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Battle of The Cameras!

Thursday, May 16th, 2013

The other day, we purchase two new digital cameras, both because of our upcoming trip. They are the Nikon Coolpix S-01 and the Sony DSC-WX80. Here is a photo of me holding both on my palm:

As you can see, they are both very small. Even the Sony is about as small as any camera we have ever owned, and the Nikon is just tiny! Both cameras are smaller than and weigh less than an iPhone.

Nikon Coolpix S01
This 10.1 megapixel camera is remarkable for it’s size, and is indeed so small you could easily take it with you anywhere. It is rechargeable, and the 16GB of memory is internal and non expandable. Some may view both of these as negatives, but considering the size and cost (under $100) I don’t. The camera has 3x optical zoom, a touch screen and can record up to 30 minutes of 720p video.

DSC-WX80
This camera is 16.2 megapixel and can record full HD (1080, 60 fps) video. It has 8x optical zoom and a whole host of shooting modes including burst mode and full 360 degree panoramas. It also has built in wi-fi which turns the camera into a wi-fi transmitter than can then send photos or video to my iphone via a (free) app I have already downloaded and tested. And then there is the beauty correction, which I will get to later 🙂

Let’s compare shots from both cameras:

Two shots of my dinner last night. The first is the Nikon, second is the Sony. Aside from the slight difference in focal length, both cameras performed well in low light, with the Sony perhaps capturing more detail. I didn’t notice until doing this blog that the Sony had defaulted to 16:9 mode, which can be changed. As an aside, that food looks delicious doesn’t it? I may have it for dinner again tonight 🙂

Here’s another subject, this time using three different cameras:

From the top, the Nikon, Sony and my iPhone (also a 10.1 megapixel camera). Hard to tell any significant difference in these scaled down to 1000 pixel versions is there? At full resolution, the Nikon had more noise and the Sony was clearest overall. But for all intents and purposes the cameras all perform very well.

For all intents and purposes both of these cameras take remarkable photographs under various conditions. They were inexpensive (the Sony was under $150), easy to use and easy to get the photos off. Both will be used to take many hundreds or thousands of photos in Japan in a little over two weeks!

And so I move on to the bushel in Sony’s basket, the beauty correction mode! Take any photo of a human face, and built in software can make them more beautiful. For instance, take this dour shot of yours truly:

Ugly isn’t it? Well, through a miracle of modern technology, the camera magically makes me look beautiful:

AMAZING!

Here’s a few other examples, showing how the camera can remove blemishes, make eyes more attractive and even change skin tone:

What’s that you say? We went overboard, posing in unnatural ways and cranking all the settings up to maximum and effectively making us look inhuman? Furthermore – detractors may claim – these photos just look like bad use of a Photoshop blur tool and this technology should remain in the ???? machines where it was pioneered.

To me, saying such things is tantamount to saying “I hate beauty”. But if you insist, I will present a more subtle example. In this case I eschewed most of the beauty options, and allowed my vanity to permit only one. I think you’ll admit the effect is striking…

Posted in Art, Family, Miscellaneous, Tech | 5 Comments »

Timelapse

Monday, May 13th, 2013

Remember in yesterdays post when I mentioned making a timelapse video of the camera photos? Well I did something clever:

That’s about half of the photos compiled into a timelapse video! About 6 days separates the first and last shot.

Toward the end you can see two frames of a furry rogue being very close to the camera! Very shortly after those photos the camera was knocked over, which is why the viewing angle changes afterwards 🙂

Posted in Animals, Family, Garden, Miscellaneous, Pets | Comments Closed

We Live With Animals!

Sunday, May 12th, 2013

Ok fellows, time again for some candid camera backyard snaps! This entry is a good one…

Firstly, I set the camera up leaning against our house looking directly in the backyard onto the grass. I left it there for a few days and… almost no animal photos! However, by sheer coincidence our backyard neighbour was having a tree removed during this period and the entire process was captured in about 300 photos 🙂

Interesting… but not furry! However this next one – one of the very few animal shots captured during that period, is most definitely interesting:

Now I’m no zoologist, but that to me looks like either:
a) A bear
b) A cougar
c) A thylacine
Sadly, with no further photos of the mysterious beast, accurate identification may remain elusive.

I then moved the camera, placing it on the patio angled toward the tree you see in the right side of the above pictures. Here was the new vista when moved:

This was a good spot! It seems this little tree sits atop a backyard highway, since over the next few days many types of beast wandered into shot. I’ll not show the usual suspects (squirrels, birds) and focus on two visitors.

Here’s a rabbit hopping into view:

And here, my friends, is an up-until-now elusive opossum:

Look at that ratty tail and pointed snout. Could this be the same guy I saw with my own eyes years ago?

Now we cut to about a week later (ignore the date stamp on the photos; I never bother to set it when). For Christmas we received a brand new squirrel feeder. It is a wheel on an axel that rotates freely and has place to put three corn cobs. In addition, I purchased a different feeder myself, which hangs a food block off a spring. About two weeks ago we installed these and set a camera on them. Here’s an establishing shot:

300 photos would be captured in this spot, about 90% of them containing squirrels making use of their feeders. Here’s two examples:

The photos not containing squirrels fall into two categories:
1) Night photos, that almost always contain only deer, and
2) Photos of birds

Here is a night example:

And here is a bird example:

That’s a bluejay. We have yet to see any squirrels attempt to feed from the new hanging feeder (as opposed to the corncob feeder hanging behind it). I think it may be too far from the branch.

By the way, compare the lushness of the greenery in the above shot to the establishing shot above. Only six days separate the two. Next year I should do a timelapse in early spring to show the growth of the trees and ferns.

Now we get to the good stuff, as in the really good stuff. I also moved the camera to look directly at the rotating feeder, and switched it over to video mode. It was set to record 30 second clips, and during the very first night hit the jackpot. Here are four such clips edited together:

Yes, that’s a raccoon! Possibly the same guy we captured in a photo a few weeks back. According to the timestamps, he was there for about 14 minutes in total. Cute little bugger, isn’t he? 🙂

So the list is squirrels, chipmunks, deer, birds, cats, rabbits, opossum and raccoons that we have caught on our cameras over the years. We know of three other mammals we know to visit our backyard that have still not been captured on film. Will I ever see them? Can you guess what they are?

Posted in Animals, Family, Garden, Miscellaneous, Pets, The Unknown | 2 Comments »

To Infinity And Beyond

Thursday, May 2nd, 2013

This past Tuesday, Florence was in town! Since she lives in the desert now, we don’t get to hang out much, so the most had to be made of it.

The decision of what to do was easy: it was time to launch model rockets!

“What, what?!” you ask? Well, I had kept it a cunning secret that Florence had purchased me model rocket supplies for Christmas, knowing this day would eventually come. Here’s a rare shot of me assembling one of the rockets a few weeks ago:

There were three in total. Before her trip I built everything and made sure it was all ready to go. A scouted out a location and bought a few extra engines. Very soon, I was to send an emissary into the cold, dark depths of space! And the very first said emissary would be no less than ‘KUMA 01‘, the bear-rocket:

We launched in Delmar park, near my house. The weather, as you can see, was perfect. KUMA is a little rocket, and it had a B-4 engine in it. What does that mean? Who knows! We certainly didn’t. I think you can gauge from this launch video how high we expected this rocket to go:

It went so high! And there was apparently a wind up there, since it traveled quite a distance (via the parachute) before touching down. In the future, remind me to snip a hole in the parachute prior to launch. Happily, KUMA survived the trip intact:

Giddy with success, it was time to move on to the big rocket, LOADSTAR. This guy is designed to carry a payload, and has a (frankly ludicrous) dual-stage that requires two engines. It was also a total bastard to assemble, and I had less than 1% confidence it would survive a landing. Here it is ready to be launched:

The launch was spectacular… ly bad! As I half-expected, the second stage failed to ignite, and therefore the re-entry mechanism did not deploy. LOADSTAR fell like a stone, nose first, into dirt:

Although it failed, I was amazed it survived intact. Kudos to gorilla glue, I suppose! I will tinker with LOADSTAR and try launching him again one day.

And then we moved onto what was perhaps the craziest of the three rockets, ATOMOS. And yes, I just made up that name one second ago. At any rate, here’s a few shots of the pre-launch procedure:

This rocket carries two shuttles, which detach at the zenith, and then glide to earth (probably bearing messages from God). This rocket kit had existed in my car for a millenia, and was actually damaged when I built it. If LOADSTAR was expected to fail, ATOMOS was expected to explode!

What’s that? The thing in the top left of the above shot? Here’s a closeup:

OMG it’s Florry, hiding behind a plastic lid because she was scared after the LOADSTAR tragedy 🙂

I had put a stronger engine into this guy, a C-5. What does that mean?? Who knows! Let’s launch:

HOLY MOTHER OF GOD IT WENT HIGH! You can see from that photo (taken on my phone…), this rocket had purpose. It raced up, screaming through the troposphere, writing “Goodbye fair Earth” with its exhaust. Maybe. At any rate, it was an amazing launch, one of the shuttles even worked correctly (the other fell like Icarus) and both the rocket and both shuttles were recovered intact.

There was only one engine left. A strong one; a C-5. It made sense to put it in the smallest, lightest rocket. KUMA 01 was on a one-way trip to infinity and beyond!

The final launch was so momentous it required two people. This may have been because the launch device had two buttons, and we both wanted to photograph the rocket as it was taking off. We hid behind our plastic shield, said a quick prayer, and pushed the button. This happened:

Look at that power! Look at it:

It was like all the angels got beneath this little bear-rocket and lifted to heaven at faster than light speed! It just went so fast, and so high, and penetrated the atmosphere and we never ever saw little KUMA again…

…at least not until he touched down safely a minute or so later 🙂

As you may be able to tell this was big fun. I already have some ideas for my second round of rocketry later this summer.

Thank you Florence, both for the rockets and for helping me launch them. 🙂

Posted in Miscellaneous, Otaku, Tech, The Unknown, Toys | 2 Comments »

Lawn Invaders

Wednesday, May 1st, 2013

I’m sitting at home sick right now, playing the utterly-without-decency PS3 game Lollipop Chainsaw (and loving it, by the way). I just got up to put something in the oven for lunch and noticed something in our back yard.

But first, a little backstory. The other day I went for a long walk to scout out an area suitable for launching rockets (as suggested by yesterday’s tweet, and which will be tomorrow’s blog entry). On my walk I noticed a certain yellow flower abundant in some lawns but not others. Upon arriving home, I was happy to see that so far our lawn was free.

I speak, of course, of dandelions.

Anyone with any sort of lawn will have an opinion of these guys, and it is rarely good. They come from nowhere seemingly overnight, and are an ugly, ugly plant (and flower) that stakes a claim on your lawn that lasts for a few weeks. They are the hydras of the plant world: cut off a stalk and find two the next day.

Where there were none in our back yard two days ago there are now hundreds.

As a child I loved dandelions. We called them wet-your-beds because, as every kid knows, if you handle them you (won’t!) wet your bed the next night. I handled them often, since I had a bizarre kids love of using the latex that leaks from their broken stalks like white blood as a glue. Try it one day: tear open a dandelion and glue your palms together using the white stuff. Childish fun 🙂

For all of their ugliness and for as much as I don’t want them on my lawn I can’t deny that when they seed they become quite special. I still can’t resist kicking the ‘puff’ and watching the seeds disperse in the wind, even as I know I am just dooming my lawn for the next year.

As I said to a woman on my walk the other day, in the war against dandelions, I simply let them win.

Posted in Garden, Miscellaneous | 1 Comment »

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