My brother and his wife were over for dinner tonight. My father-in-law came over to get some snaps taken for his 60th birthday party next weekend. Just a couple of quick black and whites. I don’t particularly like taking photographs or having photographs of myself being taken which is quite ironic but maybe I’ll ease into it.

Brother & Father-in-law

Camera self portrait

I added another Transformers Masterpiece to my collection on Wednesday with the purchase of Rodimus Prime. Rodimus became the next Prime after Optimus was killed in the original Transformers Movie. Rodimus was previously Hot Rod, a young Autobot who was able to use the Matrix of Leadership during the Autobot’s darkest hour in the movie.

Rodimus Prime was released as a Masterpiece in 2010 and there are a couple of versions, much like Starscream. The collector’s released version by Takara is boxed and also includes Rodimus’ RV trailer. These version usually sell for a couple of hundred of dollars. My Ultra Magnus (MP-01) and Grimlock (MP-08) are also Takara boxed which would be worth a little bit more if I hadn’t opened the box and started transforming them (complete with sounds!). Starscream and Rodimus are the US boxed versions of the Masterpiece series which to most people look just like normal Transformers.

This is Rodimus Prime. Instead of a trailer, you get Offshoot (previously named Firebolt but changed due to copyright).

Rodimus is a Toys ‘r’ Us exclusive and this is the sticker that’s on the box so you that you know.

The top Matrix of Leadership is the one that comes with Ultra Magnus while the bottom is the one that comes with Rodimus Prime. Rodimus’ Matrix opens a little while Ultra Magnus cannot be opened at all. I’m guessing because Ultra Magnus couldn’t open the Matrix in the movie while Hot Rod did to become Rodimus Prime.

You are probably wondering what he looks like in vehicle mode… So do I, I spent a few minutes trying to transform him and it didn’t quite work out so I gave up. I’ll try it again another time. Rodimus feels more like a toy than the other Masterpiece figures. By that, I mean he feels like the Transformers of old in the 80’s when they came out - he doesn’t feel as solid as Ultra Magnus (though non of the others do really, he’s mostly made out of metal) and not as fragile as Starscream where you are worried that he is going to fall apart when you touch him.

Pretty happy that I picked him up the other day, it was a pleasant surprise to see him at Toys ‘r’ Us. Comicon had just finished a couple of weeks ago and the US Toys ‘r’ Us store were selling it but it sold out quite quickly. They also have quite a few left of the Starscream MP-03G which is the ghost of Starscream edition but might have to save a few pennies at $249.

Walked into the city on Friday for lunch with some work mates and took the X100 for a few snaps. Impressive as always and you can just blend in like a ninja since no one takes notice of you. Most people just think that I’m some Asian tourist taking happy snaps around the mall. I am allowed to stay in this country legally you know!

Greg and I went down to the Wellington Point on Saturday morning for a sunrise shoot - The weather wasn’t exactly perfect for it because there weren’t too many clouds so it was a pretty clear sky. There were some clouds forming on the horizon but nothing spectacular. We did get a couple of moon shots as it was a full moon and very bright.

This is the moon shot I got with the D7000:

I took the X100 with me, it’s a fantastic little camera and I’m so impressed with the quality of the photos that I can get out of it. I did a time lapse using the D7000 and tool a few snaps with the X100 while that was going on.

Snapping big brother D7000 in action.

The pier at Wellington Point.



A tree and the final shot of the day when we went to get some breakfast. The lady was waiting for the convenience store to open.

My current annoyances with the X100 are related to do with the time it takes to be ready to take a shot when you turn it on which is a couple of seconds. It’s really all that long but an eternity compared to the D7000. Another thing I’ve discovered but haven’t looked into whether it’s an adjustable setting or not is that the X100 will go to sleep after sometime and the only way I’ve figured to wake it up is to turn it off and back on again.

This is the time lapse that I took with the D7000.

This week Willis and Mitch are joined by Ricky, yes that ‘Wake Up Ricky’, as a guest host and there is discussion about photo sharing sites, high ISO, weddings and more.

Links for this week’s episode:

• The camera that goes to a million FPS
• Chainfire creates Android tethered controlled app for Canon DSLRs
• RED Epic with EF Mount
• Ricoh M-mount GXR A12 module announced and previewed
• Kenko-Tokina launches NDX variable neutral density filter
• Match Technical launches Thumbs-Up for Fujifilm X100
• The great Chinese iPad Zipline smuggling ring
• Shoot Tokyo
• Danny Choo
• These long exposure are so beautiful
• More Nikon camera prototypes
• 10 slow motion videos that you must watch
• Unreleased Sony A77 nominated for Good Design awards
• Ricky’s blog
• Squarespace for easy to build websites

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The Photo Mojo Show

Shoot Tokyo

I casually mentioned to my wife over dinner that I was thinking about picking up a smaller camera to my Canon as a second point and shoot.   She agreed and off to the web I went to scout out my new Leica.  Something was serious wrong with this site I though when it returned $7,000 for the body only!  Huh?  What?  A lens is an additional $4-5,000 US Dollars?

Ricky shared this on tonight’s episode of The Photo Mojo Show and when he said Leica, I Instapapered it immediately.

The Ballad of Mike Hagger (via Joystiq) - I loved Final Fight growing up.

Last night I went to a pub quiz in West End at The Archive with some workmates and thought it would be great to see how the X100 does in low light photography. Great it seems! I’m not a fan of on flash photography so I usually have that turned off. To compensate for the lack of flash you usually crank up the ISO. In the past, increasing ISO meant that you got noise as the tradeoff. It seems that most cameras that have been released in the last 18 months or so have significantly stepped up their ISO performance while minimising noise.

The X100 supports ISO up to 12800 but ISO 6400 is probably where you would to shoot at its highest without too much noise. All the photos taken last night were shot at ISO 6400. The best thing about this camera is that everyone wants to have a look at it and if they do want to take a shot, they can do so without getting all confused but still getting a great shot. Contrast that to the D7000 and usually people will either get confused (but be in awe about how kick ass the camera is) or take a crappy out of focus shot… or both.

There are a couple of things that I have noticed that are a bit of a pain but also means that I need to be mindful of when using the camera:

1. The camera seems to take a while to start up and be ready to take a shot. Maybe it’s because the D7000 is lightning quick to start.
2. Saving in RAW can take several seconds before you are ready to go again.

They aren’t deal breakers but it does serve as a good reminder to always be ready for that shot or as the quote by Wayne Gretsky but has been recently used to describe Apple is “skate to where the puck is going to be”*

I forgot all about the in camera processing effects until after I had finished with them in Lightroom. I’ll give it a go next time I’m out shooting with the camera again but I’m really enjoying shooting with this camera. The 23mm (35mm equiv) lens is perfect for crowds and the wide f/2.0 aperture combined with the ISO performance is great for low light non-flash photography.

*This quote goes back to what Greg Joswiak, Apple’s Product Marketing Manager said in an interview with Fortune a couple of years ago. Recently used a bit by John Gruber of Daring Fireball, here and here.

Review of my dream camera at The Phoblographer

Is the M9-P a work of art or is it just an expensive doorstop?

Jollys Lookout Time Lapse from Friday night.

This is the next piece in the Office 365 for SME series. You can view part 1 and part 2 if this is the first time you have read the series.

SharePoint Online for Office 365 is based upon the on premise version of SharePoint 2010. The previous version of SharePoint Online for BPOS was based upon MOSS (Microsoft Office SharePoint Services) 2007. SharePoint 2010 was a huge improvement over MOSS when it came out about a year ago. Some of the big advantages was that it had support natively for browsers other than Internet Explorer and as such isn’t as reliant upon ActiveX like MOSS was. SharePoint 2010 also dropped support for Internet Explorer 6.

SharePoint Online is a collaboration web application that is mostly run out of the browser though some applications can be used for certain functions (such as SharePoint Designer andOutlook for integration with SharePoint lists).

SharePoint is used to create sites in which documents, files etc can be stored and effectively gather in one location. Access can be given depending on security roles assigned to users or groups and because it is integrated with Active Directory, users will not need yet another username and password to sign into SharePoint.

Some of the features of SharePoint Online include: (taken from the Office 365 site)

Features

If you are already using SharePoint online through BPOS, when you migrate to Office 365, Microsoft will handle the migration for you. This is quite good because moving from MOSS to SharePoint 2010 isn’t the smoothest of journeys. Your SharePoint site collection/s will be locked for read only until the migration has been completed.

If you have an on premise SharePoint server, you may need to look at some third party software to assist with the migration. Another issue to take into account is how much file space your site collection is using as SharePoint Online comes with 10 GB of storage for the subscription. You can purchase additional storage but at $2.50 per GB per month, it’s not a very cost effective option.

At my work we have WSS 3.0 (Windows SharePoint Services) instance installed which has been used over the years to store lots of project files and documents. Our SQL databases (the backend in which SharePoint stores its data) total over 80gb which would take an eternity to upload and cost a fortune to use just for archived storage. The options for us is to either keep the WSS 3.0 server but at risk of confusing users or perhaps migrate that data out of SharePoint. Another option which I’ll need to investigate is to see if we can make use of SharePoint 2010’s ability to use remote blob storage. Remote blob storage means that instead of storing your files in your SharePoint site in a SQL database as per the default setup, you can store it on a SAN/NAS etc and SharePoint will still be able to link to it. From an end user perspective there is no difference but from an admin perspective it can be versatile in moving storage from expensive tier 1 storage to inexpensive tier 2 or tier 3 storage.

As with Exchange Online, SharePoint online will give licence rights to access on premise copies of SharePoint server. I haven’t been able to find any information to confirm whether or not that means that you will be allowed to deploy an on premise SharePoint server if you don’t already have one.

If you are a small business without a current web presence, SharePoint Online will be of use to you as you will be able to create a public facing website. Handy because you don’t need to know code to create the public site and have something up a running pretty quickly. It also means you don’t have to worry about web space storage and bandwidth from a hosting provider as it is all included in your subscription.

A really cool feature of SharePoint Online is the ability to give external users access to your SharePoint sites (one, some or all) to join the collaboration. This is useful if your organisation is dealing with consultants and means that you can save emailing documents back and forth with multiple versions etc. The users can log into the SharePoint site that they have been given access to and participate as if they had been setup as an internal user. The beauty of this is that they do not need to be setup in Active Directory and if there happens to be a compromise in an external users account, you as administrator can revoke access to your SharePoint Online sites to all external users. The only requirement is that external users will require a Windows Live account to be able to log in.

There is quite a fair bit to SharePoint but I’ll try to cover more in the future. I think for the price that you pay for an Office 365 subscription, the entry fee alone is worth it just for SharePoint Online. An on premise instance of SharePoint server is at minimum $20,000 and that’s not including user licences (CALS) and the cost of implementation. There really isn’t anything in the market that compares to SharePoint Online and I think is a great addition to Office 365.

Last weekend Dad brought up the Fujifilm X100 camera for me to test drive. I’d been looking forward to this for a while since I first read about it at Photokina last year and we spoke about it lots of times on The Photo Mojo Show. I’m a huge Leica fan and this looks like the closest thing that I’ll get to a Leica for a long time. It takes the inspiration of the rangefinder cameras of the past but does bring a few little tricks of its own.

The X100 has a 12.3 Megapixel APS-C sensor which means that it’s pretty much the same size as you see in most consumer DSLR cameras. It has a 23mm fixed lens which is the equivalent of a 35mm in the old film standards. It’s a nice compact size, wide enough for landscapes and good rang for portraits. You can view the full list of specifications on the Fujifilm site. The camera records in RAW which is great and of most interest is the hybrid viewfinder.

I’ll have a more indepth review later but for now I thought I’d show you pictures straight out of the camera (with white balance and lens corrections only).

Last night a friend and I went up to Jollys Lookout near Mt Nebo to get some time lapse and astrophotography shots. I took the X100 with me to get a couple to see how the ISO performance is. Needless to say, we were both very impressed with it. The first shot was a test without tripod and I ended up keeping it as my Van Gogh tribute shot. ISO was set to 3200 and you have to agree that they turned out pretty good. The noise was minimal and shots were pretty clean. I’ll be taking it on the streets with me more and getting shots. I’m finding the camera is less intrusive than shooting with a DSLR and people don’t give you looks like they should be reporting you to ASIO.

This morning Mitch, Mel, Lee and I went up to Noosa Heads for a sunrise shoot on the rocks look at the headland. We were up very early (not so bad for us compared to Mitch and Mel who picked us up along the way) leaving Brisbane for the Sunshine Coast. There was a bit of trek along a walking path and then onto the rocks where we setup for a couple of hours.

Yesterday I bought a Hahnel Giga T Pro II wireless remote transmitter and had some problems getting it to work with the D7000. I had to return the first one as the cable that I used to connect it had bent pins. We got back to Ted’s just before they closed and they kindly swapped it out. When we got home I tested it again and it still didn’t work. I went to bed feeling a bit dejected though I did test it after the shoot on Mitch’s D700 just to check whether it was the cable or the transceiver.

After the shoot we went to Hastings St for some breakfast and afterwards had a look at Peter Lik’s gallery store though it wasn’t open for another 45 mins or so. We drove back to Brisbane but along the way stopped by the pine forest plantations and took some snaps off the beaten track.

Got home, Lee crashed and went to sleep and I did a bit of reading and then got up for a bit as I had a small nap on the car ride home. Thought I’d test the cable again and it turns out that I had been using the wrong cable all along and that it worked just fine. Doh! We’ll save that for next time then.

Mitch with his wife beater singlet on.

My favourite shot of the day.

I learnt quite a fair bit from Mel, all about locations, weather and all about preparation for the shots you want to take. Had a great time shooting with everyone and can’t wait till the next time. Lee, I’m not so sure because of the early rise.

So the match last week was a bit depressing if you are a Wallabies fan. Samoa played their hearts out and deserved the win.

Green and Gold Rugby put together this little video to get us going again for this weekend.

Put your headphones on, close your eyes and listen to this song. It is awesome on an epic scale.