Giants Shutout the Dodgers (Part 2 of 2)

We started this week with photos from the June 27th Giants shutout of the Dodgers, so let's bookend the week with some more. We focused on pitching and fielding last time, so today we'll focus on sliding and batting. Did I have that planned? No, but it works. We'll end this set with the game's final out and the team's on-field celebration.


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I think that hit went foul.


In fairness to that guy, he did not swing that late. He did strike by totally whiffing the ball on that swing, so I don't feel to bad about photoshopping that ball in to add some drama. In the real pitch, the ball was off the frame. I copied that ball from another shot, gave it some motion blur to match the approximate motion blur on the bat, and that was that. So, yes, he missed, but he didn't swing super late.


Last strike of the game, and it was over.


It's time to celebrate.

Giants Shutout the Dodgers (Part 1 of 2)

Something odd happened this morning. Between last night when I wrote this entry and today, all the text and photos were erased. I blame myself. In order to get Google + to post a notice about the blog, I have to update it. So I might have updated it before all the content loaded. Oops. Here, now, are the photos but humanity will forever lose out on the fun quips that once accompanied them.





I caught it? I caught it!








"No, you got it wrong. THIS is the signal to the camera man to show hot chicks on the Jumbo-tron. You gave him the 'show OLD chicks' signal."

The Canon Can, but Can it Can-can?

This Saturday Special Edition features a new digital SLR -- a Canon T1I (EOS 500D). The lens is the kit 18-55mm job. Readers will know I have mixed feelings about Canons. My AE-1 is a brilliant camera. The FD lens is marvelous. My RT and I have a troubled relationship. This T1I only muddied the waters further.

I had this camera with me when I took the AE-1 inside the now-demolished building. Likewise, I had it for Yerba Buena Gardens. Here are some shots from the trip.


Digital monochrome conversion. Window looking out the rear on the second floor. The wall just off-frame to the right had the hole I shot through and shared the result of earlier this week.


A 'found still-life.'

NEXT! Let's show off some Photoshop work!


Stopped down, this lens is great. Wide open, it's AWFUL. In fact, I'll go so far as to say that wide-open it is one of the three or four worst-performing lenses I've ever used. Also, this camera's high-ISO performance is meaningfully worse than My K-7's equivalent performance. Honestly, using this camera doesn ot make me understand all the fuss about Canon. Sure I love my little Elph, but I can't fathom this camera being a viable, professional-grade camera.


Same image without the extraneous building cloned out.

So what do I mean when I rail against this camera? In honesty, the good results are VERY good. However, I downloaded about 600 files onto my computer after this photo walk and of that 28 images of reasonable quality emerged. Granted, some of the shots were multi-image stitches, but with those taken into consideration, I still took more than 150 single-frame shots and had less than 30 return results that I felt reflected what I would expect of myself to share on this blog.


Edited from the raw to enhance details in the ruffled petals. I'd never edited from raw before, but I can understand why photographers prefer it. However, to my taste, I prefer editing from jpgs as the jpg performs more like film.


I dig how the glass pinched the reflection.


A cherry blossom, late, after all the rest on the tree had fallen.


I have no idea what kind of flower that is.


Not all Heaven is in a rage. I, however, am furious about this poor wide-open performance. Look at how blurry the robin's face is! This lens performs terribly on this camera. Now, how will it perform on film? I'm not sure yet but I will endeavor to find out in a couple of weeks with my RT. I suspect it will perform better because film has a greater circle of confusion (CoC) tolerance than does a digital sensor, especially with how tiny the pixels on an 18.1-megapixel APS-C sensor are. Even Zeiss lenses, which have a CoC tolerance of 1/1,750th the image size (opposed to other high-end lenses which are 1/1,500th) can't provide pixel-sharp images on DSLR sensors much above eight or twelve megapixels. Nayway, that's all neither here nor there for this post. We'll leave it at this: I expected greater performance from this camera than it delivered and I feel with full confidence than the K-7 is a markedly superior performer to this one. The K-7 also feels more solidly built.


A cow bird, maybe? I'm not sure.

And to answer my own question, the Canon can, but it cannot can-can.