I’ve finally taken a couple of shots with my new S2.

In all my years of hanging around this campus, I’ve never seen this large a family.

Right out of my office window. The image changes dramatically throughout the day, depending on the natural light, the internal lights, and the angles of the window.

I do so love miserable weather.

I’ve had some time to play with the S1 and I’m now able to complain about it.

• No bulb mode (unlimited exposure time, required for night time photography) I think the maximum exposure time I can dial is 15 seconds, which is well short of what’s needed for serious night time work, but adequate for play.
• Slow focus in low light conditions. It often helps to turn IS (image stabilisation) off, focus, then turn IS back on.
• Chroma distortion. Blue fringes where dark and light objects meet. Normally means that you’re close to over exposing the light objects anyway.

Went for a short bushwalk through Brisbane Forest Park during the Christmas break:

Pre-Christmas picnic at southbank, shot in sepia. Note the scribbles and love hearts.

There’s a couple of very old and run down houses at Paddington, it looks like they’re finally getting repainted; it was time to catch their character. I’m reasonably happy with this one, it strikes me as something I’d see on my favourite photoblog, albeit no where near as good; it looks a little fuzzy in the bottem left corner, and would be much stronger if it was front on. But I am happy with the colours and the celtic cross shadow.

Walked around the city with Rob and a few folks from the camera group, doing interesting things and learning things. Many more test images than real images, below are a few that catch my eye:

I took these shots about a month ago, I haven’t bothered putting them up yet because I didn’t think any of them were any good, but I was wrong, a couple have a fair bit of potential. I wasn’t that thrilled with the parkland itself, it’s all metal and awful concrete. The plants were wonderful, and the actual water itself was good. It was spitting on the day, which made me grumble, until I realised that would be perfect for some water shots. I need to get a polarising filter if I continue to do this water stuff. Album

I visited this photographic exhibition at the Museum of Brisbane today. The exhibition contains eighty odd photographs of the Great War, taken by French and Australian photographers, utilising two new colour techniques. There aren’t many action shots as the technology of the day required exposure times in the order of seconds. To my eye, neither technique works particularly well on anything but strong base colours (red, green, blue) so items that stand out are flags, standards, colourful uniforms, medals, and in one stunning shot, flora; where as most of the background fades into a sepia sameness. There are three amazing panoramas by an Australian photographer, Frank Hurley. A surprising little project by a French photographer shows a group of children acting out the military feats of their parents. At first it’s very charming, but by the end it is definitely disturbing. A must see if you’re into photography, but be quick, it finishes on the fourth of next month.

Some night time photos taken at King George square, of the bronze statues, water feature, City Hall and the surrounding buildings.

So I take some photos, upload them to the PC, delete some, touch up some others, put captions in, make thumbnails and pretty webpages etc. When I go to upload all that work back to my camera to transport it back to my uh, hosting solution (read: work account), it doesn’t let me, which is frustrating. I’ve no idea if it’s just a software problem or what so far. As a side note, my LCA album currently stands at about 260Mb, bzip compression only saves 5Mb, which says a lot about the effectiveness of the JPEG format.

The camera developed a weird problem, pictures taken with the flash would come out very dark. I took a bit of convincing that it wasn’t user error. Gave it back to Canon, who got it back to me within their estimated turn around time, with the problem solved, and handled under the warranty; I’m quite happy with their service.

I’ve just received my new Canon S1: The main feature I wanted was the 10x zoom lens, the 3x lens on the A70 was proving too restrictive. To go along with the zoom lens is image stabilization hardware, which ameliorates my shaky hands. The actual zooming motion is very quick and smooth, and a lot finer grained than the a70. I’ve also purchased a lens adapter and a polarising lens, which should make a great deal of difference in a lot of my work. At this point in time I’m very happy, we’ll have to see how it pans out over time though.

I recently purchased a Canon PowerShot A70 digital camera along with a 512Mb flash memory card. I flattened the provided alkaline batteries in the first day, but have only gotten around to purchasing some rechargables and a charger today. Yesterday a Crumpler Sporty Guy 2.8 bag was ordered to hold all the bits in. At the moment all of the pictures I’ve taken are rather amateurish; this is the first camera I’ve ever owned, after all. There’s shots of the city that have this really cool raver style effect, but that’s due to a shaky hand rather than skill.