San Jose, California

Well, I am in San Jose, California. The wedding has come and gone last night. I have more time to do some photography now.

Here, you really need to have a car to get around. There is no transit systems like those in Toronto. There are some bus lines but probably 99% of the population here drive or if you don't have a drive, you ride a car. I will either rent a car or borrow one from my aunt or uncle. For this trip, I brought a GPS Navigator. I am not a big fan of it but in hairy situations, it could get you out of trouble, unless it got you in trouble in the first place. I prefer a paper map (or Google Map) to have an overall picture of where I want to go before heading out. The GPS Navigator can only give a bird-eye view of the immediate areas, not the overall picture. You'd follow it blindly. In 2.8 miles, exit right, in 1.5 miles, keep left, in 7 miles, keep left, in .2 miles, exit at Hyllier Ave. ....

Anyways, my plans are to return to San Francisco. I was there last Friday, but since I am meeting with Naomi this Friday, I will go in as early as I can and roam around until meet time. During the week, I might also drive down to Las Vegas after all. I was planning to go to the Yosemite National Park and camp overnight, but some people didn't think the trip would be really worth it.

Well, if I capture something interesting, i.e. not the "touristy" picture, I'll post it here.

Megapixels aren't important?

I suppose megapixels are not important if you know exactly what you are taking and how you are taking it. Sometimes however, the megapixels really help.

In this one shot of a waterfall, I took a wide landscape shot. I knew part of the picture would be washed out as the morning warmed up and the sun started its climb to its apex point. It was only 9am but the sky was quite brighter than the shadows of the fall. I took the picture anyway.

Here, I cropped the picture, removing the washed out part and got this shot of the waterfall. Still lots of pixels in the cropped version. Not too bad.

Point-and-shoot ain't so bad ...

On Sunday, after a fairly long morning of hiking and shooting, my friends and I went out golfing. I could not imaging carrying my DSLR around for 6000 yards so I just took my trusty Canon SD110 3.1MP point-and-shoot.

This is a great camera for day use. It has a landscape and macro mode. In macro mode, you can get pretty close to a subject and blur the background out. This photo of the daisies was 100% cropped and sharpened in Irfanview.

This shot of the golfer was cropped and colour-adjusted (increasing contrast and lowering the gamma in Irfanview). The original photo does not show much of the orange hue in the sky but the colour adjustment really brings it out.

Not too bad for some older technology!

Nikon to Canon?

Have you ever purchased some software and ended up ditching it for another solution because support service was so poor? How about ending a relationship with a car dealer because their service shop was unfriendly? The same goes for everything, and I think companies should be careful who they have representing them on the support line, whether on the phone or behind a counter.

What can drive someone from buying a Nikon to a Canon camera? A friend was looking at Nikon cameras but switched his mind to a Canon. In his own words, "I've been looking at the Canon 50D for a while now. I ruled out a Nikon because the woman at the service counter at the Nikon service centre was friggin damn ass rude when I took Jenny's camera to get looked at."

There you go folks. Some PR lesson for the big corporations.

Sunsets

If you live on the hills of a metropolitan area, you are likely going to see amazing skies every night. I don't. I live in the suburbs far away from the hills so when the opportunity of a golf game came up, I thought, if we tee off at 5pm we would probably run into the sunset before we finish the game.

We sort of did. There were a lot of trees and it was cloudy so when the sun set, we barely noticed it. My eyes were scanning the sky however and saw a tint of red in the horizon. I took a few shots.

I played a little with the colour curve in GIMP to accentuate the red a little but it was amazing to the naked eyes.

Oh yeah, I lugged my D80 around on the golf course. It would have felt like a big rock, but I had bought a golf cart, finally, earlier in the day!

Always have a camera on you

It is rare to see Hwy 401 totally empty. This was the Expressway earlier this afternoon. On my way back to Mississauga, traffic slowed down to a halt. Something was amiss so I tuned in to 680AM. There was an accident up ahead near Keele St. A plume of black smoke was supposed to be filling the air.

I pulled out my D80 and shot this:


As we got closer, I could see firetrucks in the far distance. The fire had subsided already and no smoke in sight. I zoomed it:


Getting closer to the scene of the accident, I could not stop the car, so I just swung the camera over my left arm and shot blindly. I had no idea if I shot anything good. Well, these shots were not too bad!




You might be that next news reporter, if you had your camera with you.

Photo Stiching

To really capture the perceived beauty of a scene, one shot from the camera just might not do justice. You need to recreate the scene with a panoramic view of it. Our eyes can see almost 180 degrees. My lens at 18mm is far short of the field of view from our two eyes combined. Fisheyes or lenses at 10mm will give us the field of view we want but photo edges are always highly distorted and they are expensive. I think panoramic features of point-and-shoot cameras are great. My D80 does not have such a feature but that is ok.

I was doing interior camping at the Frontenac Provincial Park in Ontario a few weeks ago. To shoot the panoramic scene above, I first used the Aperture Priority mode or one of the other Auto modes to figure the proper exposure settings, then switched over to Manual shooting mode with those same settings. Without a tripod, I panned the scene quickly, shot the scene in 7 small increments.

I just downloaded Hugin (http://hugin.sourceforge.net/) to stich the photos together into one panoramic photo shown above. Hugin did a wonderful job. I selected the photos for it to stitch and away it went. There was no need to tweak anything. The black background that is not part of the actual photos were left in the photo to create an interesting frame around the panorama.

The photo below is the same as the one above except that I played with the curve a bit in GIMP.

Bare essentials

I just had a thought.

Over the few years I have had my D80, I have collected many camera equipments and gears and sold some. I found some quite useful and some tend to stay home 95% of the time. For those newbies to DSLR world, below are the things I find essential almost everyday and things I can live without for a while. This list might help you decide what to buy for yourself:

The bare essentials:

• A telephoto (18-200mm) walkaround lens
  
• A good UV filter that stays on the lens all the time
• Vertical hand grip with a built-in battery (good for over 1000 shots)
  
• 8 GB memory card (good for about 1000 Hi-Res photos)
  
• A hotshoe flash with a diffusion dome
• A (foam) bounce card
  
• A school knapsack (or if you want to be fancy, a camera case/bag)
• A point-and-shoot camera
• Leather hand strap
  

That is pretty much what I carry around with me everyday. Then, there are the stuff I leave at home that I use frequently. These are stuff I would naturally bring with me on a long trip, but if it's a short trip within the city, they stay at home:

• Micro-fiber cloth for cleaning the lens filter
  
• Dust blower
• Artic Butterfly brush for cleaning the sensor
• Wet cleaning kit for cleaning the sensor
• Rechargeable batteries for the flash (I have two sets -- one in the flash, one outside ready to be used at any time)
• Extra memory cards (I have 17GB in total I think)
• Memory card reader (I have two)
• A computer to view photos on
  
• A file server or a couple of USB disk drives (I built a RAID-5 NAS to store my photos in)
  

And then, there are items that rarely get used. They go into my luggage on long trips too:

• Tripod (I have a great OPUS tripod)
• A DYI lightsphere
• Extra lenses (my 18-200mm tend to stay on the camera all the time)
• Extra camera batteries (my vertical hand grip with the built-in battery tends to stay on my camera all the time now and I never have to switch to another battery as long as I recharge it before a shoot ... but I would carry the extra battery if I shoot an important event)
• Circular Polarizing Filter
  

That is about it. Have fun.