Getting out of your photographic comfort zone.

I think it's important to get out of your photographic comfort zone once in a while. Most amateur photographers, myself included, start out shooting absolutely everything they see. After a while they focus a bit more on a few subjects, take the occasional foray in unknown territory and find a niche they are comfortable with. For me that's nature and birds.

Recently I decided, together with a friend, to go to a motor cross event in a nearby village. Loads of people, noise, action, quite the opposite of what I usually do.




It took me a few minutes to get used to it all but then all the practice I put into shooting birds in flights started to pay off. I got an almost 90% keeper rate on most of the action.




But then the composition challenge started to hit me. How on earth do you shoot something that will interest other people? Get any sort of emotional reaction?

So I started to look for patterns.



But it's hard! Everything moves all the time.



In the end I decided to put it off as a learning experience. Technical proficiency doesn't mean interesting pictures. It takes some creativity and a good eye for what's going on around you. It also made me realize that I enjoy my niches much more. When I see this:



I get a sense of, well, fulfilment, joy, no matter what you want to call it. This is the kind of photography I want to do and excel at. And, since it's a hobby and not a profession I can do it and I can continue trying to improve myself.

I'd forgotten how much fun macro can be

DSC_7108
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I had a spare 20 minutes this morning and I decided to see if there was anything interesting to shoot in my garden. Now that the summer progresses it's becoming more and more difficult to get good bird shots. Foliage gets in your way and with the weather we've had the last few weeks there is an abundance of food so they no longer need to come and beg in my garden.

So, I decided to dust of my Tokina 100mm f2.8 macro and go insect hunting. Immediately I was reminded of the difficulties that you face when shooting insects. DoF is very, very shallow, with macro F8 is pretty much wide open. Your models don't sit still and even the slightest movement on the part of the photographer cause an out of focus picture.

I got out my monopod, adjusted the length and move the head far down and went hunting. Focussing tends to go best manually.

This is a bumblebee snacking on the chives flowers in my herb garden. Nice combination, chives is a tasty herb, goes great in an omelette, can endure harsh winters and it flowers intensely. Bumblebees are also good. Good natured little girls, won't harm any humans unless you really, really corner them.

Nikon predictions 2010

If there's one thing common on all the gearhead forums (dpreview for example) it's the continuing debate of "when will Nikon release something new?" quite often in combination with "I want to buy a D-whatever but am afraid that something new will come out just after I bought it".

The latter seems silly to me, the current lineup (with the exception of the Nikon D3000 perhaps) is so good that any camera will still be good enough for 99% of the users even after Nikon has released their latest model.

Having said that, here are my predictions for 2010:

Based on history as I remember it and my gut instinct.

D90 follow-up
(your guess is as good as mine as to the name of that one) sometime mid this year. I'd expected it already but end September at the latest. Slightly more mega pixels perhaps, (14mpix Sony sensor perhaps) certainly a big jump in video capabilities to full HD. A stop more usable high iso if we are lucky but I doubt that.


D3000 replacement
In my opinion this is desperately needed. It's the black sheep in the line-up with that old sensor from the D60. Don't expect video there but it needs to beat the Canon 1000D. Knowing Nikon it may not materialize this year if at all. I suspect a lack of a proper camera is hurting them more than they may realize. On any gearhead forum people will advice against buying this so first time buyers go out and get a Sony or a Canon instead and stick with that brand if they like the hobby.

D700S:
Tricky to predict. I'd expect something that fixes the few flaws in the D700 and at the same time will try to hit the 7D/ 5dmk2 segment of the market hard but which will fail to compete on price.

Nikon EVIL
(EVIL stands for electronic viewfinder interchangeable lens. These cameras are now also being called m 4/3 even though that's Olympus' solution for this class.)
After the succes of the olympus Pen other companies jumped on this bandwagon. Sony has just entered this market with two cameras. Based on that and recent patent applications I expect Nikon to enter this market as well.
I'm 99.9% sure Nikon has prototyped this already. I suspect the first iteration encountered technical or marketing problems and had to have some major rework done. I still expect this in Q3. If it does reach the market by then it may very well mean the end of the D3000 part of the lineup.

Lenses
Difficult to predict. I'd expect a 80-400 follow-up and the rumours of a 24-120 replacement in f4 are too strong to ignore. Possibly a medium long tele prime early next year (135ísh with VR but without DC)
I expect no new kit lenses and nothing really surprising in DX although I suspect quite a few people at Nikon are wondering how they can exploit and repeat the 35mm f1.8 G success even further since the 85mm f3.5 micro doesn't seem to be nearly the success Nikon has hoped for.

Flashes:
A SB-600 follow-up is long overdue. Outside chance that if the EVIL does reach the market there will be a baby SB-400 especially for that.

Other goodies
Hopefully Nikon will realize there's a huge demand for good software as well. View NX is horrible as a catalog tool and Capture NX is expensive and not well suited for bulk work.
In an ideal world we would get a workable View NX and a free Capture NX lite and we would see the prices of a full featured Capture NX positioned to undercut Lightroom.

If you want more predictions head over to Nikon Rumors.

One of the nice things of my new office location

Blue tit
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Is a wooded area with a lot of birds. There's nesting blue tits. I've spotted a woodpecker. The most common waterbirds. According to http://observado.org/index.php there's even some rarer species of woodpecker and Kingfishers have also been spotted.

Of course shooting these small birds with a 70-300 in a densely wooded area at the middle of the day is tricky to say the least.

How I feel right now

HDR world
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Yep, this symbolizes it rather well.

I start therapy on Monday, bit apprehensive on one hand but also very looking forward to it. We'll see.

Bird photography, putting in backyard practice.

Any regular reader must know by now that I'm trying to improve my nature photography and that I am putting in a lot of practice to get better at bird shooting. The reason for that is simple, there's a lot more birds, both in species and numbers, to shoot here than mammals or other big animals.

Last night after dinner I noticed that the house sparrows had managed to empty the feeder in 24 hours. Since I am low on seed for the feeder I decided to get some stale bread, cut it really fine and treat the birds to that. Soon after I noticed that this totally changed their flight patterns, from their usual hops to and from the feeder they now went on different routes. Why not put in a bit of practice? There wasn't much light left but I could still practice framing and focussing.

I was right, this is good practice and it's fun too!

I especially like these three showing typical house sparrow behaviour. After the young have left the nest you can still see them begging for food from their parents. Af first they will always give in to the begging but after some days they are left to fend for themselves. I think there's a bit of a teaching aspect as well, the chicks watch from a safe place and see their parents swoop down and pick up food.

Pics clickable for bigger version. Everything Nikon D300 + 70-300 VR

Ridiculous contest rules.

As you can see at the top of the page I am trying to participate in a nikon sponsored contest. Unfortunately I made the mistake of choosing a contest where the first round is a popularity contest. And I just don't have the social network for that.

Take this shot: http://www.whoareyouwithnikon.nl/index.php?a=inzending&code=4be2a464a53bc still top of the list. And this http://www.whoareyouwithnikon.nl/index.php?a=inzending&code=4be42edc38d67 is stuck at 5 votes.

That's no photography contest, that's just a popularity poll.

I'll pull those widgets tomorrow.

Succesful hunting.

A good morning's hunting today. All pictures are clickable for the big version.

First of all a woodpecker, great spotted woodpecker if I am not mistaken.


Normally these birds are difficult to approach and almost impossible to get on eye level. Today I was lucky. It spotted me, flew a circle and decided to inspect this young tree, something I've never seen one do. I approached slowly with the camera on my eye and took care to gently "roll the shutter.
Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 720

Next a blue tit. Common as muck but still a nice bird.



I should have taken a bit more care with my settings.
Exposure: 0.003 sec (1/400)
Aperture: f/13.0
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 640
If I'd gone down a bit on iso, up a touch on shutter speed I could have ended around f8-f11 and would have gotten something just a bit sharper. The 70-300VR is reaching the diffraction limit at this aperture and the D300 has already passed that.

Last shot, a mute swan.


I noticed two serious photographers working on something near the water. Big lenses,lens coats, tripods, camouflage gear and taking their time. So I walked up slowly as not to disturb whatever they were shooting. Mute swans are not easily scared, you see this species in parks even. This one swam up to see if I was going to offer any food but was distracted by some water plants.

Settings:
Exposure: 1/2500 sec
Aperture: f/9.0
Focal Length: 270 mm
Focal Length: 277.0 mm
ISO Speed: 640

Now why is the shutterspeed so high? Simple, I metered on the swan and by this time the sun was out already. I did pull a bit in processing but not too much. If I'd used matrix metering here I would have ended up with proper exposed water and a fuzzy, somewhat overexposed swan.

Sharpness is as good as it is going to get with my gear.


All in all a good day. I was glad I was wearing my hat. We are approaching the time of the year now where half a liter water for a 90 minutes, 7.3km walk is not enough anymore.

I got this one from my wife and absolutely love it. The way it makes people look at every day surroundings in a different manner. That's what you can also accomplish with really good photography

Reading ebooks on a nokia 5800

History
Back in the latter half of the 1990s I got my first mobile phone, a Nokia 8110 and my first PDA soon after, a US Robotics Palm pro. Back then phones could do little more than be used to call people with and to send them a text message. The PDA was used to sync my mail and agenda and, soon after, to read ebooks using cspotrun as my reading application.

A second palm followed and then a series of Windows mobile devices. With windows mobile I soon discovered Microsoft's Reader. The first application designed by a big company with usability and a good user experience in mind. The, back then, pretty much closed lit format was a nuisance at times but by and large it all worked.

Present day
These days the PDA device, something running windows mobile but without a telephone option, is about as rare as an honest politician. HP has 2 models left in it's range and that is pretty much it.

Instead we now have companies like HTC turning out a constant flow of nifty devices running Windows Mobile and Google Android. Samsung tries to rival that and Nokia makes devices with or without touch screen running various versions of Symbian.

Nokia 5800
Last week my business phone a Motorola V8 died on me, I couldn't hear anyone on the phone any more but they could still hear me. Since it was two years old and quite battered and worn I decided to replace it with something else. But with what? I wanted to get something that could potentially replace not only that phone but also the Ipaq I am using. So it had to sync with outlook, had to be able to run navigation on, play a few casual games and it needed to have the option to read ebooks.

First I started looking at the HTC offerings but couldn't find anything I liked for less than 400 euros or so. Most of the cheaper models didn't have a scoll button and I did not like the 2.5-2.8 inch QVGA (320x240) screens much.

So I looked elsewhere. Samsung didn't have much and I still have this prejudice that this company is not able to build something that will last me for two years. Next supplier was Nokia. I've had good experiences with Nokia in the 1990s and the early parts of this decade but we lost touch around 2002. Last year I bought a 3720 classic which, despite a few design stupidities, still does a good job. This time I wanted something with a bit more power. In order to use navigation you really want Series 60 symbian. For reading you want a high resolution screen, preferably of a decent size and a touch screen is nice.

After looking at the E-series (E52, nice speedy processor and a friendly price tag, E75 with it's flip-out keyboard) I broadend my search and noticed the 5800. On paper it seemed to have everything GPS, Wifi, the latest version of Series 60 Symbian and a 3.2 inch 640x360 screen.

I won't bore you with all the other details about the phone, there's plenty of dedicated phone websites and blogs out there that can do that. Instead I want to continue this post on my attempts to make this into an ebook reading device or ereader.

Ebooks
An ebook is nothing more than a file containing the text of a book. It may contain layout and formatting or even DRM or none of these. There's an abundance of these things available on the internet from the latest best-sellers in shops to freely available classical works in the Gutenberg project.

Since this is still a relatively new technology and since there are many parties trying to capture a part of what they perceive to be a lucrative market there is also an abundance of file formats in the ebook community. Depending on what you want to read on what kind of device and in which language you may end up with a different file format.

Reading applications
To read a book you need an application that allows you to do so. On my Microsoft Mobile devices I mainly used Microsoft's reader which is free. Unfortunately it seems to be largely abandoned now by Microsoft. There has not been a new version for quite some time and support for the current versions of Windows Mobile is absent.
On Symbian I found for main reading applications.

Mobireader, once the market leader on palm and early Symbian. Bought two years ago by Amazon and since then development has halted in favour of the Kindle. Despite the warnings you get during installation is does work. Since it pre-dates the S60 5th edition on the Nokia 5800 it doesn't understand a touch screen. Scrolling is done via the volume buttons on the side of the phone and there are users that report the need to reset their phone to get it out of full screen mode.

eReader Pro, an application brought to you by Fictionwise. They've been around for ages and it shows. The application is slick, the website is well thought out and they support S60 5th and explicitely name the 5800 as a compatible device.
I found the app sluggish to start and couldn't get anything out of my old collection to display on it. If you happen to have compatible files this may be the reader for you.

Qreader: The opposite of eReader. It looks and feels like a hobby product. It installs and starts up quickly. I could not get it to open any files. It might be me but I found file navigation horrible. The website seems to be "temporarily" down it just offers the file for download. Perhaps it will return with a revamped version but this didn't do anything for me.

ZXReader. An application made by a Russian. Website is also in Russian. Download link is here at the bottom of the page. Get the link under the header: v1.5.0 РЕЛИЗ
Скачать: Symbian 9.4

ZXReader supports fb2 format and plain txt. fb2 allows for more formatting but I've had some conversion issues, try it first if that doesn't work, try txt. The application has a somewhat uneven look, in parts it is very stylish, in parts it looks basic and unfinished. Despite that it starts up quickly, slows down slightly on displaying your cover image and then works fluently. Scrolling can be done by ticking the screen or making a swiping motion. It works well in automatic landscape mode as well.

For now ZXReader is my tool of choice.

Conversion and management
I mentioned earlier that there is still no single format for ebooks. ZXReader proves that. Everybody knows txt of course but I had never heard of the fb2 file format. There's a wiki entry on it here.
For file conversion I also did a lot of googling. I came across this blog post which had some tools. None of those worked well. After a lot more googling I found Calibre, a fine management and conversion tool for your ebook collection.

Calibre allows you to manage your collection, to keep the same book in various formats and, incredibly enough, to convert from and to almost all relevant file formats. It even has a build in previewer to see your new conversions.

First reading experiences
I tried to build a few fb2 books with limited success. Things like page breaks and especially special characters didn't seem to translate well or were not being shown properly. For some reason ZX Reader insisted on treating my fb2 conversions as though they are in the cp866 codepage which messes up a lot of special characters such as " or ó or ć and ň. I suspect this may be a bug in ZX Reader, after all it is a Russian application. Unfortunately I don't speak Russian so it will be difficult to submit a bug report.

In the end I decided to test a few text files and that works very nicely. It flows beautifully, it's rendered quickly and all the characters match.


Final thoughts
Symbian S60 Fifth Edition has a long way to go yet as a mature ebook reading platform. And which the rise of dedicated reader devices I wonder if it will complete that journey. What it desperatly need is a good application capable of reading the most common file formats. ZXReader has definite potential to be that reader.
Another alternative is that someone high in the Nokia corporate hierarchy accepts the fact that people do other things with a mobile besides listening to music or watching video clips of people hurting themselves. That seems unlikely since Nokia aims most of their products at people younger than 30 and they are notorious for having short attention spans. Even so, it may happen and if it does they could turn out a useable reader in a very short time. If they don't hurry and if ZXReader get it's act together, adds file types and translates it's website then they will corner the (niche) market of S60 5th edition reading applications.

Anyway, my compliments to Kovid Goyal for creating Calibre and the unknown Russian(s) that made ZXReader.

Just bought a nokia 5800 as a replacement of my defunct motorola V8 and aging ipaq. One of the things I want to do with it is reading ebooks. That proves to be rather tricky. A good reader for Symbian 60 s3 fp5 is tricky to find.

These sources seem interesting.

http://www.nokiaphoneblog.com/?p=2112
http://chathuraw.wordpress.com/2009/10/14/best-ebook-reader-s60-5th-edition/

I am so glad I do not live in the US of A.

From: http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2010/03/pregnant_woman_tasered/

A federal appeals court says three Seattle police officers did not employ excessive force when they repeatedly tasered a visibly pregnant woman for refusing to sign a speeding ticket

So... either you sign the ticket or they will shock you until you give in. We've put people on trial for methods like this 60 years ago in Germany. Nice little town called Nuremberg was home to most of those trials.

Red squirrel backlit

Red squirrel backlit
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Recently I blogged about how I improved a horrible shot of a squirrel into something acceptable.

Normally I get maybe half a dozen photo opportunities for squirrel a year. Now the second one right after the first.

Problem here is that the squirrel noticed me at the same time I noticed him. And squirrel tend to flee when they notice humans. This little guy was rather curious about me so decided to watch me from the safety of a tree. I shot about 8 frames of tihs animal before moving closer and spooking it of course.

On reviewing it closely I noticed I've focused a bit too much in front of the animal. Despite that I decided to keep it. I love the way the ears are accented by the backlight.

So, basically the age old question comes into it, do I go for technical perfection? Or do I let the mood into the picture? I decided on the latter.

Procrastination isn't the problem, it's the solution. So procrastinate now, don't put it off.
- Ellen DeGeneres

Bird Photography Part 3

(all pics are clickable)

Sunday morning, solid grey sky which is supposed to be good for bird photography since it provides a uniform diffuse light.

Now, my D300 tends to produce a fairly exact white balance in this kind of weather. That means that all the pics on automatic WB will get a rather blueish tint. I like to produce pictures that are a bit warmer in tone so I set it to 5880K. A value I know from experience will produce something I like. I gambled that it would work and save me time in processing.

There must be spring in the air, everything was rather restless. First thing I noticed were some very common mallards. Probably the most common waterfowl species here but good practice nonetheless.



Worked a bit on the exact crop and contrast. The result isn't too bad.

Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 270 mm
Focal Length: 269.1 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

So, autoiso worked this time. I'd set the camera for 1/500 in S mode and the camera put the lens wide open and upped the iso all the way. Not very much light then.

The egyptian geese were feeling the spring as well, chasing eachother, even landing in trees to make noise at eachother. Using the AF button still does the trick:



Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Good thing I raised the shutter speed I think. Still, wide open at 300mm and iso 1600, it's not going to get me the best of pics.

In a stream in the woods I noticed a grey heron. Rather small bird for a heron. Not entirely sure what caused the focus error here but I do like the lines and the reflection.



Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/500)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 250 mm
Focal Length: 254.0 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Now, the first red squirrel of the season. Rather tricky animal to shoot, they don't sit still and if they do its often at the top of the tree. Up there the challenge is an often bright background and a very dark subject. That requires careful metering.

The unedited shot:




Click it and you will see a squirrel. Settings:
Exposure: 0.002 sec (1/640)
Aperture: f/5.6
Focal Length: 270 mm
Focal Length: 277.0 mm
ISO Speed: 1600

Ah, the camera did what I told it to do. Shutter speed is the speed I set, iso is at the limit I set in auto iso and the lens is as far open as it can go. That it's underexposed is not the cameras fault, there just wasn't any more light.

But, I'm shooting a D300 and that allows for some room in post processing. So, into capture NX and see what I can do with it.




By no means the best squirrel shot in the world but it's a lot nicer. I correct exposure here by almost 1.5 stops, played with the curves, cropped, adjust color balance somewhat, slapped on a contrast adjustment filter and this is the result.

Of course there is noise, there are limits to the D300 sensor and certainly to my processing skills. No matter how good your sensor is, when you underexpose and correct that you will get a load more noise than on a properly exposed picture.

Last shot, something you will encounter sometimes, the leftovers of a predator's meal. There's a big flock of pigeons in that area and occasionally the buzzards get lucky and catch one.



Gruesome perhaps but nature all the same.

So, lessons learned

• Auto ISO in S mode is good for birds in flight and rapidly changing light conditions
• If there isn't enough light your pictures won't come out as nice.
• Fieldcraft continues to be a challenge
• There is at least some truth to diffuse light being good for birds.
• Presetting white balance will save time in processing if you get it right.
  

Bird photography part 2

all pics are clickable

After blogging about my first problems here I decided to give it another try with the new settings in my camera.

First of all, using the AF button proved to be an interesting experience. It takes a bit of getting used to, at first you're jabbing the AE-L button by mistake but after that there's certainly a speed advantage there.

My first chance I got when an egyptian goose decided to fly around. Came almost directly over me to give me this shot:


Not bad at all but not quite the level of sharpness I am aiming for. Let's look at settings:

Exposure:	0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture:	f/13.0
Focal Length:	270 mm
Focal Length:	269.1 mm
ISO Speed:	640

Hmm... 1/800 and still movement? Why? According to a quick google the canadian goose can fly anywhere between 50 and 90 km/h. Let's assume this goose can do the same and let's assume it was doing 40 km/h. That's 11.1 meters/second which means still about 1.4 cm of movement in that 1/800. Of course part of it was compensated for by my panning movement but still... So shutter speed remains an issue there. Spot metering worked very well here.

Next I encountered a flock of great tits and blue tits in a pine grove. Even though these are about as common as muck they are still good practice. Working distance is a factor with these birds. If you can get as close as 5 meters it's already a lot and then it's still a tiny bird.

Exposure:	0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture:	f/5.6
Focal Length:	300 mm
Focal Length:	302.0 mm
ISO Speed:	640

The issue here is that my settings didn't do what I'd expect them to do. Despite auto iso I was shooting wide open here and the 70-300VR isn't at it's best wide open.

1/1250 is enough to freeze these birds if they are just sitting there. If they flutter from one branch to the next it doesn't do it.



OK, so shutter speed remains a focus.

Now, standing still about 5 meters from the trees did allow the birds to get used to me and ignore me which resulted in these two:




and



On this shot you can see a few ticks around the bird's eye.

Now, later in the day this setting came back to bite me in the behind.



Granted, it's a unique moment, pre-mating activities of Storks. And yes, I had about 30 seconds before she fled the nest. And 1530 is not a good time for black&white birds. But why is this pic unsharp?

Exposure:	0.003 sec (1/320)
Aperture:	f/20.0
Focal Length:	300 mm
Focal Length:	302.0 mm
ISO Speed:	640

There we go. At f20 most consumer zooms the diffraction spook rears it's ugly head. According to Thom Hogan the d300 itself shows diffraction from f11 onwards.
What happened is that my spot metering adjusted perfectly for the focus point on a white part of the stork And since I was at a relatively low shutterspeed the camera raised the aperture to prevent overexposure.

Next stork shot, a bit later.



A lot sharper and no wonder since I was at f9.

So... lessons learned?
- shutter speed is so important with birds
- watch your metering, you don't want to enter the diffraction zone
- Birds in flight depend at least as much on you and your reaction speed as they do on your gear
- A 70-300mm zoom is short but it's still possible to get some decent bird shots with it.

I'm already looking forward to my next experimental session.

Anyone familiar with me, this blog or my photostream on flickr knows that I try to go at least once a week for a walk in nature. Usually I visit the Amsterdamse Waterleidingduinen and usually I carry my camera.

I’m skilled enough to get decent fallow deer shots almost weekly and the occasional good bird shot. I’ve been doing that slightly over a year now and I was so overconfident that I thought I was pretty good at it.

Now this Wednesday I visited the Island of “Tiengemeten”. It’s a small island about 30km south of Rotterdam that is being returned to nature. Lovely oasis of piece and quiet that is so rare in this country. A dyke has been breached to create a wetland area and the island is populated by several hunderd very noisy Barnacle Geese.

But, let’s start with this shot, the common shellduck

Looks good this small, best of about half a dozen. Click trough to the big version and you see there’s a few problems with it.

Next shot:

Click on that and it will be sharper. Too far away but sharper.

Let’s look at settings. The first;

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/800)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 300 mm
Focal Length: 302.0 mm
ISO Speed: 400

And the second pic:

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/1250)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 260 mm
Focal Length: 261.4 mm
ISO Speed: 400

Substantial difference in shutter speed.

Number three:

Exposure: 0.001 sec (1/2000)
Aperture: f/8.0
Focal Length: 260 mm
Focal Length: 261.4 mm
ISO Speed: 400

I got a few more but all in all perhaps 2 dozen keepers out of more than 200 pics. Not a good result. So I started looking for help.

http://www.birdphotographers.net/forums/showthread.php?t=58615
http://forums.dpreview.com/forums/read.asp?forum=1039&message=34700638

Now it turns out my errors had a few causes.

1. Pretty lousy fieldcraft on my side. I’ve been spoiled by a landscape with loads of cover and animals and birds used to humans. On this island I encountered about a dozen other walkers the whole day. In my weekend walks I meet that many in 20 minutes.

2. Poor understanding of my camera. “automagic AF" just doesn’t hack it. I found this: http://johnfriend.blogspot.com/2009/10/nikon-d300-auto-focus-for-sports-i.html which explains a sports shooter’s setup for his D300. Most of that will be useable here.

3. No knowledge of my surroundings. Every encounter was a surprise, most flight paths were unexpected.

4. No knowledge of my models. I met at least 4 new species.

So, I now know more or less where it went wrong. I used my D300’s AF system ineffectively. I was overly optimistic on my shutter speeds and I was unrealistic in my expectations. A 370 euro zoom is no substitute for a 3000 euro zoom and a casual shot when walking is no substitute for spending 4 hours in a hide. Next step, go to a place with loads of seagulls and practice.

One final shot:

Rain

wet sheep
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Rain. And not even a downpour but one of those steady persistent types that can last hours and hours. Hardly any colour difference in the sky, mostly solid grey. Missed a herd of male deer by about 150 meters or 3 minutes..

Now...do sheep shrink when they get wet?

Borough Market black & white

DSC_2669_DXO_agfa_apx25
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Shot this at London's borough market. One of the few really nice spots I found in my weekend visit.
I tried to get something contrasty here and ended up with something I like but isn't likely to draw in the flickr crowds.

Synology DS110j review, part 2

Part 1 is here.
A little more than a month after I started using the Synology DS110j NAS I think it's time to share the experiences.

Web interface
It works, it works well. Only thing I had to get used to is that you need to grant access to the various applications on a different tab than where you create and manage user accounts. I do expect some changes in the 2.3 firmware which is in beta now.

Speed
A lot of question I see are things like "is 800mhz enough" and "is 128mb RAM enough?" My experience up until now is that yes it is. OK, granted, you can really stress that little box. I did so just last night by running a backup from an EXT3 volume to an NTFS volume, that conversion takes some power.

Downloading
What can I say. It works, it works ok out of the box and with SABNZBD on it it works like a dream!

Hooking up an additional drive
It works. On all three USB ports. A drive shows up in the file manager tree and you can use it, that's all there is to it. Speed is decent enough although copying 45 gb of DVD images took about 50 minutes.

What doesn't work?
Well, my main problems are with audio. OK, it can share my mp3 collection, that part works. There's a web player interface that works sort of but is cumbersome to create a playlist on the fly.
Squeezebox server is installable as a service on the device. And it may work if you have any squeezebox devices but it is not a viable solution as a web player. There are various other web solutions but most of them start the installation instructions by letting your PHP and webserver out of the webroot, not something that sounds very secure to me.
The web player is supposed to get a major overhaul in the 2.3 firmware and squeezebox server may work very well in conjunction with a Squeezebox touch which should be released this spring.

Should I buy this or a bigger unit?
Well, that really is up to you. I think 120 euros for what is basically a 800mhz miniature linux system is very reasonable. It does what I want it to do. Performance is OK for my needs. Yes you can have your backup disk in the same enclosure and if you don't already own a USB disk that would make sense. Yes you can buy a DS109+ and get more CPU power. But do you need that? With 3Tb disks scheduled to be released this year and 2Tb disks rapidly dropping in price ask yourself what you really need.

Any questions, feel free to contact me.

canonian in the snow

canonian in the snow
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I wouldn't put such an expensive telezoom down without any tripods. Nice guy though, tipped me that he'd spotted a fox a bit further.

Alanis Morissette - Flavors of Entanglement

I remember the first time I head Alanis, back in 1995 with the monster hit "Ironic". At that time she was a very interesting new artist (good looking too!). After the first album "Jagged Little Pill" ,which I really liked, I also enjoyed her live album which she released late 1999. After that she got a bit soft and I more or less lost interest.

Yesterday I got my hands on her latest album, Flavors of Entanglement, and my first impression was "And she back, back with a vengeance!" This is the Alanis I've come to know and love, full of piss and vinager, anger and some things and saddned by others. She's grown up and found herself again.

The instrumentals have progressed with the years, there's very interesting sounds and effects going on on a lot of the tracks. The sound itself is typical Alanis with some influences that remind me of Madonna's ray of light period and even late Björk albums. It seems that she has avoided the current fashion of really heavy and "in your face" bass for which I'm grateful.

All in all an interesting album, highly recommend!

I'm not the only one that can kill a sonim. A british reporter killed one during a demo.
I've had two of these die on me in two years, then I gave up and bought a nokia.
Sonim, nice ideas if only they could get the quality control sorted out.

Synology DS110j review

Synology's latest 1 disk NAS, is it any good?

To create some order in the chaos of data scattered around my home I had to do something. On one PC there was my photo collection, 60gb and growing fast, on another was a large collection of mp3 files and everywhere where video files.
After a bit of market research I decided that the synology DS110j with a 1.5 Tb samsung disk was a good and affordable way to solve this problem.

I ordered it from mobile-harddisk.nl which, at no charge, installed the drive for me.

First impression
The unit arrives in a small, brown cardbord box with some black printing on it and a white sticker with key specs on the side. Bit understated when you compare it with the visual extravaganza some motherboard manufacturers use these days. Everything is well protected. The unit comes with a seperate power supply that uses the same kind of mains cable as your PC and monitor does. Also included is a short ethernet cable and the necessary screws to mount the harddisk.
The unit itself is white with a grey front and a bare metal back. On the front you will find three status indicator leds and a usb port. 2 more ports, a RJ45 gigabit port and the power connector are on the back. The unit stands on four black rubber suports.

First use
Connect power and network and press the button. While the disk station boots put the CD that you found in the package into your computer and fireup the installation software. This scans your local network and helps you connect to the web interface on port 5000 of your disk station. Logon (no password set on the admin account) and you will find a well thought out web interface where you can manage all aspects of your disk station. I would strongly advice you to set at least a password on the admin account and preferably a fixed ip address.
Basic functions such as creating shares and adding users are intuitive, quick and well documented. Some of the more advanced features are not documented extensively and will require some googling and/or some experience in handling servers. Despite writing that I think anyone who has some experience with computers and who can read a manual can setup basic functionality in 30 minutes.

In use
Both on my 100mb wired network and on my 54G network the network is clearly the limiting factor in read and write speed. I need to do some more detailed testing to determine exact speeds so I will update this information. Shares appear on your network moments after you have created them. The unit can be joined to a domain or you can make it the master browser for your home network. There doesn't (yet) seems to be windows homegroup support.

The built in fan works well, it keeps the unit at room temperature with slightly less noise than a modern desktop pc. I will keep this unit in the same closet that also houses my ADSL modem and some other utilities so noise won't be an issue. If you keep it in your bedroom you may want to use the unit's scheduled power down/up functionality.

This is a single disk unit so the single disk in there is a single point of failure. To work around that I intend to hookup a USB harddisk to it and use the built-in functionality to backup at least the essentials to that second drive.

Multimedia
The DS110j offers a lot of options here, most of them not very well documented in the manuals. It is supposed to be fully DLNA compliant something which I intend to test next week.

Downloading
If you are so inclined you can use the Disk Station to download from torrents, emule or newsgroups (using nzb files). This could very well be illegal where you live so be careful there. In the interest of this review I tested the NZB option and found it works well, it downloads and puts the material where you told it to. There is a ready made package available to install SABNZB on your diskstation which gives you options like par2 verification, automatic extraction of RAR files and bandwidth throttling.

Modification and further use.
Even though this Disk Station is marketed as an entry-level appliance you are buying a small computer running on an 800mhz ARM processor with Busybox linux as the operating system. Busybox is a basic linux version but it is linux enough that clever people have ported some interesting applications to it.
Synology itself delivers mail station which adds mail server functionality to your Disk station. It's based on postfix. Unfortunately the package installs a very basic postfix without the niceties like DNSBL spam filtering. It's there, it's possible but it does require some mucking on the command line.
Another option is to turn this Disk Station into a web server. There's apache and power enough to add PHP and Mysql so you can run any of the popular CMS packages. Synology has a list of tested applications but I'm sure any linux-savvy person can add to that list. As actual installation instructions Synology offers just this.

Conclusion
With the caveat that I have hardly touched the multimedia and streaming functionality this Disk Station does seem to be a very attractive product. It offers an impressive amount of bang for not that many bucks. The product is well thought out and there's an active community using Synology products, discovering new uses and adapting software to them. Synology keeps an eye on that community and occasionally adapts their work into supported addons and features.

So if you are looking for a simple home server or a simple but very good appliance to store your data in just one place the DS110j is a very interesting product that deserves your consideration.

I also wrote a part two to this review.

Incompetence = Air France?

Last week I was in France from wednesday afternoon until friday as a guest of IBM at their Product & Solutions Support Center in Montpellier. A day and a half to get me up to speed on Aix, Power and storage. Load of interesting information with the juicy bits under a NDA so don't ask me to blog about that.

I only mention this event because it explains what I was doing there and why I was flying back. I don't consider IBM responsible in any way. In fact I was impressed by the hospitality and knowledge of everyone involved. The only fault I could find there was that they expected the group to eat a mountain of delicious pastries with our morning coffee.

No, the interesting bit of this trip started when I entrusted Air France with my save return to Schiphol airport.

Friday morning: We'd all checked in via the Air France website and had our boarding cards printed out.

Friday 12.00: Bus left for the airport. Arrival at 12.15. Our return flight to Amsterdam, AF 7683, was shown as "delayed". The scheduled departure time of 13.30 came and went with no change in status. Now the airport has a PA system which warned us every 10 minutes not to leave our luggage unattended but apparantly was not suiteable for flight information.
At 13.15 I went to the Air France information counter where they assured me that the plane would arrive any minute and that, despite a slight delay, there would be no problem in getting onto the connection flight which would leave at 15.45.
14.00 The lady behind the Air France counter could tell me that the plane would land at around 1500 and would be serviced as soon as possible. I just might not make my flight but they could handle all that at Paris since the local facilities to change flights were a bit strained.
During this time the area behind the security check kept filling up and no flights left.

Friday 15.04: The plane had landed!! Soon it was at the gate (a different gate which we just happened to notice but hey, there was a plane and I wasn't complaining).
15.30 boarding started. Now Air France flies these routes with an Airbus A319 in an all economy configuration which is really a cattle car. Loads of hand luggage, a seat pitch so small that I was litteraly jammed between seats. Boarding one of these takes time so the 3/4 full flight left at 1600.

Friday 17.15: Flight landed at Charles de Gaulle terminal 2D. By now we'd realized we needed to be transfered to another flights. The terminal was a bit busy and we noticed some flights had been cancelled. But hey, there's a transfer desk with only about 15 people queing, they should be able to help us since they were working the counter with 4 people.
What exactly those 4 were doing I don't know but it envolved staring at their screen intently, ocassionaly typing something and very rarely printing something out and tearing up the printout immediately.

Friday 19.50: Hey, it's our turn. By now we'd grown into a loose group of 9 dutchmen stranded by the same problem. So we more or less mobbed the guy behind the counter who quickly admitted that we could forget getting home tonight but that Air France would get us into hotels. Only he couldn't get us all into the same hotel. For 7 of us there was a place in a hotel near Disneyland (33km away!). Air France would arrange for bus transportation and would get us vouchers for the hotel and meals. 2 of us couldn't be fitted there anymore and would get a hotel elsewhere. By then we'd been standing for almost 3 hours, were thirsty and hungry so we quickly accepted.

Friday 20.30: Found the bus at another part of Terminal 2.

Friday 20.53: the bus was full with stranded passangers and would go to the Dream Castle hotel and the Magic Circle, 2 hotels near Disneyland.

All this time I'd seen snow on the ground but nothing coming down, in fact it had been clear from at least 17.00.

Friday 21.20 the bus driver gets on the PA system to announce that he's a bit lost.

Friday 21.40 The bus driver almost manages to get himself stuck on a very snowed under part of the Disneyland parking lot. I suggest to the belgian sitting next to me that he's the right guy to introduce the concept of asking for directions to the bus driver since he speaks french and I don't.

Friday 21.58: Checked in at the hotel. The very nice lady at the front desk informs me that the restaurant closes in 2 minutes. We run down to the restaurant and wolf down some leftovers.

No firm information on coaches to the airport back the next morning in order to make our 0715 flight so with 4 guys together we order a taxi for 0515 next morning and we quickly head to our beds. We did notice yet another coach loaded of stranded Air France victims being unloaded and feel sorry for them.

Saturday 0515: In the lobby there's a hand written sign announcing that there will be several coaches to the airport this morning. Our taxi driver is waiting for us, so are 90 passengers hoping to get onto a half full coach.

Saturday 0540: Turns out we are not in a metered taxi but some shuttle service that charges 20 euros/person. Feels like easy money with 6 people in his fan but he's gotten us to the airport in plenty of time trough the snow and I don't want to miss my flight.

Saturday 0610: We clear security and go hunting for some coffee since breakfast at the hotel didn't start until 0700 we were hungry. There's a shop selling fresh pastry and for a mere 6 euros I get two remarkably good pieces of pastry and some really strong coffee.

Saturday 0646: Boarding starts at the announced time and continues at a glacial pace until 0720. We should have left by now. The plane taxis and taxis.

Saturday 0750: The captain announces that we are number 2 in line for decing.

Saturday 0850: After an uneventful flight we manage to reach Schiphol airport.

Now I know I've said some unkind things about KLM in the past but I take those all back. Air France is were the real evil is. I am seriously considering filing for the 250 euros damages that EU law grants passangers. Yes the weather couldn't be helped but the incredible lack of information could have as could the piss poor treatment at CDG.

christmas deer

christmas deer
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Last sunday. It was snowing quite heavily which had disrupted most normal deer patterns. I found this flock late and incomplete and 50 meters west of where they'd normally be.

This one turned out nice, quite a bit of work on the curves to get anything approaching what I'd seen.

Sharpness isn't great, this was trough 20 meters of snow filled air in very marginal lighting conditions. And the framing could have been way better. Still... I like it, as a pic it's not bad and it reminds me of a magical sunday morning.

seagull in lowlevel flight

seagull in lowlevel flight
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

This is a shot I would have liked to have made much earlier. With my Sigma 70-300 I tried and tried but it was just too slow to focus. With the Nikon 70-300 VR it's just a matter of getting the framing right.

I like this, especially with the wings down you can see how close they fly to the ground.

here's something you don't see every day

here's something you don't see every day
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

I noticed this fallow deer buck and a magpie sitting next to it staring intently at the deer's penis. I tried to move into a better position, figuring I'd get a funny shot out of it when I noticed the magpie jumping on the deers back. It moved a few steps forward. Right after this shot I spooked the deer.

Strange behaviour, I've never seen this before. Reminds me of those birds that feed of the insects of african buffalo.

Nokia 3720 classic

Or should I title this post “from one ruggedized phone to the next”? Ruggedized means more or less that it’s designed for use in harsh environments.

I don’t consider myself hard on my phones. My first few cell phones were all Nokia. I started on a 8110 and have used the 5110, 6110, 6150 and all of these spend a lot of time in my pocket or on my belt. They all suffered the occasional drop and handled it well. In the early years of this decade I switched to Siemens for an S55, lovely little phone but after a year or so it distinctly showed signs of wear and tear. The Motorola V3 I bought after that died a little under two years.

So, when I was due for a new phone in early 2008 I decided to buy something that was durable and loud enough to use in the noisy server rooms where I spent some of my time. At that time there wasn’t much to choose from on the European market. Nokia had withdrawn the 5210 years ago and had not released anything else. Siemens had tried a few models such as the M65 but Siemens sold the GSM division and that died soon after.

The only serious player at that time was Sonim. A company almost unknown in Europe if you didn’t work in the building industry. In early 2008 they had just introduced their first cell phone, the XP1 and the Xp1BT (With bluetooth). My review of the XP1BT is still the most popular page on my website.

After a little over a year I got tired of the constant echo of the phone and the fact that it couldn’t be without battery power for a second without losing it’s internal clock settings so I mailed sonim support and after some weeks they send me a replacement. That developed some sort of phone altzheimer’s in september. It would miss calls without letting me know. By then I was thoroughly sick of the 1990s user interface, the short battery life and the call quality which could range from abysmal to ok in 5 minutes. So I started looking for a replacement.  Of course the new sonim xp3 came up but I found it a bit expensive and I didn’t have much faith left in the Sonim designers. Unlike the american market where several companies offer ruggedized and mil-spec phones there is not that much on the European market. Samsung has the B2100 and B2700. And then came nokia with it’s 3720 classic. Now my wife had bought a 2330 a few weeks early and I was impressed with the Series 40 user interface and the call quality. So I ordered a 3720.

It’s a basic candy bar with a charger port at the bottom. Nice, big 2.2” TFT with 320x240 resolution which makes for a nice crispy image. Comes complete with charger, 1gb memory card, earbuds and a 25 euros coupon for the german nokia music store. All that for 136 euros including shipping.

First impressions: nice screen, fits the hand well, easy buttons. It does not come across as a very sturdy phone unlike the Sonim which felt like you could use it to drive nails with. Well, that’s not all you could do with it, there’s a load of clips on youtube of people trying to kill a sonim, This one is my favorite:

Now breaking stuff is fun to the people doing gadget

tests for a living and so the guys from phonearena tried to break a 3720:

and it can also swim.

So, despite it’s elegance I should be ok. For the moment I’m enjoying that wonderful screen, nice call quality and the fact that I can have it talk to my pc quick and easy with the standard Nokia tools.

I’ll let you know first time it needs charging.

Technorati Tags: nokia 3720 classic,nokia,3720,classic,review,sonim xp1,sonim xp1bt,sonim,xp1,ruggedized phone

I think I'm in love!

Tokina 50-135mm f/2.8 AT-X 535 PRO DX
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

And no, not with this lady but with the lens I used for this shot. The Tokina 50-135mm f/2.8 AT-X 535 PRO DX. Very, very nice piece of glass. Handles fine, built quality is on par with what you'd expect from a Tokina AT-X pro lens. Focussing is very fast and very quiet. The colors are very neutral with a tiny amount of cool.

My compliments to the model as well, don't know her name but there she was on the tokina stand continuously striking nice poses!

Beware of photography competitions!

I was just reading on dpreview about the lumix awards (http://www.lumixaward.com/). Nice website, nice theme, I'd expected to have some chance with this picture.






But then I read the terms and conditions.

16. Entrants agree that, in relation to any photographs selected as winning photographs, they grant Panasonic Marketing Europe GmbH and Panasonic Corporation companies and other members of the Panasonic Group an exclusive licence to use images for 5 years at no charge for their marketing and promotional activities. Winners will be given an authorship credit in respect of any published reproductions of their photographs made by Panasonic or its agents.

Come on! 5 years exclusive license? Get real!

buzzard in flight

buzzard in flight
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Quite proud of this one actually. A slight crop from the original. With the 70-300VR this is relatively easy to do. Of course you still have to be close enough to the flight path. Nonentheless, I am quite pleased with this shot.

Nikon AF-S VR Zoom-Nikkor ED 70-300mm f/4.5-5.6G IF

I bought this gem friday. It's replacing the weakest lens in my bag, a Sigma 70-300 APO. Haven't had the chance to test it properly yet but the first impressions are good. It looks bigger but is almost the same size as the sigma. It feels heavier and sturdier. AF is very quiet, quick and spot on. VR seems to do what it should do and quite discretely.

First test results:

And a crop:

Best airline safety briefing ever

Found this via an article in "El Reg" about IBM failing quite miserably as an outsourcing partner. It gets the message across in the right tempo with attention to details. The fact that the whole "crew" only wears body paint is to me secondary.

There I was, approaching a small herd of fallow deer which included, by the sound of it, 2 males disagreeing. Almost found a good spot and noone had noticed me. Then, suddenly, a big truck loaded with empty containers thunders by. The herd was spooked and all I got was this shot.

Esther in the woods

Esther in the woods
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Just a portrait. Shot in the dark under the trees so I used a sb-600 on camera for a bit of extra light.

how did a deer cross the stream?

how did a deer cross the stream?
Originally uploaded by j_wijnands.

Or why do I always carry my camera setup for a snapshot?

It's mating season now, all the fallow deer act weird. Normally this guy would have discretely disappeard. Now he heard another male burling and decided to go and take a look.

I was at Technet Live last thursday. Microsoft introduced Windows 7, Server 2008 R2 and, a day later, Exchange 2010.

Steve Balmer's keynote was impressive, shame there were a bunch of journalists asking really stupid questions.

After a good lunch I spend the afternoon with:

Brandon Hoff telling us about all the new features in Exchange 2010. I found the 90% reduction in IOPS very impressive. I failed to be baffled about the option to move user mailboxes during the day, something I already had in Lotus Notes 4 in the mid-1990s.

Next up was Don Schmid and Martin Vliem about security, identity and things like that. Very technical, I was dozing off due to the big lunch and lack of coffee.
I did remember an excellent quote from Don, "cloud is the new outsourcing"

Last up, Martin Sih on system center. A rather weak speaker compared ot the rest and extra handicapped by a lack of the internet connection he needed to do his demo. Apparantly System Center allows the Schiphol group to manage a varied server collection.

All in all a nice day, shame about the distinct lack of goodies, all we got was a t-shirt (xl the largest, how many sysadmins do you know that wear an XL?!) and a Windows 7 ultimate DVD.

After events like this the hangover always sets in. You realize that the change that you actually get your hands on a 2008 server running exchange 2010 is very slim. It's a reason I don't attend events all that much anymore, you see all sorts of nice goodies that you'll never work with. Same goes for booth babes, nice to look at but that's all.

Something to look forward to on TV

Recently I’ve caught some of the reruns of Victorian Farm on BBC2. Interesting show that follows a historian and two archeologists spending a year on a farm trying to imitate the late Victorian way of farming.

After the last episode it was announced that they have commisioned a special christmas episode. Since a lot of current British christmas traditions originate in this period it will be something to look forward to.

Now I’ve found out, via wikipedia, that there’s another series scheduled as well, Edwardian Farm.

According to the press release:

Following the huge success of the Victorian Farm series, BBC Two is presenting the same intrepid team with a brand new set of challenges as they are forced to get to grips with the trials and tribulations of life on an Edwardian Farm.

Archaeologists Alex Langlands and Peter Ginn and domestic historian Ruth Goodman will return to front Edwardian Farm, spending a full year delving into Britain's rural heritage.

They will make their home in a stunning new location, exploring the challenges posed by the British countryside at a time of great change and tumult; a time when farming was becoming increasingly mechanised at home, and abroad the world was moving gradually towards war.

As in the first series, the action will be based primarily on the farm, but the new setting will also allow the team to explore wider aspects of the working countryside, including rivers and coasts, boat-building, mining, fishing and market gardening.

Now, for us foreigners, the previous series was set around 1870, the new one will be around 1900-1910.

I’m now wishing I could lay my hands on “Tales from the green valley” which is made by some of the same people and deals with farming in the 1620s in Wales.

Technorati Tags: TV,BBC,experimental archeology,edwardian farm,victorian farm,history,farming