DIMW - Digital ImageMaker World

Life has been very busy recently, and my output on DIMI and here has suffered. But I’ve still been shooting.

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I just got back from a weekend at the beach and wanted to post one of the pictures I took, an IR shot with my converted 350D of the full moon over the bay at Portsea.

10 Seconds, f3.5 100ISO, 30mm focal length using a Canon 28-135 IS lens (IS off for tripod use)

My recent experiences and experimentations in photography have led me to reflect on photography as an avocation.
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Those expressed in the title are two extreme positions with regard to digital photography and related technologies. I believe both are wrong, and we will discuss in this article why.
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Here are a couple more night IR shots I took.

Enjoy.

See the MaxMax.com infrared photography competition on DIMi for a chance to win a camera conversion.

Tonight I was out testing the Pentax K100D for image noise and decided to try out my converted for IR (by MaxMax.com) 350D for some nighttime IR photography. I was impressed. The results are below.

This one even recorded some stars. 8 sec f3.5 and 400ISO

30 sec f5.6 100ISO

Same exposure

13 seconds f3.5 and 100ISO

I’ve been out and about testing cameras and lenses and generally having fun over the silly season.

Part of this has been bike rides on some of the great bike paths we have around Melbourne. Below are some pics I took yesterday with my IR converted 350D.

At the moment there is a joy of printers at my studio. My Z3100 is up and working and producing great prints as I get used to it. And I have the Epson 3800 in for review, also churning out prints at a rapid clip.

I’ve been printing a mix of color images and my latest infrared images (see some of them here) as either monochromes or subtle color images. The results from both printers are impressive, in both color and mono.

Happiness is having two great printers to play with

I’m excited. Over the last two days my Canon 350D that has been converted to infrared photography has arrived (see the first pictures with the converted infrared 350D here) and, today, my new HP Z3100 12-color 24″ wide printer has arrived. I have written elsewhere about my impressions of the Z-series printers from spending time with the development engineers in Barcelona (where HP develop their large format printers) but I have been looking forward to having my own here to test with my own images and to see what they are like to live with in day to day use.

I’ll be unpacking it tonight and getting into the testing of it probably over the weekend.

From Friday morning to Monday afternoon I was effectively off the Internet because of some stupid thing somebody at my ISP did (or rather their upstream connection out of Australia). It took some 10 hours on the phone over multiple calls and innumerable emails to solve the issue. The process illustrated some important things.

In my desperation to solve the problem I turned, as many would, to the wider community. In Australia there is this amazing web site called www.whirlpool.net.au. Whirlpool is a central site for finding out about broadband connections and has an active set of forums, including individual ones for the main ISPs. So I posted my problem there. They suggested using traceroute to see exactly what was happening to my attempts to access overseas web sites (only they were affected). These showed that international requests were getting lost somewhere in the ISPs system whereas local ones were not. I sent these to my ISP in emails and it was really these that started to get them thinking there was a real issue that was not to do with my computer. I also found a dialup Internet company that sold a block of hours (20) for a set price ($27). I signed up and thus could prove that with a different Internet connection I could access these same sites from the same computer that I could not using the broadband connection. This proved it was not something in my computer. I had also earlier used an Internet cafe to verify that the sites I was using as examples were up and working. Anyother key was finding out through the Whirlpool forums that for one of the sites I could not get to, others using the same ISP could not get to either. In other words I had to be a very active participant in diagnosing the fault and needed to do what I could to methodically eliminate possibilities.

So I guess the lesson from this is that you can’t be an uninformed user and expect your suppliers to do it all. They can, but it might take much longer than you would want it to be.