Anyway, hopefully I might kick myself back into blogging more frequently with this post. The title is the two things I bought this weekend – one somewhat more exciting than the other! My new car bought back in November last year came with the usual standard windscreen wiper, something like this.

Now these style of wipers have served the world well for many years, but there is a a much better alternative, which is now available at a reasonable price. As I needed to get a new wiper anyway, as the old one was clearly on its way out – smearing the screen and not really helping me to see at all, I wanted to go for this new style.  These flat blades look something like this:

These wipers have the advantage of having over 1000 points of pressure contact with the windscreen, rather than the older style which have only 6-8 using a whippletree mechanism and mould to the screen’s shape (which on the Elise is particularly curved. Nicely illustrated in the diagram on this page.

I picked up my new 24″ wiper blade from Tesco for only £4! Fitting it took just a few minutes and I’ve seen a vast improvement already – far less smearing on the screen and it clears rain consistently and quickly. Next job is to get a set of these for the girlfriend’s Mazda2, which – despite being 8 months old – came with standard wiper blades. My Mazda3 bought at exactly  the same time came with flat blades.

The second thing I bought this weekend was an addition to my digital SLR photography arsenal – the Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4.0-5.6 IS lens. I was desperate to upgrade from the kit 18-55mm lens that came with my EOS 350D and ideally wanted IS to improve on blurry shots in low light.

I was toying with the idea of the IS version of that same lens, though in the end, I decided it made more sense to spend a bit more and opt for the 17-85, especially as it has the USM focusing system (very fast and quiet focusing), full time manual focusing for tweaking before releasing the shutter and a far better build quality including a metal mount, rather than the plastic mount on the 18-55mm lenses.

However now I have to splash out on new UV, ND and CircPol filters as the filter mount is 67mm rather than 58mm which all my existing filters are! Hopefully I’ll bring you an update on how the lens performs when I’ve had a chance to get out snapping.

One option that many people use is Lightbox – or one of the many variants that have cropped up. This is a Javascript overlay technique that allows you to display thumbnails of your photographs and then when the visitor clicks on the thumbnail, causes it to pop-up in the centre of the screen (without a new window though) and darkens the background.

Look at this for an example:

I haven’t yet decided which Lightbox variant is best for my needs – I’m currently going through this list which is a very useful summary review of the options: Which Lightbox is Right for You?

Edit: Looks like Slimbox may have won the competition.

http://www.bobatkins.com/photography/digital/image_stabilization.html

The Canon EOS 450D (XSi) is an enhancement on the 400D with a range of new features, including live preview allowing you to use the LCD screen to frame your shot instead of the viewfinder. This includes an optional contrast detection auto focus method, which apparently is slow but potentially very accurate. Using the default phase detect AF causes the mirror to flip down every time you refocus, thus blacking out the LCD temporarily. The live histogram function the former AF mode offers could assist in preventing over- or under-exposed shots before you actually press the shutter release. Having to check the histogram after taking a photo and adjusting the exposure can be tedious so this is a useful feature. One disadvatage of live preview is that the sensor gets warm if used for this for a long period of time, which can introduce noise into your resultant shot.

DPReview have three very interesting and informative (the usual high standard) articles on the new 450D:

• Press release and specs
• Brief hands-on
• What’s new and changed

Bob Atkins also has a comparison of the 400D, 450D and 40D. Looking at the photographs of the new model, it appears to be larger than the 400D, which in turn is quite a bit larger than the 350D. I think I would still prefer the 350D given the choice, due the small size which fits my hands better. Though obviously the quality, features and resolution of the 400D and 450D are tempting!

The 350D also has a seperate mono LCD screen for the indicators such as exposure, timer mode, remaining shots, flash, AF mode, metering etc. This has a orange backlight enabled by a button for night-time shots. I prefer this to the single (though larger) screen on the 400D and 450D which displays these setting when preparing for your shot, and shows the resultant photo after the shutter release has been pressed.

It’s interesting that Canon have released the 450D which appears to be closer to the more pro models that Canon produce (40D, 30D, 5D, 1D). Looks like they’re providing a stepping stone for users who want to upgrade their models to the higher end of the range, given that the 450D contains a number of features already found in the 40D.

Update: Digital Photography Review have posted a full review of the 450D

It can be downloaded from the Microsoft web site here.

Exif data is meta data embedded within image files, usually added by digital cameras, which includes data such as aperture, focal length, shutter speed, white balance, ISO speed and date/time taken. This can be very useful for analysing photos after you’ve downloaded them to your PC to see perhaps where you went right or wrong with a particular photo and how it could be improved. I’m using this info in my series of blog posts describing my own photos.

This tool allows you to see this data easily but also make modifications to fields such as the title, photographer, description, keywords etc. Useful for managing your photos long term.

Location

This photo was taken with my Canon EOS 350D at 17:45 on 28 Dec 2007, on a bridge over the M23 (junction 10a), near Crawley. Although ideally I would have steadied the camera with a tripod, I actually used one of the posts of the metal fence/guard along the edge of the bridge to support the camera during the exposure.

Lens and Exposure

I used my 18-55mm lens at a focal length of 35mm. The exposure was 30 seconds at f29.0, long enough to capture a number of vehicles travelling in each direction to give the streams of light, but with a narrow aperture to prevent over-exposure on such a long shutter. The narrow aperture also caused the starburst effect at the converging point due to diffraction of the light within the lens, something that wouldn’t have occured at a lower f stop.

Unfortunately I used ISO 1600 which is far too high and so there is some graininess to the image. With hindsight I would have used ISO 100 or 200 and used a much longer exposure (on bulb mode) to capture a similar image with less noise. It may also have exposed the sky more which had a very interesting purple tinge that evening and is just noticeable in the shot. However as the temperature was hovering about 2-3 degrees, we were quite keen to move on as soon as possible!

Fine tuning

Post production editing of the photograph was done using Google Picasa and involved simply darkening the shadow areas to increase the contrast of the image and remove some the unnecessary and noisy detail in these areas.

Another option to get the most our of the various photos that I took at different exposures, would be to layer them all together in an image editing app (e.g. Photoshop) and use layer masks to pick out the best bits, e.g. the sky from one, the light trails from another. This was a tip I picked up from Digital Photo‘s Jan 08 edition. Unfortunately because I wasn’t using a tripod I haven’t got different exposures from the same angle. And I don’t have Photoshop – yet.