An 18 megapixel image has twice the data as an 9 megapixel image.
So does that mean a 135 mm telephoto and an 18 megapixel sensor can do as well as a 270mm telephoto and a 9 megapixel image?
No.
Why not?
Because when you crop the 18 megapixel image, and double the apparent size, you also double the image noise.
It took considerable restraint for me to write this so politely.
Please stop using div tags to define paragraphs - Blogger Help
My blogs start around 2002, when Blogger used carriage returns to delimit paragraphs. They extend through the time that Blogger used <br> tags with or without hidden carriage returns.
These days, with either the "new" or legacy editor, it's unclear to me what Blogger does. I only know that when I use MarsEdit, Ecto or the native editor I see pairs of div tags. This causes a mess. Depending on which editor I use paragraphs vanish or spacing doubles. If I open older posts with the editors I get no paragraph spacing.
If I go into preferences I see:
"If Yes is selected, single hard-returns entered in the Post Editor will be replaced with single <br /> tags in your blog, and two hard-returns will be replaced with two tags (<br /><br />))."
Of course br tags are no longer used, so this language is simply wrong. If set it to "No" my old posts format incorrectly. To put it mildly, this is a mess.
I would like Blogger to use tags to, you know, delimit paragraphs. I would like Blogger to convert older posts to use <p> tags. Please Blogger, stop using <div> and <br> to define paragraphs, it's not what they're made for.
It's hopeless (yes, I've tried changing templates). Alas, I don't think there's really any way to move my blogs and keep any sort of reasonable formatting across 5,300 or so posts.
See also:
There's no way to make Gmail and OS X Mail.app [1] into a happily married couple.
The Google Label (very shallow acyclic graph) vs. IMAP Folders (tree, single inheritance) models cannot be reconciled. If you use Gmail as an OS X Mail.app IMAP server, messages with multiple labels (Inbox, All Mail, Baseball, Work, etc) will be replicated in OS X. A single Gmail message may produce several OS X messages; Label-crazed geeks may find dozens of duplicates. Searches are a mess.
I'm happy to say, however, that I have found a way to make this dysfunctional couple settle down. I used How to make Gmail work well with Mail | Macworld as a guide. It claims too much, but the advice is still useful.
If you follow the articles advice, however, you will lose all your email archives from Mail.app; they will be only on Gmail. I inverted the advice. Using the advanced IMAP controls I turned off IMAP sync for all labels except for these four:
This means that my tagging/organization pseudo-folders exist only on Google. None of that is exposed to OS X, the Google "labels" are gone [1]. On the other hand, I still have Spotlight Search and Smart Mailboxes, and my only duplicates are with All Mail and Inbox/Priority Inbox:
These duplicates go away when I move mail from Inbox to All Mail (archive).
Note I don't see the Sent folder (that would create All Mail/Sent folder dupes), but I have no use for the separate Sent folder (I can recreate an equivalent with Smart Search). I prefer the All Mail folder. I don't bother exposing my Gmail Spam label/folder -- it's immense.
I followed most of the rest of the articles advice. Turns out I wasn't saving OS X Mail.app Sent messages on the server -- I thought I was.
With this configuration Mail.app looks like this:
It ain't a match made in heaven, but it's no longer Hell. Purgatory maybe. Maybe Apple will fix this in Lion? [1]
[1] The fix is to stop treating Gmail tags as folders, and treat them as, you know, tags. Then support tags in Mail.app and use smart search to create additional derived folders. Who files email any more anyway? I stopped doing that years ago, and it's added years to my life. (By the way, I give a great lecture on email management.)
Update 3/17/2011: Alas, I can’t seem to eliminate the Sent folder. Even though I have the Label turned off on Gmail’s advanced IMAP control, it still produces dupes with the All mail folder. This is a more annoying problem than the small number of dupes in the All Mail folder. Maybe I need to move all my email from Gmail’s “Sent” folder to a new label.
I bought my Canon G2 in October 2002 [1] and my Digital Rebel XT in Nov 2005. A few days ago I picked up the Canon Digital Rebel T2i (550D) body for $650, about $150 less the minimally improved T3i (same sensor, same processor, some improvements for videographers).
I'm happy with my purchase, though it's not the camera I've been waiting for. I've been waiting for a 12 megapixel camera that could produce quality images at ISO 3200. Instead I got an 18 megapixel camera that can produce quality images at ISO 1600 and occasionally useful images at ISO 3200. I gave up when I saw the paltry improvements from the Canon T2i to the T3i. It feels like digital photography is nearing the limits of current imaging technology; I decided I wouldn't gain much by waiting another year. So my daughter got the XT and I got the T2i instead of the T3i.
Progress is nice, but there are worse things than living with a dSLR that can take good pictures at ISO 1600 and that, after I crop, effectively doubles my image stabilized zoom range. The technology plateau means I'll get more years from my purchase; it might be 8-10 years before I switch to the MILC future. Although this technology halt isn't all bad for me, for Canon it must be very bad. For camera shops, who've struggling to stay alive in the post-film era [2], this may be a terminal arrest.
I won't bother with a full review of this 1 year old device; there are many good reviews of this camera, as usual Amazon's amateur reviews are among the best. I was surprised by how familiar it is; it feels very much like my six year old XT -- which is quite fine with me. I've never understood complaints that the Rebel body was "too small" -- I have large hands and it feels great to me. The shutter feels softer with less vibration. Of course the video is all new, but the manual focus in video mode makes it a poor fit for many settings [3].
As with the old XT, there are many features of the camera that are aimed at the "JPEG" photographer. Several of these are new, such as ways to manage dust spots, to adjust dynamic range, etc. Similarly there are several features for image management and printing from the camera. None of this interests me. I photograph RAW, review and edit in Aperture 3, then save JPEGs to iPhoto for archiving [4].
The new "Quick" menu and the "auto ISO" are good additions. I live having easy access to the ISO button. On the other hand, I'm seriously bummed that Cannon sacrificed my exposure "meter" control (weighted, average, etc) in favor of the 'picture style' control. (For "Picture Style" I use Portrait, because it uses a 'level 2' sharpening and no other camera mods. I might drop to 'level 1' sharpening or Neutral/Faithful style -- let Aperture do the rest. Still experimenting.)
The biggest change, other than image quality and light sensitivity (yay) is the SD card. It works with SDHC, SDXC or SD. For video work a "class 6" card is required. I bought a Transcend Class 10 SDHC 16GB for about $24 or so. It is a fine size for me; 300 images use about half the card. Individual RAW images are about 28-30 MB each, the JPEG produced after cropping and processing is about 2.8 to 4.4 MB.
As to the images, they are rather fine. I don't think the T2i's ISO 1600 images are quite as good as the XT's ISO 400 images, but they are much better than the XT's ISO 800 images. The T2i's ISO 3200 images resemble the XT's ISO 800 -- meaning they're only for desperate times. I didn't try ISO 6400, those would have to be grayscale only (so an option, but not for color.) The images do stress my monitors; they don't look nearly as good on my old Dell as on my 27". Curious.
Aperture 3 on my 8GB iMac 5i does well with individual images; I think the GBs of RAM are coming in handy.
Good camera, I'm loving being able to take hockey pictures at 1/125!
[1] I boxed it up recently and left it, with a note at the office. It found a home within minutes!
[2] I visited National Camera with a friend today. The retail display included darkroom gear and a wide variety of picture frames; much of the floor space was film and print focused.
[3] The T3i has a Canon G2 style flip out LCD, which is handy for tripod videography. If I do any video with this camera though, I'm likely to be handholding. There is one major point in the dSLR's favor though -- unlike the mad zoomers of today's dedicated camcorders the T2i has many affordable wide angle lenses.
[4] Crazy eh? There's a method to this. If Apple ever provided a true upgrade path from iPhoto to Aperture I'd archive in Aperture, but I'd still archive JPEG and delete the RAW originals. I'm much more interested in image longevity than small quality improvements. After an initial adjustment in Aperture (esp. dynamic range) the JPEG gives me enough room to tweak as needed.
See also:
I bought Camm PhoneView for iPhone and iPad (not on App Store) because I wanted to be able to save and restore game data if I needed to remove games from my kid's iOS devices. For example ...
Transferring Angry Birds saved game data to Mac app | Entertainment | Mac 911 | Macworld
...
3. Select Apps in PhoneView’s Data pane.
4. Enable the Show All Apps option.
5. Select Angry Birds and then select its Documents entry.
6. Drag the highscores.lua file to your Mac’s Desktop to make a copy...
You can also use it to get at media, notes and texting records.
Subsequently I received an email inquiry from someone who wanted to copy iPhone Contacts to the desktop. The problem was that these were Exchange Server contacts, so there's no supported way to get them off the phone to another device.
PhoneView allowed him to browse and copy his Contacts to OS X Address Book.
Chrome for OS X shows our old family news page as it has appeared for about ten years ...
On the right side of the page we see two "frames", each referencing a page which holds Javascript that renders Google Reader output. [1]
Recently, however, Safari shows this ...
The frames are gone. This HTML no longer works:
<IFRAME SRC="google_share.html" FRAMEBORDER=0 HEIGHT=300 WIDTH=185 TITLE="JGF Shared Posts">
I don't know whether this is a new Safari bug, or if it's a side-effect security measure of some sort. It sure is annoying.
[1] The reasons I did this are lost in the mists of time. I first put this page up around 1994. Sometime after 2000 I came up with the current scheme to display output from Bloglines, later I adopted it to Reader. A plain-jane web page on my site holds the Javascript that references Google's servers. The Frames reference the local pages. They're embedded in simple tables so they resize nicely. I'll be very annoyed if I have to change the design because of a Safari bug, less annoyed if there's a genuine security risk.
Update 3/6/11: I received a helpful response on Apple Discussions. Another 10.6 user can see the frames. On the other hand, I tried from the Apple Store and they didn't show up.
Update 3/7/11: The Frames are back again. I haven't updated OS X. I did, however, change my DNS provider from OpenDNS back to my ISP. OTOH, they only showed up now, and I did that yesterday. They've always worked in Chrome. This is truly odd.
Apple doesn't always sweat the details.
OS X installs documentation into both Library/Documentation and Users/Library/Documentation. The former location, for example, includes my iMac Users Guide, "Welcome to Snow Leopard" and some help files.
Problem is, Spotlight doesn't index Library/Documentation. It only indexes items within the Users folder. So a Spotlight search won't find those documents.
This isn't new, but it's a detail Apple hasn't bothered with.
