3.3.13
22.11.12
My experience with the FujiFilm x100
I doubt that I'll make a habit of writing camera reviews on this blog, but I've had a few thoughts on the Fuji x100 recently that I'd like to share.
I bought the x100 back in February of 2012, which is when I'd say I was just getting seriously back into photography, after a 5 year break. I looked around and researched quite a bit before I made the purchase. I was very close to buying a Canon 550d before a friend of mine, who had recently gotten rid of his SLR and replaced it with an x100, pointed it out to me. I instantly liked the look of the thing, and I would stand by that now. It's a beautiful little camera. After purchasing it, I was delighted at how similar the manual controls were to the Yashica SLR that I'd used since I was young. In fact, to start with, I'd always have it in completely manual mode.
This brings me to the first negative point I would make about this camera; I find that in fully automatic mode, 1 in every about 5 shots is either out of focus or not exposed correctly. I find it especially hard to get it to focas on objects closer than about 2 meters when in auto focus mode. For this reason, I found I was having to switch back and forth quite a bit between manual and automatic focus. Compare that to my Leica, which of course doesn't have any auto focus, you lose that whole annoyance. You know the functionality isn't there, so you always focus manually and get on with it. In all fairness, this may stem from the fact that I have never really used automatic focus until this camera, so maybe I am just not used to it.
Going back to the good points, I was very impressed with the photos that the camera was producing when I was able to get the exposure and focus correct. The colours are beautiful and I'm happy with the look that the little 23mm lens gives the photos, and the 12 megapixel sensor seems more than enough for nice sharp images.
The other major good point about this camera is the silent mode. In silent mode, you can take photos with pretty much zero sound from the shutter. It's even more silent than my Leica. This is essential when taking the kind of photographs that I normally take. It's so silent, that some people actually questioned whether I was even taking any photos!
My last negative about this camera is the price. I paid around £750 when I bought this camera new, and I would say that is a bit over priced for what is essentially a compact camera.
Overall though, I think this is an excellent little camera. I really like the styling, (even if it is just a Leica look-a-like) and the photos it produces are great.
I bought the x100 back in February of 2012, which is when I'd say I was just getting seriously back into photography, after a 5 year break. I looked around and researched quite a bit before I made the purchase. I was very close to buying a Canon 550d before a friend of mine, who had recently gotten rid of his SLR and replaced it with an x100, pointed it out to me. I instantly liked the look of the thing, and I would stand by that now. It's a beautiful little camera. After purchasing it, I was delighted at how similar the manual controls were to the Yashica SLR that I'd used since I was young. In fact, to start with, I'd always have it in completely manual mode.
 |
| Upfest, Bristol, UK - Taken on the Fuji x100 |
This brings me to the first negative point I would make about this camera; I find that in fully automatic mode, 1 in every about 5 shots is either out of focus or not exposed correctly. I find it especially hard to get it to focas on objects closer than about 2 meters when in auto focus mode. For this reason, I found I was having to switch back and forth quite a bit between manual and automatic focus. Compare that to my Leica, which of course doesn't have any auto focus, you lose that whole annoyance. You know the functionality isn't there, so you always focus manually and get on with it. In all fairness, this may stem from the fact that I have never really used automatic focus until this camera, so maybe I am just not used to it.
Going back to the good points, I was very impressed with the photos that the camera was producing when I was able to get the exposure and focus correct. The colours are beautiful and I'm happy with the look that the little 23mm lens gives the photos, and the 12 megapixel sensor seems more than enough for nice sharp images.
The other major good point about this camera is the silent mode. In silent mode, you can take photos with pretty much zero sound from the shutter. It's even more silent than my Leica. This is essential when taking the kind of photographs that I normally take. It's so silent, that some people actually questioned whether I was even taking any photos!
My last negative about this camera is the price. I paid around £750 when I bought this camera new, and I would say that is a bit over priced for what is essentially a compact camera.
Overall though, I think this is an excellent little camera. I really like the styling, (even if it is just a Leica look-a-like) and the photos it produces are great.
5.11.12
25.10.12
24.10.12
...and we're back in
After many years of neglect I'm resurrecting this blog. It's now going to be somewhere I can publish my photographs. I do currently publish to flickr a lot, and of course my main website, adamcheasley.com, but I keep these pruned of any photos that do not stand the test of time. This blog will be more of a dumping ground and will probably be updated more often than flick and my main website.
I doubt I'll write much more here, as I'm not much of a writer. I'll let the pictures speak for themselves.
31.10.07
Redesign
At last I finally got round to redesigning the site. I'm in the process of pulling all the bits and pieces into line so it all fits together nicely. For now, the main page and this blog are fitting together nicely. Enjoy.
3.5.07
Quicksilver
Quicksilver is " A unified, extensible interface for working with
applications, contacts, music, and other data." I have been using it for a little while just as an application launcher but in the past week I've really unlocked some of it's power just by tweaking the preferences and installing a few plug-ins. I thought it would be a good idea to document these somewhere, my opensourcemacintosh blog would usually be the place I do this but as I'm not totally sure that quicksilver is 100% open source so I thought I would record it here.
First off, the basics:
The easiest way to get into quicksilver is to use it as an application launcher, which it can do very easily with the default settings. Simply, download and install and go through the set up process. Once quicksilver is running you can then evoke it with a quick key combination. I believe the default is control-space bar but for some reason, I changed this to alt-space bar...I forget why. Once you have quicksilver visible you will notice that it has two panes. If you go ahead and start typing the name of the application you want to launch, it will guess what you wish to run. Once you have typed enough to be able to see the application you want to launch, you can simply press return. Boom, your application is launched. This saves all that unnecessary mousing around to find the app in the finder.
Some other simple actions it can do are browsing and launching of files. If you start typing the name of the folder you wish to access in the first pane you can then navigate back and forth through subfolders using the arrow keys. Once you have found the file you want you can launch it. Not only this, you can use the second pane to perform a plethora of other actions to the file e.g. move it, copy it, get info, move it to trash and loads more.
Now where it starts to get even more interesting is when you start adding AppleScript into the mix. You can write AppleScripts and by placing them in Library > Application Support > Quicksilver > Actions folder, you can access these in the second pane too.
An example of this that I implemented was a script to send some text to twitter, although this script I downloaded from the internet.
This leads me on to another useful feature, which is using the full stop button. If you evoke quicksilver and press the full stop button you can then type text directly into the first pane, then using the second pane do a wide variety of actions to it. One useful action is adding this text to an iCal event or to do, although you do have to make sure this plug-in is installed.
I have still only scratched the surface here. There are quite a few good blogs out there for more tips and tricks, one that springs to mind immediately is 43 folders by Merlin Mann. Also the quicksilver built in docs are very useful.
All in all this application can increase your work flow tremendously. I will hopefully post some more tips as and when I come across them.
applications, contacts, music, and other data." I have been using it for a little while just as an application launcher but in the past week I've really unlocked some of it's power just by tweaking the preferences and installing a few plug-ins. I thought it would be a good idea to document these somewhere, my opensourcemacintosh blog would usually be the place I do this but as I'm not totally sure that quicksilver is 100% open source so I thought I would record it here.
First off, the basics:
The easiest way to get into quicksilver is to use it as an application launcher, which it can do very easily with the default settings. Simply, download and install and go through the set up process. Once quicksilver is running you can then evoke it with a quick key combination. I believe the default is control-space bar but for some reason, I changed this to alt-space bar...I forget why. Once you have quicksilver visible you will notice that it has two panes. If you go ahead and start typing the name of the application you want to launch, it will guess what you wish to run. Once you have typed enough to be able to see the application you want to launch, you can simply press return. Boom, your application is launched. This saves all that unnecessary mousing around to find the app in the finder.
Some other simple actions it can do are browsing and launching of files. If you start typing the name of the folder you wish to access in the first pane you can then navigate back and forth through subfolders using the arrow keys. Once you have found the file you want you can launch it. Not only this, you can use the second pane to perform a plethora of other actions to the file e.g. move it, copy it, get info, move it to trash and loads more.
Now where it starts to get even more interesting is when you start adding AppleScript into the mix. You can write AppleScripts and by placing them in Library > Application Support > Quicksilver > Actions folder, you can access these in the second pane too.
An example of this that I implemented was a script to send some text to twitter, although this script I downloaded from the internet.
This leads me on to another useful feature, which is using the full stop button. If you evoke quicksilver and press the full stop button you can then type text directly into the first pane, then using the second pane do a wide variety of actions to it. One useful action is adding this text to an iCal event or to do, although you do have to make sure this plug-in is installed.
I have still only scratched the surface here. There are quite a few good blogs out there for more tips and tricks, one that springs to mind immediately is 43 folders by Merlin Mann. Also the quicksilver built in docs are very useful.
All in all this application can increase your work flow tremendously. I will hopefully post some more tips as and when I come across them.
10.1.07
Open Source Mac
Recently I watched a film that really got me thinking about my computer and the software I run on it. The film was called Revolution OS and is about the free software movement, Linux and open source. For a few years now I have been a user of open source software e.g. Firefox being the most well known.
Although I have never actually used the source code to make any changes and I've never been invloved in the improvement of any piece of open source software by contributing myself, I really like the idea that the opportunity is there.
I've been thinking more and more about this and I may even start up a seperate blog to post about this. Until I decide, here's a good site to get into some of the programs available for Mac computers (my computer of choice). Visit Open Source Mac.
Although I have never actually used the source code to make any changes and I've never been invloved in the improvement of any piece of open source software by contributing myself, I really like the idea that the opportunity is there.
I've been thinking more and more about this and I may even start up a seperate blog to post about this. Until I decide, here's a good site to get into some of the programs available for Mac computers (my computer of choice). Visit Open Source Mac.
20.12.06
Steam skate
This was a film made by Tim Crawley for his DVD magazine called insitu. The three skaters are Jack Rowles, Jay McKissock and myself. The driver of the steam car is Grant Gould and that car is his own which he built from scratch!
This was a really fun film to make. Enjoy.
Bye bye navbar
After a little searching I've found the solution for getting rid of the navbar. I found it here at this gentlemans blog. Perfect.
All new blogger
So I decided to move my blog over to the 'all new' google blogger that is now out of beta. It seems as if they've got some nice features now e.g. the introduction of tags, which I will think about getting into. The first thing that I didn't like though was that my little snippet of CSS to hide the top blogger navigation bar seems to have been disabled.
I was using this CSS;
#b-navbar { height:0px; visibility:hidden; display:none }
But this appears to no longer work. If anyone knows of a new fix then please let me know.
I was using this CSS;
#b-navbar { height:0px; visibility:hidden; display:none }
But this appears to no longer work. If anyone knows of a new fix then please let me know.
18.12.06
Updatable content
It's getting more and more difficult for me to keep the main Someplace nice site up-to-date with my recent work. Therefore I'm going to try to post more snippets of work up here. I am also going to try out some new design ideas here before I try them on the main site so be prepared for some layout and colour changes in the coming days.
11.12.06
Oomph widget 1.1
The Oomph widget now includes it's own icon (for the widget menu) and clicks through to the Oomph website. Download it here.
8.12.06
Oomph widget
I've been working recently on how to creating widgets for the Mac OSX dashboard. I've discovered that the main languages used are XHTML, CSS and JavaScript so I was able to pick up the basics quite quickly.
I've managed to create a widget for Oomph. At the moment it's just a logo but I'm hoping to add RSS functionality into it soon. You can download the widget here.
I've managed to create a widget for Oomph. At the moment it's just a logo but I'm hoping to add RSS functionality into it soon. You can download the widget here.
1.11.06
Processing
Yesterday I downloaded the Processing software once again. This is something I used to use a lot when I was at Uni but I haven't played with it for a while.
If you're unfamiliar with Processing it's basically a tool for teaching programming to designers and artists. Well actually it's so much more than that. It is extremely easy to get your head round the language and start making 'sketches' within a very short space of time.
I'm hoping to get some of my sketches up in the play section of Someplace nice very soon.
If you're unfamiliar with Processing it's basically a tool for teaching programming to designers and artists. Well actually it's so much more than that. It is extremely easy to get your head round the language and start making 'sketches' within a very short space of time.
I'm hoping to get some of my sketches up in the play section of Someplace nice very soon.
5.10.06
Dark ages
This is a map of dark ages Britain that I built from my creative director for a war game he is running. It was interesting to see what England looked like back then.
Update to SPN
I've updated someplace nice yet again. The site just wasn't working for me anymore and I was unhappy with the secondary navigation.
The new site is a lot simpler and lets the work take the focus.
The new site is a lot simpler and lets the work take the focus.
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