wheels (and metals and tyres)

Recently a mate of mine showed me a picture he'd taken of one of his wheels on his car which had failed (broken) hitting a pothole.

This sort of highlights to me why for ordinary cars (not race cars on tracks) we benefit from lower priced but less "glamorous" steel wheels and tyres of more ordinary profile.

There is a common belief that mags are somehow stronger than steels, with some web pages (written by people who probably don't have any qualifications other than in "cut and paste" research) outlining why mags are tougher. This is only true in a narrow view of the world: the racing world. Certainly the wheel shops are happy to propagate this view.

In racing mags are chosen because for the same mass they can be made to have stronger torsional rigidity, and for less weight they can be strong enough for cornering and breaking.This helps when you are trying to get the best handling (and 100ths of a second matter) by reducing the unsprung mass of the wheels (allowing suspension to work better).

Lighter maybe, but they shatter on impacts.

Normally most racetracks don't have potholes. Potholes are unfortunately common on the roads outside of the highways and high traffic areas, especially with all the rain we've been having this last couple of years.

Further low profile tyres may have less squirm in corners than regular profile tyres, but guess what? That extra baloon effect on regular tyres provides more give than low profile tyres, so saves your butt (and your wheel) when you hit a big pothole. Not only is the regular tyre is more likely to absorb impacts and not ruin your wheel (and your day) but will be far more informative as to low pressure. Running your tyres on too low a pressure will cause blowouts and make this sort of wheel shattering more likely. Because of the nature of low profiles you're not as likely to notice a tyre with lower pressure than normal because it can't 'sag' as much to show you.

Catastrophic failure of a mag wheel in a pothole in a corner (or even just the rough shoulder of the road) could cause you to loose control of your vehicle and end up.

My mate was lucky.

Australian Bees

Blue banded bees Amegilla cingulata is one of the Australian native bees.

very cute, and perhaps often called "bumblebees" when they aren't

We often get a few of these little fellas hanging around the back yard. Unsurprisingly they have a brightly banded blue abdomen. My wife (who likes bees) reckons that despite the number of good images on the WEB for these little fellas there isn't much really showing off their colour.

They have really shinny eyes ...

There is a more dedicated website here for the interested. But like they say:

Unlike honey bees, blue-banded bees are capable of hovering, which one would assume makes them easier to photograph. This couldn’t be further from the truth, and taking a clear photograph of a blue banded bee in flight is reason for celebration.

 took a bit of time to get even these shots with my FD300mm on my Panasonic GH1

:-)

Nokia E72 cam VS digicam

I've been using this phone for a little while now and have been impressed with its capability. People often say (when discussing phone cams that "you can't compare it to a DSLR". I'd say this is about as obvious a statement as you can get and I'm in complete agreement with that.What I do think you can compare it to is a compact digicam.

Background:

Since we often take the phone with us on outings, do we need to bring along the camera? Certainly for SMS and Email almost anything is enough (like 1600x1200 pixels will be more than enough), but with the though in mind of a print one needs more pixels. Even a 5x7 inch print needs a good 2100 pixels width to print neatly. Its been my experience for a long time that a good 5Megapixels was a good basis for a print up to 8 x 10 inch and most of my digital cameras have been a good 5MP for a while (like since I started using a Nikon Coolpix 5000 in mid 2003). Even my Canon10D (which is 6MP isn't really much more pixels than 5MP) didn't really outdo my CP5000 in good conditions.

So with that in mind I thought I'd compare it to my (wifes) Panasonic DMC-F3 (details here) ... a compact zoom digicam which we paid about $130 for. Its not a startling camera, but has been quite a handy little thing to augment our other cameras (and our much loved Canon A520 bit the dust).

Now the Pana is natively a 12MP camera (4000x3000 pixels) but to be honest it sort of sucks at 12 so we often leave it on 8MP (which allows the camera to scale it down to 3264 x 2448 cleaning it up a bit too) . Even there its not really as good as my Nikon 5000 is, but hey

• it cost less
• fits in a pocket easily
• was cheap

So no gripes there. The Nokia E72 has a 5MP camera built in (which for the record produces 2592 x 1944).

The Nokia has no zoom (well, only digital zoom which simply crops from the capture and upscales), while the Panasonic has a x4 optical zoom. Clearly it will have the advantage when zooming in! Since that was a foregone conclusion I thought I'd compare these two cameras at their widest setting.

I took the shots in the back yard standing at the same position and holding the both the phone and the camera in my hand as steady as I can (and I reckon that I'm pretty good at that compared to many). I kept that tree with the 'air fern' on it in mid picture.

Test Results

I thought I'd start with some overview shots, first the Nokia E72

Then the Panasonic F3

I guess that the first thing you can observe is that the Panasonic (with its advertised 28mm wide) lens is a bit wider than the phone is. Probably about 28mm vs 35mm effective focal lengths (that'd be compared "full frame" cameras of course).

Well something which is important to notice here is that the difference in pixels of 8MP vs 5MP is illustrated to the left here. It quite neatly corresponds to the difference in 'angle of view' that happens to be recorded by the Nokia with its 5MP image (blue line) and the Panasonic with its 8MP (green line).

This is useful as it essentially equalizes the comparison of the cameras a little bit. Sure the Panasonic will capture a wider area, but when viewing at 100% you will see scene features occuping nearly the same number of pixels. This is helpful to determine how well the rest of the imaging systems cope with their tasks. Lets get back to that in a minute...

The next thing you'll spot is that the colour balance on the Nokia was pretty darn good. Better than the Panasonic by a heap if you ask me. This is something I've come to expect (from both cameras actually ... the Nokia is always sweet and the Panasonic always blue) as even my Panasonic GH1 and G1 cameras were a little 'off' in their choice of colour balance.

Zooming into the images at 100% (which this isn't, its further reduced by Blogger, so you'll need to click the image if you want to see that) one can see that the Panasonic has about the same sort of pixel to feature ratio as the Nokia (as mentioned above).

but bugger me its neither sharp or has as much detail as the Nokia does. The colour is washed out so the the flowers have no detail either.

Next looking at the top left hand corner have a careful look in the left side image and you can see the neighbors brick wall through the foilage ... and see the bricks!

Moving over to the top right hand corner the Nokia again shows its better clarity and colour rendition.

Frankly apart from the fact that the Panasonic gives you a wider view and has a zoom to allow better telephoto the Nokia does quite well (and no my lens isn't filthy either!)

Being careful in examining this in terms of colour I'd call the Nokia image a bit blue and 'vibrant', with the Panasonic perhaps a bit more natural (particularly with respect to blue, the bin is perhaps a bit blue as is the fence).

But bloody hell its good for a phone cam. For example the Nokia has an outstanding macro. For example this shot below was taken with the Nokia of some paper dasies going to seed.

Impressive if you ask me

Conclusion

If this was the only camera you had with you it would be equal in many ways to top digital Pro-sumer cameras of just a few years ago. In some ways it even manages to hold its own against smaller compacts, so apart from missing telephoto images its makes a good run of competing with a compact digicam.

So would I take the phone in preference to a dedicated camera? Well certainly not my GH1 and probably not even the Panasonic F3, simply because of the flexibility of the zoom. But compared with other digital cameras I've seen in the $200 range yes I would take it in preference.

Heck, even though it lacks all the integrated apps, its a better camera than the iPhone 4 (sorry Charles)

None the less, I'm not at that point where I could use this to replace my Panasonic GH1 in my photography. I need better lens versatility for one thing (and access to RAW for another).

I'd feel a bit like this magpie if I didn't have my 'real camera'

when I wanted to or needed to get a shot like that.

Sweet little things

Ya know as a Mini Moke owner and long time lover of the Mini its just impossible not to share this.

Pulled into the 'servo' this afternoon as I was filling up my Pajero and sounded as good as it looked.

If you've never seen one in the flesh then you probably can't really appreciate just how tiny they are.

I'll have to watch the 'Italian Job' tonight (and I mean the Michael Cane one from the 60's)