Tag Archives: motorola

Using the Canon PowerShot SX30 IS at Big Day Out

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It’s hard to go from a steady diet of caviar and champagne to moldy cheese and stale crackers. That’s how I felt when using the Canon PowerShot SX30 IS yesterday at Big Day Out. It’s not a bad camera, just that I’m used to much, much better in terms of image quality.

I went as a VIP guest of Motorola, and the ticket included entry to the air-conditioned VIP bars. I’m not sure what the actual temperature was, but it felt like over 40 degrees Celsius! Being able to retreat to the air-conditioned comfort was a Godsend, although it was a fair bit further from the stage than I’m used to.

The below image shows how far we were from the stage (I was shooting through a window).

Hanging in the VIP bar at Big Day Out

Using the 35x zoom, however, I was able to get right up to the stage and shoot the artists performing. I wasn’t too happy with the quality I was seeing on the LCD screen though; it showed a soft and hazy image, and after awhile I stopped bothering to take photos of the performers, as it just wasn’t up to my standards. Had I used the Canon SX30IS for shooting concerts before, however, I would’ve known that this could have been fixed in post processing. Upping the black levels significantly seemed to get rid of the haze, and consequently make the images look sharper as a result – especially when viewed at smaller sizes. Some judicious cropping, and the photos were good to go! See a before and after shot below.

Unedited version

Cropped and edited in Lightroom

Now I wish I had taken more photos! As it was, I ended up going home early, before all of the acts that I wanted to see had gotten on stage! These music shows always have the better acts right at the end, and I would’ve loved to have seen John Butler Trio, Wolfmother, LCD Soundsystem and PNAU perform. Alas, after a near-sleepless night before BDO, I was tired, my feet were killing me, and I had to make the long trek from Homebush back to Bondi Junction! I left the show at around 6.15, but didn’t get back home till around 7.45!

A couple of other images I was reasonably happy with below.

Dead Letter Circus

Lupe Fiasco

Bliss N' Eso

Will I be using the Canon SX30 IS? Most definitely – if it involves concert photography or anything else that requires a super-long zoom! Otherwise, I will stick to one of my other cameras to guarantee good quality :)

Big Day Out, here I come!

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(cross-post from Foto Geekz)

Thanks to the lovely PR girls at Motorola, I’m off to the Big Day Out music festival today with a VIP ticket!

Unfortunately, you need to have press credentials in order to bring a ‘professional camera’, and while I probably could’ve swung these by talking to the right people (me being a journalist, and all), I decided it was too much effort to bother with.

Super zoom!

This means that the 5D is definitely staying at home, leaving me with a few ‘smaller’ camera options. I don’t actually own a compact point and shoot, but I have a couple of mirror-less cameras and a ‘super-zoom’ camera that I bought on a whim and haven’t really used much. I decided on the latter, the Canon SX30 IS, for the following reasons: (a) it has a 35x zoom, the equivalent of a 24mm-840mm focal length – definitely long enough to be able to capture the artists cavorting about on the stage!; (b) it has an articulated LCD that I can use for holding the camera above my head (and the crowd in front of me) to get the shot (I hate getting stuck in crowds, so I’m more likely to be towards the back of the audience); (c) it’s my cheapest camera, so I won’t be that heartbroken if it gets broken or stolen.

This will be a good opportunity for me to ‘bond’ with the SX30 IS – having so many cameras at my disposal means that I have a touch of ADD when it comes to using them, and I tend to favour the higher quality ones over the SX30 IS. I can’t argue with its versatility, however, and hopefully I’ll get to know this camera a lot better during the course of the day!

Motorola Atrix: the future of mobile computing

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I’ve been talking about the ‘one gadget to rule them all’ concept for years. One portable device that would power all of your screens, namely the desktop, laptop and TV. Finally, someone, Motorola, has come along and implemented this idea with its new Atrix smartphone – officially unveiled at the Consumer Electronics Show a few days ago.

The Motorola Atrix connected to the laptop dock

Thus far I’ve been able to abide by my new years resolution of not buying any new technology that I don’t really need, but since the Atrix is the culmination of something that I’ve wanted for years, I’m willing to make an exception in its case!

In case you aren’t familiar with the Atrix (c’mon, are you living under a rock, or what?!), it’s an Android 2.2-powered smartphone with a 4-inch 960 x 540 display, dual-core 1GHz Tegra 2 processor, 16GB of internal storage and microSD expansion. The two accessory docks are what transform it from a not-so-humble smartphone into a desktop, laptop and HDTV multimedia player. I’ll start with the HD multimedia dock: this does double duty as a dock for the TV (outputting your music, movies and photos via HDMI, complete with an infrared remote control) and desktop dock, the latter of which is used by plugging in an LCD monitor, keyboard and mouse. In either scenario, a different interface appears on the screen that’s suited for that particular application. In desktop use, it uses Motorola’s proprietary Webtop Linux interface, but you can also run applications and games on your smartphone in a separate window.

Remember the Palm Foleo? The laptop dock is basically a reincarnation of it. It’s a laptop ‘shell’ with an 11.6-inch display, full-sized QWERTY keyboard and two USB ports, and it’s powered by the Atrix, which you dock into the back of the shell.

Yes, I think this will revolutionise mobile computing.

It has almost enough to replace my current computing setup – a 27-inch Apple iMac at home, and tablets for computing on the go. How cool would it be to hook the Atrix up to a 30-inch monitor and use that as my main computer? The HD Multimedia dock comes with three USB ports, but if the Webtop OS supports wireless keyboards and mice, then I could use all three USB ports for other supported peripherals. I’m mainly thinking of a memory card reader and a 1TB external hard drive here. Yum! The only reason that I couldn’t move to this model is that I’m pretty reliant on a few Mac applications like Adobe Lightroom, Photoshop and iTunes, and I also need to access Windows every now and then (which I do using an old netbook that I keep around for that very purpose – someday soon I will get around to installing Windows on my Mac using Parallels) to install firmware updates on my multitude of gadgets.

Imagine if Apple adopted something similar with the iPhone? Or another smartphone vendor did it but with a Windows desktop environment via Linux?

Apparently the Atrix is due to launch in the US in Q1 of 2011. Australia has a pretty good track record of getting new Motorola smartphones in a timely fashion, so hopefully we’ll be seeing this sexy smartphone soon as well! In the mean time, I will power on with my Samsung Galaxy S – which, I should add, has been running like a dream since I installed Android 2.2.1 on it. No more lag, and no need for installing any of those complex lag fixes. Yay!

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