My backyard

My backyard has changed from the lush greens in the summer and couple of feet of snow in the winter to steel, glass, and concrete year round.

I did not think much about this when I was looking for a place in Toronto, but since I was a kid, I always thought it would be cool to live in a high-rise in a downtown area with the glitters of city lights poking through the glass windows.

My backyard.

Well, I am now fifteen floors up and the view is not too bad.  Facing south, I can see some parts of the Toronto Islands and parts of Lake Ontario.  On a normal day, there is enough light out there I could walk around my place without turning on my lights.  On a foggy night, the view could be quite interesting.  I will see how winter will shape the scene--we just had the first snow fall this year in this area and temperature has fallen down to -1 degree this morning.

The street reporter

I have not posted anything for a while but I have been out there shooting.  Sometimes, it's lugging my two DSLRs around, and sometimes, it's just--wait a second, something just dawned on me ... did I miss the Henry's Exposure photo show this fall or maybe they cut the show down to only one per year--about running into something interesting while biking around.  And for that, I need something light, like my Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ30 that I purchased a while ago for $70.  The built-in telephoto lens on this camera is perfect for the ride-about that I do from time to time or the ride to work that I do everyday.

Just yesterday, I ran across an area cordoned off by police.  It was on my usual, daily bike route.  Some car was pulled over earlier in the day (apparently not by random chance) and some small explosive was found in a gym bag in the trunk.  The event had already unfolded by the time I got there but I got a glimpse of the scene.  It would have been more interesting had I witnessed the detonation of the explosive that the police had set off--well, maybe they would have cordoned off a bigger area so I might not have been able to capture anything then.  Anyways, I feel like an amateur street reporter with a cheap camera on hand.

It's almost 8am.  I gotta start preparing to go to work.

Amazon sucks

Ok, so last year, I ordered this studio umbrella set for about $80.  That was last November.  Today is July and it has not been shipped yet!

I thought I would try to wait longer and see how this story unfolds but it's been long enough and I will be moving soon, so in case the order actually goes through and I won't be at my current place, I decided to cancel the order, eight months after placing the order.

Pathetic, Amazon!  The couple of times I contacted Amazon, they say they will try to fulfill the order as soon as possible.  Well, I don't know which earth they live on but on this earth, that means a few weeks at most, not months!

Geez.

Reality check

Every now and then, I have the urge to buy a professional lens because my compromise lens works up an itch hard to get rid of.  I actually went on Kijiji and Craigslist to find a used Nikon 17-55mm f/.8.  A used copy could go for about $800 or a bit less if one is lucky.  Anyways, at the Henry's Exposure show this weekend, I had  the opportunity to test out a Nikon 17-55mm and as I feared, I could not make the best use of it.  Hand-held, it's not too easy to get a nice, sharp picture, and when I managed to get a sharp picture at f/2.8 there were some purple fringing (see below).  It's not too much but there is definitely purple fringing.  The Nikkor 18-200mm VR lens gets me a sharper picture, but not the image effects of an f/2.8 aperture.

Nikkor 17-55mm at f/2.8, centre crop

Nikkor 18-200mm at f/6.3, centre crop

Nature in the backyard

Sharing a meal?  Not so quick!

Quite rare of a sight of two birds taking care of their nest.  I thought the male bird was going to share his grub, but no, it ended up having it all for himself.  Such is nature.

I realized this weekend that the Tokina 80-400mm is darn sharp at f/14 with manual focus!

Maybe I will get to use my 500mm lens when the eggs start to hatch.

Let nature come to you

Turquoise eggs

Ok, it's not often that one gets to enjoy nature right in your backyard, but every now and then, luck strikes.  I have always wanted to see a hummingbird in my backyard, but short of that, a nest is equally as fun to observe as a hummingbird.  So, I've got a nest on the trellis in our backyard.  I had to remove the window screen on my second floor window to have a clear view of the eggs.  I tore the window screen in the process but it is worth it, I guess.

Mommy bird:  a blackbird?

For these shots, I used my Tokina 80-400mm lens.  It was a bit hard to shoot hand-held in the late afternoon light as the Tokina does not have VR, but it turned out not too bad.

I cannot wait for the eggs to hatch!

BlackBerry Z10's camera

Well, I have been taking the subway to go to work over the last two weeks, ever since the parking lot I used to park decided to hike up their fees.  It already did not make much sense for me to drive into work over the last couple of years but because the parking lot was a lot cheaper than many others, I decided for convenience sake to drive the 30km everyday.

Anyhow, since I have been taking the subway, I had more opportunities to use my BlackBerry Z10 and its crappy camera.  I have to say crappy since I have yet to see any photo with good IQ.  The best so far could be this photo here:

New Toronto TTC Subway Cars.

Here I was standing still while taking this photo.  Colour reproduction is not bad.  I thought it was sharp at first.  It looked quite fine on the small screen of the Z10 but displayed on a notebook screen, it was clear my hands were shaking.  I had taken some other photos inside a subway car while it was moving and I wish BlackBerry invested in some vibration reduction technology in the Z10 camera!

Well, the best camera is the one you have with you.  So, the best camera was my Z10, but that won't stop me from complaining about it. :-)

Flash gels

Until yesterday, I never thought of using flash gels.  All I cared was the colour temperature on my subjects and not so much the background.  When shooting indoors with incandescent lights, I never saw a problem with the background being a little orange.  It adds some warmth to the picture.  However, after chatting with a work colleague, I think I will give gels a try now.

The idea with the gels is to make the effective flash light output (which is daylight balanced, naked) similar to the ambient light and with the camera's white balance set to match the ambient light, everything (and not just the subject) would be well balanced.  The next time I do indoor shooting, I will remember to bring the gels with me.

D7000 mode dial, again and again

I complained about the shooting mode dial before and I cannot stop complaining about it.  Just yesterday, I was at a gathering and a number of shots were underexposed.  The mode dial got changed to the "M" position by accident.  I guess on my way from one location to another, I must have scraped the dial against my hip where the camera dangled to.  It was a good thing I checked the LCD from time to time or I would have walked out with dark pictures only

D7100 mode dial.  Image from Nikon's website.

Nikon has heard enough from their customers.  The Nikon D7100 was released recently with a brand new mode dial lock button!  This is absolutely one of the best designs I have seen since the days of the D80, when I started complaining about the dial.  Seven years late but at least it is available now.  I so want to upgrade just because of this button but I just cannot really justify it.  So, I will keep on complaining about the dial until my D7000 dies or until I sell it.

Maybe I could use gaffe tape around the dial to smoothe out the side.  The tape will not last but should be good enough for one setting.

Flickr to Picasa Web

We have a Toshiba Blu-Ray BDX-2300 player.  It is a Linux based machine tailored for multimedia purposes.  In addition to local media file support, it has support for Internet-based services like Netflix and YouTube for videos, and Picasa Web for photos.  It is the latter service that I am interested in.

I use Flickr Pro to store my many thousand copies of my photos.  I do not want to use Picasa Web but it looks like I would have to store photos there if I want to display on my TV using this Toshiba player.

I have not familiarized myself with Picasa (the desktop software) to manage photos in Picasa Web and the Picasa Web interface seems to lack a feature to auto-resize photos before uploading them.  So, I thought I'd find a tool to transfer photos from Flickr to Picasa Web--my photos in Flickr are already resized.

I found this Python script called "migrate-flickr-to-picasa-nokey.py" that will do just that.  For installation instructions, visit http://www.edparsons.com/2011/06/migrating-from-flickr-to-picasaweb/.  If installing in a Windows environment, you also need to install Python 2.7.3 from http://www.python.org/getit/ first and then "easy_install.exe" which comes from the following package:  http://pypi.python.org/pypi/flickrapi.  Download it, expand it, and run "distribute_setup.py".  The "easy_install.exe" will be found in C:\Python27\Scripts\easy_install.exe.

By default, the migrate-flickr-to-picasa-nokey.py script will transfer everything you have from Flickr to Picasa Web.  I want to transfer only selected ones, so I modified the Python script to allow me to specify the Flickr album name I want to transfer on the command line.  I also hardcoded my Flickr username and password in the script.  I could then execute the script as follows:

migrate-flickr-to-picasa-nokey.py New-Year-Eve-20121231

Well, it works well with only one small issue.  It looks like the script would download each photo from Flickr first then upload it to Picasa Web one at a time.  I thought there was a way to transfer from Flickr to Picasa Web directly through some API calls.  Anyways, it is an unattended process so I guess it's not a big deal.

For anyone interested in the modifications, find below the UNIX diff output between the original and my modifications.  My code is not the most efficient as I have forgotten most of the Python language but it does what I need it to.

25a26,28
> import getopt
> args_opts, album_title_to_move = getopt.getopt(sys.argv[1], '')
> print "Will copy " + album_title_to_move + "..."
115a119
> picasa_username._value = "YOUR_PICASA_USERNAME"
116a121
> picasa_password._value = "YOUR_PICASA_PASSWORD"
118a124
> flickr_api_key._value = "YOUR_FLICKR_API"
119a126
> flickr_api_secret._value = "FLICKR_SECRET_VALUE"
159c166,174
<     sets = FLICKR.photosets_getList().find('photosets').getchildren()
---
>     tmp_sets = FLICKR.photosets_getList().find('photosets').getchildren()
>     sets = []
>     for aset_id in range(len(tmp_sets)): # go through each flickr set
>         aset = tmp_sets[aset_id]
>         set_title = aset.find('title').text
>         # Transfer only this one photo set ...
>       if set_title == album_title_to_move:
>             sets = [ aset ]
>             break
336c351
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