Photography

If you use a telescope for astronomical observation or astrophotography, or a camera for night scenes, such as the aurorae, star trails, and the like, you must have experienced dew building up within an hour or less.

The BBC has a very nice slide show titled: In the eyes of Saudi Women. Worth watching ...

This article discusses how good video footage is being shot by amateurs. The following high quality macro videography is what caught my eye.

Ants and Bees from youdiejoe on Vimeo.

Hover flies, Bees, and more, camel spider and mantis from Lucasberg on Vimeo.

If you want to buy a new digital camera, it is best to check the reviews from more than one web site first.Here are sites that do these reviews on a regular basis.

• Digitial Photography Review. Founded by a Phil Askey, professional photographer. The site has in depth reviews of digital cameras and other products related to digital photography. Its main focus is the high end pro and pro-sumer cameras. Recently, the site hired other reviewers and started to look at mid and low end cameras as well.
• Steve's Digicams.
• DC Views.
• Imaging Resource.
• DC Resource.

One often needs photos for web sites, or other projects that require photos. Here are some free stock photo sites that have a wealth of subjects.

• Yotophoto. This site runs Drupal, an Open Source project I am involved in, and categorizes photos from other free stock photo sites. It uses tags.

As I mentioned in a pervious post in this section, for almost four years now, I have been using a FujiFilm FinePix 2400Z camera, which is a basic point and shoot consumer oriented camera with 3X optical zoom, and 2 megapixel resolution.

This camera allowed me to take some good pictures over the years. However, it was time for an upgrade, now that the technology is more mature, and for the same price point, one can get more features. Specifically, I wanted a more powerful zoom that can give better framing and get closer to subjects, specially wildlife. I also wanted more manual control of various features.

Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii (or Gorsky) (1863-1944) was a Russian photographer that offers a vivid visual portrait of the Russian Empire at its height, and more importantly, the architecture, the scenery and the people of the lands that constituted this empire, including the Caucasus region, and Central Asia.

This page is sort of a chronicle on my adventures in photography over the decades.Currently, I do not do much in photography, apart from the usual family stuff, and some interesting things I find, such as flowers, nature scenes, and the like.The first camera I owned was a 35mm Minolta Uniomat II from around 1960, which I inherited from my late father. It was a range finder type, with a match needle exposure meter built in, and of course nothing automatic.

I have an extensive photo album that I started in Ontario, Canada in spring 2001. It is available for viewing, and contains many pictures of myself, my kids, scenes from Canada, wildlife, plants, flowers and much more.