1. Closing the resource is probably the worst idea one might have to express his/her vote for Internet freedom.
2. Just owning a button to on or off the resource created by millions of people does not mean that the owner is granted a moral right to use that to achieve his/her particular goals.

And yes, SOPA/PIPA has to be stopped.

Deer Springs / Оленьи Ручьи nature park, Urals, Russia.

All photos tagged with “amsterdam”

All photos tagged with “utrecht”

• Programming is fun
• Programming is simple

It was an astonishing “You can do that” idea: you don’t have to be a mature, qualified engineer to start doing things with the computer right now. I still don’t know whether it’s a property of the C language itself, or of the book (in very good Russian translation); but even complex subjects, like pointers etc., were explained in an amusing way, intuitive for an average 13 y.o. schoolboy.

I don’t know another programming language specification that were such fundamental and detailed but simple and inspiring at the same time. I really owe to it in particular and to the C in general for I had not been lost in the jungles of something like BASIC (as it was suggested by the most of the “beginner” books of those days) and got a taste for a good language and for a fun of programming from the very beginning.

Unfortunately, I never remember Mr. Ritchie when I turn on my Linux (UNIX!) computer for doing my everyday work (those curly braces and all that stuff). And it’s sad.

Until recently, good long-focus lenses (those huge telescope tubes) were the property of professional photographers and few consumer-oriented models available at the market suffered from average-to-poor image quality. Fortunately, the progress in technologies in last few years changed this situation. Now, it’s not a problem for even an amateur photographer to get an affordable, relatively compact telephoto zoom providing pretty decent performance in a focal range up to 300mm at a reasonable price.

70-300mm

Rambling across Andorra la Vella, I stumbled upon a small but amazingly rich photo store where I picked up a Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 DG OS lens. The lens offers a good telephoto range (equivalent to 110-470mm on APS-C DSLR) and features the Sigma’s Optical Stabiliser (OS) technology which, of course, is a must-have at those levels of magnification.

Max magnification of Canon EF-S 18-55mm IS (88mm APS-C)

Max magnification of Sigma 70-300mm F4-5.6 DG OS (470mm APS-C)

The lens initially was meant to be an auxiliary add-on to complement my basic Canon kit for distant shooting. However, Sigma 70-300mm demonstrated some interesting features beyond its long-zoom capabilities and I had a lot of fun playing around with it as with my main lens. Though not being a true macro, it delivers attractive close-ups with impressive bokeh and amusing effects of shallow depth of field:

Also I found that at the wide angle end (70mm), it performs well like a portrait lens.

18-250mm

I realized very soon that what I really wanted is one universal lens to cover as much as possible. I understand that this is a disputable point that would likely cause criticism from serious photographers, but an advantage of ability to capture everything without having to swap lenses on the run matters a lot for me. Again, the technology progress in recent years has improved the mega-zoom area significantly and almost all major lens makers now can offer the quite well-made 10-15x zooming constructions featuring a wide focal length range with minimum of compromises in speed and image quality.

After reading some reviews and test reports, I ended up with another product of Sigma: a 18-250mm f/3.5-6.3 DC OS HSM model. The main advantage is, of course, its 13.9x zoom range that makes it a great general purpose and travel lens.

18mm (29mm APS-C)	50mm (80mm APS-C)
150mm (240mm APS-C)	250mm (400mm APS-C)

Like 70-300mm DG model, this Sigma lens features the image stabilizer which is very helpful for shooting in low light without a tripod (though the tests show that it’s effectiveness is somewhat overrated in specifications). The lens is also equipped with an ultrasonic (HSM) autofocus motor (that the 70-300mm model lacks) which makes focusing amazingly quiet, fast and accurate.

By the specs, the minimum focus distance is 45cm, but it seems like a limit for AF only. In manual focus mode, I can shoot as close as at 10cm for decent close-ups:

For a mid-level superzoom lens, Sigma 18-250mm exhibits outstanding image quality in terms of distortion and chromatic aberrations. Sharpness is another story, though: all tests I saw exposed inconsistency with sharpness across the frame area and focal length range; notably, soft corners and general softness at the telephoto end. But the same reviews suggest that if to stick to aperture size from f8 to f11 at those focal lengths, the image stays pretty sharp. So, this is something I can live with.

Conclusion

Well, if I would start right now, I were forget about the kit lens and get the camera body and a modern superzoom like Sigma 18-250mm (Canon 18-200mm, Tamron 18-270mm, name it…). The lesson I learnt about the modern consumer optics market is that in the low- to mid-level range there is absolutely no point to have a set of lenses only to extend your focal length possibilities. The advantages of having a single all-in-one lens are obvious and the difference of quality given the same price segment is negligible. And it saves money which is better to be spent for specialized tools – something like a super-wide angle or a good fixed portrait lens.

Now, the Sigma 18-250mm completely replaced the Canon’s kit EF-S 18-55mm IS as my main general-purpose lens. Together with EOS 600D, it is compact and light enough, making a handy combo (near 1kg total) I can carry everywhere and shoot without a feel of any limit.

Download SCAN-Desktop 1.4-beta (Windows installer)

Note that 1.4 package includes MS-Office, OpenOffice and PDF document plugins by default (no need to install them separately) to provide an out-of-the-box solution for the most of users.

1.4 version is strongly focused on stability, performance and usability improvement. Major updates since SCAN 1.3 are:

• Numerous performance and stability tweaks and bugfixes (including a critical bug with crash on very deep folder structures and threading issues).
• Updated version of Lucene search engine (2.9.4) featuring improved speed and stability of indexing and searching. Also, other third-party libraries were updated to their latest versions where available.
• On Windows, the native look-and-feel is used to make the user interface looking and behaving like a typical Windows application.
• The main window is minimized to a system tray icon (useful if you want to keep SCAN running in the background to monitor updates in your sources).
• Tag management features (renaming, splitting and merging of the tags).
• Support of new document languages (fi, hu, ro, tr) and improved language auto-identification.
• New MS-Office document plug-in with (long-expected!) support of OOXML format (Office 2007 and later).

Please note:

• Compatibility with old Java versions (1.5.x) is no longer supported. Please make sure you have Java 1.6.x installed.
• There may be a bug that the preinstalled document plugins are displayed as upgradable in the Plugins manager window. Do not try to update them: otherwise, they will be replaced by older versions from the web-site.

Street protesters: “We are not anti-system, the system is anti-us!”

Catalunya independent.

Pyrenees.

A fountain in Girona.

The full photoset from travel to Spain can be found here.

Between two countries.

Andorra la Vella.

Dali’s “Nobility of time” (“La noblesse du temps”) in Andorra la Vella.

Old Andorra.