Good Luck, Marc V. & Patrice B. !!!

We'll all miss you. Hope we see you two soon!

Brazilian Influence

I was in a comparison of wikwblog & blogger (shortly after the tsunami traffic died) when I noticed something odd...

I had surfed 22 hrs straight, & seen nothing but Brazilian teenagers !!
I don't necessarily read Spanish, it was the pictures I had been interested in.
And there were lots of them...
They weren't all good...
The pictures were classic 'snapshots'...
They have more users than anybody else.

"American kids today, gotta' lotta' catchin' up, to do !!"

Happy Birthday TONI K

I miss you too buddy !!

Color Test

"Hey, I know that guy !" - seahawk

Actually, this is a color test to see just how fresh the saturation is after running through Picasa2 & Hello BloggerBot. The result has a bit more overall color intensity & has a slight wash. There seems to be an increase in the yellow component, the eye of the onion was a faint lime green in actuality. That's when comparing with the original, side by side. If you increase that component, the reds get richer, and your greens will be more pronounced. It's possible that the host is doing it on purpose, in order to achieve a greater satisfaction from photobloggers. It's more likely it's my camera. Maybe someone with a bit more technical savvy than I might explain a bit in the comments.
Actually, after considering that the image has traveled half way around the world, and posted to a server as a raw file, it looks great.

Tribal Relations

There has been a bit of friction in the photo jungle, of which I'm glad I'm not a part of. I've surfed & scanned a wide portion of the internet over the past two weeks, and I think I've found a pattern developing. Now, this is all based on my opinion which were formed by my independent observations. We shall proceed in chronological order...

First, we need to go back to the mid 60's.
My father, (who was alive until I reached the age of 7 years old) worked at the local airport full time. He also had a part time job in the evenings working at a prominent photo store during the height of the reign of Kodak at that time. My father had 5 or 6 cameras, only one of which was a Kodak. On some evenings, he would develop in the kitchen sink under a blanket. He took shots of airplanes on approach during his lunch breaks, Fast shutters on the then "new" modern films. I even knew what a bromide process was. He had a Pentax, a Hasselblad, even a big old clunky accordion-like Polaroid before they went entirely "One Step". There were foil bulb flash cubes & the later 8-way flat flash packs, so yes, I was there back in that era. The almost forgotten time when just seeing a lens meant an entire menagerie of photo support & resulting pile of trash.
The advancements of the 60's brought the refinements of the 70's, which in turn led to the very reason that we have the co-joined Konica Minolta, FujiPix, & Canon of today. The demands of business, not photography drove the technology of the 80's to produce scanners & copiers for the corporate world. Of all of the big camera makers today, Canon is probily the most illustrative example of this. Every product that Canon has made for the corporate world, they have managed to bring to the retail sector. Printers, scanners, copiers; They were first produced for the business sector, then made their way to the back of your PC.

And that brings me to the present diatribe...

The best example I ran into was in the customer reviews on Amazon.com for the new kid on the block, Panasonic's Lumix DMC-FZ20PP I doubt putting a link here makes any sense as Amazon will surely change things in the page over time. It all boils down to this. A lot of Cannon, Olympus, Minolta owners, seemed rather emotional in the defense of their favored brand. The cause of this effect is, well, elementary. That emotional response could be seen all over the web, in all kinds of sites. Just plain a lot of knocking & poking over the whole issue all directed at people who seemed to support the new camera. Panasonic made some very careful maneuvers in the production of this line of cameras, which is now I believe in its third year.
Panasonic is not known in the "beaten path" of the retail photo sector, and for that reason they attempted to meet the market's expectation in the product's features.

5MP for under $700 in a near full size ESLR like body form
12x Optical Zoom
Integrated Flash
Impressive Power Management from a very small battery
EIS
AE
AF with easy control
TIFF Ability & it even shoots video to QuickTime! ( Which I didn't even know until I used it )

But pretty soon the Canon tribe will find you and beat the jealous drums of envy, calling the other tribes to join in the attack.
I'll be playing with the ISO, Shutter, & F-Stop.
You'll let me know what you think when I post the pics!!