David Naylor: Blog

Silvana och Henriks bröllop

2008-05-07T00:15:00.005+02:00

Here's my first post in Swedish. Not sure if I will do this more often in the future. We'll see.

Ja ... I helgen var jag och Jenny ner till Silvana och Henriks bröllop i Oskarshamn. Det kändes som en väldigt högtidlig och stor dag.

Jag fick äran att fota alltihop och i morse lyckades jag äntligen få upp bilderna till mitt Flickr-konto. För den som vill kasta sig över bilderna direkt har jag samlat dem i en ... um ... samling, här. Jag kan rekommendera att klicka på "Detail" i varje set, för att se lite större småbilder.

Vi hyrde en bil och åkte mot Oskarshamn redan på fredag kväll. Jenny och jag fick bo i Silvana och Henriks lägenhet tillsammans med ett trevligt gäng från Gotland. S & H själva hade flyttat in hos Henriks föräldrar över helgen.

Lördagen, bröllopsdagen, började för vår del kl 10.30 hos frisören. Silvana och hennes syster tillika tärna Madeleine, fick håret fixat under cirka fyra timmar.

Att få håret fixat innebär tre saker har jag nu förstått: Hårsprej, hårsprej och hårsprej.

(Alla bilder från frisören här.)

Brudparet och tärnorna for sedan till en fotograf för att ta studiobilder. Under tiden bytte Jenny och jag om på Villabacken. Därefter bar det av till ett stenbrott i närheten av Påskallaviks kyrka där vigseln skulle äga rum.

På tio minuter avverkade vi förmodligen Sveriges hittills snabbaste bröllopsfotografering. Tur att alla inblandade var så avslappnade och spralliga trots tidspressen! Följande tre bilder är nog mina favoriter därifrån:

Tyvärr var ljuset ganska hårt, men med 30 minuter kvar till vigseln hade jag inte sinnesnärvaro nog att börja mixtra med den reflektor jag fick låna på jobbet.

(Alla bilder från stenbrottet här.)

Mot kyrkan. Med ungefär tio minuter till godo hann jag ordna med blixtar och testa det jag behövde testa innan brudparet gjorde entré.

(Alla bilder från vigseln här.)

Utanför kyrkan fick brudparet ta emot allas gratulationer. Och lite ris.

(Alla gratulationsbilder här.)

Sedan gick färden tillbaka till Oskarshamn med M/S Solkust.

(Alla bilder från båten här.)

Dagen avslutades i Elajohallen där vi bjöds på en välorganiserad, god och rolig bröllpsfest!

(Alla bilder från festen här och här.)

Vi kom hem vid halv tvåtiden på natten.

På söndagen gick vi på en skön picknick i Oskarshamns stadspark. Solskenet gjorde gott.

(Picknickbilder här.)

För att ha varit min första bröllopsfotografering kändes allt skapligt lyckat. Mina enda tabbar var att jag lyckades sänka kameran efter ringväxlingen och därmed missade den första kyssen, och att jag senare var för långsam upp på läktaren när brudparet skulle ut. Plus det med reflektorn då. Ok, tre tabbar.

Nine millimetres is less than you think

2008-04-26T09:10:00.003+02:00

Went to the hairdressers yesterday. She is always very careful when cutting and usually ends up cutting less off than I really want. So yesterday I had prepared to ask her for the cutting machine.

We agreed on using a nine millimetre comb on top and six millimetres around the sides. She started by trimming down the sides. But then she sort-of chickened out and started cutting the top of my head with scissors. I looked like a mushroom.

After watching her with the scissors for a while I asked why she didn't just go ahead and shave it all off as we had agreed. I guess she knew how short nine millimetres actually is and didn't want to do something I would regret. But I said that I knew it was really short and said she should just do it.

So ... it turns out, nine millimetres is pretty short! But I don't regret anything. Just takes a bit of getting used to.

What can I make out of these?

2008-04-17T16:19:00.007+02:00

Yesterday I was in a shooting mood and bought some interesting vegetables and fruit to shoot when I was at Hemköp.

I set up a provisional studio on one of my chairs. I just used a large sheet of white paper that I happened to find in a photo frame. For lighting I used my desk light and a second smaller light.

I hunted down the correct exposure to make the paper only just overexpose in the brightest corner, and then shot in manual mode.

I used my Sigma 17-70mm, Canon 50mm and Canon 70-300mm lenses. I liked the results best from the 50mm, so I ended up sticking with that lens most of the time. (Except for the real close-ups where I used the 70-300mm + a close-up lens.) And most of the time I had the 50mm set at f/2.8 which seems to be this lenses sweet spot.

If you want to see more of the shots I've put my favourites in a set at Flickr.

Shooting Flames

2008-04-15T16:43:00.006+02:00

I bought the latest issue of Digital Camera (or to be more precise: the Swedish translation DigitalFoto) and found an article on simple macro shots you can take at home.

I saw a photo of a match being lit and decided to have a go at cloning the shot.

It was difficult getting the exposure right. To begin with I was over-exposing wildly and I had to go as far down as 1/1000th at f/8, ISO 200 before I got it right. I had no idea that a match was so bright — that's brighter than a clear blue sky or at least roughly the same.

After having set fire to almost a whole box of matches I ended up with 19 shots which were keep-worthy. The following two were the coolest hottest:

The weird flame in the second shot is from the match I used to light the upright match, as I was pulling it back.

I took the shots against a black background but that really hadn't been necessary. The matches were so bright that any indoor background would have looked black.

For the record I used my EF 70-300mm lens with close-up lens 500D screwed on.

The next project on my list is to have a go at weird fruits and vegetables.

Trainspotting

2008-04-15T15:03:00.007+02:00

On the Sunday evening I went out to shoot the old trains I had found one week ago. There was plenty of — er — old stuff to be found.

I tried developing this close-up of a buffer both as a colour shot and as black and white. I preferred the black and white version because I think it gives you that heavy clonky metal feel.

This old engine was stripped of all the machinery and completely vandalized. It was packed with that eerie feeling of old abandoned places.

Not sure what kind of machine that was on the goods wagon. It could have been the engine of the engine, but it really didn't look like an engine to me.

The drivers cabin of the engine was ripped to pieces. All windows were smashed and the seats and instruments were broken.

This gauge was broken off and lying on the dashboard.

The engines must have been badly isolated. The drivers apparently had electric heaters for their feet.

More gauges.

Since most of the subjects were shaded and the light was getting low I underexposed all the shots by one to two stops to avoid the washed out look you otherwise can get in shade.

These were only a few of all the shots from the train yard. The rest are in a set at my flickr account.

New Memory Card Seems to Work

2008-04-14T15:26:00.006+02:00

After I bought my new memory card I found several reviews of the card saying it didn't work properly. So I decided to test mine to see that it works properly.

First I filled it with old photos from my archive. No problems.
Then I deleted a few, and put it in my camera. I seemed to be able to see all the photos, and I could also take a few shots to fill the remaining space.
Finally I put it through a few disk tests. I used the Windows disk check thing and a program called CDCheck. The latter seems to work for any kind of disk. Neither of them found any problems.

Conclusion: Works for me!

Nice start, Ameibo

2008-04-11T20:28:00.010+02:00

I was just checking out Ameibo which was launched only yesterday. If I've understood correctly it is a legal, torrent based file sharing service which charges for downloads and pays users for uploads.

I haven't actually tried downloading anything yet. Since downloads cost money I'll only download stuff I really want. But everything was looking really promising and I got the feeling of Wow, finally someone has worked it out!. How to provide legal downloads of films for a reasonable price.

But then I got a welcome email, and I quote: (translated from Swedish)

To make best use of the service we recommend that you use Internet Explorer 6.0 and Windows Media Player 11 or higher.

Emphasis mine there. Well as you understand, that's a bit of a turn-off for a Firefox guy geek like me. At least there's the higher which refers to IE7 I guess. That's better than asking for IE6 only, which would be plain crazy.

Don't they understand that their audience, people using (or willing to use) bittorrent, are much more biased towards using Firefox than the average internet crowd?

Then there's the fact that most of the films are DRM'ed, and therefore can't be burned and played on a DVD. But perhaps the film industry will one day understand (like the music industry now finally has done) that DRM is only a nuisance for the legal downloaders and no one else.

Problem and solution: 16GB Compact Flash in EOS 30D

2008-04-09T22:33:00.003+02:00

Today I got the 16GB Compact Flash card that I ordered a few days ago. I just wrote about the crazy weather but this is almost even more insane: 16GB now cost me less than half of what my two 2GB cards cost me two years ago. And back then I had a serious discount since I bought them at the shop I worked at, Allradio. That means that the price per GB is now less than a tenth of what it was two years ago!

Eager to try it out (why? don't know) I put my 16GB card in my camera, formatted it and ... Oh! It now only had 8GB of space.

It turns out, the Canon EOS 30D doesn't cope with (formatting) cards larger than 8GB. And when the card had been formatted down to 8GB it couldn't be reformatted to 16GB. Not in the camera, not in Windows.

After hunting around for a while, giving up, and then hunting around some more, I found a solution: A small program called USB_Format. Just unzip it and run it, and it should let you reformat your memory card in your card reader to it's proper size.

Now I just have to remember not to format the card in the camera. But that shouldn't be so hard. I don't usually format, I tend to Delete all instead.

Crazy Weather

2008-04-09T22:29:00.003+02:00

The weather has been really wacky the last couple of days in Eskilstuna. Today I switched back to my winter jacket and boots, and put on gloves and a hat for work. I'm glad I did too, since the wind speed gave a chill effect of what felt like -20° C. What happened to the record breakingly early spring? No one knows.

Blog Design Tweak

2008-04-06T12:49:00.003+02:00

I just removed the the borders around the sidebars to make things a little cleaner. I realized they felt a little out of place somehow.

Saturday Photo Excursion

2008-04-05T16:37:00.004+02:00

I was bored this morning and felt like some photography, but I just couldn't think of anything to shoot, especially since it was around 10 and the light was very bright and sharp.

So I decided to do some location scouting instead. I packed my camera bag and went for a slow bike ride, more or less randomly around Eskilstuna. Tried to go where I had never gone before.

First I came across Eskilstuna Art Museum. Although I had read about it at work I hadn't really understood where it was.

At the entrance there was this cool piece of art¹:

It is made out of sheets of glass stacked on top of each other, and I'm guessing that the naked girl visible in the block is cut out of all the sheets.

Later on I found a train yard with loads of old rusty engines and wagons. But I didn't bother taking any pics in the harsh light. Instead I'll go back some evening.

Then I found this fellar (?) fluttering about. He was unusually patient when he finally settled down though.

Well, it wasn't that much, but at least I got some fresh air... :)

1) I don't take to art very easily so this should be considered quite the compliment.

Firefox 3 beta 5 is out

2008-04-02T22:50:00.006+02:00

As the title says ^^. Get it now. Or read a review over at Mozilla links first.

It's available in an amazing 45 different languages, simultaneously! I hear Vista SP1 in Swedish will be out some time during quarter two...

There have been quite a few nice little theme tweaks since beta 4. And I believe all the memory and javascript performance improvements that the Internets have been raving about are new for beta 5 as well.

New Blog Design

2008-03-30T10:40:00.003+02:00

If you've been here before you might have noticed the new design. I got inspired yesterday and thought I should have one if those hip dark wallpaper pattern inspired blog designs.

If you still see my old default design, the Tech Blue, just click Dark Pattern at the top of the page.

I started off by finding a suitable pattern for the background. I found this one:

... at theinspirationgallery.com, inverted it and used curves to make the pattern a dark grey.

To increase the readability I added a see-through (40 % opaque) black to the main section using the following CSS3 declaration:

#main {background-color: rgba(0, 0, 0, 0.4);}

This is what it should look like:

So far, only Firefox 3 and Safari 3 have support for semi-transparent colours (RGBA/HSLA), but I think the text is fairly readable even if you don't get the darker background. Hopefully the number of Firefox 3 users will increase to about 20 % when it is released this summer, thanks to the auto-update feature of Firefox 2.

I've also changed the font to Lucida Sans Unicode (Lucida Grande on the mac), inspired by John Lilly's blog. I decided to use it for both titles and text.

And here's what a quote looks like:

I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be.

Douglas Adams

Overall I'm really pleased with the new look. Do shout if you find any annoying bugs.

New Shoes

2008-03-26T21:13:00.004+01:00

I thought I'd do something I've never done before: I thought I'd blog my new shoes. Just for fun. :)

So without further ado, here they are:

So... what should you write when you blog an item of clothing, or footwear? I guess I should write where I got them... make, model, price perhaps?

Shop: Din Sko in Eskilstuna. Make: Ecco. Model: I haven't got a clue. Price: 995 SEK.

That makes them the most expensive pair of shoes I've ever bought. But then I'm planning to use them for my wedding, and perhaps one or two other weddings. So you'll have to try and mentally replace those brown jeans with fancy black trousers.

They're very comfortable and I'm walking around with them indoors to soften them up a bit.

Oh, and by the way: Today I found a fairly decent amount of fuzz in my belly button, from my new t-shirt.

Favourites on Flickr

2008-03-18T11:09:00.002+01:00

I've been going through my photos and putting together a collection of my favourites. I'm quite pleased with the outcome. It looks very colourful when they're all put on the same page:

To get the large versions of the photos, click View as slideshow at the top of the page.

Interesting: Sigma 50mm f/1.4

2008-03-18T02:16:00.007+01:00

Sigma just announced the new Sigma 50mm 1:1.4 EX. Since I'm a bit disappointed with the performance of my Canon EF 50mm f/1.4, this might be an interesting alternative if the price is right. (I find the Canon 50mm 1.4 is only usably sharp from about f/2.2.)

Edit: Just realized I published a quick sharpness test of the Canon EF 50mm f/1.4 last year.

Good news from Redmond

2008-03-06T00:09:00.003+01:00

I'm a bit late to the party, but in the last couple of days we've had two great pieces of news from Microsoft:

IE8 will render web pages in IE8 standards mode by default, not IE7 standards mode as was previously announced.
The first beta of IE8 has been released for testing.

In the IE8 beta announcement I really like the sound of this paragraph (emphasis mine):

One theme I hope developers notice here is interoperability. The team understands how big an impact differences between browsers (and previous versions of IE in particular) have had on developers in terms of wasted time, frustration, and (in some cases) limiting the experience that they deliver to users. We want to deliver a big step forward in real-world interoperability for developers with IE8, and standards are at the core of our approach. This topic deserves a lot more than just this paragraph; expect more soon.

That's really the first time they have properly acknowledged all the pain web developers have felt over the years. Sure, they have admitted they were behind the times back when they released IE7, but this was the first real reference to the huge annoyance IE has been to web developers.

Let's hope all this means they really will try to move forward on the standards front. If IE8 passes Acid2 it means it must cope with min- and max-widths/heights, so my blog will look as it should for the first time ever in IE. If you happen to be stopping by in the IE8 beta, please send me a screenshot. (My email is in the right hand column.)

Edit: One very important factor which I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere is that they've made IE8 available for Windows XP. If they hadn't, all the dreamy thoughts about standards compliant web developing would have had to be postponted another five years, waiting for Vista to gain some serious market share.

Read more about IE8 and it's features at microsoft.com. Personally I'm going to wait a bit before I install it. IE beta releases are usually about as stable and reliable as early alphas of Mozilla products, and considering how deep IE is integrated into Windows ... Let's just say I'm not going to risk borking my whole system.

How to define Firefox 3

2008-03-03T16:44:00.008+01:00

Ok, so we all know Firefox 3 will be great. But what will it mean? What will it feel like?

Well it just hit me. Firefox 3 makes Firefox 2 feel like a beta. It's not that Firefox 2 is buggy or hangs, but there are just so many things in Firefox 3 that work better, easier, faster, simpler.

I guess all the Firefox releases so far have been like that. The improvements make you wonder: Why didn't they just do that in the first place? That might sound like criticism, but it isn't.

Instead it's a matter of the Firefox community and developers managing to think of more and more ways to streamline and simplify the browser for every release.

New location bar

For instance, take the new location bar: When you start typing, Firefox will start listing previously visited pages that match what you've typed so far. It will match against URL, page title and bookmark tags. Firefox will take into account how often and how recently you visited the pages in the list and order them accordingly.

The location bar search is very soft, in other words it will find matches with the searched words in any order, and it'll also find parts of words.

Also, the location bar will learn how you think. Sort of. If you type in "news" and then choose http://www.cnn.com/ from the list of previously visited websites, Firefox will remember that combination of search phrase and web page. The next time you type "news", CNN will end up higher in the list, if not at the top.

Other new features

Here are a few other things that will make Firefox 3 easier to use and live with:

A panel in the Add-ons manager for installing addons straight from within the browser.
Another panel in the Add-ons manager for plugins. Makes it very easy to enable and disable plugins as you like in stead of mucking around in the installation folder.
Pausable downloads - great for large downloads or if you're on a dialup connection.
Searchable download history.
Quick bookmarking - just click the star to save a bookmark! Click it twice if you want to place the bookmark in a particular place, or if you want to tag it.
Per-site permission settings for images, cookies, popups and addons, all accessible in a new panel in the page info window.
Full page zooming
Saved bookmark searches. Allows you to automatically sort your bookmarks into folders based on tags, location (server/URL) or visiting dates. Great for the bookmark addict.
New themes making Firefox 3 fit much better in Windows Vista, OS X and in Linux. I'm a little sceptical about the new XP theme though, but then it's not actually finished yet. See Wikipedia for some fairly up to date screenshots.
Malware protection. In the same way Firefox 2 blocked known phishing sites, Firefox 3 will also block sites known to try installing viruses, spyware, etc on your computer.
New manager for controlling how your downloads are handled. Similar to the file-type handler in Windows, Firefox lets you set if you want different file types to be saved, opened by a certain program or handled by a plugin.

Speed

One major advantage of Firefox 3 over 2 is its performance. Firefox 3 is quicker and uses less memory than Firefox 2. I haven't compared the two for speed myself, but the difference in memory usage is easy to see after a few hours of browsing.

I've always known Firefox was generally a quick browser, but I obviously hadn't understood quite how fast it was. Yesterday I did a quick test of various pages in Firefox 3 and IE7. Man, this thing flies! It just sucks the pages down off the net, while IE7 sort of sits there - waiting to be served... If you want to read more about Firefox 3's performance, see this article by Percy Cabello.

Well, I'm probably forgetting a few things now, but those are probably the main reasons to switch to Firefox 3. I'm predicting we will see a final version some time in July.

Firefox bug submitted

2008-02-29T22:48:00.002+01:00

Today I submitted my third Mozilla bug, "Search using awesomebar locationbar doesn't always find history entries". (The use of both locationbar and awesomebar is to make it easier to find using the search in bugzilla.)

Here's the description of the bug I posted to bugzilla:

When I type in a word into the location bar it doesn't always find the relevant history entries.

For instance, in the past 60 days (my history cutoff) I have visited the website "Helgessons kök", http://www.helgessons.se/. Now when I type "helgessons" (no quotes) into the location bar I get nothing, even though it should match both the URL and the page title.

When I do the same search in the History side-bar I *do* find the website. (Se attached screenshot.)

I have previously submitted one bug for Thunderbird and one for Firefox.

Firefox 3 beta 3 is out

2008-02-13T10:22:00.003+01:00

The third beta of the mighty Firefox 3 is out now. You know you want it.

If you don't know you want it, read this great review at Mozilla Links.

Edit: Here's a full list of improvements in Firefox 3 beta 3.

Uploading 4,600 photos to Flickr

2008-01-15T00:28:00.001+01:00

After having spent many, many hours keywording all my photos using Lightroom, I have now uploaded all the photos to Flickr. (Here's why I didn't go with Zooomr.)

Obviously I had to get a Pro account for unlimited uploading and storage. With the dollar being so cheap though it was a steal at SEK 160.

The uploading of my ~4,600 photos took roughly four whole days and nights on my ... umm, modest Internet connection. (2 Mbps down, 256 kbps up.)

Now I have a wonderful, searchable, keyworded archive of all the photos that I've taken with my dear EOS 30D. Here, for instance, is a search for leaf:

Both Flickr and Zooomr have pretty nice AJAX style uploading. Flickr's would only (?) take 400 or so photos in one go. I uploaded the photos as private, but allowed friends to see them all. I have then gone through them all and (so far) selected 673 photos that I've made public.

One really nice thing is that I can write captions for the photos in Lightroom, and when I export the photos the caption is saved to the IPTC info, which Flickr reads and understands. Three cheers for standards and compatibility!

Flickr Won Me Over

2008-01-14T23:37:00.000+01:00

Even though I had already paid for a Pro account at Zooomr, I ended up going with Flickr for my online archive/backup.

I usually go with the underdog, which would be Zooomr in this case. Mainly because the underdog usually works harder and more often thinks out of the box in order to win people over.

Zooomr does have free, unlimited photo hosting. And you only pay once to get a Pro account, not anually as with Flickr. But Zooomr has a few annoyances that put me off it.

Zooomr doesn't cope with Swedish characters (å, ä and ö) in the IPTC tags of uploaded photos.
Zooomr doesn't display EXIF data in a readable way.

When half the point of uploading the photos was to make them searchable, those bugs are pretty serious. I've spoken to Kristopher, the founder and developer behind Zooomr, and it didn't sound like the EXIF bug was very high up on their to-do-list. So Zooomr will have to wait for now.

If and when they fix those two bugs (which were the only bugs as far as I could see) I might decide to make a second backup on Zooomr. The (future) possibility to sell photos on Zooomr (Marketplace) definitely sounds interesting anyway. Until then I'll at least be following the Zooomr blog closely. The upcoming Zooomr Mark IV (aka 2008) release might be just what I need. Who knows.

Lightroom problem solved

2008-01-05T15:51:00.001+01:00

Since I only use Lightroom for keywording my JPEG photos, I want to be able to save my keywords to the JPEGs without changing the actual image at all.

The fact that Lightroom by default modifies the look of JPEGs even though I haven't touched a single slider is pretty annoying, but now I have found the solution.

When exporting the photos (Ctrl+Shift+E) you can choose to export the original image data untouched by lightroom's mischievous fingers. To do this, select the "Original" option under File settings -> Format, in the Export dialogue.

Then, when I hit Export, the images will be saved in a new location. They will be exact copyies of the original, but they will be keyworded just as I want them, with synonyms, etc.

You may think: Why doesn't he just hit Ctrl+S to save the keywords to the original files? Well, because that action won't save keyword synonyms, and it doesn't obey the checkboxes Include on export and Export parents. So I'd get all my keyword categories saved to the photos as well (for instance Colour and shape), which I really don't want there...

IE8 will pass the Acid 2 test

2007-12-20T11:55:00.000+01:00

This is seriously good news for everyone who is planning on making a website in the coming 10 or so years.

What does it mean? Well, here are a few things:

The IE team must have started working on IE8 roughly at the same time as they started work on IE7.
Finally, IE will support CSS min- and max-widths. (Which I use on this blog to regulate the width of this main column.)
Loads less IE layout bugs: Web designers and web developers will be happier at work in the coming decade.

However, there is a big however. The IE team speaks of some kind of switch to make IE8 work in IE8 Standards Mode. Let's just hope they didn't choose a non-standard way for websites to request standards mode... (I.e. I hope they're going to stick with the transitional vs. strict doctypes for quirks mode vs. standards mode.)

Internet Explorer 8

2007-12-08T11:33:00.000+01:00

Cross posted from my comment at the IE Blog:

I must say I'm carefully optimistic about IE8. No thanks to the IE Blog though.

At the moment, the most informational information about IE8 is to be found at molly.com:

In the transcript of Molly H's discussion with Billy G there is mention of a new engine.

However, I doubt that the IE team could have built a new rendering engine from scratch in just over a year. Or is that why they've been so quiet - they just haven't had the time to post because they've been too busy rewriting Trident from scratch? We can always hope.

The fact that Molly just said what I've heard so far is to my liking about IE8 also adds to my optimism.

Thanfully though, I won't need to care much either way:

If IE8 gets it right, I won't need to care because it will render my websites like all the other browsers.
If IE8 gets it wrong, I'll be too fed up with IE to even think about caring.