Lao Minivan in Bangkok

I do not see many vehicles with foreign license (registration) plates in Thailand. I can recall four in the past year.

This Lao registered Hyundai Starex minivan stood out in my local supermarket car park a couple of days ago. The owner must be very rich. Laos is still a Communist country and one of the poorest in the world. The country is small and landlocked and I think most of the world has forgotten about it after the tragedy of the Vietnam War.

Lao Hyundai Starex Minivan in Bangkok - front

Laos uses a different alphabet to Thailand so I can’t read the plate or get any of my Thai friends to help. Wikipedia has articles on the Vehicle Registration Systems for most countries but it does not have one for Laos.

Lao Hyundai Starex Minivan in Bangkok - rear

They do not sell the Hyundai Starex in Thailand. The styling is quite distinctive.

It Wasn’t My Eyes!

I found out why I could not focus properly on the moon last night. My Canon EOS-30D’s viewfinder was not adjusted properly.

It was obvious when I looked through the viewfinder at a passing helicopter the next day. I must have moved the adjustment wheel inadvertently. I’d forgotten it was there.

Here’s the page from the Canon EOS-30D User Guide:

Canon EOS-30D Dioptric Adjustment

Another thing I liked about my old Canon A-1 was that it had a little shutter to close the viewfinder window. It was good for tripod work. Canon have done away with it on their consumer cameras. I think the EOS-1D has one.

Dying Battery?

The batteries on my Nikon Coolpix P6000 have developed an annoying habit. They both die without warning. Up until last week the camera showed a “low battery” icon on its screen when the battery was about 75% discharged. then it shut down gracefully at maybe 1% charge with a message on the screen “The battery is exhausted”.

I guess the batteries have aged and they go to zero without enough time for the camera’s firmware to react.

I still get about 300 shots per battery. That’s with the LCD on all the time and the GPS active. So it is annoying and not disabling.

I wish Nikon put a battery status indicator on the display all the time – not only when the charge is depleted.

A Little Bit Out of Focus

Last night I made a second set of test shots of the Thai moon over Bangkok. This time I tried manually focusing on the moon with my Canon 75-300mm lens set at 300mm.

Although the pictures looked all right in the viewfinder and on the LCD display, when I got them into Lightroom they were unacceptably blurred.

Moon Out of Focus

My first attempts when I let the camera auto-focus were much better. I was surprised that it could focus, but it did and it did a better job than my 53-year-old eyeballs.

I remember my Canon A-1 film SLR camera had two optical devices in the viewfinder to help you focus. (This was the 1980s before auto-focus was available).

The first were micro-prizms. They disappeared when the picture was correctly focused. The second was a split prism. This worked better in low light. You adjusted focus until the top and bottom half of the picture was aligned. This article talks about them and this article explains the optical theory.

I don’t think there’s a technical reason cameras no longer have these aids. They are available on professional cameras like the Canon EOS-1 series. I suppose manufacturers believe that autofocus works 99% of the time so they are no longer necessary for amateurs.

PRINT EMAIL FACEBOOK DIGG TWITTER RSS SHARE

PRINT EMAIL FACEBOOK DIGG TWITTER RSS SHARE

Most of the time Google Reader does a good job of parsing stories and presenting them. But some of the time it includes a load of nonsense in the story from the links and other stuff on the original page. The page is probably missing a closing tag of some sort so Reader just went on copying the text mindlessly.

I expect it is an error in the way the page was written but it is still annoying. Maybe it is good though – it reminds me that my Google Reader “experience” is generated by a machine.

All Questions Answered

Even dumb ones – by the Flickr community!

I photographed a car in Bangkok that I didn’t recognise. It had a badge on the boot (trunk) that I misread and became confused. I thought it was an Opel “Calera” or “Galera”. There’s no such thing.

I posted the photo to Flickr and within a couple of hours somebody told me what I should have known anyway: it’s an Opel Calibra. That’s why I like Flickr despite their misguided policies about “voyeurs” and so on. See here and especially here.

Moon Shots

I asked my online mentor, Michael Willems, a question that’s been bothering me for a while:

We’re having some lovely clear nights in Bangkok now it is the cool season. The moon often looks great but I have had limited success photographing it. Do you have any tips for good lunar photography?

He responded here with some useful tips.

The moon wasn’t very interesting tonight and it wasn’t full but I thought I’d try his suggestions.

I set up the Canon EOS-30D on a tripod with a cable release. My longest lens is the Canon 75-300mm F3.5-5.6 so I used that at 300mm.

I set the camera to 100 ASA to get the best quality from the sensor. I set a manual exposure of 1/125 at F11.

The moon was high in the sky so I got a crink in my neck trying to focus manually. It was not very bright so I tried some longer exposures.

I converted them to greyscale in Lightroom – the images looked better that way.

Here’s a single sheet with four pictures, courtesy of Lightroom’s “Print to File” feature:

Moon Shots

I also put some larger pictures on Flickr:

1.

2.

3.

4.

My reaction? They are okay and better than I have achieved in the past. They don’t have the sharpness I was hoping for. I think that’s a function of my inexpensive consumer-grade lens. The camera is capable of better pictures.

Namebench

The Google Code site has a DNS Benchmark Utility to test if your DNS server configuration is really the best. You can read about it here.

I thought it would be good to test my use of Google Public DNS from my location in Bangkok, Thailand. It occurred to me that sending every request to servers that are most likely in the USA may not be the best for me.

And so it proved. I ran the test using a data source of all the sites in my Firefox history. I was surprised it contains over 47,000 domains.

Namebench told me that a Thai-based DNS Server called AsiaNet-2 TH is 27% faster than Google DNS.

Namebench Results. Click to see full size.

I decided to put that one as my primary DNS Server but use Google DNS as the secondary. Google DNS had a respectable performance. It seemed wise to have a backup server in a different location.

Don’t use these recommendations without testing yourself. My results in Bangkok with my ISP won’t be the same as yours.

Bangkok Sunset from the Apartment

We had a good red sunset in Bangkok on the evening of Boxing Day, December 26th. I set up my Canon EOS-30D on a tripod and took a picture every minute for fifty minutes as the sun set and the city lights came on.

I shot in RAW and used aperture priority at F8 and 100ASA for the best picture the camera and lens could produce.

I did minimal processing in Lightroom. I used the “Camera Landscape” calibration profile. That did a good job of matching the colours as I saw them.

Then I used the Lightroom Slideshow module to create an Adobe PDF file of the presentation. I sized it at 1024×768 which produced a 3MB file.

I uploaded it to my account on Scribd. I embedded the document in this post after the jump.

I like the effect – you can see how quickly the sun sets in the tropics and the red sky is striking.

Download it and let me know what you think.

Haze, Low Clouds, Pollution?

I shouldn’t be so complacent about the good cool-season weather we are experiencing in Bangkok while my European and North American friends are freezing. This is the view from the apartment about 10am on Boxing Day morning.

I don’t know if it is just mist or pollution but it isn’t very attractive. The atmosphere feels heavier than it did a day ago.

Nevertheless I prefer this to freezing temperatures and snow.