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IMG_3159
Originally uploaded by Ric Charlton

I was sorting through some 'old' pictures to upload to Flickr and stumbled across this one.

I'd forgotten I'd taken this and, I think, it's rather good :-)

Noise versus ISO for Canon EOS 1Ds

Gary recently pointed me towards a forum post discussing noise on a EOS 40D at different ISO settings. The forum post can be seen here.

This whole 'faking' of ISO settings - basically using a full stop lower ISO setting and boosting the EV in camera which caused problems.

It seems that the 5D also suffers from this, although the effect is seen at different points through the ISO range. This got me thinking... does my 1Ds do the same thing? An experiment was required!

After a few practices, I settled on the following conditions:

1. Camera set to Manual



2. No lens - just the body cap



3. Eye-piece cover shut



4. Exposure time set to 30 seconds (this exagerated the noise at very low ISO)

I then took a shot at each ISO setting (from 50 to 1250) and measured the mean luminance in Photoshop CS4. That produced the following graph (which didn't show a lot because I didn't have enough noise!).

I re-measured the luminance after increasing the EV on each shot by 20. This made for some noisy shots at high ISO (as you would expect!). The following graph was produced which showed the differences a little clearer.

So... what does this prove? IMHO, the 1Ds does not suffer from the faking of ISO settings in the same way as the 5D and 40D were described. Although the graphs do not clearly show this, ISO 160 did produce slightly less noise than both those ISOs below and those above it - the difference was only 0.06 on the +20 EV shot mind ;-)

Picasa and Flickr

I've been contemplating a switch to Flickr from Picasa Web for some time because it tends to have better integration with many Web 2.0 apps - e.g. Facebook. The main reason stopping me migrating, though, is that I really like Google's Picasa application.

Today I came a cross a great little app called Picasa2Flickr which adds another button to Picasa which uses Flickr Uploadr to get the selected pictures onto the web. Not the prettiest solution but it does seem to carry across all the titles, tags, etc. (except for the geotag data).

A note about the installation though... it's not immediately obvious but you need to click the links in the instructions to get the button to install correctly.

Facebook Test Post

This is a post to check whether adjusting my Blog feed (as per the instructions here) would allow full posts and piccies to automagically import to Facebook.

Anyway... here's a pic...

Blackpool Air Display

Finally getting caught up on blog stuff since I came back from the EduGeek meetings down south...

Before the meetings, I popped along to Blackpool for their annual air display. It was glorious sunshine and it was really nice to relax on the prom at North Shore for a couple of hours.

The air show also gave me the opportunity to play with my 500mm camera lens :-) By adding my 1.4x extender I got a full 700mm too :-D

Here's a sample of the pics I took (the noise was awesome when the Vulcan flew over - full afterburners, the lot!)

Pocket Scrobbling!

Last.fm is something I've been trying to use to find new music. It's a massive web application that analyses your listening tastes and connects you with bands you may not have heard of and with people with similar tastes to you.

A part of the Last.fm experience is the 'Scrobbler'. It basically sits there while you listen to music and sends information to your Last.fm profile - it only sends deatails of tracks that you listen to a certain percentage of though so that you can skip through the rubbish.

Anyway, I primarily listen to music on my phone (HTC Touch Pro2), so these haven't been getting 'scrobbled'. Today I stumbled across an app though... the 'Pocket Scrobbler'.

The Pocket Scrobbler will work offline too and only send data when you want it too. Brilliant!

Check it out at http://sourceforge.net/projects/pocketscrobbler/ - I decided to try the 1.8 beta... TinyURL is http://tinyurl.com/l3qrxw if you want to easily download it onto your device.

Web albums updated

I just got around to updating my online pics. This post has a couple of my favourites :-)

Lazy cat

Came home today to find the cat asleep in a rather unusual position.

Take a look at the pic!

Matt of the 'Mill

Matt (the assistant manager of the Windmill Tavern) is going to kick himself for reminding me of the attached photo :-D

I think it looks rather fetching ;-)