update!

Leanne, caught browsing through imported Asian goods at Bamboo Village, in Downtown Vancouver

I finally caved. After five or so years using my trusty toshiba m-30 laptop, I finally bought myself a desktop. The screen size and hard drive space just wasn't cutting it anymore for photo editing.

My new computer is a Dell XPS 430...its a gaming machine with a giant enclosure and massive fans. It's totally overkill for my needs, but I deserve the blazing speed (after years of wobbly laptop monitors and half-broken keyboards). Adding to the love is my update to a massively-wide-screen 24 inch monitor.

 

Ive finally gotten around 'trying to' compare the images from my new Pentax DA 100mm macro lens versus my old macro solution (the Raynox M250)...

Image quality is hard to compare with winds outdoors and such preventing controlled shots, but the 100mm macro is MUCH easier to use, thats for sure. The raynox makes auto focusing impossible, and the depth of field is NARROW...like if you breathe you lose focus. The macro lens is a bit more forgiving.

However, the price of the raynox is much better (~$50 vs ~$300), plus the raynox is way lighter, so will still be my macro solution of choice for multiday hiking.

Here's a test shot from the 100mm macro, sharpened and saturated to heck using Picasa's 'feeling lucky' one-touch fix. Its not perfect, but at least I dont have to open lightroom (or worse yet, Photoshop).

For the last few months Ive been worrying about needing to clean my camera sensor. You see, my k10d was my first dslr - and in its first few months of operation I probably changed lenses hundreds of time for fun. This led to my sensor eventually getting horribly dirty.

Well a few weeks ago (prior to my Hawaii trip) my friend Thiago brought over some wet cleaning swabs he had bought (forget the brand right now, Ill update), and following a simple instruction I did one pass with a slightly damp brush on the sensor with my mirror up and it was all done.

"Too easy" I thought. "Theres no way it worked". Looking at the before and after pics below confirms the opposite. It worked WELL.


Cleaning your camera sensor is EASY as long as you follow the instructions.

I often use Google Earth to get a quick overview of the topography at a site which I havent had the opportunity to visit - I've often wanted to have an NTS map sheet overlay on Google Earth, to make selecting Geobase DEM tiles for input into our wind resource models much easier than going through the visual selection tool available at the Geogratis portal. So, after some looking around Geogratis I found the NTS 50 and 250 k Canada map indexes available as shapefiles, which I then exported to KMZ using one of the nice ArcGIS plugins that a community user had made (here).

The result has been surprisingly useful for me, and since I couldnt find it already set up somewhere else, I've decided to post it here in case somebody else wants it. The NTS map index names are all there - it looks a bit overwhelming until you zoom in close enough so you dont see 600 sheets at a time. Warning, even using KMZ over KML, its still a 5.5 mb file.

Anyways, HERE it is (you can also click on the post title).

Labels: Canada, google earth, NTS, overlay