03.23.08
Posted in Culture, Media, Modern Life at 9:52 pm by thomas
I’m a happy owner of a Sony eBook Reader and I’d like to share some of my thoughts after using the device for a few months now…
So first of all – happy, yes. I saw an very early version of the Sony eBook reader a few years ago in Tokyo in the Sony building and ever since had no doubt that I would own one of these whenever they become affordable and open enough for me.
The critical threshold was the introduction of the new 505 model late last year which removed many of the issues that I saw with the original device. It has a SD card slot and allows for the simple import of PDF and text files without the use of the Sony eBook store – which I assume is still as ridden with DRM as it was a few years ago.
I’ve been using it now for several months and I love it! The display is beautiful and the buttons are exactly where I want them. It’s very light and it very much looks like a device at home in the 21st century.
Since I’m on a Mac I use the open source libprs500 application to manage the files on the eBook and that is working like a charm. With a 1GB SD card I could probably easily store several thousand books on the device, so there is never again a worry about running out of something to read.
While I still read quite a lot of “real” books, the eBook is now my preferred reading material out and about in town, and in my mind it has become “The Book”.
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Posted in Photography at 8:34 pm by thomas
I shot this picture some time ago on a foggy night on Bush and Taylor here in San Francisco and once I got the developed film back I had a problem – the atmosphere of that night was one of cold, wet wind blowing through the streets. It was late and lonely out. But that camera – my Kodak Retinette 1A – has a lens that changes near everything into an orgy of color and the photo had lost all of the atmosphere that I had hoped for.
So this is one of the few cases where I had to go for some serious Photoshop adjustments to get what I wanted.
Photo taken with my Kodak Retinette 1A (balanced on a parking meter for the long term exposure) on Kodak Gold 200. Click for a larger version.
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03.17.08
Posted in Photography at 10:37 pm by thomas
In January we took a short road trip up along the coast to Gualala were we stayed overnight. It was a full moon night and we went out for a little photo experiment near Gualala at a small cove that overlooks Castle Rock and the rugged coast in this area.
The night was very bright with the moon out and the heavy rain clouds staying out on the ocean and we took some long time exposures with a tripod. What you see below was the most spectacular shot of the night – it’s Castle Rock at 30 seconds with wide open aperture and an ISO setting of 800 on our Nikon D80… at about 10 o’clock at night.
This was in fact the first shot at 30 seconds and we waited hopping from one leg to the other in the cold night, every breath creating clouds of moisture in the moon light. And when the picture finally popped up on the LCD monitor, we both couldn’t believe that this was the actual picture we had just taken! It looked too unreal to be true!
But there it is – you have to look at the large version (click!) to fully appreciate the racing clouds over the ocean in front of a starry sky, with the waves blurring into a milky haze in the foreground. Definitely not something you see every day…
[crossposted at MapSkip.com]
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