Raw fish: om nom nom!

I have had my Canon S90 for nearly a year! Quite hard to believe - in fact Canon has already announced an update is due out soon (S95). Apparently the rear dial doesn't turn freely anymore on the S95 but I haven't actually found that the loose one on the S90 has been the problem many feared it might be. I like that they've added extra holes for a proper neck strap though - that seems like it could be useful.

If there was one thing that would make me want to upgrade, it would be the ability to attach a dedicated optical finder. I know Canon would rather have me buy the G11 for that but those cameras are simply too big once you've tried the S90 (not to mention the lens is a stop slower!)

I would imagine such a device using a proprietary clip instead of the usual flash shoe to keep the size down; perhaps with an extra frame marked for 50mm FoV. It doesn't need to be super-accurate, although large and bright would be very desirable. For bonus points, the finder could incorporate a focus indicator LED and illuminated frame lines that switch as you zoom the lens - I'm sure many people would pay good money for this.

I often find that I am holding my camera up to my eye, zoomed all the way out and pre-focused, just trying to eyeball the correct framing. It works surprisingly well! Some enterprising users have already hacked (well, glued) finders onto the S90 but a first party solution would be far more elegant. Mike Johnston recently likened these cameras to the original Leica; I think a proper finder would really cement the argument.

Lightroom tells me that my catalogue only has about 750 shots from the S90. It's not much but I have some travels coming up so that number should go up soon. More importantly, I have a very large number of keepers - about 150 are marked 3+ stars - and most of these are in difficult low-light situations where most compacts would struggle to deliver much in the way of usable pictures. These are 150 shots I would not have made with my DSLR because it was sitting at home!

On a related note, I managed to drop mine a short distance onto some gravel. Luckily it escaped with nothing but a mark or two on the lens ring paint - easily sorted with some black permanent marker The build quality (while not up to Leica M standards) is also more than adequate!

Shot info: f/2.2, 6.85mm (one step from full wide), ISO 1600, CR2 converted through Lightroom 3.

curl -s -d @request.xml -H "Content-type: text/xml" \
    http://example.com/endpoint | xmllint --format -

Create a file request.xml with your XML input, pretty XML output will appear on the standard output. Curl is an HTTP swiss army knife, xmllint is a XML verification and manipulation tool.

?- A.
% ... 1,000,000 ............ 10,000,000 years later
%
%       >> 42 << (last release gives the question)
?-

That's just awesome Reminded me that I haven't (re)read HHGG in recent years - maybe I'll put it on me phone. Seems like the perfect book to read a chapter here and there when bored.

Shot with a Nikon D700 and a selection of fines Nikkors: 14-24/2.8, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8 VR2, 105/2.8 VR. If I had to pick a favorite lens it would definitely be the 14-24/2.8, with the 105/2.8 VR Micro-Nikkor coming a close second. They are all, without exception, big and heavy lenses I wouldn't want to carry around all the time but they certainly produce the goods when needed!

And to illustrate just how tiny it is  - here's mine next to an AA battery (you might also recognize the Gordy's camera strap it's wearing):

Nikon expert Thom Hogan has posted his views on the S90 and sums it up much better than I could. I find the S90 a great camera for those times when I don't feel like lugging my SLR around. And since I've had a chance to handle the Olympus E-P1, I really don't lust after a m4/3 camera anymore even though I'm sure it's technically a better proposition.

Let me start with an observation on the two biggest players in this space. Twitter and Facebook are diametrically opposite in the way that their social links work - Twitter is asymmetrical where following someone has no implication for them. Befriending someone on Facebook on the other hand is a symmetrical relationship. (Facebook has tried to augment this, quite successfully, with the Pages feature.) These core properties also dictate the experience: Twitter serves up small slices of chatter and subscribers see updates fairly close in time to them being published. Facebook on the other hand personalizes your news feed and prioritizes items based on your past activity. (You can also choose to view the latest news from all your Facebook friends from a couple of iterations ago - see a pattern here?)

Buzz's major downside for me at the moment is that the popular posts tend to stay at the top, even if I'm not that interested in them. If you contrast to the above paragraph, you'll see how it fits right in the middle - you get a public conversation with the "buzzing" items floating up to the top. Google will probably tweak the post prioritization over time to get the signal-to-noise ratio lower (I would like a button to mute specific items for starters. Edit: ah, it's right there in the little triangle menu - silly me).

Jason Calacanis writes that "Facebook just lost half its value". I'm not convinced of that - for one, Facebook has iterated on their UI much more and is very good at catering to the use cases that people want from it, IMHO. Another is privacy concerns - for all the gaffes, Facebook does actually have working privacy controls. Google has a lot of catching up to do in pure features here. That is, if they even want to go there. My guess is that they'll stay out in the open like Twitter and sidestep the issue. Simple example: I would upload photos to Facebook that will never see Flickr or Google's Picasa data centres.

I also think that it's Twitter that may have lost half its value - in the 24h that I've had Buzz in my Gmail, I've seen much more potential to strike up a conversation in public on Buzz than I have on Twitter, which in turn tends to be quite impersonal until you have built something of a following. If Google provides an API with open access, Buzz could really become the centre of one's online universe. One potential killer feature (for technogeeks anyway) would be to aggregate ad-hoc social interactions such as comments on blog posts and forum posts from all over the internet. Blogger is already supported, all that's needed is push support in Disqus and vBulletin/phpBB . The challenge here will probably be minimizing noise - think Facebook app spam.

Related - Buzz from the corporate network. How many companies block access to the likes of Facebook? I'd guess quite a few, especially once you reach a certain size. Gmail on the other hand is often permanently open in a browser right next to the corporate Exchange mailbox. Short term advantage to Buzz here, but how long before the network policy declares it an enemy? Gmail is already on the borderline as it is with the embedded Google Talk feature.

I have turned Buzz off for the time being but I will keep revisiting it. I would have much preferred a standalone page which I can visit. As it stands, I find it very distracting in my Gmail. At the same time, I think that over time it will become a very useful tool. I suspect it will eat more into my Twitter usage than Facebook. And I should imagine that Buzz will really hit its stride once mobile support is rolled out.

WTF, NVIDIA? Please don't screw with my colours and focus on building better hardware instead. Secondly, how did this update get WHQL approval and made it into Microsoft's Windows Update? It's little things like this that have made all the pros move to Mac.

Lightroom was actually doing the right thing by preserving the original look of the images. All that was needed was to either reset the development settings (killing my adjustments in the process), or update to the latest process version (this is available from the Settings menu when in the Develop module). I have noticed that some of my images require a lot less sharpening under the new process and so would look rather over-sharpened when simply converted to the latest process. In other words there is a good reason why Lightroom does not automatically put your old images through the new process – it’s different enough that the results of your original adjustments may simply not look as good as they should. My advice would be not to do large-scale en masse conversion of entire folders or catalogs, rather convert individual images and reassess the adjustments made.

Now that I am seeing the output of the latest rendering engine, I can tell you that this alone will be worth the price of the upgrade for me. Colour noise handling is vastly improved, the luminance grain is tighter and there may even be a tad more detail visible in some borderline cases. Have a look at the following side by side crops and judge for yourself (click to see in full):

All files use the default Lightroom noise reduction settings – the colour noise reduction slider was set to 25, and luminance noise was set to 0.

The improvement in the G10 images is very impressive. Also note the much reduced vertical banding in the 50D ISO3200 sample #4 above (this is the only crop that is not 100% because the banding was not as obvious at the 1:1 magnification size). Overall, I am seeing ever so slightly more detail (e.g. the stitching in sample #2, eyebrow hairs in sample #3) and vastly reduced colour noise with a more pleasing grain pattern. The Nikon D700 does not show a huge improvement – I had to go through quite a number of ISO 6400 photos to find one that shows much of a difference, mostly because the files are so good to start with. The story is similar with the Pentax K10D in that it doesn’t show much improvement – the files are fairly noisy in the first place and stay that way even under the new process.

All the above files have easily discernable differences at full-screen view on my HP LP2475w (24” 1920x1200 LCD, or around 30% magnification depending on which camera the file comes from), except for the Canon 50D @ ISO 400 and the two Pentax shots. The differences between Lightroom 2.5 and 3.0 Beta rendering for these three images are basically invisible at smaller magnifications.

Another small but important improvement that I’ve noticed is the smoother movement of the adjustment sliders. Previously, some computationally-expensive adjustments would make the sliders very notchy as the image preview was being rendered every time you changed a value. Now the sliders can move freely all the time. This is a classic case of better use of multithreading leading to more responsive software. I haven’t done any actual testing but it seems as though the new beta is also utilizing my dual core CPU better during import/export. It only makes sense as CPUs with four or eight threads of execution are becoming increasingly popular, and Lightroom 2 has some known deficiencies in such configurations.

The Lightroom 3 beta is available to all at Adobe Labs (free registration required).

Orlando Power Station set on Flickr (slideshow).

Canon G10 set on Flickr (slideshow).