"First floor"

I've always been pretty sure that, like in Denmark, "the first floor" in some English-speaking areas means the floor *above* the ground floor.
Wikipedia shoots me down, it says it's the ground floor.
But the dictionary justifies the wonderful confusion:

first floor
noun
1.
the ground floor of a building.
2.
the floor above the ground floor of a building.

Does somebody have any experience or rules as to where or when to use which?

Update:
Ken pointed to a wiki entry:
Floor numbering is the numbering scheme used for a building's floors. There are two major schemes in use across the world. In one system, used in the majority of Europe, the ground floor is the floor on the ground and often has no number or is assigned the number zero. Therefore the next floor up is assigned the number 1 and is the first floor. The other system, used primarily in the United States, counts the bottom floor as number 1 or first floor. The next floor up then becomes the second floor and so on.

Small wonder we get confused. Since there are no numbers in this apartment building, I think I'll continue to give directions with "one floor up", instead of "first floor".

New Nikon compact big-sensor camera (updated twice)

Nikon, as one of the last, has finally stepped into the bustling arena of battling compact cameras with big sensors, with Coolpix A. It has a large APS-C sensor, but no image-stabilization.

I would say the two most prominent features are:
1) A fixed, non-zoom lens, at 28mm equivalent, and F:2.8 (not so fast these days).
2) It's surprisingly compact, much smaller than the nearest competitors, I'd almost call it a true compact camera despite the large APS-C sensor. Lo:

So if you like all that, this may be just the thing for you.
For me, personally though, I think they made the same mistake as Leica did: go with too big a sensor, necessitating big compromises on the lens.

With the amazing sensors these days, the differences between an APS-C sensor and the next two sizes down are really not big (except maybe in dark conditions, and then much less than it used to be). And if you go to a slightly smaller sensor, you can do what Fuji and Sony have done (with the X10 and the RX100): make a very compact camera with high quality results, and still have a flexible and fast zoom lens, freeing up the usefulness of the camera enormously.

Size comparison from camerasize.com:

They are indeed almost the same size. The Nikon has a notch bigger sensor, but from the comparison shots on the article on top link, it doesn't seem to make a huge difference. The Olympus has in-body stabilization and exchangeable lenses.

Update:
It should be said, like Bru points out, that with most lenses, an exchangeable-lens camera become larger than a fixed-lens camera with a foldable lens.
Though in my view, as I've said, this needs to be a reasonable zoom (28-120mm) to be really useful. And for this to be compact, even folded, the sensor currently needs to be smaller than the one in either of these cameras.

A Few Notes on the Culture

Iain Banks wrote this cool article about some basic aspects on his semi-galactic civilization, The Culture. Like Banks himself, I'd love to live there. Like he said, the idea was to make a Utopia which was about as good as he could imagine it within realistic standards for a human society. And he also said it was the driving engine for the whole series of books, which I find really interesting and cool. Most writers, moi included, sadly find it much easier to be driven by darker ideas.
Of course this is countered by the fact that to get narrative tension, most of the stories take place on the edges, where the peaceful culture meet less placid alien cultures.

I would love if the Culture would be added to Kindle Worlds, where fan fiction authors can get their stories selected, and monies earned are split between the author and the owner of the original world. It's a great idea. (Though so far, sadly, limited to US citizens. Payments and taxes issues, for sure.)

Of course in the case of the Culture, this might be a bit redundant. It has no recurring characters, and the stories tend to take place widely spaced out in time and space, and within the Culture and the book series, it has such fantastic variety of... well, anything, that one might as well make it all up oneself, simply inspired by Banks.

“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”: The new warrior cop is out of control

“Why did you shoot me? I was reading a book”: The new warrior cop is out of control, article.
Sal Culosi is dead because he bet on a football game — but it wasn’t a bookie or a loan shark who killed him. His local government killed him, ostensibly to protect him from his gambling habit. [...] Another example is the use of these tactics on people suspected of downloading child pornography.

Because people suspected of such crimes are generally considered among the lowest of the low, there’s generally little objection to using maximum force to apprehend them. But when police use force to demonstrate disgust for the crimes the target is suspected of committing, there’s always a risk of letting disgust trump good judgment. In one recent case in West Virginia, police violently stormed a house after a Walmart employee reported seeing an image of a man’s genitals near a child’s cheek in a set of photos a customer had left at the store to be developed. After terrorizing the customer’s family (he was out of town), the police learned that the cheek in the photo wasn’t a child’s but that of a thirty-five-year-old Filipino woman.

---
By the way, an odd thing: I am stopped from posting a link to this article on Twitter. Even when using URL-shortening, it does't work. I wonder if this is some kind of censorship-like filtering? 

Candace: extra-ordinary (Phineas and Ferb)

 "I want to be extr'ordinary, not just extra ordinary..."

 I love how HD has given cartoonists a bigger canvas.
And they have some good artists sometimes. The drawings below are all shots from a short sequence of one episode (Big Balls of Water) of Phineas And Ferb. Notice the difference in style between the first two pictures, for example, or in the third one that the foreground is darkened, giving much more depth to the picture.
And they are just good drawings, I am particularly fond of the first one. See, to the corporate masters it's "just a kids' show", nobody is going to fire them if they phone in the backgrounds. But they have too much fun making good stuff.

(all clickable)

Neil Gaiman eulogizes Iain Banks

I'm pleased that Neil Gaiman was a fan of Iain Banks, as evidenced by this Eulogy.

And then I wrote to Iain.  [...]
I think you're a brilliant and an honest writer, and much more importantly, because I've known lots of brilliant writers who were absolute arses, I think you're a really good bloke, and I've loved knowing you.
[...] 
If you've never read any of his books, read one of his books. Then read another. Even the bad ones were good, and the good ones were astonishing.

For me, to be frank, there are several of his most mainstream books which I don't think I'll ever get through. But his more quirky stuff and especially his space opera, was in a class of itself. For example, the term "space opera" doesn't cover his SF by a long shot. Surface Detail took place partly in artificial, computer-generated virtual realities, which got as weird as anything I've read. One of them was a highly controversial Hell Reality, which was just like a very imaginative mind could imagine Hell to be. Many wanted it deleted, but the conservative/religious forces on the planets involved kept it going. For moral and social purposes, you understand, not because of basic sadism... Two of the main character voluntarily goes in there to report of the horrors. But as you may imagine, that world is not exactly designed to be easy to get out of...

There are enough great ideas in Surface Detail alone that many authors would have gotten 8-10 books out of it. But Banks' problem didn't seem to be getting enough ideas, more how to get them down fast enough. 

Sensor size graphic

For future reference if nothing else.

This graphic is larger than life. (Micro Four Thirds is 13.5x18mm, and Full Frame is like the old negative size 24x36mm.)
Which shows how much sharper sensors can be made than film normally was. (Many phone cameras have even smaller sensors than the smallest here.) The smallest successful film format was the Instamatic 110 casettes (the small, flat cameras). The negative was 13x17 mm, which made for very poor image quality if you tried to go above the 4x5-inch standard prints. Attempts at even smaller formats (Kodak Disc!) were too horrible even for casual snapshooters, and failed. And yet the "1/2.3" size (I swear they use these terms just to hide facts) is only 5x6mm and can give great results! (If the light and lens is good.)

Here's a 2013 article about what sensor size matter. 

How to Photograph Fireworks Displays

How to Photograph Fireworks Displays, article. 

Keys points:

• Tripod. 
• Wide lens mostly.  
• Lowest ISO setting. 
• Small aperture (11 or 16). 
• Manual mode and manual focus. 
• Long exposures, perhaps bulb. But not too long, they are easier to over-expose than you think. 

Photo by Vlad

A triumph: Olympus E-PL5 at high ISO (updated)

A small giant

I yesterday watched a short review (which I can't find now) of the new Olympus E-P5, Micro-Four-Thirds camera.
The lady, sitting behind the desk, said words to this effect: "image quality is good until ISO 800, from 1600 and up it begins to get a bit blurry". (ISO of course being the setting of light sensitivity of the sensor. The higher you push it, the more quality suffers because of the signal boosting.)

This didn't fit with my feeling about it. Okay, my old Panasonic GF1 did not do at all well over 800 ISO (basically unusable at 1600), but things have improved immensely recently, so I tested it today. Well, I tested the E-PL5, which has the same sensor and is a bit older and cheaper than the E-P5, so if anything it should be not quite as good.

The result surprised me. I don't know what that lady had been looking at (or smoking), but my test images were sharp and baby-bum smooth up til at least 6400 ISO! Astounding for a M4/3 camera.

Not only that, 12,000 ISO is pretty good too! And even 25,000 ISO wouldn't be unusable in some situations, though barely.
[Note, earlier I had written "1200" and "2500". I'm not used to using 5-digit numbers about ISO sensitivity! We're not in Kansas anymore.] [Note two: normally people use "12,800" and "25,600", but this is misleadingly precise numbers in such an area.)

Why is this so exciting? Well, young people are getting used to developments like this in electronic, but those of us who photographed before the millennium, the only one way to get just one stop higher sensitivity (a doubling of ISO) was to either accept a dreadful degrading of quality over 400 ISO, or to get a faster lens. And a faster lens, say two stops faster, was, and is, much bigger, much heavier, and much more expensive (so much so that they were and are out of the reach of most amateurs). And then you got to deal with the much shorter depth of field (depth of sharpness), this is not the case with sensor improvements. So you may see the improvements in recent years as getting a 1.5-kilogram, $2.000 lens for free, plus getting the faster film without the quality hit. Heady stuff.

I even tend to forget, except when trying to photograph with a phone camera, but the ability to freely photograph hand-held indoors or after sunset and get top-notch quality is new, and very liberating indeed.

You can download full from-camera files of those three settings from here. (Click on the three dots in lower right when looking at one of them. (Three dots is new-speak for "Menu".).)

At 6400 ISO:

Same one, about 100%, detail:

... Perfect 6400 ISO on one of the smallest exchangeable-lens cameras in the world! Dang. People who think M4/3 is still not up to pro use haven't looked at recent results.

In fact, personally I think that M4/3 is the future format for enthusiast and professionals. You can make the cameras so small that they are almost too small for some photographers. And the format is big enough, especially with future development, that you can accomplish any technical quality anybody would want, including shallow depth of field for portraits and such.
I think bigger formats will become reserved for special purposes. And smaller formats will be reserved for pocket cameras and phone cameras.
So it seems Olympus was right when they chose that sensor size originally. Although it took over a decade for the quality of it to become truly pro. Just a few years ago they had serious limitations in dynamic range and in low-light capability, and focus speed. In the past 3-4 years they have blasted through those barriers with a vengeance.

This is no idle prediction, because if I'm right, it means that Fuji, Leica, Sony, and the others which have bet on the bigger APS-C format for their mirror-less cameras, have bet on the wrong horse. Already now, and especially in just a couple of years, the format is simply unnecessarily big, and they'll be stuck with big and clumsy cameras and especially lenses all the while the party is on all night in the M4/3 camp.

A note: the E-PL5 (and a couple similar cameras) is a dream camera for street photographers. After waiting impatiently all through the "noughties", we finally got our digital street camera: compact, rapid response and focusing, and image quality good enough for gallery pictures. And this specific one has a tiltable screen, which I feel is very useful for a more flexible viewpoint and for not spooking the natives.
(If you want a pocketable camera with zoom and outstanding image quality, look at Sony RX100, which has just been announced in a M2 version with tiltable screen.)

Too-short zoom. Leica X Vario

Leica has come out with a brand new model, the X Vario, which is "economical" compared to most Leica cameras at US$ 2,850.
It's an APSC sensor, meaning pretty big, and it has a fixed zoom lens. Which means this zoom has to be either real damn big and expensive, or it has to be slow and limited in range. Leica chose the latter. It is 3.5 to 6.3.

Worse, in my opinion, is the zoom range: equivalent of 28mm to 70mm. I have had a few cameras and zooms with this range, and I consider it rather useless. 70mm is not even telephoto, it is just long-normal.
In contrast, I've also had, and still use, cameras with a 28mm-120mm range, and I consider these highly useful, going from taking in a landscape or a room, over normal, to covering all normal portrait ranges, to short telephoto.

For me it's a deal breaker. I almost think you may as well make it a prime lens then. This would make it faster, and more compact. And you could crop with limited quality loss. In any case, it doesn't appeal to me. Every time I use a camera with only a 2.5X zoom range, I think 'what is this good for'?

Okay, it should be said, the image quality of the X Vario is outstanding by all reports. That's good. If it wasn't, what would be the raîson d'etre of it? I'd rather get, for example, one of the new Fuji X-mount cameras, which also have great quality. And exchangeable lenses for much great flexibility.

I think that if Leica had stepped one more step down in sensor size, to Micro-Four-Thirds size, they may have had a much more interesting camera. It could be almost the same image quality, be rather more compact, and have a greater zoom range.

'bye Irv

Irv Thomas passed on peacefully recently, in his eighties. He was a friend and example to many, and one of the most active and famous hitch-hikers in the world.

Recent interview.
Irv's home page.

(Photo by me, when he visited me a couple of years ago.)

A heavy girl

[Thanks to Bert] 

Aaralyn and Izzy. The singer is six. It's original growl thrash heavy music by her and her brother, nine. I think she is better, and scarier, than most adult male growlers I've heard.





(Notice the look she gives her brother at 1:20 when whazface says he can't wait to hear their "sweet music".)