Harry's Blog

I found it very difficult to get to sleep last night. That's because of our neighbour upstairs running around for ages. His footfalls a constant tap tap tap against my late night sanity.

Why should it bother me so much?

Because we live in a terraced house, not a lower floor flat, and the neighbour running around above our head was clearly a rodent of some kind, in a mad frenzy.

Which means that in addition to our front door being about to fall apart, the gale force draught through many windows and a central heating system fitted by the Romans we now also have rodents in the attic.

I wouldn't mind. But couldn't they do their running about during the day?

They were up before 7am.

Bugger.

I mentioned earlier today our difficulty with the twins' sleep pattern at the moment.

So today when I brought the babes home from their child minder at 2pm I decided to try something different. Normally they go to bed, stripped to their vests¹ and eventually have an afternoon nap.

On mornings at home they go for their nap after lunch at around twelve thirty. On child minder days it's just after two in the afternoon. They tend to be more grumpy after those later naps.

Anyway, I'm digressing here. So today I decided no nap. If they wanted a sleep they could have one on the sofa. And so we got home and started to play.

Read more »

Canon EOS 50D Canon's latest 1.6x prosumer crop camera certainly has been controversial, partly due to early reviews which used Adobe Camera RAW to develop the files. That version of ACR gave a poor impression of the 50D's RAW files when in fact the camera is much more capable as users of better RAW software such as Digital Photo Professional and DXO Optics Pro have discovered. I'll be writing a full review of the camera over the next week or so. Lenses

Sigma AF18-200mm f/3.5-6.3 DC Optical Stabilizer This Sigma lens is a good walk-around piece of glass for when you may be on vacation or not able to carry much equipment around with you. It's certainly not the best lens for optical quality, but what it lacks in quality at times it makes up in versatility. The optical stabilisation works brilliantly to help you get hand-held shots in low light and at long focal lengths. If you're making the step up from a basic kit lens and want just one good all-round lens this is a good place to start.

Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II Known by many photographers as the "nifty fifty" this is one lens every Canon SLR owner should have in their kit bag. The cheap and cheerful plastic-cased lens is very fast - making it ideal for low light - and the f1.8 aperture also makes for great creative use of depth of field. You really can't go wrong with this lens as it packs more punch that its price would have you believe.

Sigma 105mm f2.8 EX DG Macro The Sigma 105mm is an excellent Macro camera offering a 1:1 magnification ratio, but it's also a great fast indoor portrait lens. The f2.8 aperture means you can get great shots in lower light without using a flash and the reach of 105mm on a crop camera such as a 400D or 50D means you can grab candid shots from across a room. The focus limit switch can be a pain until you get used to it, as is the push-pull focus ring, but the results of the great optics more than make up from a few usability issues.

Tamron AF 17-50mm F2.8 XR Di II LD Aspherical (IF) The Tamron 17-50mm is a real unsung hero of a lens. The optical quality is on a par with many lenses that cost twice as much and the fast f2.8 aperture makes it very useful indoors without a flash as well as out and about. 17mm is pretty wide even on a crop camera and this makes the lens and ideal walk-around when snapping landscape images. Flash Canon EOS Speedlite 430EX flash unit Accessories Canon BG-E2N Battery Grip For EOS 20D, 30D, 40D & 50D

So one of our munchkins thought their first experience of snow was the most exciting thing ever. The other thoroughly hated it. Can you guess which was which?

We're at war with our children at the moment - the bone of contention being their insistence on getting up before six for the last few mornings.

Perhaps it's our fault for putting twins that aren't even two years old yet in beds rather than cots, but when they can walk and talk it seems a bit silly keeping them in a cage.

So a few months ago we made the leap to beds and on the whole it has been quite a success. Okay, so often one has to loiter outside their room at bedtime to quickly throw them back into bed should they feel the need for mischief, but on the whole it has worked rather well.

Read more »

Taken with a Canon EOS 40D Digital SLR Camera
38mm, f/8.0, 1/50sec & ISO 100

You ever have those days where you come home with your camera and you look at the 80 or so shots on the card and not a single one is worth uploading to Flickr or even showing anyone?

That's how my morning went. We took the kids for a walk to Bushy Park and onwards to Hampton Court palace. The sky was grey, the light terrible and to make matters worse I took the wrong lens with me.

I was using the Sigma 18-200mm DC OS which can be surprisingly sharp at times. But out and about today I took a lot of very dull badly focussed shots. The autofocus in the lens prefers sunny days and today's dull light gave this slow - but very useful - lens nothing to work with.

Read more »

Link: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/americas/7847651.stm

It looks like new US president Barack Obama is off to a great start already. He's revoked the ridiculous, and one could argue evil, gag rule which blackmailed aid organisations into not mentioning abortion if they wanted funding from the US.

This rule, set up under several Republican administration, caused countless suffering across the globe and deprived those aid agencies who saw freedom of speech as a value worth preserving of much needed money.

The gag rule wasn't just about preventing abortion. What was so wrong about this policy was that it forbade organisations from even discussing the issue within the context of family planning education for fear of funding being withdrawn. The policy denied aid organisations overseas the freedoms of expression that are enshrined in the US constitution.

Thankfully though now it has been repealed again.

A flashgun and a saucer of milk is all it takes for some late night silliness with a DSLR.

The Naughty Step is something many of us young parents have come to know through the show Supernanny and something many of us use too.
We've been pretty sparing with it until recently, but now the twins are old enough to be naughty it's started getting some use.

However it's clearly had an influence on our daughter. She's only 21 months old but seems to think she's the family's second mummy. Daughter will tend to boss her twin brother around, fetch and carry stuff needed for nappy changing and helps a lot when tidying up.

Yesterday though she rather excelled herself. She was playing with Baby, her favourite doll. All of a sudden she exclaimed "Step" crossly and took baby off and put her on the step.

She came back into the room without baby and wifey asked her, "has baby been naughty?" Daughter answered "yes". She waited a while then collected her plastic child from the step, cuddling it and patting it on the back as she returned to the lounge.

Bless her.

We went shopping in Uxbridge at the weekend and parked on one of the higher floors of The Chimes shopping centre.

We took the lift down with the twins in their buggy. There was another couple in there with a hyperactive kid. There was also a middle aged woman with her older mother. The mother seemed scared of lifts.

Not a good day to get this lift then.

Because it fell down the lift shaft.

Read more »

I've just read an interesting article over at bobatkins.com about the controversy surrounding the 15MP sensor in the new Canon EOS 50D Camera. There's been a lot of nonsense talked about this new sensor - especially about diffraction. And Bob has succinctly cut through the BS.

So, yes, stopping down past f8 with the EOS 50D might well result in lower image resolution. The important omission is that stopping down an EOS 40D, a Digital Rebel XT, a Nikon D300 or a Nikon D90 past f8 would result in exactly the same thing! Not only that, but the camera with the highest resolution would be sharper at f8. So, for example, the 50D image would be sharper than the 40D image...

...I've even seen some people suggest that images from the 50D will be less sharp than those of the 40D with most lenses. I'm not quite sure of the "logic" they have used in reaching that conclusion, but they got there somehow!

Again these "deductions" are completely wrong. The fact is that the higher resolution of the 50D will result in higher resolution, sharper, images than those from the 40D whatever lens you use. Doesn't matter if it's the pretty average "all plastic kit zoom" shot wide open or a super sharp lens like the EF 135/2.0L shot at f8. The higher resolution sensor of the EOS 50D will result in sharper images in both cases.

You can read the whole thing over at bobatkins.com. And there's some interesting real world proof of this at a blog called Serious Amateur Photography here and here.