July 15, 2008

The Big Picture

It's been a while since I've gotten really excited about a new blog but the Boston Globe has an excellent photoblog called The Big Picture which culls photos of current events from the major news wires and posts them in much higher resolution than what is normally seen on news sites. Alan Taylor, the guy who chooses these photos, is doing a wonderful job and it's nice to see such great photography presented in a large format. Today's collection of photos from the Tour de France is a good example of why this blog has quickly become one of my favorites.

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July 2, 2008

Manyhighways on Eurotrip Podcast

I'm in New York right now, staying with my good friends Matt and Kabrina. Matt is the main administrator for Eurotrip, the big backpacker website. Today he asked me a few questions about photography for the latest Eurotrip podcast.

Download it directly from Eurotrip or subscribe and download via iTunes.

Post a comment and let me know what you think!

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June 10, 2008

Summer Plans

As usual, my plans for this summer include a lot of travel. Here's a rundown of what I'll be up to over the next few months...

On Friday I'm heading to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area in northern Minnesota for a week of canoeing. This is a remote region of Minnesota up near the Canadian border which has many of Minnesota's ten thousand lakes. It will be the first time I've ever done something like this and, frankly, I'm a bit nervous. My fellow travelers have been making this trip for the past several years but I was never able to make it because I've always had other plans. Since I'm the least experienced canoeist and camper, they've done most of the planning and I simply have to follow directions which is nice. Fortunately, they've planned a route that will give me a true taste of the wilderness but also includes stops at some historic places that have Native American pictographs. They're counting on me to document the trip in photographs and there will be no shortage of photo opportunities.

In early July I'll be flying to New York then taking a road trip up to Montreal with my friends Matt, Kabrina and Kristin. We'll be spending America's Independence Day in Canada which is a bit ironic. We traveled to Montreal during the winter of 2007 but our trip was cut short by a blizzard and I was sick one of the days we were there. I'm excited to see the city in the summer this time around.

After Montreal I'll be hanging out in New York City for a week, then taking a train 100 miles north up the Hudson River to Poughkeepsie to spend a week learning about Franklin Roosevelt at his home in Hyde Park, NY. That will be followed by a second week-long history seminar in Lower Manhattan where I'll be learning about Ellis Island. The Ellis Island workshop should be particularly good because our group will be given a tour of the unseen portion of the island - the part that has all of the abandoned buildings and is completely off-limits to the public. Unfortunately, I've already been forced to sign a waiver/agreement which limits photography at these sites. This means that any photos I do take cannot be exhibited, sold or even viewed by anyone other than myself. There is nothing that bugs me more than stupid photography rules and this is definitely one of them but I'll take what little I can get in this case.

August is still up in the air right now but might include the Lollapalooza music festival in Chicago. I'd also like to visit my godmother Sherri and her husband Bruce who are in the process of moving to from Oxnard, CA to Omaha, NE as I type. There may also be some more extensive travels in Iowa if I haven't used up my travel budget by then.

Keep an eye on this space for more posts and photos throughout the summer.

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December 3, 2007

First Impressions of the E-510

Although I was way too busy this weekend to take full advantage of my new camera - an Olympus E-510 - which arrived last week, I did have just enough time to take it out for a short half-hour walk around the neighborhood this evening. And even though the only photos I've taken so far were shot in the dark, I can already tell that I'm going to love this camera.

The first bloggable shot has been posted and it's a photo that I never would have been able to get with my old camera. First, there is no way that I could have gotten such a steady shot on my old camera without a tripod. The new camera has image stabilization which works extremely well. I've been able to take shots with a 1/2 second exposure time and they've turned out just fine. Secondly, I'm now able to shoot RAW which means that the camera isn't taking what the sensor sees and compressing it into a noisy JPEG filled with artifacts and blocks. Instead, the images that are recorded on my memory card are exactly what the camera is seeing and this is turning out to make a huge difference in terms of quality.

I'm giving this camera two thumbs up so far and I'm very much looking forward to taking it out in the daytime to see what it can really do.

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November 23, 2007

New Camera Purchase

Several weeks ago I bought an iMac with all the bells and whistles, plus Apple's photo management and editing application: Aperture. The problem was that when using Aperture's loupe to instantly zoom in on images, I realized that my camera (a Fuji Finepix S9100) was outputting some very noisy (grainy) images. Not only that, but I was starting to notice the large amount of barrel distortion in the lens which was making straight lines look curved. Considering that I take quite a lot of photos of buildings and street scenes, this was a problem. It was then that I started looking into the latest digital Single Lens Reflex (SLR) cameras. SLRs are the more traditional type of camera which typically have larger photosensors, detachable lenses and almost always produce higher-quality images than the standard point-and-shoot style camera.

So after weeks of poring over reviews of digital SLRs, I finally decided on the Olympus EVOLT E-510 which I just ordered on Amazon a few minutes ago. I chose the E-510 for several reasons which I'll outline here.

First and foremost is image quality. My biggest complaint with my current camera has been the graininess so I was looking for a camera that would minimize noise at high sensitivity (ISO) and more faithfully represent what my eyes actually see. The E-510 boasts 10 megapixels and from all the samples I've viewed, is crystal clear and has little noise even at high ISO.

The E-510 has an active image stabilization system which will help reduce camera shake. My current camera has "picture stabilization" but all it does is increase the ISO so that a faster shutter speed may be used, thus reducing blur in low light images. The problem is that the resulting images end up being shot at 800-1600 ISO which made them ridiculously noisy. I left it on by accident a few weeks ago when shooting a train crossing a bridge at dusk and was disgusted when I got home and looked at the photos on my computer. That incident was the straw that broke the camera's back.

Obviously, image quality is of highest importance in a digital camera but the file format is important as well. The E-510 will shoot RAW images that can be directly imported into Aperture. This gives me a lot more flexibility when editing my photos. It also uses xD and CF cards for recording images. This means that with my 2 GB xD card plus the 8 GB CompactFlash card I just bought, I'm going to have a whopping 10 GB of storage space in the camera at all times.

When looking at cameras last weekend and actually holding several of them, I realized how important shape is. With a camera as large as an SLR, the way the camera feels in the hands is very important. Several of the cameras I held last weekend were uncomfortable to hold. On one (a Nikon, I think), my right hand rubbed against the lens itself which would have eventually cramped up my hand and literally left me with bloody (or at least irritated) knuckles. Maybe I just have big hands but I was able to comfortably wrap my right one around the grip of the E-510 without any problems and it felt good in my hands.

I'm on a limited budget so price played a big role in my decision as well. The E-510 can be purchased with two lenses on Amazon for only $675. This makes it one of the most affordable 10 megapixel SLRs on the market. Sure, you can buy many other SLRs for that price but they often only include one lens or none at all. The two lenses that come with the E-510 will allow me to get out and start using the camera as soon as it arrives.

Finally, the internet obviously played a huge role in this decision. The number of camera review websites is staggering but the one that I kept going back to when evaluating all my options was Digital Photography Review. They wrote a detailed 32-page review of the E-510 which compared it to other cameras. They also posted a full size sample gallery and judged it on more criteria than I am even able to understand. For me, they've become an invaluable source for choosing a digital camera.

Hopefully the E-510 will live up to the hype I've just built up here. I'll be able to find out for myself when it arrives sometime next week so stay tuned.

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