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I recently had the pleasure of spending 7 days in New York City, in connection with Frankie95 - a festival to celebrate the life and 95th birthday of Frankie Manning, a Lindy Hop legend. Sadly, he passed away only weeks before thousands of dancers from around the world showed up in New York, which meant the event transformed into a memorial event, celebrating his life and the dance he helped create. There’s a really good short documentary here, about Lindy Hop and Frankie Manning in particular.

Frankie95 was absolutely fantastic, and in-between all the dancing, performances, and great bands, there was even time for some sightseeing around New York. I’ve uploaded a couple of pictures on Flickr (below), and you can see even more here (sightseeing) and here (dancing).

Light is everything, as I re-discovered as a party yesterday, where a glow-row supplied hours of fun and entertainment:

I don’t normally just link to news elsewhere, but I’ve been waiting a long time for a review of the new Canon 24mm f/1.4 II lens, and it’s finally up at the Digital Picture.

The review shows the mark II as a significant improvement over the mark I in CA and sharpness as wider apertures (where I’d planned on using it), and a lot of other good things. It will be a long time before I’m able to scrape enough money together for buying one of these babies, but they say patience is bliss.

I have wanted to get a fast prime lens for a while, but wasn’t sure whether to go for Canon’s 50mm f/1.2, 35mm f/1.4 or the new 24mm f/1.4 II to put on my EOS 50D. I had an idea that wider lens would support my style of photography better, because I often shoot dancing indoors, where it’s hard to get a good distance to the subject, but I had no hard data to back it up.

I use Adobe Lightroom for almost all my image editing, and although it is a fantastic piece of software, and can show me picture counts by lens, camera, etc., it cannot show me how many pictures I’ve taken at various focal lenghts.

So I wrote a small Ruby script to do just that. It takes a folder and a result file name as arguments, and scans through the folder for any pictures that matches the file type (jpg or raw) and the camera model I’m interested in (to filter out the compact), and counts all the focal lengths used, and their frequency. It then stores the results in the result file in CSV format.

If you like, you can download the script here. There is also an example result file, which shows a run of all the pictures I’ve taken in 2008. The script uses the mini_exiftool gem that wraps the exiftool binary, so you’ll need both to run the script.

I just love how simple it is to put these kind of utilities together with Ruby. You are welcome to modify the script as you like, and I’d like to hear about any improvements or other cool stuff you come up with.

The image below shows a graph over the 6608 pictures I’ve have kept, taken with my Canon EF-S 17-55mm f/2.8 IS, over the last 1 1/2 years. This is the lens that I use for 75% of my pictures.

This shows a couple of interesting things (at least to me):

• I primarily use the lens at it extremes: 17mm and 55mm
• I clearly prefer the wider focal lengths, from 17-35mm

So now I am sure that it is the Canon 24mm f/1.4 II that should be on my wishlist - now I just have to save up for it

Today was the 5 year anniversary of our Swing Café at Studenterhuset in Copenhagen.

We were two who exhibited about 10 photographs each, and I did a slideshow of pictures from various Lindy Hop related events in Copenhagen and the rest of Europe, including Goodnight Sweetheart (GNSH), Herräng Dance Camp and CopHop.

You can view the video in high-resolution (~280MB) by clicking the image below. If you are on a slow connection, there’s also a lower resolution version available here (~110MB).

I just picked up my new EOS 50D today, and wanted to see how the low-light/high-iso performance of it was, compared to my 400D. I upgraded to the 50D because I was expecting it to be a much better low-light performer. I shoot a lot of dancy-photography, which usually happens indoors in lousy lighting conditions, so I was hoping the 50D would be a massive improvement.

The following will be a small review of the Canon EOS 50D, focusing on the low-light performance. If you want to get a more technical or extensive review of the 50D, the following sites might be interesting to you:

• DPR’s pre-view and forum
• Roland Lim’s thorough use-oriented review, and comparison with 40D and D3.

For my own little test, I setup some items in a dark room, lit only by a single table-lamp. Don’t be fooled by the brightness of the pictures - to achieve that at ISO 100, a shutter speed of 2-3 seconds was needed. Seeing how the 50D would perform in this kind of setting was exactly what I wanted to know.

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I just got the Canon BG-E3 battery grip for the EOS 400D.

Before buying it, I wasn’t able to find out whether it could work with just one battery inserted, sparing me the cost of an additional battery, but giving me the advantage of comfortable portrait-shooting and a better center of gravity with long, heavy lenses.

After receiving the BG-E3 yesterday, I can confirm that it does work with just one NB-2LH battery. I can think of a couple of use cases for this:

• You’re on a tight bugdet, and want the advantages of the battery grip, other than just extended battery life.
• You have two batteries, but you’re shooting in low temperatures that drain your battery faster than otherwise. You can keep one battery in your (warm) pocket, and periodically swap batteries to counter the cold-drain.

I ended up buying an extra NB-2LH anyway, but now you don’t have to

Nothing much has happened here in a good long while.

I’ve started to put my photos on Flickr, instead of using my own installation of Gallery. Hopefully that will make it more “lively” You can find them here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/wonderbjerg/

By the way, I can very much recommend the plugin PicLens for viewing images in your browser.