Yepppoon Info

I thought I’d better let you know why there’s been an absence of the daily photo series and normal posts. Well the answer is that I’ve lost quite a few recent photos due to my hard drive’s space running out. As a result of that I’ve purchased another computer with a hard drive that’s 4 times bigger. Stay tuned at JylanWynne.com/Blog for a more detailed post abou the new computer when it arrives (hopefully early this week).

I will not be posting any more daily photos until the new computer arrives, but I might be able to do a post about our weekend camping trip at Byfield in the meantime :-).

Update: My post about Red Rock has now been finished.

I’m not sure whether any of you have noticed yet, but I have a new website and blog up at jylanwynne.com. Basically I’ve decided to change Jylanization into a blog entirely about Yeppoon and my area, and use jylanwynne.com as a personal blog with web design posts and things like that (phew, over and done with!). That means I’ll be able to tweak each website until they’ve reached their full potential, which I can’t do at the moment.

I have some cool things planned for each blog, so make sure you come by often!

Now, about subscribers and what you can do. I’ve made a list below showing your options:

1. If you want to keep subscribing to both blogs: Do nothing! I’ve already used Yahoo Pipes to merge the two feeds of Jylanization and Jylan Wynne together, so that means everyone subscribed to both blogs (as well as email subscribers) will stay subscribed.
2. If you want to only subscribe to Jylan Wynne: If you came here just to read about web design stuff, etc, then just unsubscribe from whatever you’re currently getting my posts from, and resubscribe to feeds.feedburner.com/JylanWynne/. Keep in mind however, you won’t get any pretty pictures of Yeppoon to look at :-).
3. If you want to only subscribe to Jylanization (or Yeppoon Blogging): Just unsubscribe from the feed you’re currently getting my posts from and resubscribe to feeds.feedburner.com/YeppoonBlogging/. Remember though, I might suddenly move to Borneo and you wouldn’t know!

I hope I’ve covered everything here. I might do a post on how I did the design and everything for jylanwynne.com, but in the meantime go and check it out, then please tell me what you think! I will start right now on changing the branding for Jylanization, see you ;-).

Check out my photos from Humpy Island for some more samples.

This year as a very big (and late) birthday present I bought myself a Canon Powershot A720, which has 8MP of resolution, a 6X optical zoom, optical image stabilisation, up to 1cm macro, and the ability to control all the settings instrumental to creating a photograph, such as aperture size, shutter speed, ISO, and focus.

Olympus Mju 820 and Canon Powershot A720 comparison

When I was looking for a camera to buy I was originally planning to buy an Olympus, because that is what we’ve always had, and I’d also just purchased a XD type memory card which only works in Olympus and Fujifilm cameras. After looking around, I decided that the Olympus Mju 820 fitted my needs pretty well. It had 8MP of resolution, a 5X optical zoom (the Canon had 6X), a digital image stabiliser (compared to an optical stabiliser for the Canon) and could take photos up to ISO 3200 (higher ISOs are very good for lowlight shots, the Canon A720 only goes to 1600). It also had a 3cm macro (while the Canon A720 has 1cm macro).

More specs for the Olympus Mju 820 included the blazing fast 7 frames per second drive mode, and a maximum 4 second shutter speed for night shots. The Canon Powershot could only take about 1.5 frames per second but had a maximum of a 15 second shutter speed. The Olumpus Mju 820 also had a movie mode that could take 10 seconds of 30fps video at 640×480 resolution, but the Canon Powershot can take videos at that resolution to a maximum of 1 hour!

Why I bought the Canon Powershot A720

All of the above factors contributed to my decision to buy the Canon instead of the Olympus, but the deciding factor was a review of the Olympus Mju 820 by imaging-resource.com that said the Olympus had fairly bad colour fringing problems, which mean that the camera adds coloured edges to bright sections of a picture. In addition, the Olympus Mju 820 had a tendency to produce soft photos, which I certainly didn’t want. By contrast, the Canon Powershot A720 received a glowing review.

Where I bought the camera

After looking around, I decided that eBay was the cheapest place to buy the Powershot. I chose eBay user digital-rev-oz, because they had been using eBay for 7 or 8 years and their feedback rating was excellent. Once I bought the camera, it took about 13 days to get delivered to our house. Once the package arrived, I tried to rip it open straight away but was defeated by the layers of wrapping that they had used. I had to get the scissors to open it properly.

First Impressions of the Canon Powershot A720

When I first turned the camera on, it was a pleasant surprise not having to wait the 4 seconds that it took for my old Olympus to power up. The A720 only takes about 1.5 seconds. The focusing and photo taking speed is really fast too (in comparison to my old camera). If you go back to the Imaging Resource review of the A720, all the speeds for this camera can be found there.

The design of the camera can’t be complained about, although I wish that they had a button instead of a switch that could be used to switch between viewing and taking photos. The battery compartment is securely located at the bottom of the camera and can’t be accidently opened. The position of the flash at the front is a bit annoying, especially for me, because when I grip the camera with both hands I often cover the flash without knowing.

So all-in-all, I’m very pleased with my new Powershot A720, and you can expect to start seeing photos on Contrasting Sharply, my photoblog, this week. I’ve put some sample pictures in below.

A photo of our cockatoo called Daisy.

A nice macro of a little brush.

Another nice macro of a special type of building nail

A creative type shot of our big yellow table.

A few days ago I finished reading the whole Lord of the Rings series (wrapped up in one big book). For those who don’t know what the Lord of the Rings series are all about, I’ll give you some information. They were written in the 1940s and 1950s by J.R.R Tolkien, a good friend of CS Lewis. The series is based on the story of a very powerful ring that is owned by a person so evil that he could be evilness himself. He loses the ring however, and at last it falls into the hands of Frodo, who is given the mission of destroying the ring.

Of course, that’s only an extremely brief overview, so if it sounds interesting I suggest you borrow it from your local library. I managed to finish it in about 4 days. Below are some photos of the book.

The Lord of the Rings cover

You can see how thick the book is

The first few pages of the book.

A photo taken by suddenly pulling the camera upwards while it was taking the picture. Do you like it?