I have an old Canon 20D. I’m pretty happy with it, the large pixels behave well in low light conditions and it’s got reasonably comfortable handling. There’s just one thing that’s been really bothering me, and as far as I know, all the other cameras suck just as much as mine.
Exposure bracketing was implemented by someone who hates HDR, photographers, and humanity altogether.
I use continuous shooting mode (hold the button down and the camera keeps shooting as fast as it can until it chokes). First, I have to press the button and hold it for exactly the right amount of time to get three pictures. In the beginning, it used to give me a headache, but after some time I got used to it. It’s stil an inconvenience, but a rather minor issue.
There’s something I don’t get at all: Why do I even have to shoot more pictures to get more dynamic range?
If the wonderful RAW format had for example 32bit depth instead of 12 or 14, we wouldn’t need bracketing at all! You would just take the longest of the exposures, and the camera could record all the data without overblowing the highlights. Or, if that is too much hassle, it could make 3 “virtual” RAW files — by simply taking a snapshot of the sensor’s state at three different times during the single exposure.
Given the amazing feedback I’ve been getting here lately, I don’t expect an answer. But I do wonder — is there anything in the way? Or are camera manufacturers incompetent?
PS: Yes, HDR is an instrument of the devil. If you look at my recent pictures, you might see that I realized that aready. But sometimes, sometimes I like to go to the dark side…
On my way from Korea back to Europe, I had an amazing flight.
My original flight got cancelled. But Finnair quickly found a ticket with KLM for me. Direct flight to Amsterdam.
When getting the ticket I asked for a seat next to a window. I thought that the guy didn’t understand or care what I said. He seemed completely oblivious to my request.
But as you can see, I got the seat next to the window.
The weather was great. There were amazing clouds as we flew over the yellow sea.
This is somewhere in northern China. That’s what the flight attendant told me.
The Gobi desert.
Slightly cloudy.
Patterns. If you look closely you can see few roads down there.
I’m really happy with how these pictures turned out.
This flight, especially the amazing Gobi desert, was one of the strongest experiences in my life.
PS: You can view bigger versions of the pictures in my photo gallery. Also, check out my flickr photostream.
My blog is dead. Long live my blog!
My plans have changed. I am going to Korea for three months to study go. Then I’m going back to Amsterdam, almost moneyless, to begin the new life.
You can have a look at amazing amounts of new photos.
The EGC was mostly eneventful. After a promising first week, second week was a small disaster.
I am in Amsterdam now. I love Amsterdam.
Tomorrow, I’m flying to Korea. I was urged (by several people!) to put some info from Korea here — I will try not to disappoint you.
Good night.
LSG has ended. It was too short but a lot of fun. I’ve made about two bazzilion photographs, which I’ve managed to reduce to just 212. You are invited to see pictures from LSG 2009. They are mostly portraits, as I’m still in love with my Samyang 85/1.4 and I mostly refuse to use the kit 18-55mm lens.
You might be also interested in my gallery from Warsaw go tournament, or more generally in my pictures from the year 2009.
Again, I have no time to write much more, but hopefully all the pictures will keep you interested for a while. European Go Congress is coming up shortly, so I’m not getting a break in go nor in photography… And then — well, there’s time to slack off, travel, play go, make pics, drink vodka, and have fun, and then there’s time to work. Time to work is getting close, and to my own surprise, I’m sort of looking forward to it. 
I just finished reading Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas R. Hofstadter. I’ll wait for you to at least read the wikipedia description of the book.
Done? Ok… The main surprise for me was how many seemingly unrelated topics the book touches. Logic (Gödel), graphic art (Escher), music (Bach) to start with. But also mathematics, molecular biology, genetics, philosophy, zen buddhism, formal systems, artificial intelligence, programming, recursion and self-reference, various paradoxes, and much much more.
It is easily the best book I’ve ever read, although I can’t claim to have understood everything. If you want to borrow my copy, I’d be glad to help (the book is sort of expensive and really hard to get in Czechia).
I’ve wanted a DSLR for a while. At first, I wanted to buy an entry level camera like Canon 1000D, but after I found out that the price of a used Canon 20D (semiprofessional camera, about five years old model) was considerably lower than price of 1000D, I just had to buy it.
1000D has more megapixels, but that’s about where the advantages end. 20D is more sturdy, has better handling and controls, rubberized grip, bigger viewfinder, higher frameburst rate (5 shots per second) and better high iso performance.
I decided to buy two lenses (neither money nor space for more ). The first one was the kit 18-55mm with IS (maybe buying used lenses isn’t such a good idea… but hey — it was cheap). As the second one, I originally wanted to buy Canon 50mm f/1.8, but I wanted also a little longer lens (I already have 50mm covered by the kit lens) and after finding the new Samyang 85mm f/1.4 with manual focus, it was an easy decision. That said, I’m still fighting with getting the focus right (it is very very hard, as almost everything appears in focus in the viewfinder… I wish I had live view and could zoom in to get preview of focus).
I am really happy with the high iso performance. With Canon 20D at ISO 3200, the noise is somewhere between ISO 200 and 400 on my point & shoot Canon A590. Five shots per second is very useful whenever you are shooting something moving unpredictably (kittens!).
I hope I haven’t become an equipment-theoretician freak yet.
I was thoroughly bored with the previous theme, and although I tried to revive it with the new header image, it was still bugging me. So I created a new one.
I had a draft of a new theme lying around for quite a long time, so I made few adjustments to it: made the code much longer and much less clean. But it seems to work.
Features of the new design include, but are not limited to:
- big letters in headings (big letters rock)
- even less images (none, except the two links to flickriver, smilies and images in posts)
- half-fixed-width half-fluid design (the design is fixed width, but the sidebar is fluid — works well for many different widths of browser (800px — the sidebar isn’t displayed, it’s accessible through scrolling; 1024px — sidebar in one column, 1280px — two columns, more px — more columns (it is capped at three columns)))
- emphasis on typography (lists, blockquotes, etc. are styled properly)
- lines vertically in synch (left column, middle column and sidebar)
- the old color scheme, I mostly like it and more importantly — couldn’t find a better one at the moment
- justified text (I’m still very unsure here — justified looks way better, but left-aligned is more readable)
Bugs of the new design include, but are not limited to:
- IE6 sometimes messes up the sidebar, not quite sure why
- Opera doesn’t keep lines in synch when there are smileys (and I thought I had the solution, sigh…)
- IE doesn’t align the comment date in the comment list (will look into that later)
Also, I spent ages dealing with various bugs in IE that caused things to disappear.
One such bug caused the sidebar not to appear (it was an absolutely positioned element next to a floated element — don’t ever do that), another sometimes caused titles to disappear (they were relatively positioned, now that they are static it seems ok, but I have no idea why). When repairing the sidebar, I had to move it in front of the actual content in the markup, which is wrong and I know it. I am sorry to all lynx/links users out there.
Bug reports, remarks and suggestions are welcome! 
I first read Desiderata in Polish, at Letnia Szkoła Go. There’s a path that leads through woods. As you walk down, every few dozen of meters you encounter a slab with one verse on it. I found it hard to understand as my Polish wasn’t as great back then, but from what I understood I knew this was something special.
I thought it was just local folklore and so was surprised to find out that Desiderata was originally written in English almost one hundred years ago by Max Ehrmann.
Desiderata is a short prose poem, possibly the most powerful text I’ve ever read. Everytime I’m feeling down, angry, hurt, upset or desperate it brings instant calmness. Here’s a quote, one of my favourites:
If you compare yourself with others, you may become vain or bitter,
for always there will be greater and lesser persons than yourself.
–Desiderata
I felt an urgent need to print out Desiderata and cover the walls with it. As I haven’t used TeX for quite a while (a year or more?), this was a good opportunity to recall it a bit. You can download Desiderata (pdf) for printing.
The first time I saw square thumbnails (ie. thumbnails which are downsized and cropped to square) I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread.
The advantages of square thumbnails are obvious:
- they are really easy to align and never mess up your layout
- the layout will look more uniform and better than with irregular thumbnails
- they do not show everything so they invite the visitor to view the full sized picture
But there is a downside. Square thumbnails alter the composition of the picture. In some cases, when the photographer hasn’t thought much about composition, it can often actually improve the picture. But in other cases, when the composition is deliberate and well thought out, the square thumbnail can destroy it completely.
I use square thumbnails in my photo gallery (have you seen the pictures from my recent cross-country skiing trip?). And I keep wondering whether I should change it to normal thumbnails (normal = scaled down so as to fit into a given rectangle while preserving the aspect ratio).
Do you personally prefer photo galleries with square thumbnails (cropped) or with normal ones?
Many posts have been written on the topic of best free fonts. Therefore, I’d like to approach it differently.
Here, have a picture:
You should click on that picture to see the large version. And if your screen isn’t big enough and your browser thinks the image would look better downsized — your browser is wrong: click on the zoom button and view the picture in its original size.
As you can see, there are only 14 fonts. Surely there must be more quality fonts available for free? Yes, there are. This is a small selection of only the best of the best.
Now that you have the original picture open, let’s have a look at those 14 fonts (all available either in otf or in ttf):
- Antykwa Toruńska is a very original typeface created by Polish type designer Zygfried Gardzielewski in 1960. It was digitised by Janusz Marian Nowacki. The font contains many obscure glyphs (various diacritical marks, math symbols, etc.) and is available in light, regular, medium and bold versions, each of which has its own italics.
- Typo Latin Serif is a slab serif (egyptian) typeface with an extremely large x-height. It was created by a German type designer Manfred Klein.
- The DejaVu fonts are based on the excellent Bitstream Vera typefaces and extended by additional glyphs. They are well hinted so they preserve their onscreen readability even in small sizes.
- Palatino is a typeface by Hermann Zapf, a pioneer of computer typography. Palladio L is a free Palatino clone created by URW in cooperation with Hermann Zapf. You can download it in URW fonts pack (together with 79 other fonts).
- Gentium, a typeface for the nations by Victor Gaultney, extensive unicode support.
- Optima is another wonderful typeface by Hermann Zapf. You can download it as MgOpen Cosmetica.
- Bembo is a dynamic antiqua created by Francesco Griffo in 1496. The font Cardo, based on Bembo typeface, was created by David Perry.
- Vollkorn is an old style numerals featuring typeface which was created by Friedrich Althausen. Old style numerals own.
- Computer Modern is a Didone typeface created by professor Donald Ervin Knuth.
- Avant Garde by Herb Lubalin can be downloaded in the above mentioned URW font pack where it is known as URW Gothic L.
- Goudy Bookletter 1911 is a reincarnation of Frederic Goudy’s Kennerley Old Style by Barry Schwartz (funny thing, another Barry Schwartz… there is also Barry Schwartz the SEO and Barry Schwarts the psychologist from Paradox of choice). By the way, have I mentioned that old style numerals own?
- Helvetica by Max Miedinger. Perhaps the most famous and most abused typeface ever (seriously, fuck Arial). Helvetica isn’t any less awesome now than it was 50 years ago. This version was created by Magenta Ltd. and is available in the MgOpen pack as MgOpen Moderna.
- Geo Sans Light is a font by Manfred Klein, which is based on Futura, a geometric typeface created by Paul Renner in 1926.
- Garamond. The best serif typeface ever. For the third time, URW font pack.
The picture was created with Inkscape. Inkscape rocks. For anything that you think might be vector use Inkscape. Generally, GIMP for photo editing, Inkscape for everything else. It enables very easy manual kerning, and after you are done, you can convert the letters to paths (Bezier), and continue making changes (not sure whether that was clear — anyway go and try it out ).
Ah, I almost forgot — you can get the SVG source file (already converted to paths, as I don’t suppose you have all the fonts installed).
Got other excellent free fonts? Feel free to leave a comment!
