After breakfast had a quick look in the garden, the ice was over a cm thick, though the frost wasn't everywhere, most plants didn't have frost on them, just things on the ground.
I came back in and checked my email and hotukdeals. Then I did some work on my website for the rest of the morning. After lunch I went on Animal for about an hour or so then Clare asked me to take Ben out for a walk again, so I did. This time I took my D200 with 18-70mm lens & an SB800 flash to see how it compared (image quality wise) to the 450d with 18-55mm IS lens. Zooming in on the pictures on the camera's LCD, they certainly looked a lot sharper than the 450d pics did yesterday. I will have to do a proper comparison when I copy the pics to my comp and process them.
The conditions for photo taking were very different today, yesterday it wasn't really sunny but 1/40s at about f/5.6 and ISO100 was giving me a blown out sky. But today I started off accidentally shooting at 1/60s at f/5.6 and ISO1250, but the sky still wasn't blown out. The cloud cover was a lot thicker and there weren't any gaps for the sun to shine through today.
I noticed that when I reviewed the pics on the camera's LCD it was very obvious I was using flash. I think probably I would need to use a big diffuser or bounce card to get more natural looking light. Maybe if I get some time I will try and read up on outdoor portraiture using flash.
My Canon 100mm f/2.8 Macro Tripod Ring B adapter collar (part YG2-0500) arrived today from Lehmanns, a bit of a rip off piece of plastic for £20, but at least now I have it. I mounted it to the lens using the instructions here: Using the TMA-B with the EF 100mm f2.8 Macro USM.
I did some more work on my website for the rest of the afternoon.
After dinner I did some more work on my website, all day today I have just been a script to handle the admin form when it is submitted. I haven't tested it yet, so there's probably lots of errors in it that need correcting. After writing most of it (there's still quite a bit left to do on it) I ran a couple of tests on SELECTing some tags from a table. I found that rather than doing
SELECT * WHERE Tag = 'this is a tag' OR Tag = 'this is another tag'It was nearly twice as quick to do
SELECT * WHERE Tag IN ('this is a tag', 'this is another tag'). Unfortunately all the work I've done today is in the first, much slower style.
Then I did a quick test (not tested it properly yet) to see if it was faster to run the query inside a loop, or build up the query each time you run through the loop and execute the combined query when the loop's finished. It seems that building up a large query and then running it after the loop's finished is quite a bit quicker than just running a smaller query inside the loop. Unfortunately again, all my work today has been writing queries that run inside the loop.
So if I do some website work tomorrow I will probably finish the testing to get the figures to check running a large query outside the loop works best. For my page I'm working on, I think I will leave it as it is running small queries inside the loop, then when I've got it working change it to build the queries up and run them outside the loop, as much as is possible. I might post the results of the tests when I'm done.
Later in the evening I watched a couple of episodes of The Office (US) with Mac, then checked HotUKDeals. Clare and Ben (who's still off school with constipation) put the Christmas Tree up in the front room today. The weather was dull, grey and overcast all day.
Food
Breakfast: Grapefruit marmalade toast sandwich; cup o' tea.
Lunch: Chicken Tikka sandwich spread sandwich; most of a bag of roast chicken flavour crisps; clementine; chocolate digestive biscuit bar; cup o' tea; Sainsbury's caramel chocolate.
Dinner: Shepherds pie; cauliflower; carrots; grated cheese. Pudding was a Strawberry Muller fruit corner. Coffee; 2x Advent calendar chocolates (from the 7th and 8th).
Supper: Cup o' tea; dark chocolate digestive; choc chip cookie.
No comments:
Post a Comment