Timelapse from Karl Roberts on Vimeo.

I made this since I was bored. All I actually doing was english lit work and call of duty.
The song is Book’s from Boxes - Maximo park

Today I picked up a nikkor 55-200 mm lens for my D40. This is a zoom lens or “telephoto” which both basically mean the same thing.
D-SLR’s use measure zoom differently to regular point and shoot and is called “focal length” which is measured in mm as you would measure zoom on a point and shoot (3x zoom, 10x zoom, etc.).
This lens starts at 55 mm which is the maximum focal length of my original 18-55mm kit lens which came with the camera body and goes up to 200 mm which I think is alright since I can’t see myself shooting anything beyond that, if not a crop tool always comes in handy. Its given me some experience in purchasing lens’s as you have to think practically of what your going to shoot. I’ll most commonly use this lens for the moon or nature in the garden so that I can step back while I shoot.
There are downsides to this as you may find you need to swap lens’s quite regular which can be quite a tedious thing trying not to expose your sensor to much. An alternative to it would to purchase something like a 18-200 which was £500 in store, I don’t think so...
I was saving for one though my parents were confused with the lens name and length so we went out today and purchased it. I hope they don’t ask me to wrap it up..


All in all I think this is a good budget telephoto lens for someone who is beginning photography like me.
If your after this lens. The exact model is:

AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 55-200mm f/4~5.6G ED

Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas!

I took of the previous blog post and decided to reblog about the dashboard widget I made last week. I used Dashcode which is packaged in with the xcode developer kit available when you sign up to the ADC (apple developer connection) over the internet. I found that it was alot easier to create a widget than I first thought. The graphical user interface makes it quite simple and quick to produce what you want, rather than learning how to program cocoa. Though you can view the source code if you want to know what makes it tick, a bit like peeking at the html of a website.
The point of the widget is to basically count down to christmas day at 0:00:00 and took me 5 minutes to make and then add my own styling and cheesy clip art snowmen (thanks microsoft!).
All I had to was take the .wdgt file and zip it up and place it on here.



Download here

Please get back to me with feedback about it.
Thanks.

Xyle Scope is a really neat app from Cultured Code.
If you like CSS and to know how people like to wire up there code this is a really useful application. It is basically an internet browser interface where you can navigate to the site you want by URL as you would. Then in the section of the interface to the right you can see the layout and the cascade of the stylesheet. When you select a snippet of code. For example a div tag in which site content is contained. It would show you the CSS rules which have been given to that snippet of code, such as a width, height, padding margin and so on.
Here is a look at the interface displaying my friend Sam’s website.
I seriously recommend this, though I am only using a trial at the moment.

More Photoshop fun.
I used the Paint splat brush for this.

This is a blog post mostly written out of annoyance to some people I go to school with.
As we all know out of the top competing consoles these days there is certain rivalry between them, in this particular case I mean the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.
Rather like many useless arguments such as the PC and the Mac and whatever else.
I own a Playstation 3 and I purchased this console because it was an offer at a reduced price with a game I really wanted to play, the reason I took the Playstation 3 over saving for an Xbox 360 was because A. This console has free online capabilities for multiplayer with other users and so forth. Alot of people with argue to me that “the xbox live is better”, but really how?
They both do the same thing. Both have video and audio chat, buddy lists in and out of game. Both allow you to team up with other players in and out of game to do things. But you have to pay for this on xbox live. People will then argue “but it isn’t that much”, so.. if there’s another console out there for around the same price tag which has online capabilities for free. I would not see the point in buying the one which you have to pay for. B. The Playstation 3 is more reliable, this may not be the same in certain cases though I have seen more red rings of death on a friends Xbox 360 than my Playstation 3, why I believe this is? the shape of the Playstation console is bigger than that of the Xbox, this is just seen as “bulky” or a “george foreman” but logical. If you want a processor or hard drive to work efficiently at its best capacity, It needs to be cooler, not cramped within the case which from my point of view looks like someone sat in the middle of it. Microsoft, rather like they do with there operating systems such as vista. Have gone rather for the style element of the console more than performance.
Though the biggest argument on the xbox’s side of the fence is games. There are generally more popular games for the Xbox than the Playstation 3. In which Microsoft, being the greedy cunts they are, sign contracts with companies such as bungie so they can only play there games on the xbox. “Software without walls”, No.
So its really catch 22. You can buy an xbox for all the great new games which are being released or buy a Playstation 3 for the performance and free online.
Yes I could go out and pay more money on an xbox 360 elite which has a bigger hard drive and has been painted black. But don’t you think thats enough money spent on a console which at the moment I wont have much time to play as a year 11 student.

I’m sorry if I may have offended Xbox 360 users in this blog post. But I honestly felt that I needed to get my opinion out to people about this. I have a friend who I regularly play on his Xbox with and I would class it as a good console.
This is mainly a go at some of the people who I go to school with who steriotype the Playstation 3 before they go to sleep holding there Xbox.
Thanks

I just cooked this up in photoshop. For no reason at all.
Enjoy :)