Hand Coding

As I do every March, headed down to Austin earlier this month for SXSW. I also brought my new camera along, a Canon 40D which I’ve had since around February. To go along with that, I rented Canon’s 17-55mm f/2.8 IS lens from lensrentals.com (an awesome online lens rental shop, if you ever need that kind of thing).

I had always heard generally good things about image-stabilization including some reports of being able to hand-hold shots down to 1/8 sec or even 1/4 sec. Given that I seem to encounter a fairly average amount of camera shake (as opposed to an extraordinarily low amount of it), I was cautiously optimistic about how much the image stabilization system might be able to help me.

In short, I couldn’t be more pleased. If the phrasing wasn’t so religiously-exclusive, I might even be tempted to call this the Jesuslens (see also: Jesusnoun.) Or, put another way, if this lens wasn’t around $1,000, I probably would have bought it by now. But, I’m getting ahead of myself. I knew that I’d be hand-holding shots at SXSW and I was hoping that this lens would come through for me — it sure did. I managed several keepers at 1/8 sec. and even down to 1/6 sec.

With the aid of the back of a chair in my hotel room for additional sturdiness, I was also able to work through a set of four 1/2-second exposures of the Austin skyline which I then was able to stitch together to form a panoramic. (Incidentally, Photoshop CS3 is more intuitive than I thought it’d be for making panoramas. They’ve really improved that functionality over CS2.) I may have to try that panorama-thing more often — that was kinda fun.

I’m going to SXSW this year (in fact, this weekend) and I was looking around for an online calendar that might help me plan which panels I was going to. (South by Southwest, in case you might not be familiar with it, is a music, film, and interactive festival/conference in Austin, Texas.) The sxsw.com website usually has a semi-usable calendar, but I just couldn’t get it to work this year.

Some friends of mine mentioned a third-party calendaring option, Sched.org, and I thought I’d give that a shot. I must say, I was pleasantly surprised. In fact, it’s great — it’s easy to use, intuitive, and uses just enough Ajax to be helpful without getting in the way. Anyhow, I’ve worked out my calendar and I think I’ve figured out most of the panels that I’d like to go to. As you might guess, if you see two panels listed for the same time slot, it means that I like both of them and just haven’t yet figured out which to go to. For instance, like these:

• Saturday, March 8: Getting Unstuck: From Desktop to Device vs Opening Remarks with Henry Jenkins and Steven Johnson (both at 2 p.m.)

• Sunday, March 9: Scope Creep and Other Villains vs Wireframing in a Web 2.0 World (both at 10 a.m.)

• Monday, March 10: Targeting Your Web Site: Accessibility Litigation Update vs WaSP Annual Meeting: Don't Break the Web (both at 5 p.m.)

Of course, I’m open to ideas if you have any suggestions on resolving those stalemates. One way or another, I’ll figure things out :).

I saw my parents and brother over Chrismakwanzakah (well, mostly Christmas, in this case) and I took some shots during my visit. As it worked out, I took 44 shots and I’ve posted six of those. (Ok, laugh it up, fuzzball. Yeah, I know it’s March.)

I like to post just those shots that I’m happy with, so it’s par for the course that I end up posting fewer shots than the number of times I happened to have hit the shutter. Still, I usually aim for a higher ratio than this. What happened, as I discovered, is that while some people can hold hold a shot at 1/30 of a second, well, I’m apparently not one of those people. Candid shots are my bread-and-butter and hand-holding the camera goes right in line with that.

You may have heard that old adage about taking 1/ focal length to estimate the minimum shutter speed at which a handheld shot can remain acceptably sharp. (For instance, according to the adage, an 80mm focal length would need at least a 1/80 sec shutter speed in order to have a good chance of being sharp.) That’s said to be true for 35mm film, but the math does need to be updated a bit for digital cameras. Due to their smaller sensors, the “1/ ” part needs to multiplied by the crop factor of the camera (which is typically about 1.6 for Canon bodies and 1.5 for Nikon bodies).

Since I was shooting most of the time with my 50mm lens, the rule would suggest that I’d need a shutter speed of at least 1/75 sec. in order to get a good chance at a sharp image. Well, with the caveat that everyone is a little different — and some people may be able to hold a camera more steadily than I can — I can confirm that the rule is a pretty good guideline. Or, put another way, that would explain why the dozen or so otherwise-good shots (that happened to have a shutter speed of 1/30 sec.) didn’t have the sharpness I was looking for.

If I’m in a similar situation again, I think I’ll try increasing my ISO speed; most of my not-sharp shots were taken with an ISO of around 200-320 and there probably wouldn’t have been much to lose if I had increased the ISO to 400 or even 800. (Since doubling the ISO value captures twice as much light, those forget-about-it shots at 1/30 sec. might have been saved by a 1/60 sec. shutter speed.) I’d probably hesitate to use ISO 1600 if I could help it (as that’s when digital noise can start getting in the way), but from what I’ve read, most modern DSLRs can handle ISO 800 with only trivial (if any) levels of noticeable noise.