January 04, 2004
Progress
The reviews will keep on coming for another couple of days. While they're all written, I generally don't remember character and actor names well enough so I have to go through putting names in based on the IMDB (and adding the imdb links and poster shots) which takes some time. Plus I don't want to swamp my regular readers with reams of prose. About 16 movie and book reviews left to go.
In other news we got some snow over the weekend. About an inch fell here in Issaquah over the course of a couple of days. And it's so cold outside that it's staying around. The rest of the area didn't get very much. We drove over to Ballard to run an errand for Rachel today and there wasn't any snow to be seen west of Lake Washington.
Here's what downtown Issaquah and Squak Mountain looked like yesterday afternoon.
This picture was taken with my new Optio S4. I took a similar picture at each supported resolution. Click the thumbnail to see a 640x480 version (140kb) (same resolution as the max resolution on the Chameleon) Or for the bandwidth- or time-rich, click one of these other resolutions: 1024x768 (263kb), 1600x1200 (597kb), or 2304x1728 (1.36MB). These are all at the medium jpg compression level. These aren't the greatest test pictures, but they'll have to do for now. I plan to shoot at maximum resolution and shrink them to 640x480 for posting, so if I post a picture you'd like to see the original of, just give a shout.
Here's a few other pictures just for grins.
 | This is a 640x480 (ish) crop from a 2304x1728 original. That's Rosalind with the pointy finger and the pointy-haired finger puppet. |
 | This one and the rest are full frame 2304x1728 shrunk down to 640x480. (Well, the thumbnails are 120x90, but you get 640x480 if you click on them.) That's Rhiannon in the foreground with Rosalind and Caroline being read to by Uncle Jeff. |
 | Rosalind again. |
 | Macro mode shot hand-held with available light. |
 | This is using the camera's night-scene mode where it does a long exposure with a flash somewhere in the process so you get people as well as nighttime background. I set the camera on a picnic table to take it. Focus is bad in the full-size version. Might be from me moving around during the long exposure... |
 | Decaying corrugated plastic towing sign in Ballard. |
I'm really enjoying this camera's feature set. Especially entertaining is the movie mode. It takes 60-second clips at 12 frames per second (320x240, I think). But the big fun is the "high-speed" option that lets you do timelapse, stretching that 60 seconds out to 2, 5, 10, 20, 50, or 100 minutes. I shot a movie of the view as I walked to the hardware store the other day, I'd put it up here but it's about 8MB of AVI and you'd get seasick watching it with the high-speed amplification of my gait bouncing the camera around. If you're really bored, here's a 1.1MB clip of walking around our living room. I need to figure out a way to secure the camera to my handlebars for recording rides. Probably want some sorbothane or something in there to damp out any vibrations. Design suggestions accepted.
Posted by jeffy at January 4, 2004 10:47 PM