Elliott’s Blog

It is a ton of fun taking all kinds of pix with this thing!  I really like the “sports” mode—it automatically chooses a faster shutter speed and a wider aperture, and it puts it into continuous-shot mode.  Also, it puts it into a “follow focus” mode, so when the shutter is half pressed it tries to stay in focus.  It will beep at about 0.5 Hz as long as the camera can keep things in focus.

It looks like my sons (mostly #2) took about 400 pictures yesterday.  #2 really likes photographing his bassoon, and his big brother’s cat, Majel.  He also took about 100 pictures of our Traditional Thomas the Tank Engine Christmas Train, which runs around the Christmas tree, through the piled-up presents.

Majel (my “Grand Kitten”) was very cute playing with the undone Christmas paper wrappings on the floor.  She kept attacking the paper, thinking that it was alive.  She hates our Traditional Thomas the Tank Engine Christmas Train, though.

We received the camera two days ago, and the whole family has been playing with it.  I outlined the specifics of what I bought in a previous post, so here are some initial impressions of the equipment.

The XSi and the kit lens, EF-S 18-55 IS, are (as I knew they would be) very light and very useful.  I also got the 50 mm, f1.8 prime lens.  The numbers told me this, but the reality is a bit more amazing: the kit lens is almost as light and almost as small as the 50 mm prime.  The image quality for both of them is real nice.

The 50 mm lens is wonderful for taking pictures of people.  You stand back a bit and snap away.  The speed of this lens (f1.8) is wonderful, as I thought it would be.  Shooting it wide open gets some amazing results, but the focus is a bit soft (as they said it would be in the online reviews) and it really only works on people at this aperture.  I tried to take some pix of the Chanukah candles, but this did not work very well. Stopping down to f8 worked better.

The 55-250 mm zoom is longer and bigger than I thought, so I don’t think I’ll be carrying this lens all the time (depending on the type of backpack I end up getting).  But I can’t wait to get this lens back to Switzerland to use outside.  Joanne is very eager to point it at Mont Blanc on one of those crystal Swiss clear days!

The most profound aspect of these first two days is that everyone in the family is really enjoying taking pictures with this camera!  All three sons (15, 20 and 23) have learned how to use it, and have taken some good pictures with it.  In fact, it is a bit difficult to get the camera out of their hands.  #2 son just finished taking pictures of his bassoon with it.  And as a family, we have had some interesting discussions on the terms “telephoto,” “zoom,” “aperture,” “ISO,” and “bokeh.”

Summary:

• It is very easy to use, both for pure “point-and-shoot” and for the various manual controls
• The 18-55 mm kit lens is excellent
• The 50mm f1.8 lens is excellent and takes wonderful pictures of people.  (I said before, and I reiterate it here, that there is no reason NOT to buy this $85 lens!)

There are, let me see, a gazillion different themes that Wordsmith offers.  So, I’ve decided to go with this new theme, “Aeros 1.0.7 by Joe Fischler”.

I have been playing with the remarkable depth of software that one can add to this web site!  I have added a photo management tool, and installed it at:

photos.elliottmccrory.com

It uses a product called “4ImagesGallery”.  I’m not sure I like it, but I’d be interested in your comments.  I tried to use “Gallery”, but it did not work–the thumbnails did not show up, and the internal log files were full of the “exception tracebacks” that happened when it tried to make the thumbnails.

I have added one whole photo to this site already!

UPDATE: Dec 14, 2008.  I don’t like 4ImagesGallery–no bulk operations.

UPDATE: Dec 15, 2008.  I changed to “Gallery.”  But there is a problem: it is not creating the thumbnails.  I have sent an email to the support folks at my hosting service (Cleverdot.com).  You can click on the image and see the full screen, and you can play a slideshow (but that is pretty slow).

I placed the order for our new DSLR.  Here is a synopsis–first from Amazon.com:

• Canon XSi with the 18-55mm EF-S IS lens
• Canon 55-250mm EF-S IS Lens
• Canon 50mm f1.8 EF lens
• An extra Canon battery
• The remote control that goes with the XSi
• UV filters for each lens (that’s 3 filters)

And from NewEgg.com:

• Two Western Digital 640 GB SATA drives
• An Antec external enclosure for one of these hard disks
• Some SATA cables (the WD disks are “OEM”, which seems to mean that they come without cables)
• Two Transcend 8GB SDHC cards
• One Transcend combo pack: 4GB SDHC card and a reader

I may also need some power cables for the drives (I hope not) and some way to mount the internal drive into my PC case.

I calculated that the photos we have taken in 2008, so far, fill just over 50 GB of space on my PC (about 20 GB of that are videos). The average size of a picture is just under 2 MB.  I am guessing that we’re looking at 5-12 MB per picture with the XSi.  So 640 GB means we have storage for around 60,000 pictures on this new disk.  At 1000 pictures per day, that gets us into March.

UPDATE: 15 Dec 08.  I forgot to order something: an adapter to let me attach my old Canon FD lenses to my new camera.  Click here to see examples of this adapter.

To learn a language, it seems to me that you need:

1. Vocabulary
2. Grammar
   • Including the way to conjugate verbs and the wierdnesses of nouns (in French, that’s “gender”)
3. Listening experience
4. Speaking experience
5. Time for this all to sink in

So far, I have made good progress on 2 and 5 (although I suck at conjugating).

I have decided to do some serious work on my French vocabulary.  Being the industrious Java programmer that I am, I wrote a program to help me with that.

So, I hereby release my version of a program called “Flash Cards”, which you can run for yourself by clicking on www.elliottmccrory.com/language/FlashCards.jnlp.

Please let me know of the errors you find.

Have fun!

We went to the Big Box Electronics Store in the next town over, and they had all four cameras of interest to me: The Canon 450D, the Nikon D60, the Olympus E-520 and the brand new Pentax K-m (!).  My wife wanted to handle only the Canon, so that’s what we did.  (Actually, I handled the K-m, but the four AA batteries were dead, so we could not turn it on.  Apparently, they don’t know how to charge batteries at BBES).

We discovered something not-so-nice about the 450D: It does not focus intuitively in the Live View mode.  That is, it does not focus when you press the shutter.  Huh??!!  Apparently, there is a special button on the back does the autofocus in Live View mode.  The sales person at the store did not know that–we called B&H in New York (and spoke to someone in India, I think) to figure it out.

The X-m does not have Live View at all.  Oops!  It is a nice camera to hold–a bit smaller than the 450D, but a bit heavier.  I wish I could have seen/heard the bells and whistles on it.

I have upload a picture of Yours Truly here, taken at BBES by my wife with the Canon 450D.  Here it is (click on it to get the 6.5 MB, 12.2 MP version):

If you look at the JPEG meta data, you can see all the particulars of the exposure, camera, etc.  It was zoomed all the way in to 55mm–the end of the range for the Kit Zoom on the 450D.

(I used GIMP to smudge out an unsightly stain on one of my teeth, which I did not know I had.  See if you can figure out which tooth.  The first one to guess it gets to use the camera a bit over Christmas, assuming that it is one of my regular blog readers–that is, one of my children.)

I haven’t made the purchase yet–soon, I think.  With this new revelation about the Live View focusing, the Olympus is trying to creep back into consideration.  (They say that the E-520 has the best Live View yet for a DSLR.)  But my wife really wants the Canon, nonetheless, and says this focusing weirdness is not a deal-breaker.

I’ll keep you posted!