That did not stop me from taking photos each day, I took more photos in the ten days Angie was in hospital than the two months before. The photos were all of the dogs, which I would take into hospital to cheer her up (and it worked). Even after Angie got out, I still manage to take photos almost everyday. I just did not get round to posting them. Even after I got back to work, I was taking photos every day, then I realised that I need to select some 60 photos, process them and post them.

With photos, I am a bit of a perfectionist, I want to display the best image possible. It would take me at around ten minutes a photo to select a photo, make adjustments and cropping in photoshop, before uploading the photos to flickr, zoomr or another service and then write the post. Without ten hours to spare I decided to halt the project and stop taking photos for a time.

It was not till I stop taking photos, I realised how forcing myself taking photos each day had changed my way of looking at the world, my observations skill had improved and I was noticing the little things.

The photoblog will return, I will make another attempt of a photo a day for a year, this time a financial year, starting July 1. And blue merle border collie fans need not worry, I am sure I can find an hour or two over the next couple of weeks to update Willow’s photo set on flickr.

The camera has severe limitations. There are only limited controls: exposure, colour temperature and two types of metering. There is no shutter speed warning under low light, photos taken in low light conditions are very grainy if not blurred, the flash is grossly underpowered. The ergonomics for a lefty with large hands are terrible. The shutter lag is annoyingly slow and the shutter click sound occurs after the photo is taken and processed by the camera, which is often 0.5 second or more after you take the photo. Which means trying to take action shots is a hit and miss affair.

The 838pro does take decent photos in good light of stationary objects. it is handy when no other camera is available, however, it is no replacement for even a basic point and shoot camera.

tagged Dopod 838pro camera phone

1. to encourage myself to take photos as often as possible and have a place to post them. this blog is not really the place to post photos,
2. to get a better understanding the Sandbox theme for WordPress for the redesign of this site,
3. to experiment with flickr, zoomr, picasa and other online photo apps and their APIs,
4. and to try to catch up to Kay on the number of blogs (all three are hers).

It is a pretty plain looking site, but I did that for a reason, the design should not take the focus of the photos.

I closed the blog done and removed it from the server, I was just not taking enough photos

So Simon has gone and gotten new toys to enthuse him to regularly take photos and use on his trip. That was enough encouragement for me to finally go get a new camera.

Well some time ago I said I was going to get a new camera to take everywhere with me. My Canon G2 is still a great camera and does everything I want, unfortunately weighing in at over 500g it is not a drop in the pocket and take everywhere camera. I started looking for a small digital camera that shot RAW format (very limited options) or had aperture priority (again very few options). In the end I decided size mattered more than those features and I was going to settle on a hopefully indestructible Olympus 720, until I walked into the camera store and saw the Samsung digimax i6, it was the size I wanted (tiny), has a three times optical zoom (all I need) and some cute tricks, it records video, audio, plays MP3s and even plays back movies (after converting anything Windows Media can play into Samsungs proprietary format on a Windows machine). So I have a new toy and it does do a decent job of taking photos, the Beaucott Buildings in Mt Lawley (there is something about type).

Update 7 Sept noon: I need to work on that photo, the camera might be responsible for a little oversaturation, but the sky was that blue, late in the afternoon. My main problem is the jpeg compression, I need a decent size photo and compressing it to 100k is causing the jagged edges.

Update 7 Sept 1400: Upgraded the image quaility (now 200k) to see if that fixes the problem.

Cause of a little sleep deprivation and a lack of blogging for the past fortnight. She is a very good puppy, active, inquisitive and a quick learner.

One the left is one of my favourite images I took early in my time as rock and roll photogragher, Tim Underwood of the Rosemary Beads in 1995. The photo on the right, was one of my last, Joe Algeri smashing his fake Rickenbacker in 1999. Between 1995 to 99 I went to a few hundred gigs and took some 15,000 photos using 35mm film and wrote reviews of most of those gigs for Bubblehead

My dark past out of the way, onto elastic design, if you change the size of the page, by either dragging your browser window or changing the font size. The photos remain proportional to the width of the page and font size (though with the use of SIFR you have to refresh the page to get the heading right). This is done by defining the image size in ems. I did that in the style sheet so that not matter which type of page you see the image on in this blog it will always fill the space.

The disadvantage, you are in the hands of browsers in the how the handled the resizing of the images, most do a good job, a few not so good. Plus you need to provide high quality images, for example the two used here are 40kb in size, if they were fixed size you could get away with 12kb images.