Category Archives: Technology

Topaz Webinar

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I woke up to a lovely surprise yesterday — a nice email from the good folks at Topaz Labs. If you follow my blog or photography you might have come across the photo here at some stage back when I was writing about India. This was shot with my old Canon EOS 40D and then graphically treated through Topaz Adjust to bring out the subtle details. Nichole Paschal from Topaz wrote me asking if she can use this image during her Webinar that is to be held on Monday July 18th (18/07/2011) 3PM CDT or (1pm PDT, 8pm GMT) or Tuesday July 19th 6am AEST. Thanks Nichole :)


Old fashioned Cooking in India

But what is Topaz Adjust?

Topaz Adjust is a Photoshop plugin that bring out dynamic enhancements to photos and makes them look ‘true to life‘. It makes your images pop and brings out the depth and colour in the most trickiest of situations. If you’d like to find out more about Topaz Adjust here are some reviews from Trey Ratcliff and Scott Kelby.

Don’t forget to register your interest for the Webinar should you be keen.

I’m a Nikon Lurker

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Just a little confession :D I truly am a Nikon lurker but with good reason. I’d so love to own the Nikon D3X right now But alas! :)

Canon & Nikon are both top-notch camera makers — but they both have slight advantages over each other in different areas of their game. If you’re new to the field of photography and have to choose one over the other its relatively easy to weigh your options. But it sure as hell gets complicated and very expensive if you’ve gear vested in one particular brand, sadly Canon over the years and looking to go the other way: Nikon that is. More so if it is a hobby. Winning the lottery would help but I never seem to be in luck.

Its been over ten years I’ve been shooting with Canon and with more concentrated effort in the last probably four odd years. From my limited experience, travels on the Internet… Canon seems to make great camera bodies and lenses and seemingly dominates the Landscape world. Nikon on the other hand dominates Sports, Journalism, Portraiture, Low-light all around. Not everything is rosy for Nikon either, one has to lug extra weight and the menu system is hideous is some ways. Resetting a Nikon setup or changing quickly between one type of shooting to another type is not as easy as it is on Canon. But when you see how Nikon gets its colours spot-on without any extra tinge of blue(outdoors) yellow(night-time) and red(on skin tones) then the extra weight and hideous menu system seems like a small price to pay isn’t it? Nikon also has excellent AF points while Canon only gets good AF measurement on the middle spot mostly(sorry Canon). Nikon offers very good low-light captures, far lesser noise both at low-light and high ISO and higher burst. Canon of course fights back with higher resolution(file-size) but unless you’re going to print every image and crop every image heavily higher file-size is good but not an imperative. What is important however is to fix Canon’s back-focusing on its lenses and noise! Canon’s low noise reduction in the current model I have(Canon EOS 5D Mark II) is over-hyped. If you are a Canon shooter check your shadow noise at any ISO with an equivalent Nikon shot.

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Canon 5D Mark II

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My new camera has finally arrived! I’m very excited, much like a kid in a candy shop. The Canon 5D Mark II is truly a dream camera. Back when Suresh gave it to me for a trial run in November 2009 I remember how pleasing the photos were. After using it just for two days it was hard going back to the Canon EOS 40D. This isn’t to say that the Canon EOS 40D is bad, but to put it simply: the Canon EOS 5D MarkII is just — outstanding. If you appreciate good imagery and optics this will blow your mind away over and over again! Truly! There’s a very good reason why so many users rave about it. I’m a little late to the party but its good to be on board for sure.

Here are some photos from the first few days of shooting.

Way to work
Way to work, now you know why its often a s-l-o-w walk :)

A leafy outlook
A leafy outlook, green is the new black!

View from Cremorne Point
Not much fun when its overcast but still good to be out and about! View from Cremorne Point

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Google’s Priority Inbox

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Very simple but what a clever piece of idea? Why didn’t anyone think of this before? Priority mail helps you wade through tons of junk quickly and over time it knows what you want to keep aside as important over junk and promotions and those ‘read later’ emails.

If you already have a GMail account you’d probably see it in action soon you log in.

I still remember the time when GMail had launched and I was the first one who swore not to use it. It does take a little time to understand how GMail is a little different but when you know the difference and the power it bring to your Inbox you’d be silly not to.

Canon 5D Mark II weekend loan

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Sydney Harbour Bridge - a different perspective
Sydney Harbour Bridge – a different perspective

Under the Jacaranda Sydney Harbour Bridge from McMahons Point Tealight Candle set by twilight Walk along Mosman wharf leading to Cremorne Point

Sometime back in April I’d talked about Canon 5D Mark II, well guess what I finally got to try one because of the lovely people at Kayell NSW. And truly it blew me away just like every other review of Canon 5D Mark II I’d read thus far! There is a very good reason why everyone wants to own this Canon body! Its outstanding. The things that jumped right out at me in these two days of trial was its ability to handle noise, increased dynamic range (without HDR), clarity and ability to focus well in low light, responsiveness, softer shutter click compared to my Canon 40D, 3″ viewing LCD, peripheral illumination compensation, full HD movie capability. If there is one complaint, its the radial distortion on 17-40mm at 17mm. You’ll only notice this if you look very closely on straight lines around the edges of a 17mm shot! There is also a little vignetting on the corners at 17mm. But the wide-angle goodness you get out of a full frame is worth every drop of gold. Should you frame your shot carefully you can work around the radial distortion.

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fixoutlook.org – have your say

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Its not much of an original post when you copy paste information, but sometimes you *have to* remind giants that sleep at the wheels inconveniencing and killing healthy competition and growth in the IT industry. Yes you guessed it I’m talking about Microsoft. Minutes ago I got an email from Campaign Monitor and The Email Standards Project. And soon I post the message you’ll know what I mean. I quote:

Microsoft have just confirmed they plan on using the crippled Word rendering engine to display HTML emails in Outlook 2010.

This means for the next 5 years your email designs will need tables for layout, have no support for CSS like float and position and no background images. Not to mention the long list of bugs and quirks that break the simplest of layouts.

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iPhone OS 3.0 software update

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The iPhone OS 3.0 software update is here. While I must admit I havent played around to check every little update feature yet, the Spotlight search in itself is a big time saver. Cut, Copy & Paste alone save a lot of retyping and mulling over dreaded typos. That is a mega saver, add to that the fact you can type in Landscape which implies lesser typos. Voice Memos – brilliant idea, Internet Tethering will be another hidden gem when you want to get connected easily.

Updating the new software for iPhone was absolutely pain-free and it was over in a couple of minutes. Apps seem a lot more responsive and start and close quicker. The only downside some apps in the App store are still not OS 3.0 ready but thats just a matter of time. :) Go get your update, its worth it.

My only concern was if Flight Control didn’t work — but it DOES just fine! Just between you, me and the gatepost my score last night was 87! 8-)

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Amazing iPhone

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iPhone App store picAt long last I’m a proud iPhone owner and like the rest who has tapped into the power of iPhone I am in sheer, awe, delight and joy of this marvel of technology!

Think I’ve done well to fight the temptation for a whole year since they were available in Australia around July 2008. Over the years I’ve had quite a range of mobile handsets but nothing has ever come close to the goodness of what apple brings in an iPhone. Really nothing comes close or is comparable to the iPhone! It is a masterpiece. A marriage of technology and superb interface. It is a love story of epic proportions if such a phrase could be used to describe a ‘gadget’. it just is! I’m truly floored by the design, the finish, the response, the crazy addictive App Store where thousands of people across the globe write jaw dropping Apps. It has considerably cut down my time in front of the computer! And dare I say I’m loving every bit of iPhone juice I can have.

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Safari 4 beta and refresh button

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safari_4_beta_screengrab

For a good few months, probably a year or more I had been using Firefox as my main browser. But since the update of Safari 4 Beta I turned by head back to Safari. i dont dislike Safari 4, its just that Firefox’s add-ons and Greasemonkey scripts are a huge timesaver. While most things remain just as excellent with Safari the one that really annoys me is not having the stop/refresh button. Grrrrrr! It is now right next to the RSS icon. God forbid you want stop loading a page and you click the RSS icon instead of the Stop/Refresh icon.

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Flickr Tools

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Do you like taking photos? Do you have a Yahoo account? If the answer to the above are ‘yes‘ chances are you also have a Flickr account and post photos there. Yahoo lets you sign on to Flickr using your yahoo ID. My main weakness to Flickr is that there are lots of enthusiast photographers posting photos and discussions to better their skills and knowledge. Looking at other peoples photos often gives me a perspective into the photographers world of image composition, layout and execution of the process. Its very addictive and informative and caught unaware you can spend hours even before you know it. And this quest surely corroborates to heighten the photographic eye.

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Sennheiser CX 500

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Sennheiser CX 500My age old iPod Nano still works fine but not quite the same when it comes to the earphones. The sound quality is not the best and often there is a cracking noise. I have always found that the earphones slip off easily, or maybe I just have funny ears.

I have been looking for a mid range compact earphone for a while and thanks to some good suggestions from HD and finally bought it from JB Hi-fi this afternoon. It really seems to offer a much richer sound experience. In fact I’m listening to Pink’s recently released Funhouse album as I write this. (Thanks DS, its a really nice album).

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BetterZip your files

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Mac OS X has a built in facility to zip your files on the fly and open them on double-clicking. But the only disadvantage with that is the fact that zipped files created this way add hidden files alongside, eg:

  • ._filename
  • .DS_filename

If you’re sending zipped files to someone on a windows machine these hidden files are of no use to them and worst of all these underscore prefixed files are visible to all and confuse users. In short, there are better ways to send zipped files from your mac. Two applications on mac that do this job really well are:

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Google Chrome and Canon EOS 50D

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UPDATE: Google chrome is now available for download. The Speed and functionality on the beta software is noteworthy. Still working out the beta browser before I write more. It looks promising.

Canon EOS 50D

2 items hot off the press — well actually one of these is no longer hot as I let this sit in my draft way too long. Canon has indeed released its EOS 50D last month. and is already making some news. This would be one fantastic upgrade… for previous Canon DSLR users. There is a huge jump in the image resolution to 15.1 megapixels and a maximum burst for 90JPGs, ISO expandable to 12800, Face detection technology! I was a bit surprise to see that the 50D didn’t come with a 1:1 CMOS conversion. Would have been nice but good still.

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