Posts from ‘How To’
Shutter Count
What is the shutter count?
The shutter count on your DSLR is like the odometer on your car. It refers to the number of pictures your camera has taken in total. The number (often referred to as shutter actuations or cycles) is a good indicator of how much life your DSLR has left. If you’re buying a used DSLR you’ll want to know this and vice versa if you’re selling one. Professional DSLRs have a much higher life expectancy than consumer level cameras…
I have an old Canon Rebel XT given to me by my brother. This one:
What makes it special is that it has been taking a photo every thirty seconds for almost a year running my Vancouver Webcam. That’s about 2880 photos per day or 1 051 200 photos per year! Before that the camera had traveled to 30+ countries and taken at least 50 000 photos. According to the internet this model of camera doesn’t keep a running shutter count. I don’t know exactly how many photos it has taken but it’s at least one million images. That’s like having a car with a million miles on it or something?! This is a testament to good design and engineering by Canon given then camera is only rated for ~50k-100k images. It’s like the Mars rover, it refuses to die.
What shutter count can I expect from my camera?
This website has a nice little crowsourced dataset on real life shutter counts and failures: http://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/
The Nikon D300: http://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/nikon_d300.htm
(camera I’m selling)
The ol Rebel XT that refuses to die: http://olegkikin.com/shutterlife/canon_eos350d.htm
How can I check the shutter count for my Nikon DSLR?
The simplest way I’ve found to check on a Mac is to use the Preview application. Open the most recent image you’ve taken with your camera in Preview. Click on the Tools menu then click show inspector.
Then click the i button, then click Nikon button, then you should see a ’shuttercount’ number:
Your mileage may vary, I’m not sure this works on all Nikon DLSRs…
[photo by opaco]
We currently live in an amazing apartment here in Vancouver. It’s probably one of the best in our neighborhood (not the one above) at a very reasonable price. People are shocked when I tell them how cheap it is to rent.
Here is a small part of our view from our vancouver webcam
It wasn’t luck that got us this place, it was our super geekyness… To find this place we used combination of craigslist, rss, feedburner and gmail.
How to find an apartment using RSS and email:
- Go to the city you want to live in on craigslist
- Find the apartment section
- Add your search criteria
- Grab the rss feed for that page
- Now pipe that feed into Feedburner
- Activate email subscriptions on that feed
- Subscribe to the feed via email
- Confirm subscription
Now you’ll receive a daily email of apartments that match your criteria only. Just set it and forget it. You’ll automatically get results in your inbox. It took us three months of going through these emails every day to find out current place. Of course we weren’t in a rush to move out either.
How to find an apartment using Twitter:
- Go to your the city you want to find on craigslist
- Find the apartment section
- Add your search criteria
- Grab the rss feed for that page
- Create a new twitter account
- Now pipe that feed into twitterfeed using the new twitter account
- Follow that new account with your old account
Good luck apartment hunting!!
[Photo by Proimos]
Tired of using Twitpic? Try this:
- Go to your email account settings on Flickr: http://www.flickr.com/account/?tab=email
- Find the Flickr2Twitter upload email address.
- Now email a photo or video to your unique Flickr2Twitter email address and the photo will upload to Flickr and a tweet will be sent to twitter with a link to that photo on Flickr.
The Subject line of the email will be BOTH the Flickr photo title and the Tweet.
You’ve only got about 116 characters for your actual Tweet because the rest will be a short Flic.kr URL itself.
You may also want to check out your upload by email settings to make sure your tags and privacy settings are correct as well:
Word to the wise: Be aware of geolocation settings on your iPhone… Flickr automatically picks up the EXIF data in your photos so if you have location services on for photos on your iPhone they will automatically show up on your Flickr map… You wouldn’t want to tell everyone where you live!? Or would you…
Also if you want to migrate from Twitpic to Flickr use this Twitpickr. (limited to yur last 25 pics)
