sethrichards.com » Linkage

Seth Richards — Wed, 24 Dec 2008 16:25:01 +0000

Noah Strycker is a penguin researcher spending 3 months in Antarctica at a penguin colony. He has a blog which he’s updating every couple days while he’s there. It’s good reading for a lazy morning with a cup of coffee, and some interesting wildlife photos to boot. There aren’t that many posts, so I’d suggest starting at the beginning and working your way through. If nothing else, it’s simply amazing that someone can be in one of the most remote, hostile locations in the world, and yet still be able to update their blog.

Speaking of updating your blog, after today I’ll be largely out of range of decent internet access until after the new year. So have a merry Christmas, and a happy new year!

Yuri’s Planet

Seth Richards — Sun, 20 Apr 2008 14:18:44 +0000

If you don’t read the Astronomy Picture of the Day every day, you really ought to. Amazing pictures, and a quite educational to boot. Anyway, last Saturday’s picture (which I would have missed if I hadn’t been going back through the RSS feed) was one of the coolest I’ve seen on there in a long time, and definitely desktop background-worthy.

High ISOs on Small-Sensor Cameras, or “Why does my digital camera suck so badly in low light?”

Seth Richards — Wed, 23 May 2007 12:43:10 +0000

DPReview has posted a typically excellent article explaining the various High-ISO/low-light modes found on compact digital cameras these days. It’s a must-read for anybody who’s looking for a digital point & shoot or who may be in the future.

The executive summary is that camera manufacturer marketing departments are dirty, dirty liars, and that these high-ISO modes either have so much image noise that you wouldn’t want to use them or (more likely) use such aggressive noise reduction that it will destroy any fine detail in your pictures. (Fuji seems to be something of an exception to this, and their cameras seem to be the ones to buy if you want to take pictures without a flash in low light.)

It’s frustrating because there’s a very simple, direct technical solution to the problem, and it’s to stop forcing more and more megapixels into cameras than the sensor technology will support, and focus on providing better pixels rather than just more. But as long as camera buyers keep focusing on that single number when comparing competing models the situation is unlikely to change. Given that the next two posts on DPReview are announcements of 12(!) megapixel compacts from Casio and Panasonic, I’m not optimistic.

Pearls Before Breakfast

Seth Richards — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 02:58:52 +0000

This article from the Washington Post is well worth checking out. It’s a bit of a long read, but I’d highly recommend it. It raises some interesting questions about art and its place in modern society, but I think the biggest one is “would I have stopped?”

Africa from the air

Seth Richards — Wed, 28 Mar 2007 16:25:27 +0000

Photographer Michael Poliza has posted a Flickr set of photographs from his helicopter trip over Europe and Africa. There’s some very cool stuff in there; it’s well worth checking out. Be sure to click on the “all sizes” link for each photo, as a lot of them really benefit from being viewed as large as possible.

One Small Step for Man…

Seth Richards — Tue, 20 Feb 2007 11:36:03 +0000

Hans Nyberg has combined high-res scans of photos taken on the Apollo missions with modern digital image processing techniques to create scrollable, zoomable 360º panoramas of the lunar landing sites. Requires a recent version of QuickTime, and I’m sure they’ll take forever to load on slow internet connections, but it’s well worth it in my opinion.

Hold on to that camera strap

Seth Richards — Tue, 09 Jan 2007 12:02:37 +0000

If you’ve never dropped and lost a lens cap, lens hood, eyepiece, or something worse, you’re probably not out there taking enough pictures. There are some places though where you really don’t want to drop your camera, like, say, orbiting the Earth. Don’t think they’ll be getting that one back.

On that topic, here’re a couple (rather large) pictures of the camera gear aboard the ISS. Pretty cool stuff. Although I’m sure that for as much as that stuff certainly cost, it was far more expensive to launch it all into space…

(Linkage shamelessly pilfered from the excellent Strobist blog. If you’re at all interested in photography, that site should be in your bookmarks.)

Bringing Wilco to the Fort

Seth Richards — Sun, 07 Jan 2007 15:36:02 +0000

I’m not sure why it’s taken me so long to link this site up, but there’s a group of people trying to get Wilco to come to Fort Wayne and play at the Embassy on their next tour. I’m usually not all that enthusiastic about online petitions, but in this case I think it may be worth a shot. If you’re interested, head over to the site and add your name to the list. Even if they don’t actually get Wilco it’ll be useful to show that there’s a base of people in the region interested in bringing interesting, innovative bands to town.

Update: Now that I look at the site again, it looks like they’re having an “Awareness Concert” on the 16th. With 5 bands it looks like it could be a good show, but why the heck did they schedule it on a Tuesday?