Jon's Photos: Posts tagged with 5D Mark II

New Lens, Bailey's Turntable Project

July 23, 2010 / Tags: 5D Mark II, Bailey

I've been thinking about getting a small (in size and weight) lens like my 50mm f/1.4 USM, except a little wider. After reading a bunch of reviews (The-Digital-Picture.com is awesome!) I decided on the 24mm f/2.

It's certainly not as fancy as the L version, but I don't have the budget for another L lens right now. And besides, the L version is a lot bigger and heavier, defeating the purpose of getting a small lens. Fortunately, my birthday's coming up, and my mom was very nice — she got it for me early so that I can take it to Amanda's wedding today.

On a very tangentially related topic, Bailey's been working on building a turntable at my place. He needs a photo dataset of 360° views of cars for his image recognition research, and the quickest/cheapest way to get the dataset he wants is to create it himself. We had a couple of different ideas, like rigging a microcontroller to a motor to stop the turntable at various positions, but the cheap motor we're using doesn't stop precisely enough. So our next idea was to use my 5D and capture video at 30fps, then just run the turntable continuously (and slowly).

As part of the project, we built a lightbox, which is what I used to take the photo of my new lens, above. Unfortunately, the lightbox we built is meant for the turntable (and it's a little too short), so the photo didn't turn out that great.

New Camera, New Homepage

September 11, 2009 / Tags: 5D Mark II, Jon, Kathy, OCPAC, Photo Outing, The District

Unlike some people, I'm not much of a writer, at least when it comes to personal blogging. For some time now, I have wanted to change my homepage to more of a photo blog, but I never could find the time to write the software. I tried evaluating Wordpress and other open source projects, but nothing was exactly what I wanted (duh). I did find some inspiration though, and with the arrival of my 5D Mark II, I figured now was the time to make it the switch. So a sleepless week later, I present to you ::drumroll:: my new home page.

The main features are a cleaner layout with nicer inline display of images

and better large image display. Instead of going to a separate page, large image display is done using a lightbox. (Click on the image above to test it out.) I wrote all the lightbox code myself -- it's based on the lightbox code I wrote for Arcadia Music, except instead of fixed display sizes, it sends the size of your window to the server and the server determines the optimal size image to send back. Oh, and it's written in JQuery instead of Prototype. I still like Prototype better, but JQuery appears to run faster, and it downloads a lot faster than Prototype + script.aculo.us. The HTML is also super-clean because so much of the heavy lifting is done by the javascript. The new software also supports pretty permalinks and tags. RSS support is planned, as is an open source release.

I'll leave you with a few test shots from the new Mark II. Some of these were taken at the park near my condo, some were taken at The District, and rest were taken at the Orange County Performing Arts Center.

This one is my favorite from the group.