What camera should I buy?

You're interested in photography, and you want to buy a serious camera that will not only take good pictures but also help you learn this craft and remain a useful tool as you improve. If you're the kind of person who absolutely has to know everything and can't stand to have anything but "the best", I suggest you go over these review sites, read every single article they have and make your own opinion. On the other hand, if you have anything remotely approaching a life, you might be better of following the decision chart below. This way you'll chose your camera in three minutes, leaving you with all your remaining life minus 180 seconds to actually learn to take great photos — a much more rewarding experience.



(*) "passionate" really is terribly inappropriate here, but I couldn't think of a better word, so please indulge me in redefining this term for the sake of this chart. What I mean by someone being "passionate" is that he's the kind of photographer who would benefit from owning lots of gear, and is motivated enough that one day he will. By that definition, Henri-Cartier Bresson was *not* a passionate photographer. Rather fittingly, he rarely used Canon nor Nikon cameras. In case you're in doubt, if you answer "yes" to any or all of the following questions, you're probably "passionate":

• You fully expect that at some point in the future you'll own more than three lenses.


• You're interested in technically challenging photography, e.g.: concert photography, (indoor) sports, wildlife, birds, all of the above.


• You plan vacations to maximise photographic opportunities.


• You'd like to try taking unusual photos, e.g. of very small objects or with Fisheye or Tilt/Shift lenses.


• You actually know what Fisheye and T/S lenses are, or if you don't you plan on looking them up on Google as soon as you're done here.

So here it is! If you're currently on the market for your first (serious) camera I hope you find this chart useful. If you've already made that decision and have anything to say about any of the above, I'd really like to hear from you. In both cases, the comment form is there for you. Enjoy!

This is phun!

Super cool physics simulation package that will amuse a four-year-old and make grown-ups lose days of productivity. It's called Phun and is available for Windows, Mac OS and Linux.

Cute!

New programming Language!

Name: Fortress
Developer: Sun Microsystems
Aim: kill Fortran (and good riddance)

The Fortress language incorporates a mathematical syntax, meaning that mathematic symbols are operators and can be used to write a program. As a result, mathematical operations look exactly the same in the code as they would as they do in the mathematical textbooks, or on the professors' whiteboards.[...]

Fortress features both implicit and explicitly parallelism, Flood said. Unlike every other programming language, Fortress assumes that the functions you write can run in parallel. A programmer has to specify when this is not the case. It will also divvy out work among multiple processors.

[...]units of measurements are types, assuring that no mistakes will be made multiplying, say, kilometers with miles.

http://www.gcn.com/blogs/tech/46231.html

Here comes another bubble

A youtube video asks me to blog about it and I just oblige without thinking twice. There goes my free will I guess.

The procrastination chart

Just add a "post random pseudo-interesting drivel on my blog" task somewhere in this chart and you'll get a pretty accurate model of my day-to-day life...

(Thanks to Paul Doran for the link.)

Ten Signs You Want to Be a "Serious" Photographer

I know those "Ten Things" lists can get pretty lame, but I couldn't find any like this one, and I thought it would be an easy way to conclusively prove to my esteemed readers that I am, indeed, slightly mad.

1. You have a special B&H wishlist just for camera bags.


2. You chose your whole camera system in a week and never looked back, but four years later you're still looking for the right tripod.


3. You sort national parks in preferred visiting order.


4. During holidays, you get up three hours earlier than on working days.


5. You don't understand why anyone would buy a car when they could get a 600/4.0 for the same price.


6. You don't see anything ridiculous in staying in the exact same spot for forty minutes waiting for the light to improve.


7. You consider anyone who doesn't know about adjustment layers technologically illiterate.


8. You think of your laptop mainly as a Portable Storage Device.


9. You refer to your travel companions as "interesting compositional elements".


10. And, last but not least, you get really sick of hearing "Wow. You must have a really good camera".

Tact Filter

An interesting theory about tact filters has been mentioned on 43folders a few days ago.

I'm not sure this is about nerds vs normal people rather than simply different personality types. Many people seem both tactles and clueless, and still enjoy a very succesful social life.