As I mentioned yesterday, I got a new camera. What I neglected to mention is that it also came with a big mass of industrial beauty called the "Sigma Bigma", the Sigma 50mm-500mm F4.5-6.3 OS HSM zoom lens. (The "OS" stands for optical stabilization, one of the new features Sigma added in this recent update to their original "Sigma Bigma" lens.)

Let me say up front that I had very low expectations for this lens, beyond the versatility and convenience of a 10× superzoom that goes to 500mm.

First of all, it's a 10× superzoom.

Its max zoom, 500mm, is [...]

It was my birthday yesterday, and knowing my taste for high-end photography equipment, Fumie got a new camera for me.

It's about the size of an egg, and delivers about the same in photographic quality. I love it.

It's a Leadworks "Mini Digital Camera", sporting a 0.3MP (640×480) sensor and an internal memory that can hold 20 shots before you have to download to its proprietary software (Windows only) using its proprietary drivers and proprietary USB cable. you can see more here, and even buy one yourself.

It has a counter on the back, and that's pretty much it. Anthony [...]

I was suddenly struck today by a profound realization that Anthony's "young man" factor has started to encroach on his cuteness as a kid. Until today, I would see his mental and social advances (such as taking the city bus to school all by himself a year ago) as a cute kid doing big-boy things, which makes the kid in him all the more cute.

Today we had an event where he dressed a bit nicer than normal, after which we went to a park for lunch, and I kept doing double takes at how good he looked. Yes he's [...]

I was washing the windows in the living room this afternoon, and happened to glance out to see a small troupe from yesterday's movie shoot for "Mother Water" 「マザーウォーター」 setting up shop just below my balcony, to get a short scene of the water flowing over a waterfall (the very tiny... two or three inches... waterfall seen here). I put the Windex™ down and grabbed my camera, hoping to get a better look at theirs.

I was able to see that it's a Panavision 24-275 T2.8 11X Primo Zoom, which is apparently quality of the highest order. Despite extensive searching, [...]

So, in my previous post, "Stupid Tone-Curve Tricks", I presented a few odd tone-curve presets for Lightroom that were of marginal utility. In this post, I present additional presets that are even more useless, if that's at all possible. (If you're not familiar with tone curves in Lightroom 3 beta 2, the aforementioned previous post has an introduction and useful links.)

In the presentations below, mouseover the little tone-curve squares under each screenshot to bring up an example of the preset to the screenshot. All the screenshots for a particular section are loaded upon first mouseover in that section, so [...]