Impulses

A New Toy, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I went to the camera shop today to buy a new camera bag. I had been considering the Lowepro Slingshot 200AW or 300AW but wanted to know if it would fit the camera and a 70-200 f/4 lens that I don't own yet. I posted a question on a Flickr forum and decided to just do what one poster suggested and go and look at a real bag. Imagine that! So rather than doing what I normally do and ordering off the internet I ventured into my local camera shop, Photo Optix in Guildford.

In the camera shop, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I was impressed by the staff as they were very helpful and let me mount a lens from the shop to make sure the bag was big enough. The Slingshot 200 was too small so I opted for the Slingshot 300.

As we were testing the kit fitted into the bag I asked when the new Canon 450D is going to be launched as I had been planning to upgrade my 400D if the reviews were any good.

The girl in the shop asked why I did not not want a 40D. I said that I almost bought one a few months ago but could not justify it because of the price. She then told me that the 40D had just been reduced by £100 and that there was a further £100 cash back from Canon, making a total of £200 less than the price of the body if I had bought one 2 weeks ago.

Doing the sums showed that the 40D was only £50 more than the 450D and available now. Well, the rest is history...

I now have to relearn how to photograph again so don't expect any good pictures for a while whilst I work out how to get the camera to do what I want it to!

Ski Extreme Team!

La Thuile Ski Extreme Black 3, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I have just come back from an excellent skiing holiday in La Thuile, Italy. A great range of slopes and for the most part of the holiday great snow.

One of the highlights of La Thuile is two black runs that come down the right hand side of the mountain. The imaginatively named "Black 2" and "Black 3". We spent most of the week going down Black 2 a few times a day as it was challenging enough but not too hard. One highlight of Black 2 was the last stretch that we dubbed "the ski jump" as it was very steep and if you got there early enough in the day you can schuss all the way down from the top.

I actually invented a new style of skiing on Black 2 ski jump, I call it "back surfing". It was not technically skiing as such as it involved going down the slope head first on my back with my skis in the air! I had decided to put in one last turn before schussing and lost my balance. I ended up on my back going down the steep slope, in order that I did not have to face a walk back up to retrieve any skis that came off I put my feet in the air to stop the skis catching and coming off. This had the interesting effect of stopping all braking and I ended up coming all the way down on my back. When I stopped laughing I stood up and carried on!

Whilst we did Black 2 quite a few times we were put off by Black 3 by the sign at the top that indicated the steepest part was 73% and that the run featured in world cup skiing events. Eventually we plucked up courage on our last day and Chris, Pat and I headed down Black 3. It was steep but not as steep as we had imagined it would be.

When we got back, Pat pointed out that a 100% gradient was only 45 degrees and so therefore a 73% gradient was only 36 degree slope. So there started the mystery: Just how steep is a 73% slope...?

Theory 1 – Height change by vertical distance

A 73% slope implies a drop of 73 meters every 100 meters. Going back to basic trigonometry the angle of the slope is the arctan of the opposite over the adjacent. So this makes the angle of the slope a mere 36 degrees. Hardly “ski extreme” is it?!

Theory 2 – Vertical distance by height change

In desperation I decided they must have measured it wrong and so decided to swap the lengths over. This makes the angle of the slope 56 degrees. This is certainly more "ski extreme" but I cannot find any evidence of anyone ever measuring a slope this way round.

Theory 3 – Height change by distance travelled

Looking for additional help I remembered about the UK La Thuile fan site LaThuile.co.uk. On the site it says:

"If you have any questions about La Thuile then email and we'll see if we can help."

So I thought it is worth a go and sent an email off. A few days later I got an excellent email from Woody the site owner with some text from a site about road gradients for cyclists. The site took a bit of time to get my head round it, but it says that road gradients are sometimes measured by the distance travelled by the height change. How you tell the difference I don't know!

Using the sohcahtoa mnemonic from school the angle of the slope is the arcsine of the opposite over the hypotenuse. So this makes our angle 47 degrees.

Looking at the scale diagram that looks more realistic but it does not look that steep either.


So, I am still none the wiser - I suspect that theory 3 is correct though it still does not look as steep as I remember it. I have emailed off to the La Thuile visitor information people but am still waiting for a reply.

I know this, next time I go skiing I am taking some sort of GPS with me!

Here is the Black 3 subset of the extreme ski team: Chris, me & Pat.

Black 3, originally uploaded by Me (?).

PicLens: Cool Internet Picture Browser

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I was genuinely wowed this morning when I stumbled across PicLens. It is a full screen picture reader that works with Flickr, Google Images, Yahoo! Image Search, etc, etc.

In one line it is: Cover Flow for Internet images.

It is also bloody cool!

Once installed (into Firefox, IE or Safari) you get a little arrow icon in the bottom left of your pictures when you mouse over them. Click on the arrow and you are presented with the interactive 3D wall of photos:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

You can scroll in and out with the mouse wheel and use the mouse to scroll to the left or right. Everything is smooth and intuitive. If you point it at a Flickr photo stream then it will go on forever without having to page through multiple pages to get the picture you want.

Click on an image and it is centered and make slightly larger:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Double click and the image is brought up full screen in something similar to the Flickr slideshow:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Unfortunately the full screen slide show does not have a cover flow style transition but you could always zoom into the 3D wall and view it that way.

Click on the little arrow at the top left and you are taken to the original page. I have found the PicLens is great for browsing Google Images in a much more fluid way than using the browser:

PicLens, originally uploaded by Me (?).

Clicking on the images will take you to Flickr where you can see them full size.

Excellent stuff!

www.piclens.com

Licenced to Shoot

Triple Barrelled, originally uploaded by Me (?).

That is not a shotgun, that is my tripod. It looks worryingly like a shotgun at first glance I am slightly worried that I might get 'taken out' whilst wondering the streets. Lets face it, the time I am most likely to be using the tripod is when the light is poor, and the most likely time for the weapon based mistake to occur.

The reason for this post is not to moan about my triple barrelled shooting stick but rather to show off a few pictures I took the other night whilst wandering Pewley Down at sunset.

I have been reading Scott Kelby's The Digital Photography Book and that gave me a few tips and a few ideas:

1) Become married to your tripod because you never know when you need it. I am seriously tempted to take my tripod with me whenever I go out in the car and have my camera with me.

Moon, originally uploaded by Me (?).

2) If you have image stabilisation on the lens, when using with a tripod, turn it off to get a sharper image.

Moonlighting, originally uploaded by Me (?).

3) If you are taking sunset shots, make them more interesting by adding silhouettes.

Alison and I, originally uploaded by Me (?).

4) Use the flash to bring out any foreground objects.

Pewley Down, originally uploaded by Me (?).

5) And an extra tip from me. Don't do what I *always* forget to do and give the lens a good clean before taking greater than f/11 shots. I spend ages cleaning off all the dust spots!

Potty about Orange, originally uploaded by Me (?).

This was my first proper attempt at sunset, tripod based shooting and I think the results are rather good.

Taking the iPod Touch Upgrade Plunge

iPod Touch Upgrade, originally uploaded by Me (?).

I took the plunge last week and opted to pay the £12.99 ($20) that Apple are asking to upgrade the iPod Touch to the new software.

I was initially frustrated by the charge but in the end figured that £13 these days is not a huge amount of money so went for it anyway.

So what do I think....?

Feature	Comment	Any good?
Movable icons	Holding your finger down on one of the icons on the home page allows you to move icons around and also move them onto additional pages that are accessed by swiping the home page.	Handy but not a killer app
Web bookmark icons	In safari you can now save links to web pages as new home page icons. If the site is iPod/iPhone aware then they will have created a nice icon for you otherwise you get a mini screen shot of the web page.	Handy but not a killer app
Weather Widget	Needs Wifi. You can set up the weather widget to show the 5 day weather report for a number of different cities. you can have multiple cities that are accessed via a swipe to the left or right.	Handy but not a killer app
Stock Widget	Needs Wifi. You can set up the stock widget to show the latest stock price and history graph for any number of stocks.	Handy but not a killer app
Notes	A small application that lets you type some notes which you can read or email (see below). for some reason it only works in portrait orientation so I find it hard to type on.	Handy but not a killer app
Mail Client	Needs Wifi. A full on mail client. It works with all major internet mail providers (I have mine hooked up to gmail) and works really well. You can set it up to auto sync periodically so even when the iPod is in sleep mode it still seems to replicate my mail. Also you can sent emails offline and it seems to auto send the email the next time the iPod happens to be in range of a Wifi hotspot it is registered for. Apple have also upgraded the Safari and YouTube apps to allow the emailing of links to webpages and YouTube videos. Also notes written in the Notes application can also send emails. Like the Notes application it only works in portrait mode and therefore long email messages for me are too much of a faff.	The #1 reason that this is worth the £13 for me
Google Maps	Needs Wifi. A full Google Maps client just like the iPhone version. I have been having a play and the interface is really useful. I can see it being more use on the iPhone because (a) you tend to always have your phone and (b) the iPhone gets free Wifi or EDGE access - neither that the iPod Touch can take advantage of. I really like the feature where you can type a business type (e.g. "cafe") and it detects that you are not searching for an address and puts pins on the map view that you are currently looking at. There is also the "Location Finder" feature. The app partners with Skyhook Wireless to try and work out your location based on the Skyhook database. Coverage is not in my area yet but they seem to be expanding very quickly.	The #2 reason that this is worth the £13 for me

Now I have all this Wifi capability I am tempted to sign up for TheCloud's £4 a month unlimited Wifi offer. I'll wait and see on that one.

So all in, is it worth £13? It is silly that you have to pay but then you could argue that it is a software upgrade. Mail is the killer app for me, Google maps would be useful if I had a Wifi subscription so I could use it outside the house.

However £13 is nowt these days when two drinks in a Guildford pub comes to £9 :-)

Of course the other reason to upgrade is that the iPhone/iPod SDK is released next month and I assumed you needed the SW Update to make use of the 3rd party apps. I am looking forward to an official version of the iPod Guitar Simulator!