I’ve been using UFRaw, a GIMP plugin to work with the RAW shot of the moon. The images was quite under-exposed to start with, but still it gives me very many colours in the sky:

It uses dcraw that I talked about earlier. Do you have any experience with dcraw or utillities based on it you’d like to share? I’ll spend some time learning this tool so that I can get better results than this redish sky.

I’m planning to get more away from my computer with my camera, and I’ve been looking at solutions for emptying my CF-card onto a harddrive while travelling. My most probable choice is CompactDrive PD7X (which I’ll buy here unless someone gives me a better offer), but I’m also looking at Archos AV420 that has too many features I don’t need and the Epson P-2000 that has some great reviews, is an image browser as well and supports Canon’s RAW format, but has more than twice the price-tag.

Plonsky writes on reverse lens combinations do go great macro-shots of bugs.

I just saw PicoJet’s flash-based ad (via The Digital Photography Weblog). PicaJet is software for organizing my photos, not much unlike iPhoto. I’m really fond of iPhoto, except that it’s too slow and that labelling and organizing pictures still takes too long. I miss RAW-support and search-functionality like imgSeek. I love the Gallery plugin, despite rotation bugs. I’m currently sticking with iPhoto 2 as I figure it’s been so long since the release of iPhoto 4 that a new version is bound to be due soon. But as with all other photo-organizing software I’ve seen, PicaJet & iPhoto have a problem with DVDs.

With my recent purchase of my Canon EOS 20D, the amount of pictures I take has risen sharply. And the file size of my favourite format has risen for each picture from ~400k to ~6m. Within three weeks I’d taken 4Gb of pictures, nicely fitted on one DVD. But, that’s making my pictures unavailable. I need to have a thumb-nail in my archive (say about 640x480 would be nice) that informs me what DVD I’ve put it on so I can find it back. I’ve got a 15cm stack of photo DVDs and the occational photo CD. I need this to become available. How have you guys solved this?

I bought a 2x teleconverter from 47st.photo at eBay in September. The seller has until now not made even what I can consider an attempt on solving the issue, so I’ve given up, and hereby report the issue to eBay. I also write this as a warning of people who consider doing business with this company. Don’t do business with them unless you can walk in the door and hold the actual product.

The item I was bidding for was this: Canon EOS Rebel K2 Ti GII 7n 2x Pro Telephoto Extender and it had the following picture on eBay:

This item is what I got:

As you can see, it clearly sais macro and 0.42X, not tele, not 2x.

I contacted the seller as he had requested in writing before leaving feedback. Any decent person would. I described the problem detailed, but the answer back was a one-liner: hello this is the same lens. (entire mailing history enclosed for your inspection) After more one-sided mailing to a non-responsive seller, they finally wrote to me asking me to call them. I’d already left them my phone number in case they could not communicate by email, but they clearly could. With them sending the wrong item, it was unreasonable for them to demand that I should bear the expense of an oversees call, much less wait for them to get up in the morning. These are some of the wonders of email: asynchronous and (virtually) free.

Don’t get me wrong, the people handled the shipment in due time and all the “free, bundled” stuff was there. I’m sure it was a glitch in the shipment, but they should take responsability and handle the replacement for the correct lens. After more than a month, I have now given up on them and desided to write this. I’ve bought a 2x extender from another seller on eBay, and the transaction went smooth, just like all my other buys there. I would not discourage people from buying stuff there, but beware. I have now stopped looking at items sold in US dollars and will only buy from within the European community and Scandinavia.