Gelaskins makes very nice, colorful skins (with high-quality 3M materials) for a wide assortment of gadgets, and if they don’t currently support yours, you can measure it and make a custom order for the same price. I liked the idea, I just didn’t really like any of the pictures. Fortunately, they let you upload your own, or use any image that you have rights to.

I’ve taken a few photos that I’m quite happy with, so I went searching through my Aperture archives to find one that would work. To my surprise, the image I ended up liking the most was a test shot.

Right after I bought my latest camera body, the Sony Alpha 850, I went up to San Francisco to spend a day trying it out at the Asian Art Museum and Golden Gate Park.

I spent a lot of time fiddling with the silliest and most glorious lens Minolta ever made, the 135mm STF, which I was delighted to dust off after several years where its long focal length made it difficult to use with APS-sized sensors. Out at the park, though, I pulled out an old standby, the long-discontinued Minolta 70-210mm f4. This is a consumer-grade lens, but made back when that meant “serious amateur”, not “cheapest plastic crap we can throw into a bundle”. It’s a terrific walkaround lens, despite its striking resemblance to a 24-ounce canned beverage.

One of the photos I shot while walking around the Japanese Tea Garden in the park jumped out at me as perfect for a laptop skin and wallpaper. [210mm, f4, 1/250, ISO 640]

Most people don’t read much of the manual that ships with a camera. Some because they already know what they’re doing, and just need a few keys facts about specific features. Others because the quick-start guide covered batteries, power, and how to get at their pictures, and they really have no use for 90 pages of details on what every possible sub-menu does.

This, however, is no excuse for putting useless information into the manual. For instance, the descriptions you’ve chosen to explain the “image styles” in my a850, a high-end DSLR aimed at serious photographers:

• Clear: For capturing images in a clear tone with limpid colors in the highlighted area, suitable for capturing radiant light.
• Deep: For capturing images with deep and dense color expressions, suited to capturing the solid presence of the subject.
• Light: For capturing images with bright and uncomplicated color expressions, suited to capturing refreshingly light ambience.

Compare to some of your other descriptions in the same section, where for instance the Vivid style is described with the words “saturation and contrast are heightened”, Neutral with “saturation and sharpness are lowered”, Landscape with “saturation, contrast, and sharpness are heightened”, and Night View with “contrast is attenuated”. These factual statements are followed by descriptions of their effect and intended use, where Clear, Deep, and Light are just fluff.

This is not a translation problem, because they’re fluff in the Japanese manual as well: “クリア：ハイライト部分の抜けがよく、透明感のある雰囲気に表現する。光の煌めき感などの表現に適 している”. This is about as clear as “limpid”, which is, ironically, as clear as mud.

dpreview’s test images from the optically-identical a900 suggest that Light and Deep are roughly equivalent to mild over/under-exposure, but sadly there’s no side-by-side of Clear and Light to see how they differ.

Some guy bought some off-the-shelf parts and attached a Canon SLR lens to an iPhone, and without even releasing sample photos from his “iPhone DSLR prototype”, suckered several major sites into giving him traffic. The “tech bloggers” and most of the commenters are excited about the “potential” of this “cool idea”, going so far as to say that even if the initial results are low-quality, surely someone can refine it.

Optically speaking, this is precisely as cool as taping a 50-cent magnifying glass to your camera, just a lot more expensive and clumsy. It’s like putting on a pair of reading glasses: put a prime lens in front of another prime lens, and you get something that can only focus on nearby objects, with some amount of magnification.

Here, watch me turn my Blackberry into a large format view camera, with full movements!

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One of the first things I did when I got home with my shiny new Sony Alpha 850 camera was try to find out if it could honestly deliver on its 24 megapixel resolution. The image is 6048x4032, but does it actually resolve?

First off, is it physically possible? If you break out an optics textbook and do the math on a full-frame 24x36mm sensor, it is possible to keep the circle of confusion below the pixel size at apertures wider than about f/8. With a terrific lens. And a tripod. And a cable release. And mirror lockup. And no wind.

Mind you, the actual measured lines per inch matters far less to me than the fact that it’s a full-frame DSLR that takes all my old Minolta lenses; I’d have been perfectly happy with a 12-megapixel full-frame body, but since 24 is what’s available…

I didn’t feel like breaking out my big tripod or my good lights, so I settled for getting into the ballpark: a decent lens (Tamron 90/2.8 Macro) at 100% magnification, a sturdy table-top tripod, cable release, mirror lockup, indoors, available light. ISO 100, f/8, 6-second exposure. Developed from RAW using Sony’s app, resized and cropped in Photoshop with no other modifications.

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“Day three: still no sign of the bunnykin army, and my hay fever is killing me.”

See that crack in the rock that looks a bit like a tree? Click on the picture and take a closer look.

For some reason, none of the other balloon animals want to play with Prickly Sue…

After a visit to the Cactus Garden at the Ethel M Chocolate Factory, this is one of the plants I want to have growing in my yard. I don’t know what it is, or how moisture-tolerant it is, but wouldn’t a front yard full of these make for a wonderful Halloween trick-or-treat experience?

Sadly, the “factory tour” doesn’t necessarily include having the factory be operational; it appears that it’s currently a Monday through Thursday thing, so if you see it advertised as part of a Hoover Dam or Lake Mead package, understand that you may just see a shut-down food line, without oompa-loompas or chocolate rivers. Go anyway, if you have any interest in cacti or special prices on chocolates.

(the other must-have from the garden is what I can only refer to as a “balloon-animal cactus”)