I’ve mostly finished setting up the NextGen Gallery by Alex Rabe, which is a pretty good album plugin for Word Press, and will let me publish photos easily on here.

I bought a Sony A200 D-SLR last week because it was on sale at about half the recommend retail price. It came with an 18-55mm and a 75-300mm lens, which made it a pretty good steal. After taking a large number of pictures of the inside of my house and then erasing them, I needed to go and find some real subjects.

So, what do you do when you have a new camera and want to give it a field-test? Well, I headed on up to Cleland Wildlife Park, which is up by Mt. Lofty. This was also a way to keep cool, as the temperature up at that height (500m or so) is typically about 5°C less than down on the flats, and Sunday was looking to be another warm day.

I had a pleasant walk, and had gotten there early enough to beat the crowds, who started arriving about lunchtime. This meant that I pretty much got the animals all to myself, and was able to get some great shots without having to spend a lot of time setting up.

This visit was mostly a brisk walkaround, just to see what was there and what I could get out of the camera. I plan to return again in the future (especially now that I have an annual pass – works out cheaper than three visits), and focus on certain animals there.

Anyway – the links for the new album/gallery:

• Photo Albums
• Cleland 2008-10-19 Gallery

I was pretty pleased with the results – although I’ve only posted about a third of the photographs I took. Some shots I would like to have another go at when I’m more used to the camera – for one thing, I need to relearn about setting apertures, ISO and shutter speeds, and all the rest. It’s been too long since I’ve had an SLR, and I relied mostly on auto for this shoot.

Even after I’d culled a number of shots from the original set I’d taken (I found that the auto-focus has an annoying habit of picking on the wrong object at times – like a blade of grass!), I had 1.2 GB of RAW photo data (I’m glad I bought the 4 GB card now – if only 2 hours of shooting would gain that many images). This caused a problem for me – I didn’t want to work on the images until I’d made sure that I’d saved the images onto read-only media (to prevent losing them from changes), but had no blank DVDs. In fact, until this evening I’ve never burnt a DVD before in my life (lots of CDs with albums on my shelves though).

So, I had to get DVDs and then find some software – I got this from SourceForge, which is typically my first stop for finding tools and applications. I downloaded the latest version of a tool called cdrtfe which is a flexible little program and can work with most CD and DVD formats – it is pretty well-ranked at SourceForge, which is a good indicator of a polished product. The only thing I had difficulty with was setting up the correct format for writing the files to DVD – but it didn’t let me start burning until I’d made the right choices, and it pointed me in the right direction for these.

I also had to get another application to view the RAW image files, as IrfanView, which has been my mainstay for the past few years, doesn’t support the Sony .arw format. Thankfully, the IrfanView support forum acknowledges this, and points you to FastStone, which is also free. I also find it to be a much better image browser/viewer, although I will still use IrfanView as a “quick editor”.

If you’re wondering – when I converted the RAW images to JPEG, I reduced the total filesize from 1.2 GB to only 24.5 MB! Although, I did resize the images considerably as well.

I’ve been buying Stargate:SG1 on DVD for the past few weeks, and I’ve noticed an odd thing with each of the season-long boxsets I’ve been buying.

All of them have English as a language option (very useful, since I’m in Australia and I’m buying the DVD here).

But the really odd thing is how other languages are supported.

Since Australia is in Region 4, along with South and Central America, I would expect the DVDs purchased here also support Spanish and Portuguese. Unfortunately for Brazil (estimated 187,393,918 Portuguese speakers), their language is not included on any of the discs in the sets I’ve so far purchased.

That isn’t the really odd thing though. The languages that are supported include French, Italian and German. There aren’t many native German and Italian speakers outside of Europe.

It goes a bit further than this, too. The sets I have consist of 5 or 6 discs – practically each of the discs in each set has a different combination of language options. Which means that, unless you want to watch the season in English, you will not be able to watch the whole thing in your chosen language.

Obviously, I’m alright because I’m a native English speaker. But I’m pretty sure that the production company behind Stargate (MGM Studios) are missing out on an audience because of this odd choice of language support.