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Popular cameras used with Flickr

November 29th, 2006 | No Comments | Posted in Photography by Bill Blevins

Use the Camera Finder on Flickr to see which cameras are being used to post to the popular photo sharing site. The Nikon D200 is starting to get some traction. The Nikon S9 is really taking off. Christmas season may put it at the top of the Nikon list!

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JPG Magazine

November 20th, 2006 | No Comments | Posted in Photography by Bill Blevins

My friend Howard Owens pointed me to Scott Karp’s blog which has a link to a $5 off special offer for subscriptions to a print magazine called “JPG”.

What? A print magazine? Absolutly. The print edition is the counterpart to the online site at JPMag.com where visitors submit their photography work.

I bit. I now have a tripod and a custom box coming along with the next 24 printed editions.

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Yotophoto searches free-to-use photos

November 20th, 2006 | No Comments | Posted in Photography by Bill Blevins

Yotophoto is a search engine for free-to-use stock photographs and images. These are images that are either in the Public Domain or released under generous Creative Commons, GNU FDL or similar licenses.

Originally an experiment to facilitate easier image searching of the Wikipedia, Yotophoto eventually expanded to index other well known free image sites. The index includes over a quarter million free images.

The image index can be searched by color by using a color picker or by entering hex values!

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Yahoo! Forms Strategic Partnership with Newspapers

November 20th, 2006 | 1 Comment | Posted in Uncategorized by Bill Blevins

Yahoo! Inc. today announced a strategic partnership with more than 150 daily U.S. newspapers to deliver search, graphical and classified advertising to consumers.

The partnership begins with recruitment advertising where newspapers will be using and feeding employment classifieds to Yahoo! HotJobs.

In addition, the newspapers plan to work together with Yahoo! to provide search, content, and local applications across the newspapers’ Web sites.

Initial participants:
Belo Corp.
Cox Enterprises
Hearst Corporation
Journal Register, Co.
Lee Enterprises
MediaNews Group Interactive
The E.W. Scripps Company

A conference call and Webcast, with participation from Yahoo! executives, will be held at 1:00 p.m. EST today. To access the listen-only conference line, dial 1-866-812-0403.

A live Webcast of the conference call, together with a presentation, can be accessed through the Belo Web site.

Following the conclusion of the conference call and Webcast, a replay will be archived on the websites of Yahoo!, Belo, Journal Register, Lee, Media General and Scripps beginning at 6:15 p.m. EST on November 20 until 11:59 p.m. on November 27.

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First snow of the season in Fairport, NY

November 19th, 2006 | No Comments | Posted in Personal by Bill Blevins

It is snowing!

Well, this post makes it official… it just started snowing at my house here in Fairport, NY tonight marking the first snow of the season!

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Nikon Coolpix S9 Sub-Compact Camera

November 19th, 2006 | No Comments | Posted in Photography, Rants by Bill Blevins

I bought a Nikon Coolpix S9 on Friday. I wanted a very small camera to carry in my pocket. Though the camera has impressive features, I’m not sure I’m happy with the purchase. Here are a few notes…

First off, the battery only lasted for about 25 shots. Now, in the spirit of disclosure, this it is a new camera for me and I was playing with the menu features quite a bit. I had fully charged the battery on Saturday morning and was conscious throughout the day that I was trying to conserve the battery for a party that night. There was no indication the battery was going low until the display showed the low battery symbol with about 25% remaining. (I can’t imagine why anyone would bother buying a 2 Gb SD card because simply shooting without viewing and editing I couldn’t imagine getting off more than 250 shots. The 2 gig card holds over 2500 full shots.)

Second… SD cards formatted in the camera don’t work in my card reader that I use for all of my memory cards and plugged into Mac’s OS X 10.4.8. Other SD cards (from my Canon Elf and my Canon Elura) do work in the same reader. The Nikon SD formatted card did work when attached directly to the computer inside the camera.

CAN YOU SAY RED EYE? Every single indoor shot had the problem. I don’t want to be spending my editing time after every indoor shoot fixing red eyes. I know sub-compacts have this problem and I understand all of the science of why this happens however my old Canon Elf isn’t that much larger and it does not have the problem.

Fourth - Even in a well lit room, photographing a friend opening presents from a distance of about 12 feet, the pics were horribly lit. Using no flash, the shutter speed was so slow that everything blurred.

Finally, if you hold the camera with one hand, the surface of the camera is so smooth, you almost pinch it out of your finger grip when pressing the button. Holding it with two hands, you need to be very, very careful to not get your left hand in front of the lens because of where it is located on the top front corner of the camera.

It takes video. On my card, it could record almost 2 hours of video and sound.

There is an option for using it as a digital audio recorder too. You can annotate your photos with a voice caption too. (I did not try that).

Overall, and after one full day of use I am not impressed.

On a positive note, it sure it a compact camera! The menus are easy to understand and adjust. It doesn’t have many options, so it isn’t hard to understand. One feature I’d like is to be able to reset to “default” every time you turn it off and back on. It seemed easy to set options and then forget they are on or where to go to change them.

My parents just bought the Nikon Coolpix S7 which is about a half-inch larger and noticeably heavier. I may wait to see how their snaps turn out after their trip to France later this week and consider that upgraded model.

Sample video clip:

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