Some photos

Following on from my previous post here are some examples of the photo’s i’ve been snapping up!

Plus something special:

Winter Sun

All images posted in this post or in this blog are my property. Feel free to enjoy them but inform me if you wish to use them by e-mailing me on danieljgmaclean_AT_gmail.com

My new camera – Fujifilm S6500fd

Here are some of the specs:

Number of effective pixels

6.3 million pixels

CCD sensor

1/ 1.7-inch Super CCD HR

Storage media

Internal memory (approx. 10MB)/ xD-Picture Card™ ( 16MB – 2 GB )

File format

Still image : JPEG (Exif Ver 2.2 ) CCD-RAW (Design rule for Camera File system compliant / DPOF-compatible)

Lens

Fujinon 10.7 X zoom lens , F 2.8 – 4.9

Lens focal length

f=6.2-66.7mm Equivalent to 28 – 300 mm on a 35 mm camera

Focus

Mode : Single-AF , Continuous AF, Manual Focus, One-touch AF(when using Manual focus) AF system : TTL contrast-type , AF-assist illuminator AF frame selection : AF(CENTER), AF(MULTI), AF(AREA)

Focus distance

Normal : approx. 40 cm / 1.6 ft. to infinity(W) approx. 2 m / 6.6 ft. to infinity(T) Macro : approx. 10 cm /4.0 in. to 3.0m / 9.8 ft.(W) approx. 90 cm /3.0 ft. to 3.0m / 9.8 ft.(T)

Shutter speed

30 sec. to 1 / 4000 sec.

Aperture

F 2.8 F11Up to 13 steps in 1/3 EV increments Manual /Auto selectable

Sensitivity

AUTO / Equivalent to ISO 100/200/400/800/1600/3200

Exposure modes

Programmed AE(When using P mode : Program shift is enable), Shutter-priority AE, Aperture-priority AE, Manual exposure

White balance

Automatic Manual (Fine, Shade, Fluorescent light (Daylight), Fluorescent light (Warm White) Fluorescent light (Cool White), Incandescent light

Viewfinder

0.33 inch low-temperature polysilicon TFT (approx. 115,000 pixels) , approx. 100 % coverage

LCD Monitor

2.5 inch Amorphous silicon TFT ( approx.235,000 pixels), approx. 100 % coverage

Self-timer

Approx.10sec./ 2 sec. delay

Video Output

NTSC / PAL selectable

Power source

4 AA type alkaline batteries (included)/4 AA type Ni-MH rechargeable batteries (optional) or AC power adapter AC-5VX(optional)

Dimensions

130.9 (W) X 97.5 (H) X 128.0 (D) mm / 5.2 (W) X 3.8 (H) X 5.0 (D) in.

Weight

Approx.600 g / 21.2 oz.(excluding batteries and xD-Picture Card )

Digital Zoom

Approx 2x

Shooting modes

Normal : Auto, Anti-blur, Scene Position ,Macro, Movie, Continuous, SP: Natural Light, Natural & Flash, Portrait, Landscape, Sport, Night, Fireworks, Sunset, Snow, Beach, Museum, Party, Flower, Close-up, Text Continuous: 1.Top-3 ( max.2.2 frames/sec., up to 3 frames) 2.Final-3 ( max.2.2 frames/sec., up to 3 frames) 3.Long-period (max.0.7frame/sec. Up to memory card size)

Colour modes

B&W / CHROME / STANDARD

Movie recording

640 x 480 pixels, 30 frames/sec. 320 x 240 pixels, 30 frames/sec. With monaural sound, AVI format (Motion JPEG)

Playback

Single frame, 9 Multi-frame, Sorting by date, Image rotate, Post shot Assist window (3 frames), Voice Memo, Trimming, Automatic playback

Voice memo

Up to 30 sec. WAV format 

 While for the moment I understand a fair amount of the above information it’s amazing how much information you can overlook in purchasing a camera when you have no idea what your looking for. Luckily the salesman my parents bought the camera from was a photographer first and a salesman second and recommended this beauty. I’ve only had about one week to play about with it but it has some pretty cool features such as face detection and jpeg/raw image format.

Longest updated since ever!

Wow it’s been a while since i’ve wrote anything here. To be honest it mostly because i’ve been very lazy lately. I’ve graduated from University and have moved to London to work for a IT firm. However I’ve now adjusted my lifestyle so that I can still blog and do some programming on the side. Regarding the previous posts with JPico, i’ve made very little progress with them. I decieded around four weeks ago that it needed to be completely re-wrote which as you can imagine is a monster task. At the moment it has a basic xml flat file database which stores all the directories added, plus a fast jpeg cacher and a iPhoto interface. I’ll work away on that for a while however i’m having problems figuring out howto go about designing the main multi-line scalable thumbnail browser.

In the meantime however, I got myself a digital camera for xmas and now looking to start photography. It’s going well and after writing this post i’ll put up a few examples of what i’ve been upto and what software i’ve been using.

Bye for now  

My first fruit… JPico

Ok, so this is my first proper post on something I’ve made myself. It is of course not really ready for release yet however is ready for demonstration of it’s key features.

JPico is a small cross-platform (no system dependencies) picture viewer. It has some unique display features such as reflections, shadows and a completely Java2d rendered interface. Btw when I say unique I mean these things have been done before however haven’t been brought together into one app. I’m in the middle of re-writing JPico so that the components of the interface can be made public. JPico to be honest is a platform for me to try out new things with Java2D so depending on interest I may never release it as a full app. So enough talking here are some pic’s:

As you can see there is two main components to the interface, a picture ticker and the main viewing panel.

The picture ticker takes a directory and generates thumbnails for all the supported and filtered file types e.g. jpeg, gif, png (for the now). This i’ve found is better than generating thumbnails on the fly by loading the original and scaling it espicially when the images are high resolution which most of mine are (4MP to 8MP). This means the first time a directory is loaded there is a delay loading that directory however after that it works instantly. There are however a few features I would like to add to it such as the ability to know when an image has been changed and support for multiple versions of the same image like a cvs/bzr revision system. The picture ticker is also synced with the main viewer via a clever threaded system i’ve developed reducing the lag between image changes.

The main image viewer has a few features which are worth a chat about. The obvious ones are the reflection which is generated on the fly and also a view finder at the top left allowing the user to zoom in and see what section they are looking at as well as using it to move around the image. Various transformations can be applied to the image such as rotation’s, scalings and image manipulation functions such as color adjustments etc. Most of these have been implemented however not found a sensible place on the interface yet.

Well thats that for the moment will post more within the comming week on JPico.

Welcome to the forbidden forest!

So let me tell you a bit about myself before I start posting lots of boring stuff … Nah! Here’s the system i’m running:

Acer Aspire 1501LC

Athlon 64 3000+

ATI Mobility Radeon 9600

512MB DDR RAM and a 40 GB HDD

Yeh I know it’s pretty lame compared to the systems you can get now and looking back at the price I paid I really wish I had waited. However now onto my desktop. I of course removed Windows XP Home that came with it and over time have been installing ALOT of different operating systems, here’s a flavour of some of them:

Red Hat, Fedora Core, Mandrake(Now Mandriva), SUSE(now openSuse), Ubuntu, Windows 2000, XP, Media Center, Vista(Beta’s), Mac OS X, DSL, and some other Unix-based and Linux-based distro’s.

My favorite and of course my weapon of choice is Ubuntu, why? Well i’ve been around Linux long enough to know if I can get everything set up and rolling the way I like within 20-30 minutes that it’s worth looking at further. Ubuntu’s selling points for me were the package management software(Synaptic) and the repositories it uses. I find this is the key to any serious distro and the Debian binarys just seem to always work unlike the times I’ve had with rpm’s!

So lets have a look at my desktop. I use the fantastic Gnome Desktop Environment for no other reason than I like it and couldn’t give a s*** about the others. I’ve tried them all and favor Gnome because of it’s simplicity. Not to mention the fact it comes with some killer apps such as Rhythmbox, Firefox, gEdit, F-Spot, totem and many more. As good as Gnome is there is however some changes that had to be made. I use the amazing Avant Window Navigator as my window list and launcher, Deskbar for quick command execution and file searching and Azureus for *cough cough* legal downloading . Here’s a screenshot:

Well’s that me for now. Will post soon again with something worth reading! Till next time

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