Over lunch we stopped in and picked up a digital converter box with one of the coupons I got us. I’m a gadget freak and the idea of possibly $80 towards a box that should only cost $20 (so realistically it ends up costing about $60 at the store was hard to pass up. Even when it became obvious that as I suspected the boxes would be in the $60-$80 price range. Politically it upsets me to see our government wasting money like this, yeah they’re making a killing auctioning off the spectrum and they could probably get a 47″ HDTV for every household in the country and still be well above what they expected to make in the auction, but I still don’t like to see the government spending money. But if they’re gonna hand it out anyway then I’m not going to refuse it. Politics aside what do I think of the converstion, read on. Continue reading →
Archives
18
Mar 08
Joys of digital
(NOTE: I got lightbox working. Click on one of the photos in this post to check it out.)
One of the interesting aspects of digital photography for me is the way that suddenly the camera make a much bigger difference in the photo than it did previously. This is of course because the camera now also does the job of the film. With film cameras it was relatively simple to swap rolls of film to get increased speed ratings or different color balances and response curves giving wildly different results for the same “photo”. Yes, much of that can be mimicked through processing and at the hands of a skilled artist can be quite convincing. But there are still physical limits that could be changed or pushed with film that are fixed and solid with digital. This was even worse when all cameras created JPG’s or TIF’s so you were stuck with the artifacts of each cameras own software shortcomings.
Thankfully RAW files bring back a lot of the flexibility of film that was missing. And in many ways give even more flexibility since now you can choose your “film” after you shoot instead of before, not to mention being able to change your mind on the fly.
Which tasty Challa would you rather have:
Read on for the differences
Continue reading →