Blågg

Festival of Light

Festival of Light (Bergen 09) from Stian Eikeland on Vimeo.

Fløibanen fisk

Filmet litt med den her Pentax K-7 saken, her er fløibanen med fisheye (da10-17)

Fløibanen – Fisheye ride. from Stian Eikeland on Vimeo.

Some masters stuff..

Vimeo video..

Dra til sjøs.. Piratkart, det er fali det..

Så et par skikkelig latterlige påstander før jeg dro på ferie, men har ikke hatt tid til å kommentere dem før nå.. sjøfartsdirektoratet advarte nylig i aftenposten mot bruk av piratkopierte sjøkart på GPS.

“Folk laster ned sjøkart fra nettet, og ofte er det snakk om digitale kopier av godkjente kart. Disse kan være svært unøyaktige,” skal visstnok en luring i sjøfartsdirektoratet sagt. “Med et piratkopiert kart nedlastet fra internett kan GPS-en gi beskjed om at man er midt i et sund, mens man i virkeligheten kan være 10, 50 eller 100 meter nærmere land.”

Piratebay senker skip.. bokstavlig talt..

iPhone Battery

My iPhone is almost 2 years, and I’ve been starting to notice it’s declining battery performance. I’m leaving for vacation soon and it sucks having to look around all the time for a place to charge your mobile when traveling, so I decided to get a new one. Found a cheap replacement on ebay, about $5-6 including shipping from china.. It probably suck, but I want to get a better (larger capacity than original) later anyway – when I have time to look around and do some research.

Got the battery yesterday, and put it in today.. Opening an iPhone is a bitch! Apple sure made this hard..

Instructions for opening the iPhone.

The battery is also soldered to the mainboard, so you have to desolder the old wires before removing the old battery. And then solder the new one in place (watch out so you don’t short the red wire with the others – apparently this type of battery doesn’t handle that well..). The new battery seems good so far, it’s still at 100% after several hours, just waiting for it to go nuclear and blow up..

All hail the mighty Apple!

Just a small blog post while my old iPhone is updating to the 3.0 software. Even though the title is a joke, I have to say that the iPhone is one of the tech gadgets that have given me more value for my money than anything else. I bought it almost two years ago for just over 2000 NOK (imported from the US), probably one of my cheapest mobiles ever. It’s been updated several times over those two years, and not only small fixes, it’s been getting major feature-updates regularly.. I don’t think any other cellphone company have continued to give their firmware new features two whole years after the release. The device itself feels almost as cutting edge still as it did two years ago (even though I miss things like 3g support, etc..). If I break my iPhone today, then there’s no doubt what I would buy tomorrow.. a new one (or more likely wait a week and get the 3G S).

If it only was more open.. and Apple wasn’t that asshat about their app store restrictions.. It would probably be the perfect cell phone.. But I hope Android gives it a run for it’s money (competition drives the market)

Visibility techniques..

Playing with some visibility techniques, trying to keep some contextual information based on the local curvature to improve depth perception.

Gecko from Stian Eikeland on Vimeo.

Pentax k-m / k2000

Sorry Håvard, you can just skip this one, it doesn’t feature any arrows showing which direction electrons travel :p

I bought a new DSLR body not long ago, a pentax k-m. It’s a rather cheap 10MP entry-level dslr, going for as low as 3600 NOK new here in Norway – I gave around 2800 NOK for it in the UK. So, what can this “toy”-camera do? Most of what the bigger brothers k10d/k20d can do actually. Here are a few of my own experiences with it..

Pentax k-m with da 21mm limited on flickr (cdehaan):

What have they stripped from it’s much larger bigger brothers – k10d/k20d: Weather sealing (you can’t bring it with you into the shower like the k10d), size, weight, top lcd, selectable focus point (and the red dot focus indicator in the view-finder), front wheel, Tav and bulb mode, cable trigger, and probably a few other non-important things. Quite a few of these could easily have been left on and still kept the cost down if you ask me, especially things that are mostly in software.

Even though the camera is quite light, it still feels very solid – not as solid as the armored and sealed k10d (which probably could crush someones skull without getting a scratch), but much more solid than other cameras in the same class. The grip is also smaller, but I don’t find this a problem, especially with lighter lenses. I even manage to wield something like a DA*16-50, anything larger than this though is a bit uncomfortable and looks comical. This camera thrives on smaller primes, something like pentax’ limited series (pancakes) would rock. Normally I keep my FA50/1.4 on it.

So, how is it in use..? quite good actually! Even though it lacks some features, I don’t really miss them much – maybe with the exception of the front wheel (especially when shooting manually). The autofocus is quite fast for a pentax (probably the fastest of the family) and doesn’t hunt as much as my k10d. What I do miss though is the screen – it could just be a feeling – but I like the LCD on my k10d better than the k-m’s. It just doesn’t seem as good in daylight.

Ok, so what’s the image quality like? From iso 100-800 it’s quite good, and goes a bit downhill at 1600-3200. A sample taken at iso 200 can be seen below, this is using a DA* 16-50/2.8 lens. It might not be fair to display samples taken with a lens that costs twice as much as the camera itself, but I think it really shows that if you have a limited budget it’s better to put your cash on the optics than on the camera – unless you really need all the extra buttons and frills that comes with a more high-end house. Besides, a limited lens / prime will probably give you even more sharpness than this at a lower price.

1:1 crop of the above image:

Other cool points about about the k-m.. it features in-house shake reduction, you barely even get a lens with IS/VR from other brands for the same amount of money as this camera. It uses the k-mount, which means that you use k-mount lenses going back as far as the 1970s – and get shake reduction for them. Even older lenses (M42) can be used with an adapter. Battery-life is surprisingly good, it uses normal AA-cells, and the batteries that came with the camera lasted me many weeks (3-4) and well over 1000 shots. It has some sort of dynamic range function, which seems to give better details in the shadows, I haven’t really used this much, and no-one really seems to know what it actually does. It has a dust-removal system (shakes the sensor) and also a system for dust detection. It supports SDM, for lenses with built in focus-motor. Menu system is quite good, and if you are a beginner – a help button explains everything for you. This help button can be reconfigured to other things if you don’t need it. All buttons (except flash-up and af/mf) can be operated using the right-hand while holding it.

If it wasn’t for rather low high-iso performance and the crippled 5-point (non selectable) focus system, I think this camera would completely wipe the floor with the competitors in the same price class (it still does on many points). They are all very good, so it’s only small differences that count. The K-m has some really good sides, but they shouldn’t have crippled it as much as they did if they wanted it to be the best entry-level camera on as many fronts as possible.

But, of course, to quote sveinmb, “it sucks goatballs” – because it doesn’t say nikon or canon anywhere on the body :p