Expodisc revisited

I bought an Expodisc in April 2008 and used it when shooting the Victorian Barista Championships. The event was held down at venue that had the worse lighting conditions imaginable. There were fluoros, low voltage downlights, sunlight coming through tinted windows and colored lights that lit the stage. Having shot at this venue previously I knew that having the correct white balance would save heaps of time in post processing. However, after this event I’ve barely used the Expodisc again. But, seeing how tricky the light was at AAMI park last week I’m going to shoot some reference images with the Expodisc tomorrow. Will post the results soon.

A-League Round 3

This was an afternoon match, starting at 3pm. The weather was beautiful with bright sunshine. However, this posed a real conundrum for shooting position. The sun was lighting half the stadium when the match started. If you positioned yourself in the shade then then shooting players in the sunshine meant either the image is going to be a silhouette or the background was going to be totally blown. If you positioned yourself in the sun then if the player was in the shade then you’re going to be shooting into the sun with the light flaring into the lens. Anyway, here are the images.

NBN – time to reset the vision

I have been on the Internet since 1995, selling Apple Newton software via email and web sites. I co-founded Australia’s largest free ISP in 2000 and I’ve built 3 other online-Internet companies. I can claim to know a bit about online businesses.

In the April 2000 Internet, telco and tech meltdown, one of the catalyst was the vendor-finance fuelled build out of bandwidth capacity. Build the pipes and they will come was the mantra that companies like PSINet, Lucent Technologies and other hardware manufacturers and their investors spent billions funding. What happened? No bandwidth consuming apps arrived and no companies had any business case to pay for using the massive fibre-optic pipes.

Does this sound all too familiar? For my part, it certainly does. The NBN with the claimed 1 Gbit per second download speeds will transform Austraia. What utter rubbish. What a great albatross around Australian’s necks it will be. The vision for NBN should be ensuring a price-capped ADSL2 or equivalent access to 99.99% of Australians. Here’s why:

1. The dominant consumer Internet applications are all narrowband and “always on” – anyone with 56K dial-up can use them successfully. Facebook, Twitter, Google, MSN Chat, Skype. And, the dominant narrow band applicatio used by Australians is SMS – 160 characters. You cant get more narrowband than that. What the techno-geeks don’t get is that it’s the continuous access to the Internet – the notion of always online – that is what is driving the new types of applications. Always on does not need to be 100 Mbit, it just need to be a quality stable connection that doesn’t drop out. That’s why ADSL and Mobile Broadband technologies is better than dial-up, but its not the speed that makes it useful for most users. Of course, the gamers, downloaders and Youtube junkies will want faster and faster speeds with lower and lower latency, but for the average user, download speed is not relevant.

2. Bandwidth is not a hindrance to businesses developing businesses on the Internet. Skill and knowledge is the barrier. I’m not aware of any Australia online business whose business case and economics will improve with a four-fold increase in download speed. Online business will have their web site hosted at datacentres and not at their own premises so how will the NBN assist businesses getting online at all? If a business is not already online, the NBN is not going to get it online.

3. Achieving 1GB/s download speed is a mindless target. Who cares? What content is there to download at that speed from an Australian site? I can think of some content that’s offshore but International bandwidth is already constrained. Even 100 Mbit/s is a hollow target – isn’t the point to have access for all Australians? The government can connect the last parts of Australia that is not economically viable for commercial companies to connect and be done with it.

4. Trans-pacific bandwidth is more important than domestic bandwidth speed. Can someone please release the current capacity out of Australia so we can see whether as one writer said NBN is just “building a giant fat pipe to try and suck a pea through a straw”.
http://seanonit.com/2010/08/10/national-broadband-policy/

So let’s get some sense into the NBN – let’s set the target and vision for NBN to be building a continuous always on, price-capped, ADSL2 speed Internet access for 99.99% of Australians. Did you know $40B will pay for 10 Million Australian households with broadband access for 8 years? I’m sure there’s better ways to spend Australian taxpayer’s money to get us into the Information Economy, Knowledge Nation, or whatever you want to call it than digging up the road and laying fibre optic cable.

This article is also here:
http://www.itwire.com/it-policy-news/government-tech-policy/41173-nbn-time-to-reset-the-vision

Related posts:
Why we urgently need critical thinking on the NBN
Why the NBN will fail

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About Sydney Low

Sydney Low is a serial entrepreneur. He has built several companies around software, Internet access and mobile phones. Previously, he provided advice to Australian and US companies on the strategic use of technologies as a partner at Mitchell Madison Group and McKinsey & Company. He is currently the CEO of RedTxt.com.au – a company that is pioneering the development of sponsor-funded SMS for communities.

U15/16A Ashburton – Round 15

A beautiful morning for soccer. Here are the photos.

Another season of A-League starts

Thursday night was the opening match of the 2010-11 A-League. Here are some images of the new 11th team, Melbourne Heart playing the Central Coast Mariners. In the last minute of injury time the Heart goalkeeper decided to try to score from a corner kick set play. Pretty cool if he had done so. Full set of images here.

AEK Athens v Glasgow Rangers @ Sydney Football Stadium

I had a meeting in Sydney with the promoter of the Sydney Festival of Football so I took the opportunity to shoot the AEK Athens v Glasgow Rangers match at the Sydney Football Stadium. Have a look at the images here.

Gitzo GM3860C Monopod

I’ve been using the Gitzo GM5540 monopod for a couple of years and it’s a beast. It’s the beefiest monopod Gitzo make and while its carbon fibre it may a well be steel. I’ve got a couple of trips coming up where I need to take a monopod and I’ve been looking at something lighter for quite awhile. When the GM3860C was announced about a year ago I thought this would be sturdy enough and when I saw it on an Aussie site Camerapro that was the same price as the US online shops like Adorama I thought I’d get one and try it out with the intention of replacing it. Here’s a photo of the smaller and lighter 3860 last night. It was certainly sturdy enough – it’s rated for 15kg which is more than enough for a D3 and a 400mm:

And here’s a comparison. While they look similar the 3860 has a swivel head on it so it’s in reality 2.5 in shorter.

Boca Juniors v Melbourne Victory

Shot this pre-season friendly tonight. Used a new monopod tonight – will post more info about this shortly. Meanwhile, enjoy the action.

FFV shoot at AAMI Park

Shot some images for the Football Federation Victoria today at the new AAMI Park. It was a glorious winter day with bright blue skies. The brief was to highlight the stadium with Australian Matilda’s captain Melissa Barbieri, former Socceroo Danny Tiatto and FFV CEO Mark Rendell. I won’t say what the images are going to be used for yet but it was a good opportunity to do strobist techniques. I lit the subjects with a SB800 on a light stand bounced off an umbrella. The flash was triggered with an SU800. I trusted the D3′s metering and set it to A mode f11 with compensation set at -0.7 to give the sky a rich blue and set the flash to +2.0 to balance the foreground with the background and give a high-key feel to the image. The first 3 images are scouting shots and the bottom image is an example image shot with these settings. More images here. Let me know what you think. PS – this is what the images were used for.



Nikon 24mm 1.4

This lens arrived 2 days before my London trip and I took it away with me coupled to a D700. It was my only lens and it was a perfect travel lens. All these photos are shot with it which shows you how versatile it is.