by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 23, 2004 | Photography Equipment
I purchased a Nikkor 70-300mm G lens for my D70 this week. I have never had a zoom lens before and was not sure if I would use it much so I opted for the cheapest on the market – £115 – once I know I like it I will get the real thing.
I was not expecting much from the lens since the usual know-it-all’s on the forums were having nothing but bad to say about its clarity around the 300mm mark, well I am glad to say I am absolutely very happy with the lens.
It does fantastic long distance shots which in combination with my 18-70mm gives me an amasing 16x magnification, it also does great with the kinds of shots where the background needs to be distorted.
Click on the image for some more flower shots which demonstrate the depth of field you get out of a long lens nicely.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 16, 2004 | Front Page
I always look at my web server logs, I find the various log spammers, bots and RSS readers really interesting. About a week ago I noticed a lot of log spamming all in a short period of time and thought something must be going on but waited till it happened again.
Today again I got 5 log spam attempts in a very short interval from different IP addresses. As this is the 2nd time this happens I can only imagine this is 5 machines that is acting in a coordinated fashion.
64.69.172.9 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:29:46 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://www.nudecelebblogs.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
201.128.123.11 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:33:09 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://paris-hilton-video.blogspot.com” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
212.163.30.100 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:34:15 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://www.shatteredreality.net” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
217.219.165.3 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:34:46 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.1” 200 32861 “http://britneyspearsnude.blogspot.com/” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
80.58.35.46 – – [16/Apr/2004:15:37:23 +0100] “GET / HTTP/1.0” 200 32759 “http://www.amateurxpass.com” “Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)”
The IP addresses are in US, MX, ES, IR and ES and interestingly enough have exactly the same user agent. 2 of the machines are running mail servers and may also be NAT/Masquarading machines I am guessing.
Eitherway, I think someone is controlling a bunch of bot machines and using them to spam logs. I wonder if I contact the hosting companies of these sites if they will shut them down?
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 8, 2004 | Usefull Things
I previously mentioned moving from Newzcrawler to Sharpreader as a desktop aggregator. Again I am getting a bit annoyed at the lack of development pace of Sharpreader and minimal improvements that has been made between most recent releases.
Lockergnome mentioned a new release of Saucereader and I checked it out.
It is very nice looking indeed with a modern interface, supports importing OPML files and has most of the bells and whistles you would want. I really like it and would switch to it permenantly once the following has been addressed:
- More keybindings – there is no simple way to move to the next unread item, the interface is a nightmare for people who do not like using their mice such as myself. My wrists are buggered, using a mouse hurts – using this software hurts a lot. Keybindings for opening in a new window etc would also be useful.
- Visual indication of new items arriving – something like a baloon popup but it has to be configurable, sharpreader has a rediculous baloon that takes loads of CPU.
- Abiltiy not to use IE as the browser, IE does not have proper ad blocking and so forth, I really do not wish to use it.
- Configurable actions on items – at the moment clicking on a item shows the RSS feed values of it, double clicking opens it in IE inside the reader, this isn’t nice at all. I like double clicking to open on a external browser such as firefox where I can catch up on all my sites and open interesting things in different tabs then later on go and read each opened tab.
- More sorting options for the display – I would like to sort new items on top no matter what the date in them says. Maybe I just have not found the right toggle or click since their page sorting does seem rather powerfull, I will keep fiddling this.
Most of these concerns/wishes has been mentioned on their support forum and I could tolerate most of these problems except the first one. I will not use a overly-mouse intensive program. Once that is fixed I will use this as my aggregator, for now I will have to go back to the old Sharpreader.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 7, 2004 | Usefull Things
Previously I mentioned that I am using Zempt to do my posting to my blog. Unfortunately development on the Zempt front has gone pretty much dead, in fact the domain was being domain squatted for a time so I have been looking for a replacement.
Today I found it in w.bloggar which is a very nice looking posting tool for a number of weblogs that I can recommend to anyone who does not like the web based posting tool restrictions.
by R.I. Pienaar | Apr 6, 2004 | Usefull Things
Noise in photos is a fact of life, you cannot avoid it. Thankfully there are good post processing tools available today and also the cameras themselves has improved significantly in this area by improving the optics and CCD and also by having powerful in-camera noise reduction software.
For those who aren’t fortunate enough to have a good enough camera that produce noise free images there are other options like post processing. The current package that is best for removing noise is Neat Image.
Traditionally to take photos in low light situation you would buy a “fast” film, a film with a high ISO rating. Digital cameras has a similar concept but is executed by amplifying the signals coming from the CCD, in both cases the advantage is slow shutter speed in low light with the draw back of more noise the higher the ISO rating.
My Nikon D70 has a Auto ISO setting where you instruct the camera the slowest shutter speed you want and it will manipulate the ISO according to the image you want to take, this is useful if you do not have a tripod or do not have time to set up a tripod but need to get the shots in low light. I fiddled with this once and noticed that on highest ISO ratings the noise was just too much to my liking but I am however keen to see this function become usable for some cases where I want to use the camera and so noise reduction is key.
I took a sample shot in my flat now with the D70 at ISO 1600, the room was nearly dark only a small desk lamp on the furthest corner from me, I would usually consider the shot to be impossible to do with hand holding due to the long shutter speed, but the ISO makes it trivial. I then fed the resulting image through Neat Image using their provided noise profile for the Nikon D70 and the results are amazing. I am including two 100% crops from the images as examples. View the extended entry for larger full scene examples.
Keep in mind the room was very dark, I can just about make out that writing with the naked eye in the same conditions, the noise removal obviously comes at a bit of a price, but neat image also has an excellent sharpening tool and if you view the full images you will see the improvement this has done. I will definately go try the Auto ISO again this weekend!
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