Peterbe.com

Clearly from watching these stats about cameras used on Flickr Canon and Sony Ericsson rule. Canon is totally dominating the usage of Point & Shoot cameras which doesn't surprise me. Even if I'm a Nikon user I still recommend the Canons for Point & Shoot if people ask me.

By far, the most popular SLR is the Canon EOS Rebel XT as you can see. It doesn't surprise me that much. It is a great camera. I had sort of hoped that my camera, the Nikon D70, would be more popular but perhaps it doesn't really matter.

Another interesting observation is how cool pictures people take with the Sony Ericsson cameras. It's amazing what can be done if you're a bit artistic. Most of those pictures are much better than mine taken with my much more expensive D70. Pictures taken with the Sony Ericsson 750i and the Sony Ericsson K800i

Yesterday it was Madonna's birthday. To celebrate her 48th birthday she put on a concert somewhere in London and after the concert throw a little party at the Lounge Lover. The Lounge Lover is a uptown cocktail bar tucked away on a little side street off club row where I live.

It was a lot of commotion. Staff of the bar swept the floor outside and put up barricades. Some paparazzis came already at half eight but the first celebrity didn't arrive until half nine. That was Gwyneth Paltrow

More and more celebrities came. One of the early arrivers was Kevin Spacy but he came in and walked past us so fast that I never had a chance to take a picture of him.

There were a lot of people that the paparazzis seemed to recognize that I didn't. In those cases I just took some wild pictures in hope that someone can explain who that was later. (for example, Lawrence Dalaglio who my flatmate had to explain to me who he was. Sorry Lawrence, I don't watch much television)

Last night was without a doubt an experience. I haven't seen that many nice Mercedes lined up since I was in Monaco a couple of years ago. Pet Shop Boys was the only people arriving in a limo and Jason Statham arrived in a regular black cab.

Now, let us see the pictures

Only very rarely do you get to see photos of the northern light phenomena but here on this site you get loads (all from the same location though). On the site they don't call it northern light but The Geomagnetic Storm Resulting From the CME (Coronal Mass Ejection) produced by an X1-flare near sunspot 696.

Whatever they call it, in lack of being fortunate to see one with my own eyes, these photos will have to suffice.

I've now finally uploaded all my photos from the trip to China.

From 1,000 huge jpegs (at 1.6Gb) down to 300 resized ones (at 43Mb) it took quite a long time to rotate, chose, colour modify and title. To do it I had to use digikam which is the best photo album organiser program available on Linux. Even though it's the best I've found so far it still sucks. It's frustrating when you have lots to do but it's free and works better than nothing and I haven't donated any money to it.

As you might have noticed I have had to reduce the image quality quite a bit especially of the thumbnails. Sorry about this but I see thumbnails as navigation, not the real content. If you want higher resolution images I might be able to get you the original JPG if you ask kindly for it.

This amazing hacker builds a camera (with its own custom built shutter) setup to photograph flying insects in his garden. I notice that he's got a Nikon camera with a 200mm lens and double flashlights.

To be honest I didn't read all of the text but by taking a step back and being just impressed with his willpower you get more impressed with his effort rather than the photos he produces. Yes, the sample photos are truely amazing.

I wonder if this has ever been done before? Taking pictures of sitting insects is one thing, but insects in flight I for one have never seen before.

Keep up the good work Frans!

Someone added a test issue on the Demo issuetracker with an amazing file attachment.

I have no idea where it comes from and the person who uploaded it might have left an email address that doesn't work. I've tried emailing this person in hope of more info.

Imagine that some rich person has this as interior design in their house. (the person must be rich if he/she can afford a piece of art to consume so much space in the house)