I heard a great piece of advice recently from a professional who said that one of the most important things is to, every now and then, go out and take pictures just for the sake of taking pictures. Take pictures for yourself. Remind yourself of the joy of photography. Forget about what might sell and just go were your eye leads

More and some nice pictures on my Photoblog

Bless you Panasonic. I hope you start a trend. Eventually people will realize that these crazy-high megapixel cameras are making their images look worse instead of better. I sincerely hope that low-light sensitivity and film-like dynamic range can somehow become as consumer lust-inducing as the megapixel number wrongly has.

[Read ProLost: Panasonic is My Hero]
I’m glad i didn’t get the Sigma DP-1 because the more I read about the LX-2 The more I want it.
Now.

Ok, here’s a direct link (Back on my laptop!)

Panasonic have just launched the new version of their popular and great little LX2 (I’m just saying that because I have one!), aptly named the LX3.

After I had set up the iPhone I noticed that the screen looked a bit odd. If you looked at it off angle any way at all the blacks became a bright blue. At first I thought that it was perhaps just the result of being a brighter screen, but it was really bad, especially in the dark. When viewing photos or movies with dark scenes, tilt the phone away from you at all and blacks become bright blue, washing out the image and giving the “negative black” effect much reported when the iPod touch first launched. My original iPhone’s screen was perfect in comparison. Look at it off angle and it’s fine unless you view it at extremes.

I was a little alarmed at this stage as I thought perhaps they were using new inferior screens, but I checked my girlfriend’s phone and hers was the same as my old iPhone’s, in that it was fine. It was looking increasingly like I had a faulty screen and I checked it against two other iPhone 3G’s that some colleagues of mine had just bought, and theirs were fine too. After searching various online forums it seems others are having this problem too but it appears to be limited.

iPhone 3G (Right) Compared to iPod Touch (Middle) and original iPhone (Left)

In my limited knowledge of lcd manufacturing and the principles of light and optics, I’m guessing the screen somehow missed having it’s polarizing layer applied. I tested this theory by placing a polarizing filter off my camera over the screen and doing so solved the problem and made it look more like the other iPhones I had tested. (I was quite proud that my little science experiment had actually worked) I found some forum postings from an engineer talking about the iPod touch screen problems after that product had launched and he suggested the same culprit.

As I said though, the problem doesn’t appear to be widespread (so far). I know some people would be having a fit about this, but when you sell a million units of a product in one weekend, there’s bound to be some defective models slipping through, and given the amount of Apple products i have bought over the years and what little trouble I’ve had with them I have been pretty lucky really. Unfortunately, due to the shortage of stock getting a replacement has not been easy and I’m back on my old iPhone for now, but I’ll save that story for another day.

Anyway, hopefully this is now resolved.

Apple has extended every MobileMe subscription by a month, due to the exceptionally ornery transition this past week.

“The .Mac to MobileMe transition was a lot rockier than we had hoped,” Apple spokesman Bill Evans told Macworld. “We want to apologize to our loyal customers and express our appreciation for their patience by giving all current subscribers an automatic 30-day extension to their MobileMe subscription free of charge.”

[Read Apple extends MobileMe subscriptions by 30 days]

Instead of happily tapping their touch screens, many iPhone users are using their fingers to point accusingly at Apple — and the developers of iPhone applications.

I’ve experienced alot of this since installing the new os on the phone. The Apps crashing is one thing but the phone unceremoniously rebooting is a complete pain, and considering Apple’s rhetoric about other smart phones and mobile systems and avoiding that kind of thing, it’s a little ironic.
[Read Bugs Abound in iPhone 2.0 Operating System, Apps | Gadget Lab from Wired.com]

Responding to customer inquirers, “Mike” of Apple’s MobileMe Support team affirmed that iDisk File Sharing, which would have allowed subscribers to easily share large files on their iDisk drives through automated email links, was pulled at the last moment.

That’s a real shame because it was one of the coolest features of MobileMe. However the same article also points out that Apple’s website mentions that the service will be coming soon. Fingers crossed.
[Read AppleInsider | Apple delays iDisk File Sharing feature of new MobileMe service]