Neil Duffin Blog

There’s an interesting piece on PhotographyBlog about a visit to the Manfrotto  / Gitzo tripod factory. There’s some nice abstract shots in the gallery and the factory’s local town looks photogenic too.

Fuji have released the successor to the F31fd, the new F50fd. It has an increased resolution over the 6mp of the F31fd - not 7, 8 or 9 but 12mp!

A 100% increase in resolution is either very interesting or worrying. It means that either Fuji have found a way to make their new Super-CCD-HR very quiet or they’ve given in to the pressure from the other manufactures and just gone to 12mp with total…

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I’ve uploaded a new article on Contribute CS3. It’s both a review and a ‘how-to’ for issues with the package. I hope you find it interesting.

If there’s anybody from Adobe reading this - please take note of the article. I’m still using Contribute CS3 (for now) and I’d actually like to continue but with Ecto v3 coming soon, I may be tempted away.

I found a link to "N" by Metanet Software on meta-filter the other day. I’ve been playing it off and on for a few days and it’s a great little ‘Flash’ game.

Be warned though, while addictive it will also have you very frustrated in no time. Those levels look so easy but they’re not!

Download your copy from here.

Good luck… You’ll need it!
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A couple of humourous videos by David Pogue on the iPhone can be found on the New York Times website. The iPhone:The Musical is very silly. The iPhone challenge is funny and informative.

A posting on DP Review gives some interesting news about a new Canon CMOS sensor fabrication plant. The chips will see use in digital SLRs (no surprise) and “in some compact models.”

Does this finally (!) mean that Canon are going to bring out a professional, CMOS based compact camera with RAW? I really hope so.

However, it could also mean they are looking to make really, really cheap chips for lower end models. We’ll just have to wait and see.

Following on from PC World’s attempts at destroying an iPhone, Will It Blend have had a go. It’s an ‘interesting’ video but if you really, really love your iPhone don’t watch this.

For everyone else, it’s a good laugh.

As they say though - don’t try this at home - besides you’d need one of these monster blenders to do it anyway.

There are a number of other interesting ‘will it blend’ experiments…

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The updated to Martin Evening’s excellent Lightroom Book is now available for download. There’s a piece on Lightroom News telling you how to register. If you have the book, this update explains the new features of Lightroom version 1.1. If you don’t it still worth a look - the download is available to all if you follow the guide on Lightroom News.

Peach Pit’s website is a little confusing though, so if you’re having problems…

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Casio have released a pair of new cameras which capture video in a YouTube compatible format or MPEG 4 H.264. This is the same format that the current version of Quicktime uses and is capable of very high quality video but without using vast amounts of memory to do so.

The result is 640×480 video captured at 30fps and 19 minutes of it on a 1Gb card. The new cameras implement SDHC support and so…

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You might not ever intend to damage your iPhone but accidents happen. This video on PC World’s website shows how well the phone stands up to some fairly serious abuse.