Mike Cohen

Best lens bargains for your Nikon DSLR

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If you have a DSLR, you can easily spend more on lenses than the camera itself cost. Luckily there are a few great lenses you can buy for under $200. I will highlight two of my favorites here.

Everyone should own Nikon’s wonderful 50mm f/1.8D AF, which sells for under $140. This is one of the best lenses you can buy because it’s extremely sharp and the large aperture lets you shoot in low light and blur the background nicely. It’s my favorite lens for those reasons.

Note that this lens lacks an internal AF motor, so if you have a D40 or D60 you can only use manual focus with it. If you have one of those cameras and you really need auto focus, Nikon also sells a 50mm f/1.4G AF-S, which costs around $480.

If you need a long zoom, Sigma’s 70-300mm f/4.5-6 DG Macro is a good choice for around $150. This is one of the longest lenses available at an affordable price, as most similar lenses only go up to 200mm. It has a macro mode available from 200-300mm which lets you focus much closer and gives a 1:2 close-up magnification. Since it lacks vibration reduction, you’ll either have to use a tripod or shoot at a very fast shutter speed, since the long focal length amplifies any camera shake. On the plus side, the image quality is excellent with less distortion than Nikon’s 18-200mm.

A point & shoot camera for DSLR photographers

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I really love the D90, but sometimes it’s just too big to carry. For those times it’s nice to have a compact point & shoot camera that will fit in my pocket. As much as I love Nikon DSLRs, I don’t care much for their Coolpix point & shoot cameras, since the image quality isn’t that great and they’re very slow.

I decided on the Canon A2000 IS based on its image quality. I’ve always liked their A-series, since they use standard AA batteries. I noticed some really great pictures taken with the A1000 IS & A2000 IS, but I chose the A2000 IS because of its larger & brighter 3″ display and longer 6x optical zoom. It’s also a lot smaller & thinner than older A-series cameras. It normally sells for just over $200, but I found it for $150 at buy.com last month.

The A2000 IS doesn’t provide any manual controls and the battery life isn’t great, but the image quality is excellent. It also takes great videos. I started getting a battery warning after shooting 80 pictures & 2 videos with a set of fresh AA alkaline batteries at the Polynesian Festival today.

IMG_0129

I posted more pictures here.

I can has an API

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I’ve finally had a chance to get back to work on I Can Has Cheezburger and I’ve now implemented the Cheezburger API for submitting LOLs to the site. Here is the very first LOL created from the app.

I’m still not satisfied with the submission window, which I think looks too cluttered. I haven’t decided where to add a login button, so it currently sends all LOLs anonymously.

I’ve also added a work-around for the problem with playing videos for this update, which I’ll most likely submit in the next week. I’ve kept the old user interface for this version rather than the navigation-based interface I’m working on.

Web Services and Unicode

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An application that I’m working on uses a SOAP web service to send user registration data to a server, which I implemented using Web Services Core Framework. After the user enters his details, I create a SOAP request to send it to the server:


	NSDictionary* headers = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObjectsAndKeys: soapaction, @"SOAPAction",  "text/xml; charset=utf-8", @"Content-Type", nil];

	fRef = WSMethodInvocationCreate((CFURLRef) url, (CFStringRef) method, (CFStringRef) kWSSOAP2001Protocol);
	WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(fRef, kWSHTTPExtraHeaders, headers);
	WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(fRef, kWSSOAPBodyEncodingStyle, kWSSOAPStyleDoc);
	WSMethodInvocationSetProperty(fRef, kWSSOAPMethodNamespaceURI, Namespace);
        WSMethodInvocationSetParameters(fRef, (CFDictionaryRef)params, nil);
	fResult = (NSDictionary*)WSMethodInvocationInvoke(fRef);

This works perfectly unless the user enters multi-byte Asian characters. I immediately suspected that I was assuming somewhere that characters are one byte, but it turned out to be crashing deep inside CFNetwork code.

Read more

How GM can save themselves

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GM and the other auto companies are dying because they continue doing business the same they always did and keep building the same kind of cars, which people don’t want to buy.

Meanwhile, Obama is calling for the development of a high speed rail system. Someone will have to build those trains. Why not GM? I’m sure they could re-tool some of their factories to produce trains instead of cars or trucks.

The way for GM (and other car companies) to survive is to re-invent themselves, not as a car company but as a company that builds all kinds of vehicles, including trains and monorails.

New Vampire Weekend album coming in September

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Vampire Weekend’s self-titled debut was my favorite album last year, with its catchy blend of afro-pop with ska, classical, and indie pop sounds. This blog post offers some details and a great new song called White Sky. The new song is recognizable as Vampire Weekend’s style and sounds like a lost track from “Graceland”. I’m really looking forward to this album.

Do the Republicans see the irony here?

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For a good laugh (or cry), read the Oklahoma Republican platform (or download the PDF).

I fail to understand how they can reconcile their belief in “The sanctity of human life, from the moment of conception to its natural end” with this statement:

We support the death penalty and swift execution of criminals who have exhausted the appeals process.

Elsewhere, they state:

While the objective study of philosophy and religion can be beneficial, public schools should not be endorsing any specific religion or philosophy. We believe that students and teachers should enjoy the right of free exercise of religion.

Yet the very next paragraph says:

We support posting the Ten Commandments and our Nation’s motto, “In God We Trust,” in all public schools in recognition of our religious heritage.

The Republican party isn’t only the Party Of No; they’re also the Party Of Contradictions.

links for 2009-04-27

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