Antique Style Halloween Lanterns

I was pretty happy with my Bloody Rustic Lantern from Spirit Halloween last year ($15), but I wished it wasn’t covered in blood spatter. So this year when I found two different ones online with no blood, I ordered them. One has the same incandescent bulb as the Spirit Halloween one, the other is sound activated with a flickering LED flame and spooky sounds.

Here are the two new lanterns I ordered and the Spirit Halloween one. Based on the pictures, I was expecting two different shapes and colors, but I guess “actual products may vary.”
Old Lantern (Battery Operated) Item 138511 or N0173 by Seasons USA Inc.
Haunted Lantern – Battery Operated w/Sound Item 181774 or 19668 by Seasons USA Inc.
Bloody Rustic Lantern Item 01001189 from Spirit Halloween

Here are all three lit up to compare their brightness.

Antique Halloween Lantern Comparison

And here is what I thought the Old Lantern looked like. If anyone finds one with the longer glass like this, let me know. I like the style.

Old Lantern

I don’t really like products with sound because they are usually stupid, but in that case I just disconnect the speaker. The Haunted Lantern is mostly screams, wind, thunder, and what might be crackling noise from a wood burning fire (which is incorrect for a lantern). Not sure if I will disable the sound on this one or not. The flame and sound are motion activated and it is dim compared to the other lanterns so it may go unnoticed without the sound. I use my stuff outdoors and its dark so motion sensors rarely work for me. Not sure what I am going to do about that. Luckily it comes with a try me button that I might be able to extend the cable and trigger it manually. I would not recommend the one with sound unless you are using it in an area with enough light to set off a motion sensor and you like stuff with sound.

Other than the blood spatter, I like the paint job on the Spirit Halloween one, but all three are very similarly antiqued and the difference could be all up to who slaps the paint on during production. All three open just like a real oil lantern would, but the LED bulb is glued in place. On the two non LED lanterns, you can change the bulb if it burns out by opening it as if you were cleaning a real oil lantern. For my needs, the plain cheap one is the best at only $9 from Halloween24.com.

These antique style Halloween lanterns appear very similar to the Deitz #76 Original Cold Blast Lantern. Though its slightly smaller, you can buy the real oil burning one for $17 in red, blue, or green. Of course, for safety purposes a battery powered one is much prefered for Halloween. Deitz makes some of those too, an LED lantern in the same style for $25 in black and a more powerful LED latnern with almost as much candle power as the real oil lantern of that style.

For our recent possible hurricane, I bought a Lamplight Emergency Lighting Kit with a very similar looking (non-Deitz) lantern for around $17 which is much brighter than a Halloween decoration. It is the reason I decided to start looking for lanterns to add to my yard haunt this year.

Halloween24.com

I did some shopping around and found an online Halloween store with great prices, Halloween24.com. The store is Canadian so my stupid credit card added a FOREIGN TRANSACTION FEE for a few more dollars which I was not happy about, but I saved so much buying from the site, it wasn’t that bad. I can’t say a lot about the company after only one order, but when the website had a problem with taking my order, I called and someone answered right away and fixed it. The order arrived in 7 days, faster than expected with Economy Shipping which I used a coupon to get free.

ELPH Techniques

Shooting fast moving subjects without motion blur is a challenge. You need to get a fast shutter speed. Since it isn’t possible to set the shutter speed on the Canon ELPH cameras, I needed to figure out how to force a fast speed. I tried a bunch of that shot with flash first but that gives a different look that some people don’t like. This shot probably isn’t the subject you are trying to shoot, but did require a very fast shutter speed. I got my SD800 up to 1/1600 exposure with f/7.1 aperture.

Of course, for all the stuff I have mentioned you have to be in Manual mode. I have never messed with the scene modes much. It isn’t really manual compared to a more complicated camera so don’t worry too much about that. I have not used them, but on recent ELPHs there is a kids and pets and/or a sports setting in the scene menu which should give faster shutter speeds.

You can turn the exposure down so the camera doesn’t expect as much light and will use a faster shutter speed. But you loose DOF that way and your shots will be darker. You probably can’t go too far down.

You should also zoom the least amount possible, none is best. The wider the shot the more light is let in so the camera can use a faster shutter speed. Wider shots also help catching your subject. Mine is usually jumping cats and it helps make sure I get the whole cat in the shot.

Setting your ISO to at least 200 is probably a requirement for catching fast action unless in the brightest sunlight. The higher the ISO the less light the camera needs so can use a faster shutter, but the image gets noisier the higher the ISO. Don’t be afraid of 400 if you have too, grainy shots are better than blury shots. Sunlight is extremely important if you don’t want motion blur. If you can live with a small amount of motion blur, which can sometimes be interesting and shows the action, then a bit shady or not so bright sunlight will do. Example 1, Example 2, Example 3.

Your other option is to use the flash even in daylight, just turn your camera from automatic to always flash. It will slow down how fast you can shoot and you will probably want an extra battery if you do it a lot since it will drain much faster, but it will help you freeze the action if you are close enough to the subject. Here is an example in the dark. And another example (don’t look if you are mouse fan).

If you get blurry pictures with the flash because the shutter is staying open too long you might have the Slow Synchro setting turned on. You can turn it off in the Menu. It could also happen if you are too far from your subject for the flash to have much effect. For example, when shooting an event from the stands flash (on any camera) isn’t going to do you any good. You are better off with high ISO.

Cosina 100mm F3.5 Macro

The Cosina 100mm is a pretty decent starter macro lens with good sharpness. You may also find the lens branded as Vivitar or Phoenix. But to get actual 1:1 magnification, it comes with a matched adapter. 1:1 isn’t always necessary, but its certainly good for anything smaller than a butterfly. While using the adapter, you loose infinity focus.

The image quality is good, but I prefer my old Minolta 50mm f2.8 1:1 Macro since the focal range is more useful for non-macro shots and it doesn’t require an adapter for 1:1 so it is much more likely to stay on my camera. Until I got the 50mm, I prefered using a Raynox macro adapter on my zoom lenses instead of the Cosina for shooting macros. Since I was using an adapter either way, I preferred the flexibility of the Raynox DCR-250 which I could use on any of my lenses.

After using the 50mm for a few years, I wish I had a macro lens with 90mm or more so I could shoot from a bit further away. Scaring bugs off isn’t usually a problem for me, but lighting them with my flash at 1:1 can be difficult since the lens is so close to the bug.

Not So Shiny Chrome

When I heard about Google’s Chrome browser yesterday, I was worried for Mozilla. Google is their biggest source of income and if Chrome became popular, there wouldn’t be much use in continuing that relationship. Now that I have tried it, I don’t think Mozilla has much to worry about at least for a few years.

There is much other browsers can learn from Chrome, but I think
Chrome is too simplified for most advanced users and those are the people who will most appreciate the big improvements. Having tabs in separate processes seems to be a very good idea. And being able to disconnect and reconnect tabs is convenient. Memory usage does seem pretty comparable to Firefox 3.

Popups and spyware problems are not improved much, if any, over Firefox 3. It does block some popups, but I still found plenty. One seemed triggered by Flash ads. I got one when clicking unrelated links on a hacker search engine. And I got one that seems to be a javascript redirect on a compromised blog that warned me I had viruses and is very effective. The same site twice convinced my mom that she had viruses. If you click anywhere on the site, two EXEs are downloaded automatically. With Firefox, only one was downloaded. The only thing Chrome did better was not allow the site to hide the browser window by resizing it and moving it to the corner behind the popup dialog. Firefox can be set for that too.

Chrome is missing an easy way to reopen accidentally closed tabs. You can do it from the Opera Speed Dial like home page, but why not from the context menu when you click on the tab bar? Having close buttons on each tab makes it too easy to close them. I set Firefox to show close buttons only on the active tab.

I didn’t do any official timing tests, but to me Chrome feels slower than Firefox. Loading javascript heavy pages might be faster, Gmail did load pretty fast, but loading regular HTML and images seemed slower.

The best part of Chrome is that it will advance web standards. Google’s Chrome comic explains how they test page rendering automatically on tons of the most popular pages found in their search engine. Any improvement they make will be able to benefit Apple Safari’s WebKit core which eventually works its way back KDE’s KHTML in Konqueror.

Chrome is an extremely polished beta, but if you use anything more than the back button on your browser, there is nothing really great about it that will convince people to switch. IE8 beta looks pretty good too, but I will be sticking with Firefox. Mozilla keeps actively working on Firefox. From past experience with Google software, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get board with the project and development stalls for long periods. Google’s Browser Sync was long neglected and is being discontinued. Google’s Picasa is finally nearing a beta for 3.0 but has not had a major update since June 2006 when 2.5 was released. Hopefully this one is better, but take a look at their Mac and Linux support if you are waiting for this browser on other operating systems.

Update: I gave Chrome another try after it was developed a bit more and started using it more and more. I love the speed improvements and use it 90% of the time now even though I miss a bunch of Firefox extensions and Greasemonkey scripts.

Cats Can Reddit

Cats Can't Read

Today my Cats Can’t Read photo was posted to Reddit by PaperLess. I don’t think it made the front page, but it did do well on the Pics page, making it up to at least number 6 today. Back on February 16, 2008, this shot had 3,676 views and 33 faves which I thought was pretty good. When I first learned of it being on Reddit on March 10, about eight hours after it was posted, it has 24,176 views and 44 faves. Now, around 13 hours since it was linked, it is up to 32,022 views and 47 faves. According to Flickr, there have been over 28,000 views from Reddit users in just over half a day. Thanks for posting it, PaperLess.

I do have one request though of anyone who posts links to photos. Please link the post to the main photo page, not the original size or the JPEG itself. I often find posts directly to JPEGs, that is not allowed by the Flickr TOS and is rude. The photographer gets no credit for the image that way. Linking to the larger size pages is better because the photographer’s name and copyright information is there, but the viewers won’t likely see the caption under the photo or the photographer’s other work. Reddit users don’t have a reputation for exploring a site that has been linked. Even though I have had over 28,000 views on this photo alone today, views on the rest of my photos and my Photostream are maybe at most very slightly above average. I do have a lot of other good stuff people would enjoy and usually so do other photographers that get linked.

If you ever do come across a JPEG only photo on Flickr’s servers, this bookmarklet will take you to the photo page (if I can figure out where I got it I will add a credit). I use it frequently. Often you will find other interesting work by the same photographer.

For those that don’t know, Reddit is a site like Slashdot or Digg. You have to be a computer geek to have heard of them, but they are huge in the world of computer geeks and programmers. I get most of my news and interesting links from them. On Digg and Reddit, people post links they find interesting and they get voted up or down so the really interesting ones make it to the front page. As new stuff becomes more interesting they move down the list to make room. Unless its really good, most stuff doesn’t stay near the top for even a day. The amount of traffic these sites produce if you get linked and are popular can be enormous. Frequently it is enough to knock a site temporarily off line or at least make it unusably slow.

Update: One week later and I get another shot on Reddit thanks to digital. It got about 5,000 in the first three hours it was there.
Before Microsoft Word

Hard Drive Troubles

In the last week I have had several hard drive problems. First was my external USB hard drive got corrupted so none of the thousands of photos over the last several months in the folder for my S5 showed up. Luckily it happened while I was copying them off to my ReadyNAS NV so more than half copied fine. I just had to make sure I could get the other half. I knew exactly what program to use. GetDataBack from Runtime Software. But I only had the version for FAT and this drive was NTFS. I downloaded the trial version and confirmed my photos could be recovered. So I paid $79 for the license. In the comments where it asked where you heard about the program, I mentioned that I bought GDB for FAT six years ago. They have a bundle where you can buy both the FAT and NTFS versions for a discount, but I assumed that was if you bought it at the same time, certainly not 6 years apart. A day or two later, I got an email saying I was only charged $50 (the difference in price from the bundle and the NTFS version). Even $79 would have been a deal to get my photos back. GDB has saved me a ton of data over the years that was not properly backed up. Runtime Software has great software and great people.

My second hard drive problem was with the ReadyNAS. I bought it when it was Infrant, now Netgear owns it. It is setup with X-RAID (eXpandable RAID) and one of the four drives died. That is what RAID is for though. One drive can die and you don’t loose anything. So I went hard drive shopping. I had four 400 GB drives in there which gives around a Terabyte of room (and nearly full). I couldn’t find any 400 GB drives locally and could hardly find any drives at all that were listed as compatible. So I made it all the way down to poor CompUSA. I didn’t realize they had started their going out of business sale already. I never really liked the store, but it was better than Best Buy or Circuit City and you could find most anything that the others didn’t carry (maybe that was their problem). For that it will be missed. The only compatible one large enough was a 750 GB Seagate drive, it was way more than I planned even with 10% off. Until I can replace the other three drives though, the extra 350 GB is just sitting there unusable.

Credit Cards Suck

I tried very hard to get one of my credit cards canceled. Finally after lowering my rate and agreeing to remove one of the two late charges on my card, I agreed to stay. Several days before, I had talked to someone else who agreed to remove the second late charge once I got my account current (paid the minimum necessary). In August I used this card by mistake for $40 (I have only used this card three times in the last six months). Now I owe that and $32.13 more in late fees and finance charges, almost doubling the cost of my purchase.

I didn’t look at the bills since I pay all my other credit cards online automatically and have them set to auto deducting the minimum so I never have to worry about missing and getting a late fee (a feature this card doesn’t offer). I forget about this one since I don’t use it. Their website sucks too which makes me even less likely to use the card. My pretty unique username (not jciv) that I used when I first signed up is now taken and can’t be used. It has to be a dead account I created, even though after 6 months you have to re-register. So now I have to remember to put a “1” at the end. And they misspelled my mother’s maiden name so whenever I have to re-register or recover my password, I get locked out for 24 hours until I can figure out how they spelled it. How would you ever know they misspelled it? It still sounds the same when you have to give it to the phone people. One time I just decided to try some variations.

Once I found the problem I tried to pay online, but for people who are behind, they change the payment system. I have to re-enter my checking account number (I don’t have my check book with me either). So I have to try again later. When I get it, they require you to tell them why I didn’t pay, how many months has my financial situation been bad, etc. Idiots. I can see asking this stuff if I were thousands of dollars behind, but $72.

They have my email address, that is how I got notified about my Reduced Purchases Rate quickly after talking to the first person. Why was I not contacted by email about missing two credit card payments? I also got an email about filling out a survey on how my dealing with customer service was. That is where 90% of this blog post comes from. Clearly they have my email address. But notifying me that way would cheat them out of the late fees because I would have paid it instantly so they don’t use it.

Long ago I stopped using this credit card completely but never canceled it because canceling a card can hurt your credit score and I was lazy. I never called in to activate my new card when it arrived and eventually just stopped getting bills in the mail. Several years later they sent a new card, it looked similar to one I was using so I assumed that is what it was and activated it. Its all been downhill from there.

Mainly I use a Sony branded credit card and am saving up points to get a Sony DSLR. I don’t really want a Sony camera, but I was already half way there when I realized that. When the Canon Powershot S5 came out, I had to decide between paying $500 or getting the Sony H9 free. I chose the Canon and saved my points hoping Sony’s SLR would be better. For free I can live with it, but as soon as I get that camera or give up and get a huge TV, I plan to get an Amazon card. They send you gift certificates for stuff on Amazon. Amazon usually has good prices and I won’t be locked into one brand.

Plus, the Sony Card’s website’s improved security measures means every time my browser is upgraded, I have to go through a verification (by email or phone) step because they don’t recognize my computer. If I was using IE and it only updated a few times a decade, that would be fine. But Firefox updates frequently (a little too frequently sometimes). Every time the UserAgent changes, I have to go through the verification again.

KDE 4 Oxygen Wallpaper Contest

With the upcoming release of KDE 4.0 (a Linux desktop environment), four of my photo will be among the fifteen included wallpapers users around the world get to choose from. They were chosen from over 2000 entries. The announcement is here or here. You can view all my entries here.

My Winning Entries for the KDE 4 Oxygen Wallpaper Contest

You can download and use the wallpapers from my site for your own personal use, but please don’t repost them anywhere. Unless you download them from KDE, they are still © All Rights Reserved. I have recently started putting up my images for sale at Shutterpoint if you are interested in using them commercially. I am willing to discuss licensing them for free in other large open source projects too, but you must ask first.

You can see a lot more of my photos on Flickr.