Tech Blog

Less than 100 days until the Olympics roll into Vancouver and the myriad of ways you can wave your support of the games spans every genre of souvenir. There are knapsacks, jackets, tshirts, keychains, waterbottles, flip flops, hats, scarves, pins and memory cards. Read more...

Ah! it's good to be back. My blog writing has been (very) slow and sluggish lately, as I have been substituting keyboard and cameras for diaper changes and baby spit. Well inaugurated into the daddy club, I thought it fitting to share some of junior's first shots, but with a twist. I have been scouring the web for fun, easy-to-use image editors/manipulators that will make you grow a mustache (literally) or send you back to the dazed polaroid days of the 1970s. Read more...

A couple of weeks ago Samsung Canada dropped off two new pocket cameras @ my desk. Already when opening the boxes my reaction was: "ooh!, this is so cool". So for this post I decided to put 'focus' on the innovative new features of the two Samsung cameras. Read more...

Viewfinder magic, auto focus and image quality. Read more...

Having shot with and tested the new Nikon D300s DSLR for a week and a bit now, I am tempted to think that Nikon's engineers and designers have been watching *too* much Simpsons lately. As Homer puts it, when approached by his long lost brother, Herb, with a new innovation: "People are afraid of new things. You should have just taken an existing product and put a clock on it or something." Read more...

A new GUIDE mode winks at you from the mode dial on the D3000: "c'mon, use me". Basically the mode is an extension of the different scene modes where you typically find, such as close-up, night time, distant subjects, blurry background, etc. After you select a setting, the camera briefly explains what it will do, and then you start taking pictures. You also have the option to click to tweak flash settings, etc. Read more...

Like it's bigger brothers (D300s, D700, etc.), the D3000 has the ability to move the focus point around using the small directional pad on the back. Mind you the D3000 only has 11 focus points, while the D300s has 51, but I was still positively surprised to find this feature on Nikon's bottom entry-level DSLR. Way to go! Read more...

OK, I am impressed. Mind you that doesn't happen that often when it comes to photo gear, and especially gear in the affordable end of the price scale. I mean anyone can be impressed with a $5000 lens or camera, but a sub-$700 camera, now that's something else. So what's so great about the Nikon D3000? Read more...

So that's all nice and good, but can the camera actually take good pictures? Read more...

Well, maybe Sony is not the Alpha Dog of the DSLR pack quite yet, but the company most certainly has its eyes set on the prize. A recent tally of world wide DSLR sales (measured in numbers sold) reveals that Sony made the biggest stride forward from 6% to 13% (2006-2008) of all manufacturers. Over the past two weeks I have given the a330 camera a thorough test. So the question begs, is it a worthy member of the aspiring Alpha Dog pack? Read more...

Canon's announcement of the new 7D is one of the more significant for the company in a long while. After being market leader in the DSLR space pretty much from the beginning, Canon started loosing ground to Nikon (especially the company's D300(s), D700 and D3 cameras) and Sony with it's aggressive approach of a generously priced, large camera lineup and the first sub-$2,000 full frame camera. Read more...

Ahh!, the blissful fall. The leaves change colors, football season starts again and the camera industry announces its fall lineup just in time for the nearing holiday sale. So what do the camera manufacturers have in store for us this fall? Read more...

I was fortunate to visit San Francisco last week for three days. Two days of business and one day of sightseeing. The weather was beautiful, actually too good washing out a bit of the colors and contrast under the bright sun in some of the photos (and turning my poor arms and neck an unhealthy reddish hue). Read more...

ISO (the sensor's light sensitivity) is sorta the 'pixie dust' of photography. It is not a mechanical process (such as shutter speed and aperture) and no longer a chemical process as when shooting with film. Now it is something as intangible as a pixel (whatever that really is) that catches a certain amount of light depending on the set ISO value. Read more...

When you start to see some of the technology that has made it's way to consumer electronics, it starts to make you wonder: if we can do this, what can the government do? One of the things we can now do, is recognize and label faces as we're shooting. Panasonic's Face Recognition not only recognizes where the faces are in your frame to help better focus, it also recognizes the names that belong to those faces so you can find the image you want to focus on as you're shooting a crowd. Read more...