A friend of mine was in Melbourne recently and wandered into the public access areas at the Port of Melbourne and grabbed a few pictures of the docked ships being loaded. While there, security from one of the terminals came up and stated:

I can imagine that’s bit of a surprise to someone who’s fairly innocently standing alongside a public access road and taking photos.
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Recently I did a spot of night time photography including some time lapses with my 50D, on examining the photos a few days later I noticed a nasty little red spot on one of the images. Closer inspection found me three of the little blighters, so it looks like I’ve got myself some hot pixels on the sensor.

Above is a 100 percent crop of a 4 second exposure with no lens, this is the most prominent hot pixel, click on the picture for the full size image. If you look at the file at 100 percent, (ala a pixel peeper – LOL) you will see them. It’s pretty much Top Middle, Middle Left, Bottom Left.

I’ve tried the various methods around the place that suggest the sensor can be remapped by the camera, all to no avail. Seeing it’s only 8 months old, today I dropped it off for a warranty claim and it’s gone to Sydney.

Wish me luck, took me 6 weeks to get the last camera back that I sent to Canon for repairs.

Firmware version 1.2 has been released for the Panasonic LX3.

Improvements are listed as:

1. Improved white balance flash mode setting when DMW-FL220 is connected.
2. Proper setting of shutter speed on iA mode and Scene mode when OIS is turned ON.
3. Proper Exif information in the JPEG picture file.

Considering I haven’t had any issues relating to these I’m not expecting to notice any differences, however being a compulsory upgrader I ran the upgrade anyway 🙂 Only issue being the battery was at 2/3rds capacity according to the indicator, and unless the battery is fully charged you don’t even get prompted for the upgrade, sneaky!

To challenge myself to be a better photographer I decided to embark on a “Photo A Day” adventure for 2009.

I’ll see how the first month goes, however all being well I’ll be able to keep it up and do the whole year.

Wish me luck 🙂