Moving on

Trying out blogger nowfor b0rkb0rkb0rk

And so it goes

Well, that went pretty much as expected. My separate, private blog "GoodStuff" endured for a little while longer, but eventually died.

I'm trying again, this time with my own WordPress install.

It's probably best just to use hosted blogs. Realistically, in how many posts am I going to use latex, code markup, or some other arcane plugin?

Photography

So, a few years back I wanted an SLR to start learning about photography and do some astrophotography. Time passes quickly, and suddenly digital SLRs are upon us, they spent a few years being expensive and poor in comparison to film, and then of course, the price came down and quality got better. As well as waiting, I found other toys to buy, but now digital SLRs are cheap, good and convenient. The Canon EOS 350 D is around 900 USD. It is marketed as the "KISS-N" here in Japan, including a TV advert with little kids dressed up as the band "KISS". Hmm.

According to a colleague, who has been into photography for over 20 years, and owns the expensive EOS 1D as well as custom made film cameras, umpteen lenses, and so on, the Canon 20D is a good buy. He also recommended Canon over Nikon, having himself abandonded his past Nikon investment to switch over to Canon. Apparently the quality of Canon lenses has improved such that there's little difference between Canon and Nikon on the whole, while Canon have a wider range of lenses available with more features. He has also recommended the 350D to other starters.

Still, I was considering getting an old Nikon film body and old lenses to start off cheaply, and then wait for the Nikon D70 replacement. However, another colleague pointed out that this was exactly the wrong thing to do. Starting with a digital is best, as you avoid the cost of film and printing. Buying a cheap film body and lens second hand requires more research, and may require less money down initially, but as you learn you're going to print a lot. Ding the sums, after about 500 or so prints, you may as well buy a cheap DSLR, CF card and cheap (as in around 500USD, not 100USD) lens.

After looking around at various reviews, the 350D does seem like a good starter camera. According to many review sites the optical quality does not differ much from the 20D. Also, as the 350D and 20D have very low noise at high ISOs, meaning they should be suitable for astrophotography. There's even an astro-ready 20Da available in Japan that has enhanced sensitivty to red light (to capture H-alpha emision). Presumably this is in response to people hacking their 300D and 350D cameras to have different filters for astrophotography. The main downside of the 350D seems to be it's usability - many settings are only accessible from the LCD panel onthe back instead of being quickly set by way of them being readable on the top panel.

Moving on there is, of course, the myriad choice of lenses. Apparently staying with lenses made from the camera manufacturer is best. The Canon L series are the professional lenses - aspherical ED apos, but they cost an awful lot. The EF-S series are specifically design for the 1.6x DLSRs such as the 20D and 350D. This means the lens is not suitable for a full aperture DLSR or film camera. This is probably not an issue for me - I can't see spending 8000USD or so on a full aperture camera any time soon, although I may get a film camera.

The Canon EF-S 17-85mm gets good reviews and should be a good all-round zoom lens. Not too expensive at around 500USD. Prime lenses are normally better quality for the price, but apparently in recent years, the quality of zoom lenses has improved dramatically. I like the sound of the flexibility of a zoom lens, so zoom it is. Interestingly, zoom eye-pieces for astronomical telescopes also seem to have gotten better in the past few years. Ten years ago they were disregarded as poorly-performing gimmicks, but now quality zoom eyepieces are available from the likes of Televue.

So, that seems to be that. I'll look around a bit more and think if I'm really going to have time to use the camera properly before buying it.

What to do?

OK, so I already have a "private" blog, GoodStuff. The idea here, was to have a shared blog/wiki that a few friends and I would use to share papers, articles, book references and links of any note. Being based on snipsnap, we also have a simple wiki and the ability to upload files. Sounds ideal for what we were trying to achieve - a collected set of links, papers, and our own articles. Alas, a web interface just seems to be too much effort, and very little uploads of papers are made, with only slightly more posts. Also, everyone wants their own blog it seems.

The precursor to goodstuff was just a file share. This was limited as it is difficult to arrange a directory into anything but a hierarchy and there is no indexing or metadata for searching. However, with the advent of Spotlight and Google Desktop search, perhaps a return to a shared drive, with access via WebDAV or just plain old rsync would be the best for quick file management. Files can be synchronised with the server which can make them available on the web, and only links posted.

So, I now have an offline cache of the papers and the like that I manage locally and then rsync. I've also taken to VooDooPad as a local wiki/notepad tool. This is quick, simple and easy to use, but with the ability to export the wiki to a web page, or even my iPod. Nice. There are of course many similar programs both for the Mac, Wndows, Linux and so on. Spell-checking, drag and drop linking and off-line access are some of the benefits of these programs.

Furthermore, I ended up ranting as per usual, so perhaps my own rant-laden blog is appropriate.

So, this is it.

First post

w00t! and so on.