Wednesday, June 29, 2011

X100 first image

So the Fuji X100 arrived, and here is an early shot with it. Taken with lens wide open F/2.0 and +2 Exposure Compensation, ISO 800. I cropped, mirrored and scaled it in GIMP to make it manageable for the blog. I really like the soft focus with it, and the pleasant bokeh.

So you can expect a lot of nice pictures of Annelies soon. I guess I have to sign up for a flicker account now.

Batteries

Today, my Fujifilm X100 digital camera with an hybrid viewfinder arrived from Ontario. This fine piece of equipment comes in a jewelry box, no less. I'm very anxious to test it out, but am currently waiting for the battery to charge before I can begin flashing the firmware and then shoot my first picture. While my battery charges, I was looking into purchasing a second battery as backup. Shopping for batteries is a bit like shopping for an HDMI cable: there are huge price differences for the same model battery. Now with HDMI cables I know that the cheapest cable is just as good as the overpriced rip offs. With batteries, I actually do not know. Here are two pictures of the same NP95 battery. One costs $10 and the other costs $54. Should I get the original one from fuji? Or is the replacement battery just as good? Who knows. I do know that the Dutch consumer report 'de consumentenbond' once tested non-rechargeable batteries and found out that batteries from Ikea were by far the best buy you could make: lasted extremely long, and were really cheap. Certainly not a case of 'you get what you pay for'.

Friday, June 24, 2011

the 8th incarnation

The 8th incarnation of the little crane that could is imminent. I just uploaded v1.7 to Apple for review. It will support multi tasking so that progress in a level is not lost, if you switch apps. Also there is a new level, that lets you clean up flipped over police cars after a hockey riot. It should be in the app store soon, Apple normally approves updates in a week or so.

Monday, June 6, 2011

2007 called

It is so 2007, but hey, I just signed up for Twitter. You can follow me @BramStolk. My intended primary use is communicating with gamers that play the little crane that could. I will be using the hash tag #tlctc for this. What finally made me jump on the bandwagon was today's WWDC keynote announcing full integration of Twitter at OS level. I look forward to using iOS5 and OSX Lion, and of course the newly announced iCloud. I foresee exciting times ahead, and hopefully an imminent end to the monstrosity called Microsoft Windows.