2 Bit Hacker

Happy Independence Day!

Was playing around with my Canon SD870 last night, using the CHDK firmware to do long exposure images of the fireworks. Some of them turned out nicely, I think.

Not bad for having no idea what I’m doing anyway. See the rest of them in my gallery.

Photography holiday

So, with the Nikon Coolpix 5700 not working again, I’ve been giving some thought to getting a new camera. The most direct replacement to the 5700 appears to be the P5100, 12.1 megapixel, 3.5x optical zoom, same basic form factor as the 5700, though smaller, and without the flip-out, rotating LCD (this feature doesn’t seem to exist on current models anywhere.)

Although, I’m thinking of going for a digital SLR instead. I’ve always kindof wanted one, but I don’t feel like I know enough about photography and optics to make an informed decision on an SLR at this point. I’ve been eyeing some of the lower end bodies, like the Nikon D40x or the Canon Rebel XTi, both of which are available in a starter kit sort of deal with a lens. But I’m not really sure what brands are good or what I should look out for. Any input?

Photography camera

Well, thanks to the Hindenburg upgrade on Friday, we know have enough space for me to get my pictures uploaded again. So, my gallery is back online, with most of the pictures that were in it before. I also spent a little bit of time today trying to grasp the Gallery skinning system in order to make it’s match the rest of my site a bit better. I think it’s better than it was, but still a long way off.

The main problem is that skins are just a new CSS file, and they didn’t give useful classes or ids to a lot of the fairly important elements, like the table cell that holds the image, which makes it hard for me to match it exactly to the rest of my site. I suppose if I really cared I could hack it a bit to make it suit my style a bit better, but then I’d have to make those changes again whenever I upgrade, which would just be a pain.

Maybe I should check out Gallery 2.x, maybe they improved the skinning a bit.

Photography gallery