The idea is, you print out their PDF, you lay out the chart page really flat, you line your camera up, point it down 45º at the chart, and adjust your focus. I have three everyday working prime lenses; the 40mm and 21mm “pancakes” from...

Canon’s much-ballyhooed but not universally welcomed 5D Mark II also (and this is a new thing for SLRs) operates as a high-def videocam. There are two videos linked from The Online Photographer and they are mind-bogglingly, jaw-droppingly beautiful. But it won’t work for you. The pictures you take with this camera will almost certainly look great with little effort, while your videos will require huge effort and probably still end up lousy. Skill The first reason they’ll look lousy is because there’s a whole lot of skill and practice that goes into making good video, and most of us don’t have it. You can get it, sure, and who knows, you might even turn out to have some talent, but count on months of work to get your chops down. Still, that’s not the real problem. Tools A...

Suppose you’re interested in buying a camera. If you look at the ads and reviews, the first thing you see right beside every single one is its megapixel count. The camera makers want you to think that more is always better, which is wrong. But the community buzz is starting to be “more is worse”, which isn’t really right, either. Why More Used To Be Better I was an early adopter of digicams, buying a 640x480 Fuji in 1998. I still have what I then considered the keepers, right here on this laptop; and most of ’em look like complete dogshit. Lack of talent and application are major contributors, but lack of pixels was a real issue too. Here are two of the best-looking ones, more or less (I think) as they came out of the camera. Ten years later, I still have the same...

I think that life in general and this space in particular would benefit from more of an outdoor flavor; words and pictures rooted in Nature. Our recent acquisition of a piece of Keats Island, should make this easier. Welcome to Cottage Life. Any piece of Pacific Northwest waterfront is going to include a lot of logs. A few trees naturally fall into the ocean when they die, but most of the logs that drift up on our beach represent little errors and omissions in the logging industry. Time was, you could make a living scooping these up and selling them back to the foresters; there was even a TV series about it. I believe that the rock holding the log up represents the extreme northernmost point of Keats Island. Here’s a close-up of another; they become more visually interesting as...

I’ve been carrying cameras around for a while in a bag that I hated; awkward to open, awkward to get into, ugly, big outside and small inside. So the other day I picked up this little canvas National-Geographic-branded bag made by Bogen Imaging, model NG-2343. It’s really compact, smaller than the picture makes it look, with good use of internal space. I can get the K20D in with any combination of two other lenses unless they’re the hulking Sigma f1.4 and the big old Tamron telephoto; and still unobtrusive. This is another advantage of shooting with prime lenses. If you’ve got a D3 or want to carry a couple of honkin’ zooms around, forget it. The main lid is fastened with a couple of those old-fashioned metal snaps and you can have it open in a flash. Under that is the...

A few weeks back, I bought a Pentax K20D and now that I’ve taken 500+ pictures with it, I suppose I should say a few words. To illustrate, photographs of garbage. Previously, I’ve run pictures of new cameras here, but not this time. The K20D is a commodity, so there are tons of shots all over the Net. And anyhow, it’s kinda ugly. It’s possible to be extremely functional and also beautiful—consider a violin or a tugboat—but not, so far, in the world of DSLRs. The camera is bulbous and swollen and button-infested. It takes great pictures, but then so do lots of other cameras. Saturday morning, we went to Granville Island Market, and as we walked in, there was a dumpster just at the right angle for the sun to come in. Here’s the thing: Given reasonable light and a...

Remarks from the photo world, interspersed with uplifting Hawai’i snapshots. It’s about emotion, not just technology. Emotion You want emotion? Check out grief at Arlington, specifically Greg Heins’ take on this remarkable John Moore photo. Also take in the illustrated featured comment, and then Mike Johnson uses this to launch a discussion on cropping and its ethics. They call Maui “The Valley Isle”; this is a view from the side of Haleakalā looking down at the Kihei end of the valley. I saw a tough Hawaiian-looking kid whose T-shirt said “Valley isle not haole isle”. Reality Since I’ve just quoted Mike Johnson, here are a couple other things from the last month that are worth reading: Funny That Way and Look Left, Look Right. I think that all of us, as digital...

What happened was, I wanted to buy a Ricoh GX00 and, in North America, there’s only one place to do that: Adorama (gotta love that name), a New York camera store with online pretensions. It didn’t work out well, but while we don’t know yet if the story has a happy ending, it certainly has a silver lining. When I unboxed the camera and charged the battery and turned it on, it didn’t turn on. Which is to say, the LCD on the back didn’t light up. Eventually it did, but then sometimes it didn’t. I learned that if you gave it a few gentle thumps the LCD would eventually turn on and then it would take some pretty damn good pictures (see here and here). But the required thumping kept getting harder and I could see where this was heading, so I called up Adorama. After a few busy...

Last month at the Moose Camp, I gave a short talk on high-end compact cameras. I whipped it up in a few minutes, made a links page, and the whole thing was well under ten minutes. It was fun. It turns out that Bruce Sharpe was in the audience with a video camera, and he polished up and published it under the title Northern Voice 2008: Best Compact Cameras. The quality is remarkable, particularly when you consider that the whole exercise cost Bruce approximately nothing. If anyone reading this is interested in a point-&-shoot with pretensions, they might find it useful. But here’s what’s interesting: in a world infested with videobloggers, any public utterance, no matter how off-the-cuff, is, potentially, an audiovisual publication. A permanent......

Three pictures of droplet-studded violet crocuses. Spring sunshine is lovely, but there are things to like about spring rain too. With some camera commentary. The middle flower has been splashed with bits of soil by the just-ended rainstorm, and I thought about picking them off but ended up liking them. These photos highlight both a strength and a weakness of the GX100. On the upside, the Macro setting is absolutely fabulous. People have complained that the autofocus is a little slow and yeah, it zooms back and forth for a second or more before it locks on. So what? I use Macro to shoot things like flowers and rocks that hold still, so I don’t care. When it locks on, it’s on, the depth-of-field seems to be just what you’d want, and the bokeh pleases my eye. On the...

I’ve bought two new cameras in the last month and they’re giving me trouble. If you’re thinking about one of the new Pentaxes, or one of those nifty little Ricohs, maybe you ought to read this. Pentax Sigh I’ve been very happy with my 4-year-old *ist D, the original Pentax DSLR. Except for, low-light shooting is a challenge. The K20D, along with this snazzy new Samsung-sourced sensor that looks pretty darn smooth at ISO 1600, has shake reduction. Plus lots of other goodies like weatherproofing and sensor-cleaning and lens-correction memory and so on. So I got one. The problem is, the hardware is ahead of the software. It can write RAW in Pentax’s own .PEF format, or in Adobe’s candidate standard .DNG. But Adobe Camera Raw and Lightroom refuse to even try to read the...

Officially that’s the Ricoh Caplio GX100, but a camera shouldn’t need a middle name. Mine arrived yesterday. Why? You just gotta have a pocket camera, because the single greatest factor in taking good photos is being ready to shoot when opportunity knocks. I still regret my deceased Canon S70, and while I got some OK shots with the Canon A710, I never actually liked it that much; the ergonomics were so-so and it wouldn’t shoot RAW and the shutter lag was irritating. On paper, the Ricohs scratch a few of those itches, then when I was in Tokyo last year, it became obvious that the Ricohs are the preferred camera flavor among the Japanese geek contingent; I got to fool with a couple of them and liked the feel. If you look at DPReview’s take, it’s pretty negative, but the lines...

Yes, I’ve been posting fewer substantive original pieces here. Working on a couple of things that aren’t very public, and also feeling itchy because what was radical three years ago has become conventional wisdom, which leaves me feeling empty and in need of something radical. Today an amusing antique camera, Iranian video, where we went, nine days of winter, and what happens when everything’s free? Baldini I publish quite a few slide scans here. The other day, I remembered a word: “Baldini”, which was what Dad called the camera he had before he got into serious Pentaxing in the mid-Sixties. So I looked it up, and here it is: the Balda Baldini. I remember inheriting it and using it for a few shots myself. That was the camera that produced these. As Quiet as Prayer The...

More news for the photo set. Well, the proportion who care about DSLRs, prime lenses, and so on. OK, really only the sub-sub-subculture that follows the products from Pentax. With a few introductory remarks as to why you might be interested if you tend to photogeekery. Everyone else move right along. On Pentax Pentax’s market share lags far, far, behind the CaNikon duopoly. They were late to the DSLR market and have never had more than a couple of models on sale. They don’t have the most megapixels or frames/second or the biggest telephotos. Having said that, the Pentaxes, like every DSLR you can buy, take great pictures. And the company has a reputation for being a little eccentric in their product strategies, verging on the frankly weird. Plus, the cameras have outstanding...

I was sitting up late the other night talking to Dave Sifry about his excellent Beginner’s Digital SLR buying guide: The Sifry Starter Photo Package. If you’re thinking “maybe I should get a better camera”, it’s a really good place to start. I wanted to add a couple of points and then rant a bit about the collective insanity around megapixels in camera marketing. To Dave’s piece, I’d add a few more items of advice: Dave correctly advises that if you already have some decent lenses, you might as well get the camera that goes with them. I followed that advice and ended up in the Pentax world. But his piece might leave you thinking that Nikon and Canon are all there really is. Between the two of ’em, they sure enough dominate the DSLR world, but there are excellent...

Here’s some reportage from the photoenthusiast side of the brain, including a shot by an actual real professional (and the difference shows), Ricoh rumblings, calibration, conversation, pictures by four different cameras, and two pictures of camera gear. I can gang together nearly-unrelated topics in a great big post like this because photo-hounds will read all of it and nobody else will read any; so efficiency is maximized. Ricoh Rumblings As noted here, the obsessive-photog world is all a-twitter about the Ricoh GR-D2. The zillion-dollar question: will it retain the virtues of the original GR Digital while improving that camera’s miserable low-light performance? Pavel Odklizec has been doing some serious testing, and reporting over at the Ricoh Forums. The early verdict is that...

I didn’t have to take off for my first meeting till eleven, so I cruised into Shinjuku around 9:30 to see what I could do about the slow-camera problem. Which turned out to be about perfect, since it’s Yodabashi’s opening time; so I got a leisurely look at the stuff with help from the staff. I gather the normal Yodabashi experience is wall-to-wall crush. GR-D2 The place was just plastered with ads for the much-ballyhooed Ricoh GR-D2 but it’s not launching till next week. I have to say, the advertising was polished and compelling. It’s kind of irritating Ricoh doesn’t make a bit more of an effort to export. I was hanging with Akihito Fujii, who has the original GR-Digital, and he’d just bought the GW-1 “Wide Conversion Lens” which takes it from 28 to 21mm and gives...

Following on Thinking About Cameras and the smart things in its comments, here are some conclusions and a prediction. Prediction These are electronics-driven consumer goods, right? Given that, the future is obvious: Inside another decade, you’ll be able to get something with the specs of the mighty D3 and it’ll fit in your pocket. My Sensitivity Problem I’m sorry that I went for a few years without comments on the blog. I got emails of course, but not as many, and sharing them with the world was extra work. Clearly the GR-D2 is an interesting camera; but probably not something that’ll solve my shooting-inside problem. If they’re actually out on the street in Japan and one jumps out in front of me as I walk through Shinjuku, I might give in. For the low-light problem, there...

I’ve been shooting with the 40mm pancake almost exclusively for a half-year now, and I’m not going to stop, but I’m really itching for something better. If you read the comments on that pancake link above, they say smart things, and others have written about the virtues of running with a prime (no-zoom) lens. Let me pull together my personal list. Compact My aged Pentax *ist-D is smallish and lightish as DSLRs go, and the pancake is small and light by any standards. I can easily hold the combo with one hand for an hour at a time as I walk around and shoot. Also I get to tease the other photogeeks with their huge swollen Canon lenses by waving my diminutive setup around airily as they struggle with monopods and the straps around their necks cut off circulation to their brains....

The tabs build up as fast as I cut ’em down. This sweep is half photo-stuff, but I also have Second-Life humor, an Art-Rock conundrum, and what happens when you can’t write any more. Second Life I gave up on it myself, for the moment anyhow. So maybe it’s not like this any more. GX-100 I have speculated here that the Ricoh GX-100 might fill the fairly-empty “serious pocket camera” space. Finally, the mighty DPR has a full-on review. Summary: great ergonomics, weak sensor. I dunno, my Japanese colleagues’ seemed to be getting good results on indoor shots with their GX’s back in June; see Okazaki’s work here and here. Pentax Gallery Check out the Pentax Photo Gallery; there’s a lot of beautiful stuff there. I found that I actually disliked as much as I liked; the...

Lots of interesting discourse out there in the photogeek world, girls and boys. Here’s your lightning tour, this one dominated by Mike Johnston of The Online Photographer, currently about my favorite photoblogger; high quality stuff and a nice light tone. DSLR Shopping? Mike’s old DSLR is running out of steam, so he asked his readers, one of the best-qualified communities you could possibly imagine, what to do. There are 73 comments, very hands-on, no theoreticians. If you’re thinking about a DSLR you might learn something from them. Even more valuable, I think, are Mike’s thoughts on his own trade-offs and itches. Good Little Camera I have bitched here previously about the lack of a high-end fits-in-your pocket compact camera; see here, here, and here. It turns out that...

Still in the grip of Prime Lens Mania (“prime” means no zoom), I ventured into the wilds of eBay and picked up a Pentax smc 21mm P-DA F3.2, in theory the perfect companion to the 40mm “Pancake”. With illustrations and a cat-blogging bonus. Very few pictures are worth anywhere near a thousand words, but this pair might be worth a couple hundred. The same scene from the same position, a corner of our back garden. The 21mm wide-angle above, the 40mm pancake below. The theory, I guess, is that the 21mm is for carrying around a city or a mountain and shooting views and vistas; the 40mm for taking a garden or party and shooting flowers and faces. One of these renditions looks a whole lot more like what I think I see than the other. What do you think? I’ve decided that while the...

Two pretty pictures of Western Trumpet Honeysuckle (Lonicera Ciliosa) blossoms, taken with very different lenses; for both camera and flower geeks. Telephoto above, pancake below. This bright cheery citizen of the garden looks fetching climbing the weathered driftwood fence. I had the big old Tamron SP 70-210mm on the camera to shoot the boy’s soccer game (great fun, see what I got two summers ago), and was enjoying shooting the flowers from a dozen feet away. Then I put on the new Pentax 40mm prime “pancake” and took some of the same pictures. I did a bit of cropping and other Lightroom magic to get the composition and colours to match up reasonably well. What do you think? Mostly, I’m astonished how close they are. The telephoto has more extreme bokeh which, with this...

Perhaps a little more all-over-the-map even than is usual: GPLv3 clarity, Functional Pearls, raina bird-writer, Java credits, framework programmers, and hacking my Canon. What Alison Said From Alison Randal, GPLv3, Clarity and Simplicity and is she ever right. I reviewed the last draft of GPLv3 and I should really go have a look at the latest, but I get a headache just thinking about it. Call me a wacko idealist, but I think that important legal documents should be human-readable, and on the evidence I just don’t think Eben Moglen and his friends give a damn. FP Pearls From the Haskell community, Research papers/Functional pearls; as CPUs get wider and wider, we’re just gonna have to bring some new techniques to bear to get the most out of them, and my bet just at the moment is...