So I bought a camera that wasn’t even on my shortlist (mentioned in the September 4 post). It doesn’t have RAW capacity, it cost me more than $500, and it doesnt do high speed shooting in the way I am accustomed to it. Still, it was at a reduced price at Domayne, but after I bought all the accoutrements, the cost went over $600. Oh well. And I still don’t have a DSLR.
I looked at the Olympus SP570-UZ more closely, and found that the manual zoom, whilst a nice idea, is pretty revolting. Its not completely manual, you see. You twist the zoom ring, which sets a little servo-motor into action and then it mechanically zooms. Its jerky, and doesnt quite do the deal. The Fuji S9600 (a predecessor to the S1000fs, I suspect) has a manual zoom too, but its all manual, and works quite well. If its what you want. After playing with it for 10 minutes or so, I realised that it was not what I wanted at all. I have become lazy. I LIKE having index fingertip control of both focus and zoom, and not having to lift my hand off the camera to do either. So it was back to the drawingboard, and the unexpectedly delightful result is the Fuji. I would have been happy with the Panasonic Lumix as well, I think, but it is still not available.
I confess I had not really taken Fuji all that seriously (in spite of having been a Fuji film fan years ago, almost always choosing Fuji or Ilford over Kodak).. but back in April, when I bought the Olympus MJU1020, I persuaded a friend to buy her first digital camera, and she bought a Fuji point and shoot, with 8MP and a 4 or 5x zoom (can’t remember which, now). The significant difference apart from price was that the Fuji colour saturation beat the heck out of the Olympus. My friend consistently produced nice balanced shots where mine were pretty much washed out a lot of the time.
Anyway, all this rambling is leading to today’s shots. It finally stopped raining long enough for me to get outside. I’ve taken some shots in places where I have been before, and in the yard, and the reason for this is so I can get some sense of whether I have made a good decision regarding this camera. The short answer is a resounding yes!! These shots are markedly clearer, and more colourful than the comparable ones taken with the MJU. I’ll be trying some night shots later, hopefully (unless I crash, first).. I’ve heard that this cam is pretty hopeless with low light, just like my others, but we will have to give it a go and see what happens.
In the gallery, click on each to get the medium size, and then click on that to get a larger version. All have been size reduced in the interests of saving space on my server.
I had that StupidUser moment a week ago, and now I find the very tool which I needed back then, to retrieve files. It may not be too late. I have a trial version of File Salvage for Mac, and if it works, (alas the trial doesn’t actually allow you to restore lost files, it just lets you see them) I guess I will be buying a registration. If it doesn’t, I’ll probably get a reg anyway, sometime down the track… just in case.
Quote from the subrosasoft website:
FileSalvage is an extremely powerful Macintosh application for exploring and recovering deleted files from a drive or volume. FileSalvage is designed to restore files that have:
* been accidentally deleted.
* become unreadable due to media faults.
* been stored on a drive before it was re-initialized/formatted.Use FileSalvage to recover your lost files, iTunes libraries, iPhoto collections, and to rescue data that has been lost. Built for your OS X 10.5 Leopard, 10.4 Tiger, or 10.3.9 Panther Mac.
If that’s not useful, I don’t know what is.
[Edit] Okay, I am seriously impressed. Its finding some (but not all) of my lost photographs, and its finding keychain files (thats where mac stores passwords etc) but at this stage I don’t know whats in them. Guess I’ll let it run overnight, its got a lot of searching to do.
[Edit #2: 7th September] Well, that wasnt as useful as I thought it might be (I have rescued a few photographs of which 6 were a significant loss, initially, keychains were all recent and thus of no use at all). Its a shame, really, that I did not have some of these tools on board when the Stupid thing happened. Anyway, I am correcting that even as we speak. File Salvage is good, and I am also going to see what Data Rescue II can do.
Yesterday, I wandered down to the beach, because I was awake from around 3am and I hate wasting uptime.
There was nothing much in the way of sunrise, but I caught a pelican trying to snooze on top of a streetlamp (and his mate, on the next one, drying the washing… alas I had no luck managing to keep the cam steady… I’ll drop the blurry shot here so you can get an idea, but please, no comments about how dreadful the pic is!!)
I also found this tern fishing for his breakfast. From 130 shots, only one in which the bird is not just a blur of grey and white. Lordy they fly fast!
The problem with being me, is that although I do have little spendup times, generally I am painfully and tediously sensible, as many who know me well can attest to.
I really really wanted to get a new camera. And I will, it just is not going to be any of those I wanted. I was really excited about getting a decent tax refund, and had every intention of going out today and buying a superduper DSLR (yes I had changed my mind again, and had the money to be able to do that) but, instead, I have just logged out of my bank website after having just paid around $1200 in bills. Some were outstanding, most were not. Its just that time of year… theres just once in every year when it seems everything comes at once, and thats usually August/September, for me.
So… I am MAYBE going to get a new camera later today. There is an acceptable under $500 compromise, if there are any left now. Otherwise, its all going to have to wait until next year.
And I seem to have left my newish Olympus somewhere… or dropped it out of my bag… no idea… but now I have to go in to the office on my days off and search there, because there is noplace else it could possibly be. What a bloody pest.
[Edit] Camera found and new one bought. Obsolete (2007 model, now superceded by an 8100… not a lot of difference except MP) Fujifilm S8000fd, 18x zoom, 8MP, does macro and everything else I wanted it to. My 3 year old Olympus C760 will now go to live in a new home, depending on who wants it.
Today, lunch was taken down by the harbour. It was just a lovely day, with a bit of a cool breeze, and really, it could not have been more in apposition to our normal office environment. Accompanying us today were a couple of friendly magpies. The prospect of being fed non-magpie food probably had more than a little to do with that.
I was not quick enough with my camera (having a mouthful of ham and avocado sandwich at the time) to capture one of the little guys warbling at my colleague for more, after she had thrown some scraps of food to him. He gobbled them down, and then, with obvious intent, walked right up to within a couple of feet, raised his head, and sang his little heart out whilst gazing up at her. It was so touching. Almost as if he was doing an Oliver Twist “please may I have some more” and it was quite irresistible.
His friend, on the other hand, was a bit of a clown. He was not that interested in the scraps, instead choosing to play with some grass roots he had fossicked out of the ground. He’d found some creatures to eat buried underneath but then proceeded to play with the roots. He was quite hilarious, tearing at the roots, picking them up, throwing them around and then rolling over… and looking for all the world as if that was his exact intention.
I love magpies.
I’ve mentioned acrobat.com in my last post, its the first one I found. Subsequently I have also found a few others. I’ll only mention here the ones which are Mac compatible. You can assume, unless I state categorically otherwise, that they are also Windows compatible. Linux is a whole other ballgame, I have no idea, but might look into it once I reinstall VMWare and some guest operating systems.
5G - Windows Live Skydrive. Yes, its Mac compatible. Its interface is easy to use, and it works. Its part of the live.com system and as such is more geared toward file, document and photo sharing etc. Screenies coming.
5G - 4-shared. Like Skydrive, also geared toward sharing of files, photos, documents etc. I believe this one is also Linux compatible but won’t swear to it
2G - IDrive for Mac and Windows. Has a downloadable desktop client from which you do your file choices and backups. Not designed for file sharing so not in the same category as Skydrive or 4-shared
2G - Mozy for Mac and Windows. Also has a downloadable desktop client from which you do your backups. Both of the latter have decent interfaces which are flexible in terms of choices you make.
I’ll create screenshots for all these and add more detail to the post, and I’ll also add a screenie for Acrobat.com as well.
Bear in mind all these are limited, but a bit of judicious choice and you can get most of what you need backed up online. And of course you are not like me, and you do have other backups of your important stuff, don’t you. Nobody who reads here would fall into the StupidUser category would they?
Addit: Mozy has a referral system. If others join from your link, you get extra space. This has to be a good thing. I am not going to pester everyone I know with emails, but I am going to place the link in the text here, and also have a small advertising piece in the sidebar. Soon.
Today I was looking for somewhere to store things, just in case I have another StupidUser moment. Yes, I am now using Time Machine with my external drive (a Maxtor 1-Touch 200G) but I am also looking for additional backup locations.
During the course of my search I found acrobat.com which is in beta and is a free service from Adobe. You get 5G of storage and the capacity to store, share, collaborate, create and conference online. Its a decent service. You can also embed previews of PDFs you may have stored, in your web page. I’m going to see if the embed code works well here, by embedding the code for the “how to use it” document that adobe provide.
Now that is pretty cool, don’t you think? If you have popups blocked, you likely won’t see it. Make an exception for acrobat.com, or temprarily disable popups. You can see the full version by downloading, or else click in the little arrow in the top right corner, which will give you the entire document in full screen. Its pretty nice, really.
I’m also looking at some other free 5G alternatives, and will post as I try them out.
The Panasonic Lumix DMC-FZ28-K bridge camera is the one which is now at the top of my list of possibles. Its not due for release until September (actual date not known right now) but on looking at its specs, I think its probably the one for me.
Yes, I was seriously considering that Fujifilm S100FS but I found later that it doesn’t do RAW. The RAW thats available with Olympus cameras is something called “Olympus RAW” and I don’t know how that differs from any other kind of RAW but it set me wondering about proprietary formats and I did not want that either.
So I am left with what seems to be the only other bridge camera (aka superzoom camera) which does RAW, and thats the Panasonic range… specifically in my case, the FZ28. It will also focus down to 1cm for macro shots, and zoom to 486mm (in 35mm terms) or 18x zoom which is more than enough zoom for most people, most of the time. Its 10 megapixels and I know thats quite enough for me because currently I only use 5 megapixels in my 10 megapixel MJU1020. Also advantageous is its ability to take 8G mem cards. The 2G limitation in Olympus would soon become a pest.
According to the conventional wisdom, Panasonic cams are faster to start up, and faster to shoot and have much less shutter lag than the Olympus range. This may be due to a number of things but one of the aspects affecting shutter lag is the kind of shutter… the Panasonic is mechanical rather than electronic and this is, it seems, a very good thing.
I’m ready to buy now, so I guess I will be paying close to RRP for this one, I’ve seen prices quoted from $459 through to $699… and $749 is the RRP. I’m not going to shop around much, I am pretty sure this is my next cam and I just can’t wait to get my hands on it. I believe its going to be the best all-rounder I have had so far. Pix below lifted from the Panasonic site so as not to steal bandwidth.
That’s what my friend Gary told me this morning as I was bemoaning a moment of stupidity which has cost me the entire contents of my internal drive on the iMac. I had been down the path of a Bootcamped Windows partition before, and I knew what I was doing… I thought.
Somehow (and I really have no idea how) when I began the bootcamp process, in creating a partition for Windows to live in, it also created a dos-based MBR on the other partition, without so much as a by-your-leave. I have NO idea what I did to create this problem, but I cannot think it was the software because it worked perfectly well in the past. Anyway, damage done, around 4000 photos lost, music gone, and documents vaporised.
Lesson is only this: Backup and do it often. To which end I am about to begin using Leopard’s Time Machine with my external 200G drive. I am also looking into getting an external RAID array, and Gary has pointed me at some very nice kit (an external enclosure and a drive or two) at EYO, a company he’s used for years and recommends highly for online purchasing.
In the meantime, I need to see about things like: addressbook contacts and passwords… and download all the system and iLife updates i need… sighhh… all because I wanted Windows in a separate partition.
Oh well… Onward!
Its only good when you are young and healthy. There really isn’t much that’s scarier than being really sick in the middle of the night with nobody there to help. Especially if its not ambulance-worthy (ie life-threatening) and you just have to put up with whats happening. Been awake since around 2am and cannot return to bed, its not over yet 
