I think I found the best camera settings for concerts and sports.
1) Landscape mode
2) Adjust the light settings, if you are indoors, check fluorescent or incandescent
3) Set the ISO to high
4) Turn off the flash
These are the settings I used to capture this shot of wrestler Candice LaRae performing a moonsault.
I also used these settings for this concert photography set here:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/drtran/sets/72157603985517716/
In the future, I'd love to see Nokia manage a higher ISO mode, like 800 or higher. This will lead to less blur in action shots. Another suggestion would be for a faster burst mode. Right now, the S60 imaging software takes a picture every 5 seconds or so in burst mode. I'd like something faster, like to be able to shoot 4 pictures per second like Sony Ericsson's Best Pic feature. And one more thing I'd like to see in future camera phones: RAW mode.
Woohoo, I am confirmed for BarCampLA-5!
BarCampLA-5 will take place March 1 and 2 at the AOL Campus in Beverly Hills. Click the banner for more info.
I'm looking forward to shooting video on QIK and taking plenty of pictures. Hopefully the AOL campus wifi is awesome enough for me to do everything live and instantly.
On Wednesday, my Gallery stopped reading my memory card. I tried rebooting, nothing. Took new pictures, didn't show up. The Music Player also had problems with podcasts.
Doing a bit of searching and found someone suggested that formatting the memory card would fix it. That would be fine, but I also noticed that my RAM would constantly fall under 10MB free.
I decided the only thing to do was to declare phone bankruptcy. Getting the phone back to factory settings was the best option for me at this point.
I went into the application manager and made a list of all the software I had at the time
I backed up all my essential media; my pictures, my music, my videos, etc. Next I reloaded the firmware without a backup. Then I formatted the memory card.
It took me a few hours to get all my ringtones, apps, themes and media back on my N95. But its worth it now. Its very stable. I also freed up 1.5 gigs of space on my memory card. I wonder where all that bad data came from.
List of apps now on my N95:
large time screensaver
handy taskman v1.6
garmin mobile
stowaway keyboard support
best profiles
y-tasks
devicescape
share online update
conversation
internet radio
n-starter
energy profile
google maps
location tagger
calcium
gold theme
channels
y-browser
salling clickr
mobile weather
emtube
SIC! ftp client
best timer
frozen bubble
sensible sudoku
qik
calsync s60
shazam ID
audio books
light sabre
emtube
JAVA
micro sky
tetris
gmail
ext GPS
cellfire
geocache navigator
That's the list. I cut the things I thought were memory hogs or no longer useful.
I spent the evening of February 20th, 2008 at mecca of astronomy, the Griffith Observatory.
It was a pretty chilly evening. There were quite a few clouds in the sky. They added a lot of drama, people cheered whenever the moon peeked out from the clouds.
The Los Angeles Astronomical Society and the Los Angeles Sidewalk Astronomers showed up and shared their telescopes. Kudos to them for not only sharing their telescopes, but their knowledge of the skies as well.
I shot some video for QIK where some staffers demonstrated an eclipse mostly for the many children who were in attendance.
Around 7:25 in the evening, we were informed an an extra special treat. A satellite focused its light to form an iridium flare for us.
Later on, I shot some video of Dr. E.C. Krupp, the director of the observatory, dressed up as a wizard to chase away the dragon who was eating the moon.
Check out my gallery of the events here:
Lunar Eclipse at the Griffith Observatory 2/20/2008
A lot of N-Series fans complain about the plastic materials of their handsets.
Chinese manufacturers continually pump out new plastic face plates in non-oem colors.
How come they dont make metal non-oem face plates?
Just a thought...
Themes were added to solve this problem. Using a theme, you could set an image to fill the entire background. A problem is that images set for a vertical screen do not look good when in landscape format. Users would have to hunt down landscape themes or vertical ones depending on their handset. Users with screens that can rotate, like the N93 or N95, had a hard time finding themes. Except for professionally made themes like this one from the movie Cloverfield, screen rotation is a disaster.
I have found that transparent images make for the best wallpaper. They can rotate both ways and look like they are integrated with the theme. I followed the guide I found at absolute cross to make transparent png files.
Now, I can use really great themes and use transparent wallpapers to add to them. Best Profiles from SmartPhoneWare takes advantage of this line of thinking. Whenever I change my profile, my theme and wallpaper change with it.
I changed my Vox member name. I figure its better for people who might read this blog to know my name instead of an internet nickname.
New haircut
I signed up yesterday for Twango, Nokia's online image sharing site that is part of Ovi. Its pretty neat, since it now supports unlimited uploads.
A few weeks ago, I signed up for the N-Gage Arena. I'm testing out the beta. The games are great.
If I lived in the U.K., I'm sure I'd be signed up for the Nokia Music Store. Whenever a song pops into my head, I'd go to the online store and buy it.
There's a big problem with all these services. You need a separate ID for each service. There should be a single OVI ID I can use to sign into whatever service is available.
This is a pretty big fail for Nokia's part to have these services get this far developed and not have them tied together other than being hosted on Nokia servers.
Nokia would be smart not only to tie together their Ovi services under one ID, but also bill them together as well. Have a Music Store / Navigation / N-Gage Arena / Twango / etc. account all under the same roof for one combined price.
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