I love photography. I love lighting. Bliss.

For the past two years I’ve given into this strange tradition we called “resoultions” and tried my hand at keeping some promises. Stupid, really. We really give ourselves no other incentive to succeed, other than our own perseverance. According to science, this is a skill few people have — when it comes to New Years, we put out really big sticks with a baby carrot on the end.

I originally had a few paragraphs written here that explained things in a much longer fashion. But really, who needs that? Let’s cut the shit. I have but two things in mind for this year — take some great pictures, and write more than ever before.

Update: Well, what do you know. Seems my online journalism course requires me to blog as well. I’ll probably syndicate a few of them over here. This means you can enjoy more weird and wonderful posts on things I don’t normally talk about. Enjoy it while it lasts!

My camera’s had this particularly annoying issue for the past few months where giant black dots appear on the image. As you can imagine, this proves problematic when I’m actually taking pictures of giant black dots. Or polkadots. Or ladybugs. You get the idea.

The issue is that, over time a digital SLR’s sensor will get dirty. Dust and pocket lint and nacho cheese will find a way to adhere itself to the electronic sensor, and these artifacts will appear in the final picture – but only in certain conditions. For example, wider apertures, like 2.8 render the dust near-invisible. But when I go to take long exposures, or use a smaller aperture – say, f/9 – years of neglect become more visible than I’d like. Which means my portraits now portray everyone as lepers. It is my own special brand of social commentary.

Cleaning the sensor is a pretty simple affair, though it is easy to fuck things up. If you damage the sensor, you now have a very expensive brick – albeit, one with an LCD screen. Things not to do include poking, scratching, scraping or licking any part of the sensor. Instead, a magic concoction, composed of pixie dust and the tears of a wronged girlfriend, must be applied liberally with a felt-tipped applicator, all purchased from your local Henrys. This will remove the year of neglect and cookie dust forced upon the poor sensor.

Today I did all these things, and I’m happy to say, I did not fuck up. In fact, you might say it was a great success, and my camera shoots like new again. Figure 1, pictured above, is a testament to this. Chloe looks pleased.

Next time, we learn how to make a camera strap from jerky – food and function.

The Leonid meteor shower, 2009. Stitched two photos for a 15 minute exposure.

2 AM, Tuesday morning. I’m somewhere near Milton, where the roads cease to be roads, and are simply called “lines”. Seriously. Try telling a friend you live on 4^th line.

For that matter, try telling a friend that four teenagers, in a field at 2AM, are actually stargazing.

What we witnessed was the beginning of the Leonids Meteor shower. Says Wikipedia:

The Leonids are a prolific meteor shower associated with the comet Tempel-Tuttle. The Leonids get their name from the location of their radiant in the constellation Leo: the meteors appear to stream from that point in the sky. The 2009 display peaking on November 17 may produce more than 500 meteors an hour.

500 meteors an hour. On any given night, you’re lucky to see just one chunk of ice hurtling from the heavens, but a shower of this scale is simply immense. The hard part, we found, was driving far enough from the city to actually see anything, without actually driving very far at all.

We settled upon a small park way up Britania road, which was dark enough that we could actually see a good amount of stars – not cottage caliber, mind you, but more than was possible from our driveways.

We figured an alien abduction would occur at any moment.

Fears aside, I decided to take out the camera and try my hand at some long-exposure photography. Imagine you’ve been blindfolded, handed a cinderblock, and told to capture some stars. This is what long-exposure astral photography is like.

Capturing the stars is a dark art, and one I haven’t quite mastered just yet. It takes a tricky combination of ISO, aperture and shutter speed adjustments, with the slightest tweak to one dramatically affecting the other. And while we thought we escaped the city’s reach, light pollution was still a factor too.

Nevertheless, we still saw some meteors – at least six, I’d say. It was a far cry from the 500 or so predicted at peak times and places, but it was good enough.

Thanks to Alex, Steph and Danny for coming along – you made it quite the adventure. Here’s hoping for more of the same next year!

Last year, taken in Northern Ontario. 10 minute exposure at ISO 100. Note the milky way, and single meteor trail, bottom left.

I spent the majority of last week doing what any good tech writer does — reviewing fancy, expensive equipment and wishing I could keep it all. For the record, I would be perfectly happy if my wages were paid by exorbitant electronics. I would raise my kids on the sweet taste of silicone and poor UI design.

Both the Canon 7D and the Nikon D3000 are fairly recent entries to the DSLR market. One is an incredibly high-end device, and the other, more of a consumer product. What’s nice about both is that they’re radically different from my current Canon 30D.

Full reviews for both will be up in about a week or two on The Globe and Mail, but there’s a few things that struck me about both, now that I’ve had time to distance myself from the two devices. I’ve never really gotten much time in with a Nikon camera, but I have to admit, the menu system is pretty damn nice. It throws you all the information you need on-screen, in a nicely organized manner that’s suited to both power users and amateurs alike.

My big love with the Canon 7D was just how damn sharp everything was. I’m talking thumbtack sharp. James Bond sharp. Steak knife with garlic powder and a nice BBQ marinade sharp. I was sent a kit lens, a non-L series medium-zoom, but I couldn’t bring myself to use it much. Not when I had my 50mm f/1.4 to play with. Almost all of the pictures I took were with that lens, and it made for some beautiful shots with the 7D’s new movie mode.

Strangely, the 7D outputs video, not in AVI format, but in Quicktime h.264. It’s a little bit of a strange choice, and I’d imagine the on-the-fly encoding is what causes the camera to heat up so quickly. There is actually a warning that constant filming can degrade video quality, and even heat up the camera to a degree where it must be cooled down before further use. Same applies to the Live View preview functionality.

I have a few test shots up on the first and second page of Flickr, which you can view here if you’re interested. More information in the coming weeks!