The DevTeam just released ultrasn0w last night, which makes unlocking the iPhone 3G with the 3.0 software possible and insanely easy. They’re now raising money for a few of their guys to get the new 3GS so they can work on jailbreaking and unlocking it, so if you care about this, chip in to the fund with the following widget:
Recently I’ve been spending a lot of time on a new Rails project that deals with photos and it also uses a lot of jQuery. I love the jQuery image lazy load plugin and thought since my blog is pretty image-heavy, it’d benefit from it too. It’s trivial to use this plugin, but since my blog tracks WordPress via Subversion, I wanted to do it as a plugin so I wouldn’t have to touch the WordPress code. After 15 minutes or so I hacked together a plugin for this.
You can download it at the plugins directory at WordPress. It’s also available on Github.
It took a day to get commit rights to the Subversion repo of WordPress, since I use Git and had already pushed to Github, it was a bit of an annoyance to add the empty Subversion repo with git-svn. I won’t go into the steps, but this thread helped a lot. I must say that since it’s a shared Subversion repo, the revision number was 119065 to start with, so git svn fetch took a very long time. I spent almost an hour to get to the point so I could do git svn dcommit. And now every time I do dcommit it takes a while coz it pretty much has to compute the diffs between all the recent commits and apply them to Subversion. After using Git for so long I forgot how painful Subversion was.
We rode Northstar last Saturday and we went around the east side of the lake to go back to our cabin in South Lake. There were constructions on 28 and traffic was bad, so we stopped by Sand Harbor to take a few photos and picked up a few giant pine cones.
Couple drinking wine and chilling with their dog:
Pine cones:
These were both shot with a circular polarizer, graduated filters in ACR were used to adjust exposure of sky and beach. They were shot at f/22, at small apertures like this I see quite a bit of dusts in the frame, so dust removal was also done in ACR.
I bought a Hoya Pro1 Digital circular polarizer off eBay a while ago, but didn’t get a chance to try it until today. It rained last night and first half of the day, and then the sun came out. I drove up to Twin Peaks with my camera, tripod, and my 24-70/2.8L with the circular polarizer attached for a few shots. We were lucky enough to catch the rainbow, it was definitely an interesting sight.
Both of the images here were enhanced with the graduate filter in Adobe Camera Raw to bring out a bit more of the buildings, as they were both metering more to the sky. Exposure info can be seen at Flickr (you click on the image to go to its Flickr page, and then click on “more properties” in the EXIF info section). Black and white conversion was done by simply creating a Black & White adjustment layer.
Took a hiatus from blogging. I have been busy with photography and snowboarding, I also did some personal works outside of the commercial stuff. I picked up a B+W ND4 filter, and went to Ocean Beach to test it out, my original intention was to slow down the shutter speed so I can have a photograph of the moving sand when the waves hit, but I couldn’t quite get the shot I wanted. Instead I got a decent shot of the sunset:
We are in Tahoe a lot this season, we took the cable car at Squaw:
We then went back there 2 weeks later to ride Squaw, Sherry on top of Siberia Bowl (shot with my Fuji point-and-shoot):
We got back to the city and decided to do a short day trip to Napa earlier this week, on our way there we saw an empty cargo train stopped in the middle of the track, so we climbed up there for a few shots, here’s one:
They wanted to do a jumping shot so I snapped one, Peju saw this photo on Flickr and they are going to put it up on their website.
Sherry made a video of herself snowboarding (and before you ask, no, it wasn’t shot with the 5d2):
I’ll get back into running and do more skating after the snowboarding season ends.
Sherry went to Taipei for Lunar New Year so Bear and I spent 2 weeks at our cabin in Tahoe. I snowboarded most days and it was pretty awesome. Riding Sierra on weekdays means pretty much having the slopes to myself, we got huge amount of pow the first weekend and yesterday it started snowing again so I rode pow on my last day as well. This weekend and next week should be awesome so we will probably go there again.
On my way to the cabin I took a few snaps on 50 around Echo Lake, here’s one:
The mountain closes at 4pm so I had about an hour and a half before sunset, and I ventured out around the lake to take some shots. I didn’t plan to take landscapes there so I left my tripod in SF, these shots were all taken at ISO settings just barely low enough for handheld.
I googled to find photo spots in Tahoe and the top spot was Emerald Bay, I took Bear there and got a decent shot of it:
The following day we went to Zephyr Cove, I think I was at around Zephyr Cove but wasn’t quite there. I went to this private convention center or something like that, had to hike a bit to get to the beach, but the sight was worth it:
After that I drove back to the California side and stopped by Ski Run Blvd by Heavenly:
There was a public beach nearby, the sunset on the beach was spectacular, there were properties with backyards facing the beach. These shots were taken ISO3200, a bit noisy for colors (at least to me so I converted them to duotone:
The next day I went down Luther Pass toward Kirkwood:
I meant to stop by a Pony Express remount station that was used for only 5 weeks in Woodfords but it was getting dark so I turned back and headed back home.
Those who follow my Twitter and Flickr photostream probably already know that I got a new camera – the Canon EOS 5D Mark II (Amazon link, B&H link). Before last Friday I had been shooting with a 20D, my first dSLR. I’ve had the 20D pretty much since it was released, and I was really happy with it. I never felt the need to upgrade to a newer 1.6 crop factor bodies, I really wanted to go full frame so I had been waiting for the 5D2 probably for more than 2 years. When Amazon got it in stock I JUMPED on it.
My 2 main lenses work a lot better at full frame, the 70-200/2.8L becomes a lot more useful without the crop factor, now I actually shoot in my studio with it pretty often. The 24-70/2.8L becomes a wide angle lens at the short end. The color rendition of the sensor is amazing, Adobe camera profiles in Adobe Camera Raw or Lightroom 2 further bring out the colors in the images. I’ve also started to work in the ProPhoto RGB space for even larger gamut.
Noise performance in high ISO is impressive, with ISO expansion turned on it goes from ISO 50 to ISO 25600. I shot in a pitch dark lounge in ISO 12800 and the results look fine after a little bit of NR and B&W conversion in post-processing. I would say, loosely, the ISO 12800 is the ISO 3200 on my 20D.
Pretty much everything works better on the 5D2, going from the 20D is quite an upgrade for me. One thing I would really like to have is a better AF points pattern, but I guess Canon only put that on the 1D and 1Ds series bodies. The 9-point AF pattern on the 5D doesn’t really make much sense to me, especially if you’re shooting portraits and working with relatively shallow depth of field. I always avoid the “focus-and-recompose” technique, as that easily put things out of focus, it’s simple geometry. The camera has enough resolution to crop, but I generally avoid cropping whenever I can. The AF-on button is very useful, I set it up to do AF-stop, so I can use the shutter half-pressed to focus, and then I can press and hold the AF-On button to prevent the camera from focusing again. The 20D didn’t have such feature so I had to move the switch on the lens to MF.
The video capability of the camera is interesting, I am slowly learning how to use Final Cut Pro to edit and process videos. Shooting videos also require manual focus tracking, which is not something I used to do.
I’ve had the camera for 5 days and I’ve done a couple of casual shoots with it already, I’m at over 1200 frames. I’m doing 3 days of catalog shoots next week with it. I also picked up an extra AlienBees B400 and an octobox from Craigslist. I’ll probably have a lot more to write about the camera a week later. Here are some selected shots I’ve done with it so far…
Quick test shot after I unpacked the camera, lit by available light from ceiling only, ISO 1600, with 24-70/2.8L:
That night Sherry modeled for me in my studio to test it out, I shot this with a single AlienBees B800 with a softbox on her right, with a silver reflector from her top left for fill and hair, 70-200/2.8L:
Drinks at Wish last Saturday night, ISO 12800, NR’ed and duotone conversion in post-processing, image looks pretty clean, the place was almost pitch dark:
Did a shoot with Kourtney for her website last Sunday, this was lit by a 580 EX II on the side triggered by PocketWizards:
Sherry got me an RS-4 R-Strap, and it got here yesterday, so this afternoon I went for a photowalk to test out the strap, I attached it to the D-Ring of my Manfrotto QR plate, which was screwed into the tripod ring of my 70-200/2.8L, after 4 hours of walking my shoulder felt just fine, but then I am pretty used to carrying heavy photography setup. Some images from the photowalk:
I also shot some video footage and attempted to put it together in Final Cut Pro:
WOW, the Pro-8 strobes are so fast!! I don’t need them, but I want them, yesterday!
Tomorrow is Sierra‘s opening day, and we plan to be there! Oh yeah! We will see how the Smart car performs at the mountains. I don’t think the back gates or West Bowl are open yet, but I don’t care, just riding down a bit of Sugar-n-Spice and Lower Main will already be hella fun.