Paul Mc Namara's WorldView

Now this is an interesting device which was reported by laptop mag has reported. The article also mentions a device where a 12 inch table can attach itself to a keyboard to transform itself into a notebook. However, I’m a fan of devices becoming as small as possible but also to be usuable. The iPad (which I saw for the first time yesterday) is too heavy and too big for my liking. That’s what makes the third device to interesting.

As a note-taker, the Eee Tablet could hardly offer more functionality. Its stylus uses Wacom technology to give it an incredibly smooth drawing / hand writing experience. But if writing down notes or drawing diagrams when you’re in a meeting or class is not enough, why not take a picture of the whiteboard? The Eee Tablet has a back facing camera that will take photos of anything and let you annotate it. You can also record sound while you take notes. So just imagine recording a college lecture and then playing it back while you read the notes and look at photos of the whiteboard.

It seems to me to be something business people would take to in droves. The iPad is notoriously unhelpful for productive tasks like writing, there is no camera and as far as I’m aware, there is no microphone. The ASUS tablet has all three. It seems that ASUS has stolen a march on their competitors yet again. Watch them try and catch up.

I just rewatched “Before Sunset”, the sequel to one of my favourite films “Before Sunrise”. I was struck during the dialogue that Ethan Hawke’s character notes that 6 months after a life-changing event whether it was winning the lottery or becoming a paraplegic, a person reverts to the psychological state that they inhabited before the event. Then I read the latest post by Tim Harford this evening.

It’s quite possible that our image of these possible futures is not very good. As the psychologist Dan Gilbert points out, you might think that winning the Lottery would make you happier than being permanently paralysed from the waist down, but the empirical evidence suggests that this is just a failure of imagination: paraplegics are not, in fact, less happy than people who have won the Lottery.

By the way, the film is definitely better the second time around. I wish that I could see Before Sunrise again right now. My favourite part is at the end of the film where they show all of the places in Vienna where the story unfolded the next morning, deserted. I felt that way about Prague for a long time.

I see the successor to the Panasonic LX3 has been announced, the LX5. More details of which can be found on the main photo review sites (dpreview.com for example). The new features don’t seem to justify an upgrade for someone who already owns an LX3. What was particularly disappointing was the fact that the lens cap is still detached from the camera. I will be very interested in the successor to the Canon S90 if it arrives in the near future.

The second project in my photography course was shot way back in September in Munich. The purporse of this project was to shoot the same scene but focusing on different dimensions. This would concentrate attention on different parts of the photograph.

This first image focuses on the closest feature of the scene which was the back of a woman’s head as she watched a street band on Kaufingerstrasse. This photo is not that interesting as the background is too blurry and out of focus while the head is not so interesting from the back.

This is the medium view where the focus is directed at the accordian players in the band. They back of the woman’s head is still visible but out of focus. It is still interesting that it is contained in the image as it gives the impression of a crowd watching the band.

The furthest focus was taken after many attempts to find something interesting to focus on in the passing crowd behind the band. Here, a man comes out of the Kaufhof shop and seems to focus his attention past the band to the camera. This is probably unintentional and was a result of the luck of the shot. Here the accordian player is slightly out of focus but in a much more clear way that in the first photo. In my opinion, this is my preferred photo of the three.

Susanna Hertrich’s enlightening graphic that contrasts perceived dangers against real ones.

Some photos taken on a September Saturday at Königsplatz in Munich, Germany.

These are the images that I took for the first project in the Art of Photography course. I guess the purpose here was to demonstrate the change in perspective by using prints and using them as a basis for understanding the changes that can be achieved by adjusting the focal length of the lens. I don’t have a printer so I am waiting for that to complete the exercise. One thing that I do need to get is a card reader for my SLR (Olympus E-520) which I started the exercise with. In the meantime, my LX3 will do the job nicely. Tomorrow on to focus with a set aperture.

I have taken a course called The Art of Photography with the Open College of the Arts, a distance learning institution based in the UK. As part of the course, students are required to record their work, thoughts and influences throughout the period of study. I thought that it would be a good idea to incorporate it into my existing blog.
I got the pack on Sunday after they were mistakenly delivered to my apartment in Munich rather than in Berne. Since then I have been reading and re-reading the course information. This is something similar to what I have done with many other books on photography but this time, there are projects and assignments to be done. Tomorrow I will tackle the first project and record the results here.

It seems the success of the LX3 by Panasonic has produced a reaction from Canon with the introduction of the S90. After years on auto-pilot, it seems that the market is waking up to the demand for better photo quality, especially at low light.

Where the S90 seems to have surpassed the LX3 from looking at the specs is that it seems to be much smaller and there is no need for a lens cap. When I had to get a new lens cap for the LX3, it cost €25. In addition, when an opportunity for a shot arises, taking the lens cap adds another step to the process. It will be interesting to see if Panasonic responds to those advances in the near future.