Blog entries from April, 2008

Last night I went to the April Web Standards Group meeting where Gerry Gaffney talked about how users really search and John Allsopp talked about the web away from the desktop, in particular on mobile devices.

But that isn’t really what I want to talk about.

In a repeat of the recent Perl Mongers meeting I borrowed a co-workers 50mm f/1.8 lens. This time I kept the lens on my camera all night as it was working really well.

At the venue there was hardly any light but I was able to get some shots:

Downlight above Gerry, reflection from the projected image and light from the laptop screen.

John was directly lit by the projector, downlight for the background.

Light from behind the bar.

In this case the narrow angle of view at the 50mm turned out to be what was needed as I was able to take these photos from the other side of the room. It is definitely something to consider in my future lens choice.

One other change I made was that instead of having the camera in aperture priority with it wide open, I had it in shutter priority at (mostly) 1/25 second in order to freeze action with the intention of lightening the photos later if they were a bit too dark. It turns out that I only needed to do that to one photo that had nowhere near enough light.

When I got home from work today a parcel was waiting for me that contained an Apple TechStep, the handheld diagnostic tool for Apple Macintosh‘s.

I now have two of these as 18 months ago I got one. The massive difference is that the one that arrived today is immaculate and includes additional ROM packs, all cables, manuals and the floppy disks. This was all reflected in the cost which was an order of magnitude higher than the first unit, but it is worth it.

One issue I now have is that this is yet another item on my long list of things to take photos of. I really need to get started on that.

Wednesday week ago, Melbourne Perl Mongers was held at a new location in Southbank followed by dinner and drinks at the Town Hall Hotel in South Melbourne.

This afternoon I finally got around to sorting through the photos and uploading a select few to flickr:

Melbourne Perl Mongers (April 2008) – a set on Flickr

For the night I borrowed what a co-worker refers to as his “nifty fifty”, a 50mm f/1.8 lens. This is a pretty cheap and inexpensive lens, so I wanted to try one out before getting one. This was also my first opportunity to use my new camera bag, a Crumpler 5 Million Dollar Home.

I found that f/1.8 is a big improvement over the f/2.8 of my 28mm lens, but being 50mm it is too narrow which meant I didn’t use it for much of the night.

When talking to Wes I found that even though he has the better 50mm f/1.4 lens, he is finding that it is too narrow and is thinking about the faster 28mm lens.

That Canon 28mm f/1.8 lens is very temping as it gives a ‘normal’ angle of view on a crop body and is nice and fast due to its wide aperture. It also doesn’t hurt that it it a USM lens as the motor in the 28mm f/2.8 is slow and loud. What would hurt is the price and that it doesn’t appear to be anywhere near as available secondhand as the f/2.8 is.

I had also lined up a Speedlite 430EX flash to borrow for the night but that fell through at the last minute because its owner had to make a decision between catching the body or the flash before they encountered the floor. The flash is what ended up breaking.

This coming Wednesday is a Web Standards Group meeting which will give me another opportunity to experiment in low light.