jayneandmarty.com

…doing this.

Hmmmm.

I’ve used the macro setting before but thought I’d snap a few off this morning anyway.

On these I set the camera to macro, then held it about 50cm from the subject, then zoomed in a bit. They were pretty quick shots (because when you bend down to look at something closely on the beach Max comes to see what you’re doing and sticks his big boofhead in the way), so they’re not perfect. But they’re a good start.

Also, that last photo is the 3,583rd one we’ve taken with the camera since we bought it almost exactly a year ago. That’s 149 rolls of film, which would have cost us more than $2,500 to buy and develop if we were still on film. Amazing.

The fact that our camera has continuous shooting mode isn’t likely to elicit gasps of amazement from anyone, but we haven’t used it before so it’s new for us. Here’s a sequence of Max catching his frisbee on our beach walk this morning.

I didn’t bother experimenting with any other settings – I just wanted to play with the continuous shooting. Got some other good sequences of him too. Now we just have to remember to use it when it’s appropriate.

This afternoon I decided to re-read our camera’s manual in an attempt to understand how photography works. Usually I just leave it on the auto settings (and most of the photos turn out fine), but our low light photos are ordinary, and like many point and shoot cameras it struggles a bit with moving subjects. The camera’s a Pentax Optio W20.

A 15 minute flick through the manual tells me that it has a continuous shooting mode, an interval shooting mode, a histogram mode to help balance brightness and contrast before taking the shot, different AE metering settings including centre-weighted and spot metering, and different auto focus settings including spot focus, automatic tracking and a focus limiter. No doubt all cameras similar to ours have similar features, but I bet that, just like me, 98% of owners aren’t aware of them or simply don’t bother with them.

First up, low light shooting. On the auto setting our photos suffer from noise. You can see it in these three shots, which are of the same subject with the same ambient lighting, but different ISO speeds.

1. On the auto setting, which is ISO 400.

2. At a manual setting, ISO 1600.

3. At a manual setting, ISO 64.

Clearly the ISO 64 setting has the least noise (this is a no-brainer for anyone who knows anything about digital photography, but that didn’t include me 20 minutes ago), but the picture’s a bit dark. However, when I adjust the brightness and exposure in my photo editor, things look a little better.

4. At ISO 64, but with brightness and exposure adjusted in iPhoto.

A 100% crop from the original (in the same order as before)

So I’ve learnt something – to reduce noise in low light photos I should manually set the ISO low (e.g. 64), then rely upon my photo editing software to bring up the brightness.

One of the cool features of the camera is a special button that I can assign up to four shortcuts to (the Green Button). Shortcut #1 is now the sensitivity setting so that I can quickly lower the ISO down to 64 before I take my low light shot.

I’ll keep playing with some of the other settings and post the results here soon.

I haven’t written much on jayneandmarty.com recently. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in the blog – far from it. It’s simply that we’re in our normal transitional phase from summer to winter. We tend to hibernate a bit when the cold season rolls around. Things are still happening around the house, but slowly. We still head out at weekends, but not as much as we do in summer.

One thing we have started doing is watching TV DVDs. We don’t watch many shows on network telly because we’re in bed by 9pm, and we don’t have Foxtel, so along with taping the occasional show on the DVR (the recent addition to the TV corner), we’re buying DVDs of shows like Extras, Entourage, Blackadder, Frontline, Northern Exposure, Dallas and so on. Some of them are of questionable value (i.e. six episodes for $20) but others are super value (season 2 of Entourage is 13 episodes), there’s much more value in TV show DVDs than buying film DVDs, and they’re all quality shows … WITH NO ADS!!

Had a great time fanging Dad’s MX-5 down the Gt Ocean Road to Apollo Bay this morning.

Dad picked me up from home at 6.15 and we drove the five minutes to our meet-up point opposite Bunnings Waurn Ponds on the Princes Highway, just before the Anglesea turnoff. We were a few minutes early but the 50-strong convoy soon zoomed past and I pulled out to join it. There were a few stops and starts between Waurn Ponds and Anglesea to bunch up the cars and let others join the convoy, but as soon as we cleared Anglesea the proper driving began!

On the section between Point Roadknight and Lorne we were behind an MX-5 who struggled to keep up with the cars in front (she was a bit slow, the cars in front were pretty quick), but it was still fun whipping into corners and letting the car do its thing. I haven’t driven a manual for a while, but the memories of driving my old Mini Cooper repro came flooding back and before long I was up and down the gears, accelerating into the bends and generally having a great time.

After a coffee break at Lorne (where Dad tried a weird self-heating latte that he’d bought – but it didn’t self-heat) we were off again on the section to Apollo Bay. Dad suggested we try to get into the convoy a bit earlier to avoid the slowpokes, so we moved out of the foreshore car park in about 9th or 10th spot, which was almost directly behind the MX-5s with all the racing stripes, fat exhausts and rollcages.

It was clear after about 2km that the gold car in front of us couldn’t keep up with the racers (or didn’t want to), but he was going plenty quick enough himself, thanks very much. It took almost everything I had just to keep up with him around those corners, so I’m glad we weren’t immediately behind the rollcage brigade. It really was quite quick … the car feels like it’s on rails no matter how hard you push it through corners so there’s no need to brake, which is handy as there wasn’t time to. In fact it went around them even better when I accelerated through them, which felt good to me but I’m not sure what Dad thought of it. Before long my arms started hurting and my clutch foot was ready to give up, but then we rounded a corner and were upon Skenes Creek, where the limit dropped back to 60 and we could trundle for the next few kms into Apollo Bay.

All up it was a great experience. I can see why the club members enjoy these runs – the early start means very little else on the road (i.e. in your way) and a real chance to take a very capable car flat out around corners whilst staying within limits on the straights. The top was down on 90% of the MX-5s the whole way (including ours, naturally) and although it was pretty cold at first it was fantastic to zoom along with the wind in our hair. There’s a lot to be said for open-top motoring.

Thanks again Dad, and I’m glad you’re enjoying being part of the club.

(More photos to come when Dad sends me the ones he took on his camera)

…I’m fiddling with the jayneandmarty.com site theme, so watch out for big orange blocks of content this evening.

* 7.47pm: All done. Hope you like it.

** 7.52 Correction: Have to fix some stupid Internet Explorer bugs. Expect more orange blocks for a few minutes.

*** 7.56: Done.

Those following my tweets (just Rob, I think, and even then maybe only via my blog’s sidebar) will have seen that last night I wasn’t happy with 7’s decision to move Lost’s timeslot to 10.30, which is ridiculous as there’s no way anyone will stay up to watch it now. I also ranted about how I thought it was time Jayne and I bought ourselves a PVR (the modern, digital equivalent of a VHS video recorder) so that we could ditch normal telly scheduling altogether and watch what we want, when we want. (Ad-free, too.)

To date we’ve held off buying a PVR because (a) we don’t watch much telly, and (b) the digital tuner/PVR combos are usually $600+. But a friend mentioned to me this morning that Strathfield Car Radio currently has $299 no-brand twin tuner 160gb Standard Def PVRs reduced to $180, which is a nice price, so I went and bought one.

Set up was easy and it works fine. The two tuners means that we can watch something and record something else at the same time, and the electronic program guide means it’s easy to flick through the week’s programs and mark the things we want to record. I reckon it’ll be good.

I guess I’ll report further in a few weeks, when it’s either changed our telly-watching habits for ever or has made no difference……….!

*** Update: we have some sort of remote control interference issue. When I change the volume on our surround sound system the PVR changes channel. Not ideal. Will try to fix tomorrow!