New Camera

by Sander Tams 6. February 2010 19:21

Got me a new camera now, finally. And that is some days ago already, just so that you know. A few problems arised and all of a sudden there were a game show going on, so I weren't able to post this article by the time that I wanted.

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My shiny new DSLR of walletbane.
It's a Canon EOS 50D with a Tamron SP 17-50mm F/2.8 Di-II attached.

Cannon states this camera is somewhere between novice and professional. As far as I'm concerned, it outputs signifficantly better pictures than my point-and-shoot Sony Cyber-shot, and is able to take many consecutive shots pretty fast compared to other cameras in its class. The lens is of course, probably more important to overall image quality. It's a wide angle lens that becomes normal when you zoom in. It doesn't zoom much for an all-around camera, but I'm still planning on using only this one for now. Am not taking a lot of pictures of landscapes or hard-to-reach objects, so my expensive lens should be enough. It deals with lots of people moving around indoors pretty well, and has surprising capabilities for portrait shooting. And then, it's not that it was really-really expensive. It's third-party after all. 18000 NT$

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The sharpness of the lens is really great. And then it's good for taking pictures during night time, which is my top priority for now. The combination seems also to make the pictures more luminous. I feel that this way, I can snap photos that are more true to the extremely well-lit Taipei.
Above picture is taken with the new camera by 6.30 pm just outside Taipei World Trade Center Exhibition hall 3 (somewhere near Taipei 101).

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This picture is of the park by Banciao Main Station - which contains the MRT station nearest my current home.

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And there goes another shot in Taipei 101's neighbourhood. A lovely well lit place with lots of people around.

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Went to Taipei Game show again today (Saturday), and snapped some more pictures. I'm quite amased at how easy it is for me now to get really great shots of single people. On the point-and-shoot I used before, I had to point at the exact right position and then make the planets align. Obviously, that's the idea of point-and-shoot, and there's a good reason people are willing to pay so much more on the bigger cameras. Still, I am really surprised at how easy it is to do this. Can decide amongst a number of autofocus points and the camera focuses exactly on the object I'm interested in. The camera adds in a little bonus bokeh (blur on out-of-focus objects) by itself. Actually I don't need anything but to zoom and the auto feature gets the other stuff just right. And that is, much more just right than the unintelligent Cyber-shot that doesn't let you pick anything.

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Yet, I pretty quickly got to love control. Setting ISO, Aperture and shutter speed by yourself actually isn't such a big work to do, and I'd say it vastly improves the photosnapping in changing conditions. High ISO speed causes ugly, digital noise. An aperture that's wide open will reduce picture sharpness, (although it's pretty hard to see the difference with my lens.) And finally, low shutter speed blurs out moving objects. High shutter speed, low ISO and narrow aperture makes the photos darker - less exposure. It's really that simple it seems. You pick the lowest shutter speed when not much movement is going on. When outside during night time, slam the aperture wide open (that is, set it to the lowest possible setting) as well as setting the ISO up around 800-1600 (or 400-800 if your equipment is awesome) depending on the shutter speed. (Lotsa cars and people around this place, so I can't leave it too low.)

That's what I know so far at least. You can find that stuff all over the internet pretty quickly. They're well explained too, but to me, it seems really just terribly advanced when you read it compared to just snapping photos yourself. All that stuff about how to take it the right angle and golden panels and whatnot, I'm not an expert on currently, but for just 3 days of rampant snapping, I feel the manual control is no bother already. I can never go back to point-and-shoot again, that's 100% sure.

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Now, to be a little Canon EOS 50D specific, there's one feature for this DSLR body that's worth noting. As stated earlier in this post, it can spree photos pretty quickly. 6.3 photos a second, actually. Which is just great for taking photos of giveaways where people have to catch the stuff. - Or perhaps more likely, sports. I don't have such a great control of this feature just yet, so the pictures I've taken so far are not really the best of those I have.

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What an awfull lot of people.

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I wonder what kind of blog post this became. Some sort of cross between review, guide and computergame exhibition? Or just ramblings in excuse of posting more cute Asian girls?
Sorry to dissapoint you again, eventual female readers.

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Events | Taiwan | Photography

A day that end in a totally different place than it started

by Sander Tams 9. January 2010 19:24

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I went to shop cameras today. It's not that I bought any, but perhaps I have a better idea of what's out there now.

Went to Guanghua again, as they have not only computers, but a lot of camera stores too. Now, I am not very good with cameras, actually. I can look at a photo and tell if it's good or not, or if it's just too damn blurry to see a thing, but I don't really know much about why it's so important to stick a wide array of overly expensive lenses into those DSLR's to make them take the best photo for the occasions.

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Outside of the Guanhua New Digital Plaza, robots were rampaging the streets. A bunch of kids were running around and hitting the robotic baloons so that they almost fell over and the people who keep an eye over them had to ask the kids to behave.

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Appareantly, Intel had some promotional going on about you being able to win a trip to russia, to fly military airplanes and fire missiles at poor farmers, should you decide to buy a computer with an Intel processor inside during these promotional days.

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Inside, people are, of course, playing world of warcraft to promote some 'gaming' stationaries with lots of colored lights inside.

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Like this. I mean... It's really cool and all that it looks like some spaceship or whatever on the inside, but how is this going to be usefull to anyone? Oh, and that brick in the middle with cooler master written on it has a processor inside that outputs 2.74 gHz according to the screen to the left.

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Well, there's not much camera shopping over this, but that tauren druid totally just shapeshifted. Fuck I miss this game.

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Of course they had girls dressed up. Even some of the food courts have that kind of thing around here. A lot of guys with expensive cameras kept taking pictures of them over and over, so I decided to take pictures of those guys taking pictures instead.

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Look at that. Perhaps I should've just asked them what they use of cameras and I could've finished the day having a 90k NT$ camera in my hand smiling.

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If you walk a little off from all that digital craze, you can get to an arts exhibit with cat women and stuffs. I just walked past.

Right next to that place there's a spot where you can walk along the highways on grass. Nothing's currently build there, and even though you are almost in the absolute middle of Taipei City, there's actually space for you. It's a lovely place that I'd love to get back to soon.

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Right under this spot, theres a highspeed railway line for one of those trains that goes up to 400km/h. Amazing.

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There's also these old tracks for normal trains, but it's closed now. And here's some very rare exposure to Taiwanese graffiti. You know it already: I am in the land of video games and there's nothing you can do about that jealousy growing in you.

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After taking those pictures, I headed to another house in the rotary/rotaract-network. Maxine had some friends there, and of course, those friends were also members of rotaract and had parents that were members of rotary.

Well, I'll about how many people are, are related to, or know someone in rotary in another article. Ending up here was because some of the people there had tasted my rice pudding I made for The Christmas Party that was held at my house the 24th December. They wanted to learn how to make it and, obviously, craved it.

To make long stories short, the rice pudding didn't go well, partly because of wrong ingredients, mostly because of bad cooking. Not that we tried hard though. We played monopoly so much, that we decided to just do it another time.

Now, that was a day of events that went completely unforeseeable, eh?

I love this place.

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Computers | Travel | Taiwan

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Please note that I now do most of my blogging on Boonbot.com. There, you can also find many photos that I take. Try and have a look at my post about Taipei Game Show 2010 or my posts about Computex.

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About Me

My name is Sander Tams.
I am an exchange student from Denmark in Taipei, Taiwan.
I'm mainly focusing this blog on how it is to try and live a life as the locals here as a foreigner, commenting on the differences in culture and whatever I find amusing or interesting.
Have fun with the info about my life here. 

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