Getting in on the act

It's taken me a long time to start using the RAW format for my photography, but as soon as I did, I've noticed the huge difference it can make. I really hadn't realised how much was lost when the camera applies its algorithms to determine what settings should be used on the raw data in terms of white balance, color saturation, contrast, and sharpness before compressing to jpeg.

I spent all of yesterday working through a series of papers, relevant to the work I'm about to start, plus writing out flash cards to speed up my intake of Spanish words - up to around 500 in passive use, not much in active use yet. With a good day's work under my belt I headed back, and took a detour to a sculpture that I'd previously spotted and thought would make an interesting subject.

This is the sculpture, though the obvious angle wasn't the one I was particularly interested in:

I often get strange looks as I'm taking photographs, as I often find myself in strange angles, under objects to get what I think will be an interesting shot. These were a few that I managed from the above sculpture:

This set of buildings also caught my eye, and it's the much higher dynamic range that I seem to get with RAW that has me so excited for the prospects. Perhaps it may not look like much, but I can see a big difference. Click on the photo to see more detail in the larger versions:

and finally, one, before I started with the new format, of the Cathedral, as seen through Santiago's winding alleys:

New Toys

Having spent all of last week preparing for my big talk on Friday and most of the week before away from the office, it's only now that I plunge back into my projects. I've managed to cut the ones that I'm working on reasonably full time to just three and have shelved a couple for now. It feels a little more manageable but still a juggling act.

The talk was enjoyable though rather tiring. At two and a half hours it was a great chance to go into some of the details which I usually have to leave out of a talk. As always lots of good questions although I fear that the students who were not versed in AdS/CFT were a little lost.

Last week we also had a talk on unparticle physics which is taking off, as expected. As a phenomologist friend of mine pointed out, it seems strange that people are using this model which is so little understood and may have so many possibilities to start studying precision physics. Georgi's paper which talks about distributions of missing energy from a generic unparticle physics model seems a long way away from corrections to g-2 of the muon or B-Bbar mixing. Still it's interesting to watch a new subject develop and I'm sure there are surprises to come.

Anyway, with little time to blog recently it's all been adding up. I'll randomly update on recent events as I have spare moments. The big news from this weekend was that I finally picked up my camera, a 10.1 Megapixel Canon 400D (Digital Rebel XTi) SLR with a 17-85mm Canon Lens. Suffice it to say that I am both hugely excited about having a new toy and overwhelmed by what it can do.

I've been spending a bit of time over the last few weeks reading up about digital SLR photography and techniques with this particular camera and so it felt remarkably comfortable playing with it once I'd set it up. That's not to say that the shots are great by any means yet, but I can see what it's going to be capable of. Though my point and click is just 3.1 Megapixels I've had it long enough to know both its limitations and what it's good at and so have managed to get some pleasing results from it over the last 3 years. With the new baby it's clear that it's much easier to get a bad shot (unless you're on fully automatic) but the possibilities of getting a superb photo rather than just a mediocre one are also vastly improved.

I spent Sunday afternoon and evening walking around the old Summer Palace (Yuan Ming Yuan) which was destroyed by the British and the French around 150 years ago - a particularly embarrassing period. Though the buildings are all almost entirely destroyed, the lakes are still beautiful to walk around and the place is a lot more peaceful, tourist-wise than the new Summer Palace. Yuan Ming Yuan is just by the West Gate of Tsinghua university, so you can do both in a long afternoon. There's also the famous West Gate barbecue restaurant where you can stuff yourself with chicken wings, chicken hearts and lamb kebabs, while sitting with a hundred others on plastic chairs by the pavement drinking cheap beer and breathing in the car fumes. I give it a bad image but this is a truly enjoyable part of Beijing life - the casual streetside eateries where summer nights are easily lost.

Anyway, of the 350 shots I took yesterday there were a few which show some of the nice bits of Tsinghua university:


and Yuan Ming Yuan:


There's clearly a lot still to learn about the camera but I'm currently having a great time finding out.