Zen Haiku: Usability, General Topics & A Bit of Poetry by Chad Lundgren

Canon S1 IS Pictures and A Mini-Rant

Update (11/14/2006): Check out www.FiendishMasterPlan.com for another sunset picture, this one set in Albuquerque.

I haven't been posting regularly for quite some time, but the site's not dead, just going through a slow period.

However, I have been taking quite a few pictures with a Canon Powershot S1 IS, which I've had for nearly six months now.

My mini-review. Overall, I'm quite happy. The zoom lens is a great deal of fun, and the image stabilization actually works as long as you try just a little to hold the camera steady. With other cameras, "holding steady" was an exercise in frustration. I found that in any other light condition than full blast sunshine, handheld shooting produced too much blur. With the S1, I can go down to 1/30 and even 1/15 if I have to, although that's starting to push it.

The purple fringing issue occurs more often than I expected, but usually in small areas.

Here's a picture I could only have gotten with a zoom lens:

The overall sunset was decent, but these clouds look almost hellish to me, and it was the detail in them that I liked.

Here's a postcard picture taken in the Jemez, ones of my favorite places to go for landscape photography.

Some people would mean postcard pejoratively: I take it as a compliment. Taken at nearly full zoom.

Here's a picture I took to shut up the "But where's the picture of you with your really long shadow in it? That's never been done before!" emails I constantly receive.

Here's the mini-rant: the follow-on to the Canon S1 IS is the Canon S2 IS. There are two problems with Canon expecting people to just smoothly upgrade: 1) They switched from CompactFlash to SecureDigital memory formats, which means the 800+ Megs I have in CompactFlash would be worthless with the S2. and 2) They changed the adapter size from 52 to 58mm, which means almost all the filters I have are worthless. What a slap in the face.

And now, I leave you with a picture I found mildly humorous:

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Thursday, July 21, 2005 (Link)

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Aluminum Yucca

A while back, I was driving west into Albuquerque late at night. As I neared Albuquerque, I looked up and said, "What the heck?" There was this lit-up thing right at where the canyon opens up just before you enter city limits.

I had seen one of Albuquerque's latest public art pieces, "Aluminum Yucca." The public arts folks are working on getting gateways to each entrance to the city installed.

Well, being the photographing type, I had to get some pictures. This involved a death-defying stop on the shoulder of I-40 with semis roaring past, hopping over a wall, and clambering up some rocks, but was worth it.

OK, it was during that day, so it wasn't that death-defying. Because I thought the sculpture looked like a bunch of rockets, discovering what it was called took a lot of googling. Since it was made with salvaged F-15 fuel tanks, I like to think I was close.

If you're into the sport know as geocaching, which is sort of a modern day treasure hunt using technology, there is a geocache near the Aluminum Yucca.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Thursday, July 1, 2004 (Link)

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Seattle Sunset background image

Here's a picture of a Seattle sunset from my recent honeymoon.

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Posted by Chad Lundgren on Sunday, May 16, 2004 (Link)

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Wedding Fabric

I've been pretty busy with wedding planning [Link removed 12/21/2004] lately, hence the low frequencies of updates to this site. I have taken some pictures however.

This was inspired when I wandered by Karen's sewing machine, which she had inadvertently left on late at night.

This next one is a closeup of a fabric detail.

And here's Karen's favorite.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Sunday, February 29, 2004 (Link)

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Chad Gets a New Camera

I haven't posted many photos in the last month or three. The reason? My old Kodak digital camera gave up the ghost.

I researched and researched, and I bought a Canon Powershot A60. I've been using it for about three weeks.

The executive summary? An amazing amount of performance for a camera in this price range ($210-$250 as of October 2003). It can do a continuous drive mode which lets you hold the shutter down and take 3 or 4 pictures in a row like a fashion photographer (saying something cheesy like "Make love to the camera, baby" is optional.)

The pictures are crisp: many are usable at 100% size. It also has a 3X optical zoom and manual settings like a F-stops, shutter speeds ranging from 1/2000 up to 15 seconds, and exposure compensation, that let you capture what the vast majority of digital cameras costing this much simply couldn't.

The only real miss is the software. The picture transfer software uses TWAIN to bring pictures into Photoshop. Excuse me? Like I have time to do that for 100 images? Even worse, the install program crashed twice on my fully patched Windows 2000 computer; and afterward the ZoomBrowser thumbnail program crashed every time I tried to run it.

I eventually installed a newer version from the Canon web site, but it ran slowly and didn't tell me anything the File Browser in Photoshop already couldn't. Fortunately, I had bought a Compact Flash reader and am happily using that to transfer pictures.

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Posted by Chad Lundgren on Thursday, October 23, 2003 (Link)

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Socorro Road Tripping

My girlfriend Karen and I recently went on a road trip in and around Socorro, New Mexico. The first shot was taken by Karen, the rest by me.

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Posted by Chad Lundgren on Thursday, July 17, 2003 (Link)

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Sunset in New Mexico background picture

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Posted by Chad Lundgren on Sunday, July 6, 2003 (Link)

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Mountains & Arroyos

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Posted by Chad Lundgren on Saturday, June 7, 2003 (Link)

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A dirty picture, shadows, and the Jemez mountain pictures

This dirty picture was shot through a car window, and then had the holy living bejeezus cropped out of it. Digital cameras make taking unplanned shots cost effective, but only a few turn out.

Possibly rotated. Sometimes I get pictures where I can't remember the original orientation, and I just pick one I like.

Jemez Mountains near Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Wednesday, April 9, 2003 (Link)

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Sandia Mountains and other pictures

All pictures have had only contrast adjusted.

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Posted by Chad Lundgren on Monday, February 17, 2003 (Link)

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Balloon Fiesta Pictures

The Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta happened earlier this month. Here are pictures. The haiku is a bit harder to find.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Wednesday, October 23, 2002 (Link)

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Zozobra

Sometimes it's really cool to live in New Mexico. While working on a site I can't talk about until it launches, I was in Santa Fe late enough where I said heck, I'll should go to Zozobra again like I did last year.

Zozobra, of course, is Old Man Gloom, and you burn him to get rid of your woes. The effigy burning/music festival happens right before the Fiestas Days in Santa Fe which have been going on for hundreds of years.

I managed to get some pictures too. Most of them didn't come out, because the big effigy is slowly thrashing and my shutter speed is not adjustable.

Here's the least blurry picture of Zozobra, right before he get torched, with fireworks smoke all around him.

My favorites are the fire jugglers anyway, which came out a bit better.

Zozobra explodes.

Zozobra in full flame.

Zozobra is apparently based on an old Indian ritual, or pagan, as the religious folks would think, which outrages both the Catholic and Protestant religious folks in Santa Fe. Religious pamphleteers and banner wavers were out in force (again) this year, which only made the walk back to the car more fun. This year they stayed out the middle of the street.

The really bizarre thing about Zozobra though, is that the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe puts it on. Go figure.

It's also where, last year at the 75th Burning of Zozobra, I (re-?)invented the term "secondhand ganja." The secondhand ganja factor was about the same, maybe a bit higher this year. (Just for the record, I don't think the secondhand ganja is really enough to have an effect.) There were also an outrageous number of beautiful women and girls there.

A nice Dionysian time, considering I didn't drink anything.

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Sunday, September 8, 2002 (Link)

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Camera blues (and yellows)

I bought a new digital camera, a Kodak DX3500. Overall, it has solid usability: other cameras have annoyed and irritated me far more.

One thing drives me crazy, though. When you're scrolling through the pictures and pull up the delete function, sometimes, but not always, it jumps to the first picture, not the picture you're on. If you're going too fast, you end up deleting the wrong picture. No way of getting back.

Nice features:

1. The preview mode is accurate, and avoids any parallax issues for close-up shots. It operates at 20 frames a second and is a nice looking screen. Does tend to nail the batteries though.
2. You can turn the flash off.
3. The focus and exposure are both automatic. No waiting for the focus to snap into place like with other cameras, which I hate.
4. The menus make sense: have clear language.

Annoyances:

1. The focus and exposure are both automatic. Since it's fixed focus, I don't see that changing, but I would like more control over the exposure.
2. The aforementioned jumping around when you're trying to delete things.
3. The digital zoom quality is only good enough for web resolution, and then not for bigger images or tight crops.
4. You cannot leave the self-timer as the default. I had one picture of my hand reaching for the camera.

I was bored with the available lighting, so I used my Revo sunglasses as a filter, which worked pretty well, as Revo likes to brag about their optical quality lenses. (It's a Flash page). [Update 03/25/2004 - Link removed, but you can still go to Luxxotica, click on Brands, then Revo and be treated to a big Flash movie. In Italian, even though the page I was on clearly was in English. ]

(The indivdual entry contains more pictures).

Posted by Chad Lundgren on Wednesday, September 4, 2002 (Link)

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