GPS Running and a trip to New Zealand

I haven’t been run­ning much lately, because… I’m lazy. And there are exams on. And I’d much rather pro­cras­ti­nate pas­sively. Or some­thing. I don’t know, I don’t really have any good excuses.

There is, how­ever, some­thing that would prob­a­bly make me want to run more. This ridicu­lously cool GPS train­ing device! It’s like… hey… you’re a geek. And you want to run. With gim­micks that are arguably use­ful. Buy me, buy me!

Some­how, though, at $US330ish plus ship­ping, I don’t think it’s going to hap­pen. The solu­tion? Start jog­ging with a back­pack and take a car GPS unit (already have one)!

Yeah, not ter­ri­bly likely, either. Ah well. Hope­fully The Trip to New Zealand com­ing up (have I men­tioned that online yet? Geez… maybe not… how bad) will serve to kinda rem­edy the whole lack-of-exercise sit­u­a­tion and cre­ate a habit for when I get back. If I haven’t men­tioned that on this site before (I don’t remem­ber doing that, I don’t think I have), then… con­sider this notice. I’m going to NZ from Sat­ur­day the 12th of Novem­ber until Mon­day the 5th of Decem­ber. Tori leaves to go to Eng­land on Novem­ber 10, so that’ll be dis­trac­tion enough after fin­ish­ing the exams and just before pack­ing… and hope­fully NZ will be enough of a dis­trac­tion for me to not realise she’s on the other side of the planet for a while (and vice versa, I imagine…)

I’m plan­ning on tak­ing lots of pho­tos, but haven’t decided which cam­era to take yet. Or, more accu­rately, how many I will take. I’m def­i­nitely plan­ning on tak­ing my Pen­tax SP500 w/ 28-70mm lens, but don’t know whether my lit­tle Pen­tax qual­i­fies. I can see it either get­ting bro­ken or full very quickly. Con­tem­plat­ing get­ting a harddrive-based reader thingo (some­thing like this HD-DM40 from Any­ware, about $215 from a retailer), but quite uncer­tain. It’s just more stuff to carry in a back­pack that’s already going to be sub­stan­tially full.

Plus, as I’ve told some peo­ple before, I like film grain. It looks nice. Far nicer than dig­i­tal com­pres­sion arti­facts or the sen­sor crap­ping out in low light con­di­tions. One of Hayley’s pho­tos on year12.joahua.com demon­strates this nicely, because it’s not a good photo, but it’s very nice and char­ac­ter­ful… mostly, I think, because it was shot on film not digital.

So, I can live with my own inabil­ity to use a cam­era per­fectly mean­ing I get a hand­ful of blurry shots, and it cost­ing a lit­tle more to get pho­tos developed/make mis­takes. The ques­tion is, should I have a sec­ondary cam­era for quick pho­tos that I can check the qual­ity of imme­di­ately, just in case? I could prob­a­bly drop my SP500 in water and it’d sur­vive after a [prob­a­bly quite expen­sive] ser­vice… I can’t say the same thing for the dig­i­tal. Fun­nily enough, the tiny dig­i­tal would ulti­mately take up nearly as much space as the chunky SLR, because it would mean I’d be car­ry­ing a charger for its bat­ter­ies, a hard drive, and a charger for the hard drive, as well as the cam­era itself. I could just not use the hard drive and try to find a net cafe, but that’s some­thing I’d rather not rely on. I could also buy another SD card or two before we leave… which is a dis­tinct pos­si­bil­ity, given how cheap those things are get­ting (I saw a 256MB card for under $30 yes­ter­day, and wasn’t even look­ing. 512MB cards can be had for under $50). Prob­lem­at­i­cally, they’re absolutely tiny and I can just see myself los­ing one.

Sug­ges­tions, anyone?

# by Josh on October 26th, 2005 Tags: , , ,
| 4 Comments »

Digital made me dumb

The last two nights I’ve used my Pen­tax SP500 (film SLR) cam­era, and I’m more than a tad annoyed at myself. Less so tonight than yes­ter­day, but there we go — either way, it’s not good. I hadn’t really used the film cam­era since about Jan­u­ary this year (I know, it’s appalling; more as a result of time than desire, how­ever, as I haven’t had many planned oppor­tu­ni­ties for good pho­tog­ra­phy ses­sions), so this was the first time I’d really used it since get­ting the dig­i­tal toy (because, really, despite the opti­cal zoom, that’s all it is).

It’s cre­ated three major prob­lems, in terms of my pho­tog­ra­phy skills. Firstly, I’m snap-happy. It’s ridicu­lous (ridicu­lously expen­sive!). Last night I went through a roll of 35mm film in one per­for­mance (didn’t cover the whole show, either), and tonight, when I was try­ing to cover the bit I missed, I went through another roll in under 15 min­utes. Yeeaaahhhh.

That’s not so much a tech­ni­cal issue as a styl­is­tic one, how­ever. Far more impor­tantly, I quite lit­er­ally for­got that adjustable F-stop rings existed. Need­less to say, when I remem­bered, I kicked myself rather hard. Stupidity++.

I’d also for­got­ten to use the spot meter until about halfway through the night (and, hon­estly, it’s pretty use­ful to have! Com­plain all you want about how they’re inac­cu­rate and don’t tru­ely mea­sure what they’re see­ing, but it’s a great ref­er­ence point — I’m not say­ing fol­low them blindly, but they cer­tainly help), which prob­a­bly resulted in a whole num­ber of too-dark pho­tos (or too-unneccesarily-blurry pho­tos — the shut­ter was set to quar­ter sec­ond expo­sure for most of the night!)

Speak­ing of enor­mous expo­sures, I’m really lov­ing hav­ing a CHUNKY cam­era to hold again. Don’t get me wrong, I love my tiny Optio (it fits in my pocket per­fectly), but not for night pho­tog­ra­phy sans flash. It’s just too small to hold steadily, unless you’re braced against some­thing incred­i­bly solid, or you get lucky with the sub­ject mov­ing as your hand does (cool focused sub­ject with blurred back­ground — noth­ing to do with depth of field, just motion). The SP500, how­ever… drool. I haven’t had time to get these two rolls put in for devel­op­ing yet, but it just feels good to use. Ridicu­lously good. It’s like mov­ing from a dis­pos­able cam­era, almost (a GOOD dis­pos­able cam­era, but still).

This is why when I got the dig­i­tal I tried to con­vince myself I’d never use it for any­thing seri­ous — because I fully recog­nise it’s a dinky lit­tle toy. It exists to be taken nearly every­where, to cap­ture any­thing, just for kicks. Like this police car, for example…

Wide shot of a Smart car with police markings
Close up of Smart logo and police markings

# by Josh on March 11th, 2005 Tags: , ,
| 1 Comment »

Returned.

Yarrr. I’m back from my unan­nounced hol­i­day, to a mass of email, an over­flow­ing RSS reader, and a com­puter which is boot­ing inter­mit­tently. I want to go back on holidays.

Yes, I did have Inter­net access where I was stay­ing. I enjoy know­ing I can blog from any­where in the world, nearly as much as I enjoy know­ing that I can choose not to. And so I didn’t — I realised that I hadn’t announced my depar­ture a few days back, but decided it wasn’t worth writ­ing home about. This was a hol­i­day from blog­ging as much as any­thing else; not that blog­ging is some­thing to be escaped, nec­es­sar­ily, but it is good to get away from on occasion.

And whilst I was escap­ing, I immersed myself in books, and cam­eras, amongst other things. Of books, more shall be said later, if at all. Of cam­eras, more details are com­ing, I promise — along with pic­tures, so I hope. “Other things” encom­pass more toys, includ­ing the pend­ing arrival of some semi-vintage (read: old, but rel­a­tively intact and refur­bished) speak­ers; for those who care, and/or are famil­iar with such things, I’ve got a pair of Acoustic Research AR14 2-way speak­ers in stor­age, which I’m hop­ing to put to good use once this damn house is sold, or at least taken off the mar­ket. They sound decid­edly warm, although the HF is quite dis­tinc­tive. Mid-range is a tad lack­ing, but cer­tainly no worse that what I’m cur­rently using.

So, I’m look­ing for­wards to that. As I am look­ing for­wards to play­ing with this cam­era (an SLR) over the next few days. I haven’t time to upload pic­tures of the cam­era itself right now, but it’s an old Pen­tax Asahi SP500 model — if you care that much, Google’s num­ber one match for “Pen­tax Asahi” at the time of writ­ing returns a web­site which bran­dishes a few decent pic­tures of the cam­era. As far as I can tell, the cam­era itself is about 30 years old, and is in pretty decent nick… I’ve got two lenses for it, details of which will be posted later, and a UV fil­ter for one of those lenses.

It’s a 35mm cam­era, and was appar­ently last used in the early ‘90s… Because I couldn’t bring myself just to waste the mostly-unused film which remained in the cam­era, I fear that some rather good shots have gone to waste on the aged film which I’ve used for the last two days. We shall see.

Aside from all of that, I’m back in Syd­ney. Excit­ing things are hap­pen­ing in the realm of web devel­op­ment, away from this web­site, which shall be unveiled in the weeks to come. Until later, I’m going to sleep…

EDIT: Looks as though some­one was screw­ing with Google’s index­ing sys­tem as I searched for “Pen­tax Asahi” — the afore­men­tioned page dis­ap­peared into the void. For ref­er­ence, the page was http://www.talboys.fsnet.co.uk/roderickt/pentaxcdfiles.htm.

# by Josh on October 4th, 2004 Tags: , , , ,
| 9 Comments »