Archive for the 'Camera Stuff' CategoryAbout cameras, equipment, and postprocessing techniques Have you ever noticed that some parking lots have yellowish lights that make things look crazy colors at night? A movie theater in Santa Clara, CA we used to go to made Fumie's silver car look perfectly green, or something like that. Such situations are an extreme example of the simple fact that all light is not created equal. Any middle-school student can tell you that perfect white is an even dose of all colors across the visible spectrum, but it's only common sense that if the light shining on something white doesn't contain that even dose of [...] View full post » As I commented a few weeks ago, I worried that the barometric altimeter on my GPS unit (a Garmin GPSmap 60CS) was worthless because there are many factors that change air pressure besides a change in altitude (such as holding the unit in a breeze, moving with the unit, changing weather, etc.) So, I sent a note off to Garmin asking about it, hoping that I was just missing something. Really, why would they include such a feature if it was worthless, much less tout it as they do? Here's what I sent: Is there a [...]
Last month I bought a GPS unit (a Garmin GPSmap 60CS) so that I can geoencode photos. For example, clicking on the photo in this post brings up a page with data about the image, including a satellite map with the location marked. And the photo in this other recent post has the speed and bearing shown as well. The GPSmap 60CS is a nice unit. It has a lot of functions (including a magnetic compass and a barometric altimeter), but after using it for a while I do have some gripes that I'd like to mention, in [...] View full post » Since I'm getting more interested in photography and understanding cameras and techniques, I find myself wanting to know the details under which a photo was taken. Modern digital cameras encode a lot of such data -- shutter speed, lens focal length, etc. -- into the image file, generally called "Exif Data" ("Exif" stands for "Exchangeable Image File Format" and as an acronym would normally be written as "EXIF", but the standard creators explicitly say that it should be written "Exif", which is nice.). So, I wrote a little online Exif viewer to view whatever data might be [...] View full post » This is a followup to my previous post on testing a Transcend 4GB 120x Compact Flash card. In that post, I found that its write speed was actually slower than the 80x version of the same card (tested in a separate post). I contacted Transcend Japan about the slow card, and to their credit they replied very quickly at each step along the way. However, their initial reply was full of wishy-washy ways to avoid the issue, saying that there could indeed be situations where tests shows the 80x is faster than the 120x and that the speed [...]
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