St George's Day Walk 2011

April 23 saw the annual St George's Day Walk in aid of Help for Heroes. Over 200 people walked the 5 miles from The Smiths Arms to the Windmill Tavern, Hand and Dagger, Sitting Goose, Saddle Inn and back to The Smiths Arms in order to raise over £2,000.

Photos from the day can be found on Flickr here.

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!)

Web albums updated

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

Straight from the 80s

It's like Gav knew that we were going to be going to the 80s bar and he dressed appropriately!

The EduGeek giant and his wine

Shaun (the EduGeek giant) struggled to drink his red wine out of a normal large wine glass

Picasa and Picasa Web Albums

I decided last night (whilst we performed miserably in the pub quiz) that I would post a few of my photographs to the web for all to admire.

The easiest way to do this was to use Picasa (which I already use to organise my pictures) which allows easy upload to Picasa Web Albums. After a few clicks, the job was done.

I've even added a couple of albums on the right hand side for you to enjoy if you can't be bothered bowsing all the way to http://picasaweb.google.com/ric.charlton.

Blakey had an accident!

Lol!

Playing with HDR

I've seen a few examples of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography lately and it looked pretty wicked... so I thought I'd have a bash.

I found a tutorial on Instructables that explained the process using the GIMP. This was the result using photos of some snowdrops in the dark.

Peter Griffin in 'The Club'

How surprised was I to find Peter Griffin from Family Guy sat at the bar in my local?

Amazing!

Dragonfly by the canal

This is the only pic I managed to get of the dragonfly I saw the other day... there was some random clicking going on as it shot past!

Anyway, this thing was huge.... I'm talking almost 6" from head to tail and the wingspan was easily more than that. Tom got a book out when I got home - as only he could - so that I could identify it and apparantly it's one of Britain's largest species.

The Ploughmans Challenge

So we ended up having a drink and Wayne announces that he has some crzy hot chillies and chilli powder. Out it comes and he loads up a 'ploughmans lunch' bar snack with a load. Every credit to Blakey for doing it!



After Chappy suggests that it's far too hard to do, I foolishly agree to have a go. I really should have known that Wayne would try to do me and I probably ended up with about three timesa as much of the hot stuff... and boy was it hot?!?



Anyway, I managed it... stealing Blakey's crown from him with ease :-D

More YouTube Entertainment

Here's another clip of the fun that Sambo and Blakey got up to over the weekend.

Sam has a dance in the Windmill

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see this - too busy selling Dave a 'puter. Anyway, Ollie sent me a video of the night's events for your viewing please ;-)

BTW - Ollie has a rubbish phone so sorry about the quality ;-)

Dancing in the dark in Salwick Club

Sorry about the poor quality but it was dark! It is still pretty funny though :-D

The things that people do at 11.30pm eh?

Blakey's Colar

No running away now Blakey!

EduGeek North '08 Conference Pictures

A selection of my pictures can now be found in my EduGeek.net albums at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/members/ric_-albums-edugeek-north-conference-2008.html - a few notes will be added soon (along with comments for the pics).

See if you can see Jenny the Horse too ;-)

A wildlife walk (trialing Google Docs)

I took another walk today to photograph some of the local wildlife.

My camera had decided to go off on one when on Aperture Priority mode which was a pain... everything was under exposed! :-(

Anyway, the wonders of shooting in RAW allowed me to rescue some images and I got some good ones later by switching to manual and keeping a better eye on the shutter speed.

I have decided to add a selection of images using a Google Docs presentation. Here goes ;-)