Good friend Grif sent me a link to a press release at dpreview.com for the new limited edition black version of the Canon Digital Rebel camera. The photo of the camera is actually of the Japanese version, where they’ve always had the choice of a black version. This was one of the things that was putting me off getting the digital rebel, especially when I saw the black version while in Tokyo.

They also have a review of my current favourite choice for my digital SLR (when I finally get around to buying it!), the Canon 20D. This would seem to be the better choice at the moment, although it is quite a lot more expensive so I might change my mind again if the black version of the rebel is available for the same price as the regular version.

Another photographer’s website worthy of checking out is Laurence Parent‘s. In particular, the photos from US National Parks are beautiful (don’t miss the second page of these). My favourites include the shot from Redwood National Park, the sunset shot in Saguaro National Park, the reflection shot from Yosemite National Park.

Interestingly, it was the photo from Joshua Tree National Park that I saw printed on the cover of a magazine that drew my attention to Laurence’s work, but the online version looks washed out (at least on my machines) compared to the print which had much more saturated colours in the sky.

Most, if not all, the other galleries are worth the time to browse through too. The inspirational, water and mountains are my choices after the parks. What are yours?

Sunday night I went for a walk along the shoreline near Crab Cove (never made it that far as the gate was locked by the time I reached it). On the way though I snapped a few shots of the sun setting. The best place would have been over the other side of the island where the sun was turning the relatively heavy clouds over the Oakland hills pink & red, but I was on the bay side of the island…

This shot, with the crescent moon overhead and the amazing gradient from burning reds just over the skyline up to the deep blues, appealed to me. What do you think?

Heading home from work tonight I noticed that the sky over the city was unusually clear, so I stopped off at Treasure Island and snapped a few shots with my little Canon S100. (Tonight is one of those nights when I wish I had bought the nice digital SLR that I’ve been looking at.)

Still, a couple of the shots are not too bad. They are not as sharp as I’d like, but I didn’t have a tripod with me, nor is the tiny lens on the S100 really ideal for long distance night photography. Better than nothing though.

As always, click the thumbnail for a popup window with a larger shot (something that WordPress does not make as simple to achieve as MovableType did – but I can fix that…).

Another photographer’s website for your enjoyment; Jeff Maion specialises in adventure and travel imagery (to use his phrasing), and some of these shots are spectacular. Click on the places on the map to jump into galleries of images from that area.

Browsing through some blogs earlier today I discovered this site: New York City Photography: Color & Black and White.

I found the site via his blog, which is complete with selected photos, covering everyday life and events in New York City. Make sure you check out the recent photos gallery for more candid shots on the city streets, as well as some more artistic shots from around the city.

Having my little Canon PowerShot S100 travelling without me, I was once again thinking about buying a digital SLR. My original thought was to get a Canon EOS Digital Rebel. While I was in Japan earlier in the year though I saw that they had a black version which I liked more. Why they don’t sell that in the US I will never know, but knowing it was available kind of put me off buying.

Anyway, I went looking again the other day and noticed that Canon had launched a replacement for the slightly higher-end EOS 10D in the form of the EOS 20D.

The US site is surprisingly lacking in detail at the moment; the Japanese site contains much more information, including a comparison with the Rebel (called Kiss in Japan) and even three sample images.

It is an 8.2 megapixel sensor (instead of the 6.3 megapixels in the 10D and Rebel models). That means images of 3520 x 2344. It also has next generation of the DiGiC image processor, and a USB 2.0 connection for higher speed uploading of your photos.

On the downside, they do not appear to be in stock anywhere at the moment, and it is not cheap at around $1500 without any lenses 🙁

A story on the BBC web site presents the results of some durability testing on digital media cards. They took five formats commonly used in digital cameras – CompactFlash, Secure Digital, xD, Memory Stick and Smartmedia – and then subjected them to a number of tests that would destroy most electronic devices, and defintely destroy regular film!

The tests that the cards survived were:

• Dipped into cola
• Put through a washing machine
• Dunked in coffee
• Trampled by a skateboard
• Run over by a child’s toy car
• Given to a six-year-old boy to destroy

Having survived all of that, they then took it up a level and tried a sledgehammer as well as nailing the cards to a tree. Unsurprisingly, none of the cards survived these tests!

A friend sent me a link to some amazing scans of some colour photos taken by one Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii in Russia. So what? Well, they were taken almost 100 years ago. The site explains more about the technology that was used to create them, and is also offering prints of the ones that have been scanned so far.

This is an amazing collection, not just because of the technology used to take them, the outstanding scanning and restoration work that Alex Gridenko has done, or even that they are colour photos of a time before most colour photos but because the many of the photos themselves are really stunning.