Updated Gallery to include RSS feeds. I’ve also added a dynamic album that shows the most recently added images, but I’ll be stuffed if I can figure out how the heck to include it as another front-page album. Still, it has a working RSS feed, even if no-one’s going to be able to find the damn thing.
I’m also about to roll Wordpress 2.2 out.
Just a quick post about some incoming search trends. I’ve had quite a few people hit my site looking for information about grey market cameras - here’s what I have to say.
The major camera manufacturers lock up each region around the world through exclusive wholesaler arrangements. So, if you want to buy a Canon or Nikon camera, you have to go to the (normally) single wholesaler who’s authorised to purchase from Canon or Nikon. Obviously, in these days of global trade and the Internet, their closest competitor is only a single click away. If you don’t like the prices they’re charging, you’re free to go to a vendor in the US, the UK, or wherever else.
To stop you from doing this, most local service arms will refuse to service or honour the warranty of models purchased overseas. It doesn’t matter if you bought a $2,000 camera in Singapore from an authorised vendor - their default position will be that because you bought it overseas, your warranty isn’t valid. Nice, isn’t it?
These imported models are called “grey market” cameras. They’ve been imported legally and are technically exactly the same as the models being sold domestically, but they aren’t recognised by the manufacturer. The primary advantage this gives them is that they can set prices in each region to be whatever they want. Canon and Nikon, for example, tend to charge approximately 50% more in Australia than in the US or most of Asia. On the other hand, Pentax is really cheap in Australia, but expensive in Europe. They’ll normally tell where the camera was purchased via the serial number of the bottom of the camera - Nikon varies the first number depending on which market the camera was intended to be sold in. Most retailers will provide domestic support of a foreign model as long as you purchased it in person overseas from an authorised vendor. Canon’s a bit of a prick about this one, apparently.
They argue that it ensures consistency of product, better consumer satisfaction, and so on, but it’s bullshit. It’s basically a form of price discrimination.
So why go grey market? It’s often bloody cheaper (hundreds of dollars in many cases). Why not? You normally lose local warranty support and may have difficulties getting your camera serviced later on. Bear in mind though that this isn’t necessarily the end of the world - most cameras only come with a one year warranty anyway, and there are other service centres that really don’t care where you bought the camera in the first place. Most reputable local retailers will also provide the warranty coverage for you (which they have to do by law), so if your camera breaks, they’ll take care of shipping it back and getting it fixed in the country or origin.
So, in a nutshell, the advantages of going grey market:
The disadvantages:
The two companies most people know of in Australia that deal with grey market cameras are PhotoBuff and D-D-Photographics. It’s up to each individual whether or not they want to take the risk, and I make no comment about the long-term reliability of either company. However, I believe PhotoBuff’s been around for about three years, and D-D-Photographics about five.
Now that I’ve picked up my AF Nikkor 50mm f/1.8D and 70-300mm f/4-5.6G lenses, how are they I hear you ask?
The simple answer? Surprisingly good. I paid only $179 AUD for the 70-300mm and $189 AUD for the 50mm, and for the price, they’re an amazingly good deal. I took them to the Melbourne Zoo on the weekend to see how they perform:
Bokeh is quite nice, and the 70-300mm is actually a decent macro lens. Not great, but decent. The reach on a 300mm telephoto on a digital SLR ends up being around 450mm, which is great for closeups. It’s not the sharpest lens around, and it does suffer from chromatic aberration, but honestly, for the price, it’s impossible to find anything even close to it. I’d love to get the 70-300mm VR version, or even better a 2.8 lens, but they’re at least five to twenty times more expensive. It really does work well only in good light though - I found my camera regularly ramping up to ISO 1600 in most situations, trying to maintain the 1/1000 shutter speed I was shooting at. So, a lot of the shots ended up being quite noisy. Honestly though, I don’t really care - I got the shots, which is far more important to me than a bit of noise.
The biggest downside with the zoom is that it’s just too darn slow to focus a lot of the time. That’s fine if you’re shooting a stationary object, but it’s really hard to lock onto something in flight. You need to plan your shot in advance, because if you don’t, you’ll miss it. Either that or use the manual focus - the shots of the lion were all manually focused through quite a dense a cage (the camera only wanted to focus on the mesh, not the lion):
Butterflies really are beautiful:
The 50mm has crazy depth of field and it’s fast to focus - shooting indoors isn’t a problem, as long as you’re willing to play with depth of field:
Overall, they’re both well worth buying. They’re a very cheap extension to the kit lens and have the advantage of covering a wide variety of additional shooting situations and compositions. The 70-300mm is easily outclassed by other zooms, but on the other hand, there’s nothing in the price range that’s even close from a functional perspective. I’m having fun, and that’s the important thing. 
Just for the hell of it, here’s a shot from a moving car through the window of the moon:
Now tell me that isn’t fun.
One of the upsides of too much travel is frequent flier points. They’re normally fairly useless given that they put you on the red-eye and / or make you book so far in advance that you can’t even be sure what’s going to be happening, but not all programs suck. International travel’s always pretty OK (even if you do have to leave at 3 am), and Virgin’s Velocity Rewards program actually has a real shop where you can trade in your points for free stuff (unlike Qantas, which has a shop but basically gives you a 10% discount in exchange for your points). As in, stuff like this:
Unfortunately, most of my music isn’t tagged. I didn’t bother when I ripped it - I simply used a directory structure to keep track of everything. Rather than have everything neatly organised by metadata, I have a file system that like this: Artist / Year - Album / TrackNumber - TrackTitle. It makes it very easy to find stuff through the file system, but it’s totally useless for stuff like iTunes, as I never entered the metadata. And, going back through and updating everything isn’t much fun. On the bright side, I’ve found the best program ever for this kind of stuff - MP3 Tag Studio. I actually found it a few years ago, but it’s still the best out there - it not only allows you to directly edit the tags, it’ll also let you recursively enter tag information by using rule-based file name interpretations. So, you define what the filename should look like, and it’ll pull the appropriate bits out of the filename and populate the relevant metadata. Nice.
Still, it’s a nice piece of hardware - I’m quite impressed. I still like my Creative Zen Vision W and use it most days at work as my jukebox, but they each fill a very neat little niche.
My first attempt at doing a high dynamic range (HDR) image. The D80’s great - very cool. Tell you what though, there’s so much functionality in there, I think it’s going to take me quite a while before using it’s second nature …
Nothing about Masters of Doom, unfortunately. Don’t have it with me, and it’s been long enough that I can’t remember the detail of what I read. What I do remember, though, is:
I’ve also finished the first trilogy of the Uplift saga. Absolutely brilliant books. The basic premise is that the five universes are filled with a variety of galactic-travelling species. Everyone was “uplifted” at some stage by another species, right back to the progenitors. Uplifting is a nice euphemism for “genetic modification” - species that show potential sentience and promise are genetically tailored by a sponsor species for greater intelligence and, depending on the sponsor, deliberate modifications to better serve their sponsors.
In this very ancient system waltzes the clueless wolflings, the human race. Without a sponsor, and beliveing that they evolved intelligence. This, needless to say, is extremely challenging for every other species, making humans totally unique. Humans would have rapidly been enslaved, were it not for the fact that they had already started the process of uplifting dolphins and monkeys.
The trilogy deals with, in turn, a murder mystery, the beginnings of a galactic war, and the impact of the galactic war on a single human / monkey planet. Very good books - what makes them even more interesting is that the epic story is actually background. There’s a massive backstory going on, but it plays second fiddle to the main, character-focused story. Very worth reading.
I’ve also almost finished The Devil Wears Prada. The short description is that it’s the coming of age story of a small-town girl who finds a job with the premier fashonista of New York. She’s idealistic and wants to write, but she ends up working as a gofer for the boss from hell with the promise of anything she wants once she finishes her time as the local punching bag. Not so impressed, really - too Jackie Collins / trashy for my taste. I liked the first few chapters, but unfortunately the next 15 or so are exactly the same as the first three. Best I can see so far, it has little to do with the movie. Unsurprisingly, I might add. I haven’t finished it yet, so I don’t know if she goes to Paris or not, but it doesn’t look like there’s enough book left to fill the story, so to speak. If she does, it’s going to be rushed. I noticed in the airport that she’s got another book out with a similar premise, but my guess is that it’s not really worth reading unless these types of books are your thing. Or unless you really get off on fashion and trendy New York / Sex in the City type stuff. Without the raunch.
While I stuck on the tarmac this morning waiting for the lightning storms to die down so the unions would walk out on the runway and load the damn airplane with our baggage, I also read half of Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman. Basic backstory is that the protagonist is the son of Anansi, the spider manifestation of ancient myth. Think the Trickster of the American Indians, Loki of the Norse, or Bre’re Rabbit of Disney. He finds out he has a brother who got the godly powers while he got … well, nothing really. His brother comes back into his life and hijinks ensue as he finds out his brother is a far better him than he is, right down to sleeping with his fiance who was holding out until marriage. Quite a painful book, in a good way - it’s well written, it’s creative, it’s funny, and it’s very emotionally cutting at times. He sees his fiance falling into bed with his brother, the god, at one point, crushing his heart, but the only problem is that his brother won’t let him back into the apartment, so he wanders around the neighbourhood for hours trying to find his own apartment but getting lost every time. Eventually he calls a cabbie, who treats him like an idiot, as his apartment is only around the corner. About eight hours later, they both give up and buy some bacon and eggs in a local diner. I’m only half-way through, but it’s a good book. Again, worth reading.
Not sure what I’m going to read next, really. I started reading the Mars trilogy - might go back and finish those. Wasn’t really gripped though, to be honest. Harry Potter’s out soon, which I’ll have to get. One can’t not know whether Dumbledor’s really dead or not, after all.
I’ve got a few other books on the shelf ready to go, but I’ll probably pick up the second Uplift trilogy next. I already have the second book, just not the first or third. The other ones to read are the Quicksilver series by Neal Stephenson. I’m about 2/3 of the way through the first, and I’m seriously looking forward to the story actually starting in book two. Looks like it may be time for another trip out to the used book store, really.
Damn good article about Ken Kutargi, creator of the PlayStation and pronouncer of madness:
http://www.eurogamer.net/article.php?article_id=75805
Talks about his life, his career, and his relationships within Sony.
Worth a watch (goes for about half an hour, split over three clips):
http://kotaku.com/gaming/clip/clip-shoko+tan-explains-otaku-in-private-lesson-247255.php
Somewhat of an insight into one of the more famous Japanese subcultures, the Otaku. Similar to the cracker / hacker difference people have tried to make. Rather unsuccessfully, I might add.