many
Saturday, November 3 2012
Sandy and Voxel hosting
[20:34:14] matt [wronka.org]/navic Many of my sites are hosted on machines in Manhattan. As you might have noticed, they have been up and down over the past few days.
[20:34:14] matt [wronka.org]/navic Many of my sites are hosted on machines in Manhattan. As you might have noticed, they have been up and down over the past few days.
Friday, May 25 2012
Dissapointed with the Lytro Camera
[06:27:28] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.generay I split time on my recent vacation in Japan between my DSLR and my Lytro camera. I had some dedicated days where I just used the Lytro, and it was the only camera I carried with me. Other times, I carried it once I'd put the DSLR away. It has some bennefits, but I don't think I'll keep it as a real back-up, even over my main phone's fixed-focus camera. Prox has similarly indicated he's not enthused about it, to the point he's going to sell his.
Walking around, my impression was that it was hard to see the LCD in actual light to frame a photo; if you're using it for the touted bennefit of shoot-first, focus later, the difficult with framing on the small screen while squinting in daylight causes the process to take longer than most camera's would with auto-focus. As has been mentioned in every amateur photographery review of the device, there are no manual exposure controls at all, and I couldn't find a means of AE-lock either, which means you're at the mercy of the environments for the final exposure unless you're shooting in a studio. And if you're in the studio, you can use a tripod and take several much higher-quality shots at different focus points and create the same depth perspective (at least until Lytro adds 3D modeling based on the depth-map which would be much more difficult with the in-studio fakes).
Since I didn't bring my hefty Mac OSX laptop (another drawback is that the camera is basically tied to its proprietary closed software to convert photos from the device to a rendered lightweight version) I looked at the photos on the device, and my reaction was that the results were much better than I had expected, while many shots from indoors in non-ideal lighting were blurry, and night shots were very noisy. Many however included frustrating white balance settings which were also not within the user's control. Still, I felt like maybe I'd underestimated its bennefits as small little camera.
However, after getting home and looking at the final results on a computer (extracting the JPEG files and looking at full size) it again was dissapointing. Downsampling from the 1024x1024 square (I like square film, so I was quite happy with this) could probably fix the blockiness, and banding perceptually, but it's clear that this isn't something you'll want to look at blown-up or even larger than a 4x4 if printed. Again to be fair to Lytro, they've said as much.
[06:27:28] matt [wronka.org]/Psi.generay I split time on my recent vacation in Japan between my DSLR and my Lytro camera. I had some dedicated days where I just used the Lytro, and it was the only camera I carried with me. Other times, I carried it once I'd put the DSLR away. It has some bennefits, but I don't think I'll keep it as a real back-up, even over my main phone's fixed-focus camera. Prox has similarly indicated he's not enthused about it, to the point he's going to sell his.
Walking around, my impression was that it was hard to see the LCD in actual light to frame a photo; if you're using it for the touted bennefit of shoot-first, focus later, the difficult with framing on the small screen while squinting in daylight causes the process to take longer than most camera's would with auto-focus. As has been mentioned in every amateur photographery review of the device, there are no manual exposure controls at all, and I couldn't find a means of AE-lock either, which means you're at the mercy of the environments for the final exposure unless you're shooting in a studio. And if you're in the studio, you can use a tripod and take several much higher-quality shots at different focus points and create the same depth perspective (at least until Lytro adds 3D modeling based on the depth-map which would be much more difficult with the in-studio fakes).
Since I didn't bring my hefty Mac OSX laptop (another drawback is that the camera is basically tied to its proprietary closed software to convert photos from the device to a rendered lightweight version) I looked at the photos on the device, and my reaction was that the results were much better than I had expected, while many shots from indoors in non-ideal lighting were blurry, and night shots were very noisy. Many however included frustrating white balance settings which were also not within the user's control. Still, I felt like maybe I'd underestimated its bennefits as small little camera.
However, after getting home and looking at the final results on a computer (extracting the JPEG files and looking at full size) it again was dissapointing. Downsampling from the 1024x1024 square (I like square film, so I was quite happy with this) could probably fix the blockiness, and banding perceptually, but it's clear that this isn't something you'll want to look at blown-up or even larger than a 4x4 if printed. Again to be fair to Lytro, they've said as much.
Tuesday, December 20 2011
Google Alerts
[14:38:33] matt [wronka.org]/Trip Many people may not be aware that I actually use Google for its 'Alerts' feature, which is pretty useful. As Google looks around the Web, if they find something that matches terms you have registered, it will send you an eMail.
I get a lot from various news sources. What I really want is to hit reply and correct them. Maybe that will be in version 2.
[14:38:33] matt [wronka.org]/Trip Many people may not be aware that I actually use Google for its 'Alerts' feature, which is pretty useful. As Google looks around the Web, if they find something that matches terms you have registered, it will send you an eMail.
I get a lot from various news sources. What I really want is to hit reply and correct them. Maybe that will be in version 2.