Solipsism Gradient

Digital Photographer Brasil is coming out in a few days: a Brazilian edition of the UK’s Digital Photographer magazine. Congratulations to the editor, Mario Amaya and all our friends at Editora Digerati.

Special thanks to Mario for featuring one of my pictures on page 14 of the magazine; you can see it on his post, it’s the first top left picture after the cover.

On the stopover at Hongkong; amazing place. I bought a new camera today (the Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX65) and it seems reasonably improved from my previous FX35. Tomorrow we go off again southwards, first to Manila (weather permitting).

In other news, RBSplitView 1.2 is up. I’m still not satisfied with some aspects, but it should now work OK with Snow Leopard, 64-bit, garbage collection, etc.

Here’s a nice post by my friend Daniel Steinberg about coffee, with two pictures I took at a friend’s coffee plantation a few years ago.

So, last August I switched over to the Lumix FX100 – great camera, if a bit noisy in the high-ISO shots. Then a few weeks ago the Lumix FX35 came out, with a wider lens angle and 30fps HD video, so I ordered one on the day it became available and found a buyer for the FX100.

Now, while the FX35 is still in transit, the Lumix FX500 is announced, with a better lens and larger LCD. Argh. In a couple of years I suppose we’ll have to just rent the camera du jour for a few days while a better one is shipping…

Then again, the FX500 won’t fit into the old, battered cellphone case I always walk around with, so I shouldn’t be too upset. Also, they haven’t yet implemented my ideal features; namely, an option for RAW storage, manual speed/aperture selection (correction: it does have that!), a way to override autofocusing, and a remote shutter release (for doing shake-free tripod shots).

Very interesting post over at the online photographer:

…Canon introduced three coupled tilt-shift lenses for the EOS system, a 24mm, a 45mm, and a 90mm.

…I was told that Canon expected to lose money at least on the 90mm, and that probably all three lenses would never earn back their development cost.

What? So why make them at all?

Because, I was told, the availability of the three tilt-shifts would serve as an enticement for pros thinking of switching systems from Canon’s main competitor. The company would never make any money on those specific products, but it would make money from all the other products those “switchers” would buy after they switched.

OK so far, but now read this:

Once, I ran into an even more fascinating phenomenon: a photographer who had switched to Canon because of the tilt-shift lenses, but who hadn’t actually bought any of the tilt-shift lenses!

What was that about? “I just like to know they’re there,” he told me, “so I can buy them if I want to.”

Does this sound familiar…?

There’s this new Internet meme going around. Anil Dash has a good writeup.

So here’s my modest contribution, but with a mutant twist. I present to you… loldevs!!!!

If you’re a dev and have a blog, consider yourself tagged. Post a picture of yourself with a caption that fits one of the standard categories, and which alludes to something you’ve been blogging about. Non-devs should be unable to understand the result, of course…

This time, I’ve come back with 99% of my photos already organized. Which is good, since I took about 1500 on this trip; those new 2GB SD cards come in very handy. As you can see on the left, I’ve already uploaded several of the new pictures (and half a dozen from the August trip to San Francisco). And a few dozen more are already in the queue; I plan to upload 8 pictures every day over this week and the next.

I’ve uploaded a couple more pictures to my Flickr page and added a new tag to most of what’s there – Miksang:

Miksang is a Tibetan word meaning “Good Eye” and represents a form of contemplative photography based on the Dharma Art teachings of Chögyam Trungpa, in which the eye is in sync with the contemplative mind.

…Miksang involve nothing fancy, no special setup, just a visual capture, in the proper state of mind, of everyday’s reality.

Well, I’ve been interested in Buddhism – especially Zen and Tibetan Buddhism – for many years; I have several of Trungpa’s books; and I’ve even visited Karmê Chöling, the Trungpa-founded meditation center in Vermont, about a decade ago.

But I’d never heard of this Miksang thing until a few days ago, when I visited a friend and showed him my Flickr photos, and he exclaimed “but that’s Miksang!”

Well, after reading up on it, I have to agree that most photos on Miksang galleries remind me very much of my own photos, and the descriptions I’ve read on the process are also quite familiar. Not that I want to claim undue credit or extra specialness for these pictures… but I feel they belong somehow.

There’s a Miksang class in Berkeley which, unfortunately, partially overlaps WWDC, which I can’t miss. Drat. I’ll try to e-mail the organizers and and see if I can attend the first days…