It wasn’t any easier than yesterday, but I guess it takes time — and to be honest, I mixed up the routine a little, so it’s hard to measure if I did any better or not. I also warmed up beforehand — twists, stretches, arm-circle-thingees but perhaps I was a little too rigorous, leaving my heart not quite ready for two hundred METERS of jogging.

There’s always tomorrow… and the next day!

And no, though I sound like a convert, I’m NOT. I don’t ENJOY it — not by a long way. But it’s not as bad as I thought it would be.

Anyway, I set up my camera so that I could record a little bit of video after my jog. I don’t know if I’ll make a habit of this… but… here you go:

* * *
Also, though TMI Thursday has sadly come to an end — blame Lilu, that cow! — I did manage to record another video that elucidates just why exactly men scratch their nuts:

I don’t really enjoy listening to myself talk… but that first line! I have to admit, I’ve listened to the first line a few times.

* * *
Unrelated, but did any of you (Brits) watch The First Election Debate last night, on ITV? It wasn’t great. Less of a debate, more of a bickerfest. I don’t know how anyone is meant to pick a leader from a debate like that. At least Nick Clegg didn’t spend the majority of his time splitting hairs or repeating choice phrases from stump speeches. Gordon Brown, poor sod; seems to actually know his stuff but lacks the necessary charisma or force of will to see it through — he’s been given a bad hand of cards, put it that way. And good ol’ David Cameron… he’s the least offensive of the lot, I guess. Nice enough — but is that enough?

I don’t think Brown or Cameron should be put on a stage together again, that’s for sure. It doesn’t bring out the best side of either! The Conservative and Labour partiesmust know that this election may come down to voting on who is the least worst candidate…

[Post link: The jogging diary]

Related posts:

1. Why men pick their nose (an ‘exploratory’ video)
2. What men do in the shower, or ‘Seb sells out and gets naked on camera’
3. Those man boobs do jiggle

I don’t know the exact history of Strandebarm. It’s one of those flyspeck towns of just a few hundred souls where nothing of record really occurs — rather, the history lies with the people of the town.

The Nazis marched through Strandebarm in April 1940. The Nazi occupation of Norway was one of the quickest in history. Children were playing on the streets and quickly scattered when the soldiers marched up the road. Jews were rounded up (though the Norwegians weren’t very fond of them in the first place, it seems). It was a peaceful occupation overall, though: Norway, unlike France, wasn’t home to a war front.

A lot of stories and tales were shared, between my hosts and I, over hot cocoa and, later, some lovely salmon — fished from a fine fjord only a few meters from the table. I don’t have time to get all anecdotal though, so you’ll have to make do with some pretty photos for now.

We have a 6:40am flight to Trondheim tomorrow, so I ought to lay down and try to rest a little, even if sleep doesn’t come until it’s almost time to wake.

(Most of these are ‘50mm landscapes’… still trying to perfect my technique!)

(Trying to find out the name of the valley… can’t find it!)

(The church is from the 1800s — one of the oldest buildings in the area, I think)

* * *
I’m a couple of days behind on photos now (this always happens), but I’ll try to catch up from Trondheim…! (Unless the weather’s good… in which case, I’ll never catch up…)

(Incidentally, the self-portrait at the top of this post is the first and last time I balance my camera on sticky, stinky seaweed…)

[Post link: Strandebarm, or standing on the edge of dark grey infinity]

Related posts:

1. Treading in the shadow of my ancestors and standing where Hitler begun his world war
2. Catching up: some photos from Bergen and Hardangerfjord
3. I ain’t dead!

After unearthing the true reason behind why men pick their nose, I now turn my attention to a wholly more juicy subject — showering. More specifically, why some men take a really long time in the shower. Now, you can probably all guess, now that I’ve brought it up, but watch the video and hear it right from the horse’s mouth. I might even surprise you with some of the things that men get up to in the shower — and of course, for the sake of journalistic integrity, I actually recorded the video while standing in the shower.

I know, now that I’ve taken my clothes off — for Lilu’s TMI Thursday, no less — you think I’ve gone and jumped the shark — but not so! Just you wait; there’s a lot more weird stuff that men get up to.

Incidentally, the video was entirely unscripted, and all in one take. I dropped my towel, got into the shower and… this is what came out. I have no idea why I started singing, or where the penis-play ‘outro’ came from. I must be a little crazy in the head.

[Post link: What men do in the shower, or ‘Seb sells out and gets naked on camera’]

Related posts:

1. Why men pick their nose (an ‘exploratory’ video)
2. The school shower room
3. Day 37: Sebastian finds a camera…

With it now being spring — despite occasional flurries of sub-zero temperature – we also have all of the baby birds. Just a few days ago, my mum saw some little fluff ball jump from its nest and land head first in a big bush with a small thud. I can only assume that the birds that star in today’s video are also young, or simply a little retarded. These long-tailed tits just kept flying into the window! Maybe they could see their reflection, or maybe they just didn’t know better; thud, scratch, scratch… thud. For more than an hour!

You probably saw my dramatic video of two robins fighting for seed the other day, but in my opinion a couple of birds buzzing about like window-licking bumble bees is far more exciting. Did I mention this video has my cat Monaco in it, trying to catch birds through double glazing? Yeah, now you want to watch it! Go on, click!

I know the aspect is all wrong. I only realised afterwards that it would be the wrong way around. I’m a photographer through and through! It’s OK if you watch it full screen though. I was going to upload a ’sideways’ version, but you’d just end up tilting your head and looking stupid for four minutes.

Anyway, for those of you resolutely not watching the video, here’s a couple of photos, of the tit and of the cat; of Tweety and Sylvester.

(I’m not sure what she’s perching on… a tiny strip of wood? She didn’t hang about though, as you can see in the video.)

(Sorry… cat picture… I know… lowest common denominator and all that…)

[Post link: Titgasm]

Related posts:

1. Sweaty testicles: meet a bag of frozen peas
2. Why men pick their nose (an ‘exploratory’ video)
3. Tuesday’s Photogasm

It’s entitled ‘Things you’ve always wanted to know about men but were too afraid to ask’, and the first episode is ‘Why men pick their nose’. Yes, I’m aware that the series could do with a shorter, catchier name… but I can’t think of one. TYAWTKAMBWTATA? No. ‘… too afraid to ask’ perhaps? Or perhaps I could just embrace my uselessly anecdotal nature and turn it into ‘Things you’ve always wanted to know’. We’ll see.

Enjoy the video. Let me know if you like it, or not. It’ll be educational at the very least!

(If you can’t see the video above, you’ll need to visit my blog — and as always, I am a proud sponsor of Lilu’s TMI Thursday!)

[Post link: Why men pick their nose (an ‘exploratory’ video)]

Related posts:

1. What men do in the shower, or ‘Seb sells out and gets naked on camera’
2. Video test, Canon 550D, in which I babble
3. The jogging diary

Note: Don’t expect a highly-technical review. No doubt professional sites like DPReview will get to that in due course. This is all subjective. There are no chromatic aberration graphs, or side-by-side comparisons. Just some test shots, some video, and my (fairly) expert opinion. I’ve also never done this before, so the format might be a bit weird. Stick with me though, I should cover most of the important stuff!

You can skip directly to the sample photos, if you want to see some evidence of the new CMOS sensor and metering system, or the gains in high-ISO performance.

Gear Used

Camera: Canon 550D (also known as the Digital Rebel T2i in America, or the Kiss X4 Digital in Japan). Costs about £700, body-only, or £800 with the kit lens. Due to imports/exchange rates, it’s a lot cheaper to buy in the US (about $800 for the body only).

Lenses: Sigma 50mm f1.4 (around £400), and the Sigma 10-20mm f4-5.6 (also around £400). I’m actually a bit of a prime lens snob, but I’m still waiting for an APS-C sensor 10mm prime lens… you hear me, Canon, Sigma? Anyway, both lenses are best-in-class… as long as you get a good sample (I’m not going to go into the variety of Sigma’s output here…)

Initial Impressions

Before the 550D, I used a 450D for my ‘every day’ and on-the-move photography (travel, mostly). The 550D is identical to the 450D — weight, shape, balance, etc. The body seems to have a slightly different finish, and the grip is a little ‘grippier’. In more detail:

(500D on the left, 550D on the right)

The trigger: The button itself is a little harder to depress; slightly more ‘clicky’. Not ‘hard’ to operate though, just a little more… affirmative.

The buttons in general: No doubt the change to the trigger is due to an overhaul of all the buttons on the camera. The buttons on the back of the camera are now flat, making them quite a lot easier to use (though they take some getting used to!) There’s also a new ‘record’ button up by the eyepiece, to go with the camera’s video capabilities. Personally I still have a few issues hitting the depth-of-field-test button, but I think that’s due to my huge hands.

Other bits: In all other ways, it’s identical to the 450D (and 500D, I believe). There’s a new HDMI output, below the USB output, and an audio input (mic) above — and also a microphone on the front; for the video capabilities. Oh, it uses a new kind of battery too, the LP-E8 — so you’ll need new batteries, and a new grip too (lame!)

Photos

[Sample images are at the end]

The most important bit! (Unless you’re buying it for the 1080p HD video thing, anyway — that’s a bit further down the page). Does the 550D take good photos? ‘Hell yes’ would be the easy answer, but let me break it down a bit.

Resolution: Yup, more megapixels — up to 18 million effective pixels now, or 5134 x 3456. The RAW files are about 25MB, so you might need to get a new memory card!

Image quality (IQ): Better than the 450D, but I can’t compare it to the ‘identical’ sensor of the 7D. There are reports of it producing very, very similar photos to the 7D, despite Canon saying that the sensor is ‘not the same’. Of course you don’t get the weather sealing, but at half the price and half the weight… who am I to complain. The 550D uses ‘gapless micro lenses’ infront of the CMOS sensor, increasing the quality and sensitivity of every pixel. This in turn opens up ‘extended ultra-high ISO’ settings (more on that in a second).

Shooting: Continuous frames-per-second seems about the same as the 450D, despite the new DIGIC 4 processor — the listed speed is 3.7FPS, but if you shoot in RAW-only mode it will reach 6FPS! There’s all the standard options — RAW, JPEG, RAW + JPEG, etc. — but there’s currently no RAW support for Adobe Lightroom/Photoshop. The Canon Digital Photo Professional RAW processing tools are OK, but lack the depth of Adobe’s Camera RAW.

Metering, auto focus, and exposure compensation & bracketing: While we still only get the 9-point auto-focus (damnit!), there is a new ‘iCFL’ metering system in use, inherited from the Canon 7D. Basically, each of the 9 focus points collect a lot more information that’s then used to more-accurately expose your photos. From my tests, it does seem to be better and more reliable  than the 450D — but it’s pretty hard to test empirically. The AEB (exposure compensation/bracketing) now lets you go from -5 to +5, in steps of 1/2 or 1/3 — pretty neat, if you shoot into bright lights a lot (stage/theatre photography, in my case).

Custom functions: Some of the juicy high-end custom functions make their Rebel debut:  ’ISO expansion’ and ‘noise reduction’. With more pixels rammed every closer together, noise increases and image quality generally degrades — enter TECHNOLOGY! How better to counter technology issues with yet more technology? First, there’s ‘ISO expansion’ that lets you shoot at up to 12800 ISO speed, i.e. almost complete darkness with a large-aperture prime. There’s also on-camera noise reduction that seems to perform a lot better than the on-computer equivalent — you can enable noise reduction for all high-ISO shots, or just for long exposures. If you’ve used a digital camera in the dark, you’ve probably noticed the noise that creeps in — these new functions go a long way to making digital cameras better for night-time photography.

THE DAMN SHUTTER: The shutter is still loud enough to scare children from 100 meters. It’s a bit quieter than the 450D but not by much. Why does Canon give us such a noisy mirror mechanism when they’re capable of so much better? Lame.

Video

No doubt you’ve heard about the Canon 550D’s video capabilities. It was only a matter of time before the functionality dripped down from the 5D, to the 7D, and ultimately the 550D — you can now get a full-HD 1080p digital camera for just £700… crazy! And it’s pretty damn good at it too. Check out this little video clip:

Excuse the bed hair, but still — did you try it at 1080p? Full screen? (If your computer will even render it…) Anyway, the video functionality, in more detail:

HD, 1080p, 720p, etc: You can shoot video in all sorts of ways, with the 550D. Canon have learnt their mistake from the earlier video-shooting SLRs and given the 550D a full array of options: 1080p at 24/25fps (NTSC/PAL), 720p at 50/60FPS, and even a ‘digital zoom’ 640×480 resolution (which is kinda fun). Video clips are capped at 29 minutes and 59 seconds, which is 4GB at full 1080p.

Video quality (VQ?): I’m nothing more than an avid, amateur film maker, but the reaction of those that have seen my test 550D videos have been universally great. It’s simply flawless, 1920 x 1080 video. Just like usual film-making, the lens matters a lot. I’m not sure how else I can rate the video quality… it does exactly what it says on the box; that’s it.

Audio quality: The 550D has a forward-facing monaural microphone. It’s surprisingly good, though I haven’t tried it ‘at a distance’ — I can’t imagine it’s particularly directional. You can also hear a lot of noise from the wind in one my other videos. It was really, really windy though. Anyway, it’s more than enough for indoors and self-documenting work. There’s also an input for an external microphone (3.5mm jack).

Other bits: Video recording on an SLR is definitely a two-person thing. There’s no auto-focus, you see — well, there is, before you start shooting, but not once you press ‘record’. So you need a tripod, and depending on how bright it is, you might be trying to stay in a very shallow focus plane (look at my other test video to see how shallow the f1.4 focus is!) By default video recording is in ‘full auto’ mode, which basically chooses the ISO/aperture to match your framerate (24, 25, 50 or 60 FPS). You can switch it to ‘manual’, if you need to force a particularly wide/shallow depth of field.

Everything Else (appendix)

There are a few things that don’t really impact your use of the camera but are still worth noting, if only for a sake of completeness.

There’s a new LCD screen: It’s very nice, with lots of pixels and less glare than the 450 or 500D. It’s also the first 3:2 screen — i.e. wide-screen — so your images aren’t shrunk-to-fit any more! The new LCD screen is a real joy.

The digital menus have been enhanced: You can now access more ‘buttons’ through software — hit the new ‘Q’ button and you can change things via the LCD screen. Overall the menus are unchanged (though very busy, with all of the new video recording options), but with the new screen there’s some more real estate that is well-utilized.

Embed copyright info into your images: One of the smaller features to find its way from the higher-end Canon cameras is the ability to add your name and a custom copyright notification/message to every image your camera produces. It’s stored in the EXIF data for each image. Pretty neat!

Sample Images

I’ve only had the camera for a few days, so I haven’t had a chance to try every kind of condition yet. I’ll try to add more to this little gallery over the next few days and weeks. The various improvements to the sensor and the addition of some custom functions to the 550D are generally tailored towards more extreme use — low-light, especially. There’s also ‘Highlight Tone Priority’ (another custom function), but I haven’t had a chance to play with it yet — 7D users are reporting great results though, especially for candid/external portrait photography (weddings), so the 550D is probably just as good in that regard.

These photos are all taken on either the Sigma 50mm f1.4, or 10-20mm f4-5.6 lenses, and are straight out of the camera. Click for larger versions.

(Simulated fire, 50mm @ f/1.4, ISO-6400. Close up on the right)

Wide-angle night-time, City of London (The Royal Exchange), 12mm @ f/5, ISO-1600.

Just standard overcast light, 50mm, ISO-100, large aperture. Metering looking good.

Photo on the left looks a bit bright (but it’s accurate). Metering on the right looks pretty spot on, with dark/bright elements!

* * *
If you have any questions about the camera, feel free to leave a comment — I’ll reply.

[Post link: A brief Canon 550D (Digital Rebel T2i) review, with photos and videos]

Related posts:

1. Video test, Canon 550D, in which I babble
2. A new camera, HDR, and playing around with Photoshop
3. A wild trek through the undergrowth…

In the mean time, here’s a test of the video/film functionality. This is recorded at 1080p ‘full HD’, but I messed it up somewhere between the camera and YouTube — thus the bad audio sync, and maybe some dropped frames.

(If you can’t see the video below, you need to view this on my blog.)

[Post link: Video test, Canon 550D, in which I babble]

Related posts:

1. A brief Canon 550D (Digital Rebel T2i) review, with photos and videos
2. Why men pick their nose (an ‘exploratory’ video)
3. Video digest

And then… the animal cosplay special.

But now, ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Alien Special. All 25 seconds of it.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(If you can’t see the video, you’ll need to view it on my blog!)

Yup. My whole life was a build-up to those 25 seconds of fame. A six-month training regime. Three months of method acting. Private tuition with Andy Serkis.

You saw the still photo, but as it turned out… someone had captured some damn video footage of the pale, gangly, hideous creature that is… me.

You have to admit that the grunting guttural sounds are pretty awesome though. If you must know, it’s the scene from Men In Black…

Anyway… other than the awesome video, this Monday (if you are reading this on my blog) you get an overhauled side bar with some new favourite choices entries thrown in! Then the Index of Topics has been updated, which is where you want to go for ‘interesting’ or ‘deep and meaningful’ entries. I also updated the Travel Stories section with entries from the Faroe Islands.

And today’s ‘52 Weeks‘ is out later in the afternoon (UK time), whenever my partner in crime turns up… (if you haven’t subscribed yet, you should! With Autumn here, I can assure you there will be some beautiful photos.)

[Post link: The… Alien Special?]

Related posts:

1. Holiday mode!
2. More live music photos and a sunrise!
3. The show must go on! Just… not today.

This video is work-safe, but you probably want to use headphones as I grunt and whimper a little. The peas really are frozen, and the second bag at the end is broccoli.

Entirely unscripted and filmed in just one take, I give to you: Sweaty testicles: meet a bag of frozen peas.

Click here to view the embedded video.

(If you can’t see the video you need to visit my blog.)

[Post link: Sweaty testicles: meet a bag of frozen peas]

Related posts:

1. What men do in the shower, or ‘Seb sells out and gets naked on camera’
2. [This page intentionally left blank]

After a truly dismal beginning of the week, England finally warmed up again — just in time, too! The competition closed last Monday, and I really didn’t want it to drag on another week. I woke up on Sunday morning to be greeted by lovely, spring sunshine; it was TIME! Time to get Eric out of the box. I quickly ran downstairs and let Eric out of the rather cosy box that had been his home for the last week. Isn’t there a phrase about cats being out of boxes? Bags?

There was a bounce in his step. His face was upturned, absorbing the sun’s warm rays. He prowled around randomly, ping-ponging like Brownian motion and sniffing his surroundings, re-attuning his sense of smell and touch.

‘Today is a good day to choose a winner, Sebastian.’ I looked at Eric, shocked that he’d developed the ability to talk while caged up in his temporary, cardboard prison. The last week of solitude had obviously been quite a journey.

‘Indeed it is, Eric. Indeed it is.’

If you can’t see the following video, you’ll have to view it on my blog. The winner is shown at the end of the video. Later today I will post substantiating and ratifying proof that Eric did indeed choose the winner fairly, and justly.

Click here to view the embedded video.

I’m aware that the video’s pretty rough around the edges, but I only spent an hour filming and hacking it together! Thanks to everyone for taking part, a warm thank you to Eric for being such a good sport and congratulations to the winner!

[Post link: The die is cast, the votes counted and the blind cat UNLEASHED!]

Related posts:

1. It’s competition time and my blind cat Eric is going to choose the winner!
2. Independent adjudication and the phantom sister
3. Eric’s warmed up and rearing to go. He’s going to pick a winner!