New Camera
September 6th 2005
Thought my twenty-first birthday wasn’t a drunken bash (thankfully) I did get one great present. An Olympus E-300 DSLR camera. 8 Megapixels, two lenses, and all the fixins. I’ve been using it almost non stop for three days and it’s been amazing so far. The quality is obviously wonderful, and having two lenses is great.
I’ve mostly just been playing around with it so far… getting used to all the controls (which are very intuitive) and starting to understand aperture and shutter speed a little better, but I think I got some good shots from around Berkeley. Check out the shoot in the zenphoto gallery.
I can’t tell you how nice it is to finally have a real camera. 
feliz cumpleaos y bonita camara
saludos desde pamplona
Congrats on your purchase, I’ve heard those E-300’s aren’t half bad, though I would’ve pushed you towards Canon or Nikon.
I’ll go through and have a look at your shots now.
Very cool. I’ve been thinking of buying a professional camera for my photography as well. Still doing some research though.
Oh, and nice pictures!
Got another suggestion for ZenPhoto…
When viewing the gallery we see
../zp/Berkeley+E300+Shoot/..in the URL. Then when viewing the actual file we see../zp/Berkeley%20E300%20Shoot/...Well, I think the directory structure should be cleaned up a little so that folder names do not ahve capitals or spaces, instead something like WordPress’ treatment of categories:
../zp/berkeley-e300-shoot/...Just another thing to add to the list.
Okay, so I don’t want to do that and here’s why…
What you’re seeing there is an actual directory name of the actual directory where the images are stored. Any valid directory will work, even if it has spaces. I usually convert spaces to ‘+’ which is the same in URL encoding but looks better.
When you upload via the web, I try to suggest a folder name with dashes ala wordpress’ clean urls.
But I won’t restrict people to using whatever directory names they want. It’s your choice if you don’t want caps or spaces. Personally, I like using english directory names because when you upload via FTP, that becomes the album’s initial title.
So that’s my logic. Hope that explains everything.
So what are the lenses? Personally, I have a D70 with the 18-70mm f/3.5-4.5 kit lens, a 70-300m f/4.5-5.6 tele lens, and a 50mm f/1.8, as well as a huge interest in cameras. With that in mind, it’s a natural question.
True. Okay then. The lenses are the standard one that came with the camera – 14-45mm f/3.5-5.6 (kind of slow at high zoom, but a decent wide-angle and general purpose lens), and a 40-150mm f/3.5-4.5 telephoto, which is a really nice lens.
Of course I haven’t had much experience with SLRs, but I’m learning
I do know that the images are coming out sharp and pretty much perfect from either lens, though I’ve found the 14-45mm has some blue fringing when fully zoomed. The 40-150 is beautiful. I haven’t seen any defects yet.
Oh, and since it’s the 4/3 lens mount system, the 35mm equivalents are 28-90mm and 80-300mm for the 14-45 and 40-150mm lenses, respectively. Pretty nice, ‘cause they’re half the size
Isn’t a URL like this:
http://www.trisweb.com/zp/Catalina+2003/IMG_3758.jpg
for a (X)HTML page undesirable when you look at search engines? Some people will think it’s strange when Google points them to a http://asdfasdfa.jpg while they are searching for textual content.
Tinus – I had considered that. I’ll think about it more now that you’ve brought it up… so it’ll probably end up being something like
/zp/Album/IMG_3758.jpg/view/Does that sound good?Or I could even fake it and just put a .html after the image filename, like
/zp/Album/IMG_3758.jpg.htmlThen it’s pretty obvious what it isTristan, congrats on the new cam! Keep the new shots coming.