Canon has released their new crop of cameras. There is some interesting updates, but sadly they seem to have cranked the MP up to 14. Will have to see how this affects the noise and overall image quality. It is nice to see they finally have 720p video with a stereo microphone. It would be nice if they could have started the lens a little wider open than 28mm, but with 14x optical zoom it could be an interesting look.
Another interesting announcement is their updated d-SLR the T2i. Less than a year ago they released the T1i to replace the XSi. With entry level d-SLR’s like this, it’s hard to figure out why anyone (other than the top of the top photographers) would need anything more. the T2i offers 1080p video, 18MP and a whole heap of other internal enhancements.
I think I need a new laptop case. Twelvesouth are making some damn sexy laptop cases. (update: $34 shipping?! No dice.)
The idea of geotagging pictures has been something I’ve written about a lot in the past. I really like the idea of being able to go to a location and see a collection of photos that show the changes in a place over time. Flickr has just done a little post that shows this combination of old and new photos in one shot on their blog. It is a really amazing effect.
Photo by Jasone Powell
There is many examples of these photos on flickr, and many are captured in a gallery called Looking into the Past.
I’m always in the market for a new camera, but can never settle on a new model to replace my ageing Canon Powershot A520. The new purchase has to do HD video and needs to produce some super clean images at a moderate ISO. And it has to fit in my pocket (have the dSLR for real photo outings). And built in GPS would be awesome, as doing it after the fact with a trackfile or by memory is a pain. A few new models by Canon are starting to support my needs, but I still read that their HD video isn’t great, and they don’t do stereo audio. A few Panasonic models fit the bill, but they are priced a little out of my range for a secondary pocket camera.
Today Panasonic announced 3 new models, two of which are interesting. The Panasonic Lumix ZS7 SuperZoom does the HD, has more than enough zoom at 12x, and has built in GPS. The Panasonic models have come along way in picture quality and size. Their other model is the Lumix DMC-TS2, a camera that does HD and has underwater shooting abilities in a small package. I hope the DMC-TS2 has the same improved image quality as most of their new offerings, because I have been less than impressed with the photos from the other underwater cameras (I’m looking at you Samsung).
I’ll have to see how these cameras get priced in the marketplace.
I was a huge fan of pinball during my high school years in the mid to late 90’s. I remember going to the mall for lunch and playing The Adams Family pinball game. We left many a free play in that game when we had to leave to get back for afternoon classes. It was my favourite pinball game and the one I was the best at. I’d love to find a digital version, or a live machine someday. With the detailed game information presented here I bet I could do even better at that game. In contrast, another mall also had a copy of the game, but they had their table set at a steeper incline and it made the game play entirely differently (obviously). I really sucked when I played there.
There is a wonderful article that explains the economics of the pinball machine, and also looks at their eventual downfall in the face of video games.
Jim Whitelaw’s daughter bought an iPod Touch to play games with, and Jim placed some allowance money on a gift card for her to buy games from the iTunes store. Accept she can’t. The iTunes store in Canada does not allow one to use gift cards to buy games or applications. I ran into the exact same problem a while back when I tried to use a free gift card to buy a $10 app, and all of a sudden saw that my credit card had been charged. I wouldn’t have bought the app if I’d have known. Sure enough some digging into the terms listed online I found that I couldn’t buy applications with my gift card, but one shouldn’t have to dig through the small print to learn that info. It really should be right on the card (this card is good for music only).
Jim Whitelaw wasn’t going to just let this one go, so he set off to get to the bottom of this Apple stance. His MPP and the Minister of Industry are now involved. His story can be followed on his blog.
Sydney Australia (a near by cities) were bathed in red dust from the desert this week as huge sand storms blew the dust east. A number of eerie photos can be seen on flickr, and now The Big Picture has created a set that are also mesmerizing.
photo by tomhide
I made the trip down to the Toronto Zoo recently and brought my new camera for some photos. I don’t have anything near a zoom lens, and you really need one to get spectacular photos of most animals, as it allows you to focus through the wire on many of the enclosures. Here are a few images that I was able to capture.
Bengal Tiger
Elephant
Hippopotamus
Siberian Tiger
Gorilla
I have never found the location tagging in iPhoto 09 to be intuitive when trying to place photos in their exact location on a map. Not only do you have to do each photo separately, but you are required to create a place every time you place a pin in a unique location (as far as I can tell). The ideal situation is to geotag the photos before importing them into iPhoto. There are a number of methods to do that which I won’t cover in depth here. This post is going to explain how I was able to geotag old photos that were already in iPhoto.
I began geotagging my photos many years ago when flickr first started offering the service. I put a lot of time into geotagging each photo with its exact location (not just general area). The problem I ran into however was that I was unable to get that geodata out of flickr and into my original photos in iPhoto. This weekend I stumbled across a fairly manual process, but it goes pretty fast once you get moving.
(This process is being written from a Mac perspective. I will take a look for similar Windows solutions if there is demand.)
Assumptions:
-You have photos geotagged on flickr
-You have photos in iPhoto that you want to tag
Required:
-Geotagger – This program will insert the GPS coordinates currently centered in Google Earth into the Exif of your photos
-Flickr Photo Set to KML – This script will grab your geotagged photos from flickr and create a KML file that you can open in Google Earth
-Google Earth
Procedure:
It’s a fairly straight forward procedure. First locate the photoset on flickr that you want to use and copy the set number from the URL into the ‘Photoset to KML‘ site. Choose to download the KML and open it in Google Earth. Now locate the files in iPhoto that you want to geotag. I did this by selecting ’show package contents’ on the iPhoto Library file in my ‘pictures’ folder. Once viewing the contents go to the ‘originals’ folder then dig down until you find the folder with the images. (I think you might also be able to just open the event in iPhoto and drag the image from there to the Geotagger program.)
With the folder of images open on the computer, and the KML file loaded in Google Earth it is now just a matter of going to each image in Google Earth, letting it move to the location, then finding that same image in the pictures folder and dragging the file to the geotagger program on the dock. Most of my images were named with the default camera file name so it was easy to match up the images. Repeat this for as many photos you have to geotag.
The final step is selecting all the photos you just edited in iPhoto and cmd-clicking (right click) so that you can select the option ‘Rescan for Location’. Bam. All the images will now have the new location data and iPhoto will do a mediocre to decent job of rationalizing the GPS coordinates as a location name.
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