Chris’s Blog

I really should make an effort to post more. Anyway – I thought this would be the best place to upload my HDR panoramic test shot. I don’t think Picasa or Facebook would be very good for an image with such a high-resolution. After taking a bunch of shots (multiplied by five times for the HDR) the image size came out at a staggering 383 megabytes (23909×2803) and Photoshop was using 7 gigabytes of memory! After bringing it down to a more reasonable resolution and optimizing for web, it came out at 6.8MB.

For those of you on slow connections, you may want to pass on this one. I tried a few different panorama plugins for WordPress to try and make the image scrollable, but none worked very well. WP-PhotoNav came the closest, but it seemed pretty buggy. Not sure if it was the plugin or my theme however. I guess lightbox will have to do for now.

I picked this up at the camera store. I finally have a fast lens to use in low light conditions. The only drawback is that the fstop only functions properly in full manual mode, and there is no autofocus.

Bought a new Pentax k20d camera this weekend. Managed to get it for a big discount as it was the only one left and it was a floor model. After doing some research, it turns out I should – and I use the word should, not need (my wife would object otherwise) get some decent lenses.

Included with the kit was a 18-55mm lens. Many people have indicated that a 50mm prime lens is essential for good quality pictures. It might be a while until I can afford some decent lenses, but I can play around with what I have for now. I also ordered some lens filters to play around with. I got a polarizing filter and a macro filter (I know a lens is much better, but I can’t afford it) from DealExtreme.

Went out over the weekend to take some pictures of the surroundings – uploaded some to iStockPhoto. Hopefully they will be accepted and I might be able to make back some money.