It has been a while since I’ve posted just photos here without a story, and I guess I’ve just kept that up by writing this intro paragraph, but I wanted to share a few photos taken with the iPhone X camera that impressed me. In most cases, the phone was the only camera I had with me, but that’s not always true. Sometimes I carry my Canon S120 and other times a DSLR, but these are all phone camera shots with some simple editing in Goole Photos (color & cropping essentially).
Back in August of last year I wrote an update on the status of the projects I have backed on Kickstarter and IndieGoGo. Eight months on, only one of the projects still ongoing has delivered: Parashoot. Lima and Lono are still promising to ship soon.
I also have a couple of projects not on either of the two platforms: Coin (which finally delivered this week, very late), and Nymi, a biometric authentication project (still to deliver, but different in that they won’t take the money until they ship, so really this is pre-ordering more than crowd funding).
In the meantime I have backed a few more projects:
The Egg
A personal web server gadget. This one was a little personal since I know one of the founders, but I’ve seen one of their early units and the project has some appealing features too, not least of which is the ability to share photos with friends & family without having to upload them to a public web service.
Expected delivery: September 2015
Pebble Time
This will be my third Pebble, and I upgraded the pledge to switch to the steel variant once they announced it. Not much more to say about this one.
Expected delivery: July 2015
Titanium Pens
A set of three (because I couldn’t decide on the finish I preferred & the set was a bargain compared to one or two pens). And, yes, these pens are going to ship without a refill. But they look gorgeous, and the guy behind the project already sells lots of titanium products directly from his site and clearly has a passion for this pen project. It has been incredibly over subscribed though – about 3600% more than the goal.
Expected delivery: July 2015
The Leaders Guide by Eric Ries
A new book project from Eric Ries (of lean startup fame) with lots of unlocked extras.
Expected delivery: October 2015
Earlier this week I noticed that the Canon camera I had been thinking of getting, the S120, was on sale at Amazon so I ordered one. With their Prime service it arrived here quickly (actually quicker than I expected as OnTrac delivered on Saturday even though it was slated for delivery on Monday in the tracking info.
The features that drew me to this one were the Wi-Fi capability (so I can pull photos from the camera to my iPhone or Nexus 4 anywhere I am, even without a wifi based internet connection), the high speed lens (f/1.8) and the 1080p HD video. The only real negatives were the limited 5x zoom, and the relatively low pixel count compared to other similar offerings from other companies. But 12MP is still respectable, and the zoom is OK for most uses I will actually have for the camera.
There have been lots of cool new products released in the last month or so, some of which I have commented on here and others I looked at, then decided not to get. Here’s the round up of what I have decided against recently.
Lots of announcements today (technically yesterday, but who’s counting) for new products from Sony and Samsung. The latter don’t interest me that much, and perhaps the reasons for that will be a future post, but the Sony announcement (which I had seen the leaks about beforehand) did include something of interest: a whole new camera concept.
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I have uploaded some of my recent favourite photos to my Imagekind store. Included in the new uploads are a sea turtle and a sunset from Hawaii, the leafy sea dragon from the Monterey Bay Aquarium and a Catherine Wheel Pincushion that we recently added to our dining room wall (as a 16×20 canvas).
In addition to the Imagekind website, you can now browse and buy prints, framed or not, and canvases directly from your iPhone with the new Artview app.
In this case, that’s an unidentified floating object! These jellies, once part of the jellies as art exhibit, have made a re-appearance and they are still quite amazing to watch.
With this black background and tiny specs reflecting the light, I think they look more like alien space craft than creatures from the deep.
You knew, given all the other photos from the Monterey Bay Aquarium, that at some point I had to post the iconic blue & orange sea nettle photo. Well, here it is.
For anybody who’s been down there, you’ll know just how hard it is to get a good shot of these guys. The room is dark, and people are pushing to get to the front and be right up close to the jellies. Oh, and did I mention that they’re constantly moving? Well, they are, not fast, but fast enough to make it that little bit harder to catch them well.
A photo interlude to lighten the tone & add some colour!
A little while back we took a Sunday drive down to the Monterey Bay Aquarium (one of my favourite places around here). This is one of the many photos I took while we walked around the aquarium – a shot of a leafy sea dragon. Aren’t they amazing!
Finally got around to sorting through the photos from our trip to Hawaii’s Big Island earlier this year, and I’ve uploaded a lot of them (almost 100) to Flickr. You can see them all in the Big Island set.