Sensor Format Blind Test
TL;DR
Rank the four shots below from best to worst. Mention the position as top-right, bottom-left, etc. Submit your ranking as a comment.
The Fuss
These are interesting times for camera enthusiasts. Digital cameras have advanced to a level where most cameras are capable of publication quality snaps and you don’t even need to carry a camera to take good pictures, thanks to smartphones.
Mapping OO Interfaces to REST
A few days ago, my BBF (Big Boss Forever) Vijay R asked the following question:
Any resources on how to map OO design (controlled state change via methods) to RESTful services? #help
— Vijay Ramachandran (@vijay750) October 24, 2013
Here’s what I think about it. There are a few things that are very different about designing HTTP APIs as compared to language-native implementation design:
The goal of an HTTP API is to minimise coupling and facilitate interoperability, which is less of a concern when the usage environment is restricted to a single programming language and its runtime
Six Months with Nikon D7100
It’s been more than six months since I have had a Nikon D7100 for my own and I have been thinking of writing down my thoughts about the camera. However, these six months with the camera have been a bit of an up-and-down journey and it’s only now that I feel like I know the camera enough to write about it.
The D7100 is an enthusiasts’ camera and it will make you earn that title before you can be get along with it. Its 24MP sensor is like that brutally honest friend who wouldn’t flatter you and shine a spotlight on your weaknesses instead. Once you’ve overcome those weaknesses, though, the end result is something that can make a casual snapshot look like a stunning, frame-worthy photograph. The abundance of twiddly bits and sweetest ever handling in this line of Nikons appeal to the enthusiasts and set it apart from the latestD5xxx series that has the same sensor but with much crippled functionality and controls.
The Lost Flickr of Hope
I woke up this Tuesday morning to a shock.
OMG this Yahoo! bar on top of @Flickr is fugly. If this bar doesn’t go from Flickr, I will. pic.twitter.com/dolGKR8jJu
— Tahir (@codie) July 2, 2013
This bar is wrong in a lot of ways. The way it stands out in all its ugliness from the rest of the Flickr visual design speaks volumes about how it was executed (thoughtlessly, in a draconian way), how little the Flickr development team have a say in how things work (I can’t imagine a product owner who would allow such visual desecration of their product without a protest) and how little Yahoo! as a company cares about its vocal community (no attempt made by Flickr staff to respond to the outpour of grief in their help forum).
From Shooting RAWs to Shooting JPEGs
To Shoot RAW or JPEG?
I have been shooting photographs regularly for over 7 years now. I spent the first year shooting with a 2 Megapixel phone camera. Since then, however, I’ve almost always had RAW capable cameras and shot RAW compulsively. And why not? I get 16x or 64x more colour depth than JPEGs. I don’t have to bother about setting the right white balance, contrast or sharpness. I don’t have to choose between monochrome and colour at the time of shooting. I can figure all of that out on the computer during RAW conversion and even try out different settings for the same picture at my leisure. Why would I give up all this and shoot JPEG?
Nikon D90 vs. Sony RX100 in Goa
Last weekend I was in Goa on a leisure trip, which gave me an excellent opportunity for some photography. I carried the RX100 for landscape and street photography. The D90 also came along mainly for long range shooting with the 55-300mm VR and low light shooting with the 50mm f/1.8D. This trip allowed me to sort out some things related to the pros and cons of using a big DSLR vs. a small compact. Here’s how the cameras fared.
Nikon 1 J1 Review
My gear has evolved from P&S to DSLRs over the last five years, and each year I end up buying a new camera. The focus this year, was on reducing the size and weight of the camera gear, unlike previous years where I had been looking to acquire the latest sensor technology (although I was tempted to swap my D3100 with D3200!).
What started out as a quest for cheap backup P&S, ended up as a story about Nikon 1. But not before I had analyzed every single camera in the INR 10k to 25k price bracket. Thanks to Flipkart which has a decent range of cameras. But somehow I resisted the urge to order J1 from Flipkart, and instead went to a Nikon store in Lajpat Nagar, where to my surprise I got a better deal.
Impact of Sensor Size on Performance — a Contemporary Survey
I am in the middle of a choice between interchangeable lens systems and one of my pressing needs is the selection of a system that lets me have a smaller, lighter camera bag. Now is not a bad time to be shopping for cameras, with so much choice being available across price brackets and IQ variance. As always, having a lot to choose from is another way of getting confused, so I decided to do some objective data analysis to figure out what’s what.
The Compiler as a Refactoring Aid
Recently, I sat down to refactor a Go application with a high-level design objective in place. The application had two conceptually separate entities implemented in different files but mashed into a single package. I needed to separate them out into their own packages. I wasn’t using an IDE — just Emacs with basic formatting and non-contextual auto-complete aids.
I started out by creating a new directory for the package to be split out and moved the files that contained most of the relevant code into that directory, without thinking of the consequences. I could just invoke the compiler and let it guide me through the process of fitting the pieces of the puzzle together. One of the nice features of modern compilers is that they don’t continue dumping out errors beyond a limit. This allows fixing a program in small steps, going by the changes in errors produced by the compilers.
Go Workshop
Last week, I conducted a 2 day Go Workshop at my workplace. It was fun.
I started day 1 with the excellent Go at Google presentation by Rob Pike, followed by my own presentation of Go’s key features. The rest of Day 1 was spent taking the Go Tour.
The coolest thing I did was on day 2. I mirrored my laptop on the projector and went through a fresh install of Go from source on my [newly allocated] dev box. Everyone else had identical dev environments so they could follow what I was doing on-screen. At the end of it everyone had a functional Go workspace!