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Canon has unveiled the 5D Mark II SLR. Whoa: 21.1 megapixel full-frame CMOS sensor; ISO range from 100-6400, and expandable to 25600 (that is, shooting under appoximately no light); 1080p HD video shooting with live view on the back (3″ across), HDMI and USB connectivity…
Also welcome: a sensor-cleaning system (my 30D is constantly plagued with sensor dust).
$2700 or so.
No price yet from Amazon, but you can pre-order it.
Here’s more reason I still love blogging. Not only did I find the telling graphic above, but discovered its source, GraphJam, via Tom McMahon, Chris Blattman, Scarlet Lion and Jillian C. York — in that order. That is, Tm credited Chris, who credited Scarlet, who credited Jillian, who credited GraphJam.
Some bloggers don’t credit their sources; but the good ones — who blog to exercise and share their curious hearts and minds, and not just to make a few bucks off SEO or whatever — do. So here’s a high five to every blogger who keeps doing what made blogging worthwhile in the first place.
I grew up in New Jersey, which I think of as “New England without the universities”. There are many places in New Jersey with beauty equal to, say, New Hampshire’s. But New Jersey never had the same ethos of preservation, the same not-quite-a-mythology that explains why Norman Rockwell and his sentiments fit New England like a shoe while to the rest of the country they remain a maudlin approximation of bygone times elsewhere.
I transferred my state citizenship from New Jersey to North Carolina in early 1974, when I left our small rented house on Route 94 in Yellow Frame, out in Sussex County, the beautiful northernmost county of the state. Back then Sussex County had more cows than people, and featured fall colors and pastoral scenes worthy of calendars and post cards. Best of all it shared the Delaware River with Pennsylvania. The shores of the river were settled first by the Lenni Lenape Indians and later by the Dutch, descendents of which continued to farm the islands and lowlands alongside the river, right up to the point in the 1970s when the United States government, with help from both states, condemned the land, including perfectly good towns such as Dingman’s Ferry, and let it all fall to ruin while fighting and failing to build the unnecessary Tocks Island Dam Project. It was, and remains, a disgrace.
Can you imagine the feds, or Vermont and New Hampshire, doing the same to the Connecticut River? Of course not. We’re talking about New England here.
The difference was brought home to me this past weekend when we picked up The Kid from camp in Vermont and took our time heading back to Boston. We visited Middlebury, Waterbury (including the Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream headquarters), the Rock of Ages Quarry near Barre, and various towns along the Connecticut River before having some okay Thai food in Keene. New England is truly a beautiful region, even with almost no available hotel rooms.
Much of that was recorded photographically. Here’s the set. Here’s the slide show.
Nice to know New England is there. Less nice to know that much of the same beauty has long since been paved or otherwise profaned in other states. (Of course, I also realize that much has been lost in New England as well. Just less of it than elsewhere.)
The shot above is of the Congregational Church in Middlebury, Vermont. I shot a series of photos of the church, most with white and grey clouds boiling up in the sky beyond. I wasn’t sure which was best (which is why I kept them all), but I am sure that several are better than the one the church uses for its own website.
I also did some experimental shooting with this brick building in downtown Middlebury, which is about as nice a little college town as you’re gonna find anywhere. The best of those shots, by the way, were taken not with my Canon 30D SLR, but with a little Canon Powershot SD850is. Partly that’s because the little camera likes to yield more vibrant colors than the big one; and partly it’s because the big one wasn’t fixed right and read the light wrong.
Anyway, I’m back out in California, where I am now a citizen, even though most of the next year will be spent back at the Berkman Center in Cambridge.
Harvard blogs were “having a massage”, the message said yesterday. Today I’m looking at a new WordPress dashboard/UI, and puzzling my way around it. Categories and Tags are now separate things. Tagging is comma separated, rather than space separated, as it has long been with Flickr, where one puts names such as Clay Shirky in quotes if one wishes to tag them. I’d rather add the rel=”tag” element to the link. Never have been a fan of listing tags at the bottoms of posts.
Uploading and posting pictures (or, as WP has it, “Add media”) doesn’t work yet. I have at least two I want to share, but no rush.
Anyway, figuring it out.
Meanwhile, over in Linux Journal I’ve posted It sucks because it’s good: a defense of Jakob Nielsen‘s stalwart and sensible usability principles against the scorn of those whose sense of design owes more to ancient print sensibilities than to Web nativity.
Nice to learn that Joe Frank, one of the greatest radio artists of all time, is back. In a way. You can listen in a browser to .wma selections from albums he sells. It would be nice for Joe to make those available as .mp3s as podcasts.
Maybe when we get this put together we can find a new way for him to make money with his art.
We’ve been having a lot of thunderstorms this summer in Boston. On Sunday we followed the last ones out of town, veering west after departing from Logan, while the clouds puffed off to the east. The dawn weather was dreary at ground level, but quite pretty, as clouds go, from altitude. So here’s a set of pictures I shot on the way out of town.
Most of the rest of the trip was cloudy, wasting a perfectly okay window with no obstructions. But I still got nearly 200 shots. I’ll be putting the rest of those up soon.
I’m in Mystic Seaport with family, looking at boats and learning history. It’s a great place that I remember well, even though I’m pretty sure the last time I came here was in the 5th grade, which would have been a little more than 50 years ago. Most of the antique boats currently on display here are younger than that. Perspective.
Anyway, earlier today I dropped my main camera, a Canon EOS 30D, and it no longer takes accurate light readings. It works, but I have to use another camera to read light, or guess at exposures and use trial-and-error. So I need to send it in for repairs. Any recommendations on that? The unit is long since out of warranty.
By the way, the shot above was taken not with the 30D, but with a little PowerShot SD 850IS, through one lens of my polarized sunglasses. The lens of the camera is small enough to do that. Other shots in that same series were taken with the 30D, but lacked the polarizing filter. They are much sharper and less grainy, but also less colorful.
I should be adding many more before the weekend is out, even with the 30D limping along.
I shot some Puffins the other day, from an old lobster boat piloted by my cousin George, who is a local on Maine’s Muscongus Bay. We skirted just past the surf surrounding Eastern Egg Rock, from which puffins disappeared in the 1800s after settlers ate all their eggs. The birds have been re-established there with great help from Project Puffin and the Audubon Society. There was a nice story in the Boston Globe yesterday about puffin restoration at the small, rocky island. I was there a few days earlier, and I’ve got the pictures. Fun combo.
Puffins are smallish birds with large colorful bills. Except when they’re laying eggs or fresh from hatching between hard rocks, they spend their whole lives on the open sea. The Globe story mentions one bird that’s 35 years old. That’s a long time on Earth for a sea creature that lives mostly on or above the surface.
Anyway, travel. I do a lot of it, along with plenty of photography. For those and related reasons I am on the board of PlanetEye, a new company that just launched on the Web. Check ’em out. Give’m feedback, too. They have a link for it, and I know they listen.
