Running Speke's Gazelle

I had a wonderful father’s day this year, capped by weather fine enough to inspire a photo safari to the St. Louis Zoo just before closing time on Sunday. (Click the picture if you want to skip the words and just enjoy the photos.) This gave me the chance that I had been waiting for: fine light and interesting subjects on which to spend some quality time with my new (to me) Nikon 75-300 f4.5-5.6 zoom lens.

I was an early adopter of digital photography, purchasing an Epson digital camera in about 1996. It took crummy pictures but I loved the advantages: instant gratification and an easier way to organize the photos than boxes of prints and negatives. I also appreciate the economics. I swapped the Epson for a Sony Mavica camera, which happily turned all of those AOL floppy disks into “free film.” These days my camera, like most, stores pictures on reusable memory cards and my computer has a huge hard drive.

Since yesterday’s photo shoot was an educational excursion, I shot a lot of pictures, 253 to be exact. This would have been financially impossible in the old days when I shot Agfachrome. Even had I shot the Plus-X that I bulk loaded for about 25 cents per 36 shot roll and developed in my kitchen, that would have represented seven rolls of film. When would I have found the time to develop and print all of those pictures? Digital photography made the experiment practical. Less than two hours after getting home, I had looked at all of the pictures, learned what I needed to from them, and deleted 212 of the pictures, leaving just the 41 that I like well enough to keep.

It is simply magic to me that I can take pictures at 6:00pm, project the best of them on the wall at 9:00pm, and share them with my step-mother (who lives 1,000 miles away) at 10:00pm. As I talked to my step-mom about my pictures, she told me about the photo safaris my father and she used to take to the zoo. It’s nice that my dad and I share this. He got me started in photography ages ago and I still love it.

Here is the slide show. Click through to the Zoo Zoom photo gallery to see the pictures bigger.

To say that I am pleased would be an understatement.

If you are reading this on Facebook, you won’t see the photos until you click on Cloud Dancing.

I have noodled, off and on, with building an HTPC from open source projects such as MythTV and Freevo and Medibuntu. None really hooked me. The technology is still so new that you need a pretty carefully crafted recipe of hardware components to make it all work well and the chore of concocting the recipe and then locating all the right parts was too daunting. Worse, I was afraid that I would end up with a system that was so complex that only I could dependably run it.

I even considered buying a pre-built system with Windows Vista Home Premium. My friend, Steve, has one and it is a beautiful thing: everything just works. In my den, when it is time to watch a movie, I want to turn the equipment on and simply watch the movie. Three things put me off of this idea, though. I do not want a whole computer in my den. I certainly do not want to mess with a keyboard and mouse. And I do not want to pay as much for a HTPC as such a system would cost by the time I bought hardware which included a Blu-ray player, a video card with HDMI output, and a sound card with optical output.

Given this state of affairs, I had given up on getting a HTPC, figuring that I would revisit the idea in a year or so.

Candy and I are narrowing in on our tenth wedding anniversary. As a present to ourselves, we decided to replace our HD-DVD with a Blu-ray player and that meant that I got to play one of my favorite games: comparison shopping for electronics! I was completely surprised to find many reviews like CNET’S Best Blu-ray Players from January 28, 2009 which rank the Sony PlayStation 3 at the top of the list.

This list consists of the best Blu-ray players on the market and the bottom line is clear — the Sony PlayStation 3 is by far the most recommendable Blu-ray player available today. There are a few caveats — the PS3 doesn’t have analog multichannel outputs or an IR receptor — but they’re overshadowed by the fact that you also get a high-def gaming console and media streamer. Some home theater die-hards will insist on a standalone player, but everyone else should stick with the PS3 until standalones cost much less and perform comparably.

Beyond the basic PS3 system, I needed add only one accessory: a “real” remote control for playing movies so that I would not need to fiddle around with joysticks and a gaming remote. Sony sells a DVD remote control which looks surprisingly like the remote for any other DVD player; it has all of the right buttons in familiar places and with familiar labels. At $20, this was a no-brainer add-on.

The PS3 plays Blu-ray discs and DVDs beautifully. With the DVD remote control, operation is trivial. Pop the disc into the slot and, if the PS3 is not doing something already, it starts playing the disc automatically, just like a stand-alone player. If the PS3 is busy with another task (such as playing a game or playing some music), it only takes a few button presses on the DVD remote to switch to the disc.

I figured that buying a gaming console would provide some of that male bonding, family time that we dads crave with our sons. I have only two things to say on this subject: 1) Game graphics and sound are stunningly awesome on the PS3, and 2) my kids make these games look easy. Never mind how I make the games look. ’nuff said.

At this point, I was a very happy camper because the PS3 did everything I had wanted it to do and it did both things very well. Add in the trivial set-up and the nice, black design, and virtually silent operation and you will well understand why I was grinning. Then I started poking around at the other menu choices. My first stop was the music menu.

Audio CDs work just as expected. Pop the disk in and play it, just as easily as playing a DVD. With a couple of button clicks, you can even copy the CD to the internal disk drive so that you can listen to the album without digging out the physical disc. Sweet. Better yet, with just a little bit of effort, I was able to copy my entire digital music collection (more than 2,800 tracks, about 13 GB) from my laptop onto a 16 GB thumb drive and then onto the PS3. Now I can listen to everything I own, even music which I only own in MP3 format, on the real sound system in my den instead of only on my computer speakers. Double sweet!

Next, I tried photos:

Not only did the PS3 do a gorgeous job of scaling the 3872 x 2592 pixel digital images to fit the 1080 pixel tall screen, it is super simple to zoom and pan around the photos using the two joysticks on the gaming controller. The PS3 also includes great eye and ear candy in the slideshow department: nice transitions with enough motion to keep the viewer’s interest and an ability to play any of my music in the background.

Videos work great, too. I was able to copy some AVI movies straight out of our Canon PowerShot onto the PS3 and watch them. The PlayStation even did a nice job projecting the MP4 videos that I have of the first Apollo moon landing. Guess what: they are just as blury today as they were in 1968 and it was still fun to watch them again.

This is one of the few times in my life when a piece of equipment has wildly exceeded my expectations. I bought a Blu-ray player and got a full-fledged HTPC. I can hook up a USB keyboard and mouse for the few times when I want it (like when typing a credit card number to purchase a game on-line) but I do not need the keyboard since everything can be done easily and smoothly with either of the controllers.

Now if only I did not look like such an buffoon playing the video games….

Take a look and be sure to turn on the “smugloupe” feature. It will create a “magnifying glass” so you can see the photographs in detail. Alternatively, you can download the original camera files to your computer and examine them with your favorite image processing software.

* OK, I am actually next to the pools, not in them.

• Available light image quality is vastly improved. I had been jealous of my son’s D50′s quality and the D200 easily surpasses even that.
• Incredible color accuracy. I shot a swim meet and, expecting performance similar to the D70 and D50, I set the camera accordingly. I overcompensated and should have simply trusted the camera to do it right.
• Amazingly fast shutter; no lag time. I had thought that the D70 and D50 were fast but, when shooting swimmers, I find that I am shooting too early and need to retrain myself. What I had thought was slowness on my part in pushing the shutter button on the D70 was, in fact, shutter lag in the camera.

I also upgraded to the Nikon 70-200mm f/2.8 ED-IF AF-S VR zoom lens but that is the subject of another rave for another day.

I wonder how low the prices will go. The last card I bought, the SanDisk Ultra II 1GB 60x CompactFlash, cost only $90 at Costco.

Here is just one example.

The Emir of Bukhara

The Emir of Bukhara, Alim Khan (1880-1944), poses solemnly for his portrait, taken in 1911 shortly after his accession. As ruler of an autonomous city-state in Islamic Central Asia, the Emir presided over the internal affairs of his emirate as absolute monarch, although since the mid-1800s Bukhara had been a vassal state of the Russian Empire. With the establishment of Soviet power in Bukhara in 1920, the Emir fled to Afghanistan where he died in 1944.

The monopod, in case you are curious, is an Adorama Podmatic ($89.95) and I stuck a Sunpak Compact Ball Head ($19.95) on top.