matt_jacobs

Attached is a small, cropped portion of the sky in one shot.<div></div>

I was just looking at some photos taken with a friend's Canon

Powershot S400 and noticed what looks like a significant amount of

sensor dust. It looks just like the dust I get on my dslr, and was

more visible on underexposed shots (presumably the camera was using a

higher f-stop).

 

Has anyone encountered this before? I can't find anything in the

photo.net archives. The camera is only a year old, has been used

pretty lightly, and treated well. I thought digicams with non-

interchangeable lenses were supposed to be pretty well sealed, so

maybe the camera had a manufacturing defect. Is the only option to

send the thing back to canon?

As a side note, I just tried with a 4 year old 128MB CF card that was nothing special when I bought it, and I also got 6-7 seconds per image once the buffer fills up. So I wouldn't worry too much about needing to buy a high speed card in order to speed up your shooting on the D100.

I can help with 5, 6 or 7, but I have to admit I don't know TCL, which might be a bit of a problem. I'm comfortable with unix and most other programming languages though. As for physical location, I'm an MIT student, so I'm already in the boston area and probably up well past the point when hard working professional photographers go to bed. Time available would fluctuate greatly depending on whether its final exam time, summer vacation, etc.

the marin headlands just north of the golden gate bridge provides some incredible landscape opportunities. Weekends are very crowded, but if you show up mid-week you can cruise from turnout to turnout in search of the best vantage point. Fog rolls in from the west in the afternoon, so get the coastal shots in early and work your way west in the afternoon.

 

big beaches - the point reyes shoreline, ocean beach (next to golden gate park).

panoramas - mt tam on a clear day with a long lens. treasure island if there's no fog. don't know what the good hills in SF are.

yachts - sausalito/tiburon

 

if you're going to be shooting on a weekend public transit and walking is the best way to get where you're going.

it seems people raise two main problems with the rating system.

 

1) its not very instructive, and 2) its rife with abuse, trolls, etc

 

I don't know how to help the first one, but as for the second, how about adopting a google-style ranking system? Google ranks a web page based on how many other pages have links referring to it. Each of those referring links is weighted by the ranking value of the referring page. Similarly, you can weight the ratings people assign a photo with a combination of the rater's own ratings, the number of people who have "marked this person as interesting" etc.

 

A side benefit of this is that all the people who trash others' photos without submitting any photos of their own for critique would have their ratings count less. I'm not sure how well this approach works when only a few people rate each photo, and I don't know how you would transition between the current system and one like this, though.

in case you haven't left yet, I'd like to emphasize the point about shooting sunrises before the sun actually clears the horizon. Once the sun comes up, its reflection off the water will be extremely bright, especially if you're using a graduated filter, and unless there's a lot of stuff (clouds, pollution, etc) in the air the wonderful colors will fade moments after sunrise.

 

also, I just noticed that you said you had an automatic camera. If there's any sun in the picture at all, chances are it will confuse your camera's meter to the point of uselessness. With some automatic cameras, you can overcome this by pointing the camera at a section of the sun rise/set that doesn't contain the sun, depressing the shutter button halfway to lock in the meter settings, and then recomposing the image. A little tricky to do on a tripod without accidentially firing the shutter, but good luck.

I second what has already been said about checking out Marin - the marin headlands, muir woods, some of the small towns going up the coast, etc. But if you want some really nice beach landscapes go to point reyes national seashore and check out limantour beach - its car accessible, but extends down the coast virtually forever so you can walk as much or as little as you like. Awesome cliffs dropping down into continuous stretches of beach . . .