zondag 15 augustus 2010

Last.fm scrobbling at YouTube

Like most people who like to listen to music, I watch a lot of music videos on YouTube. Also, I'm a big fan of last.fm. For years I was thinking by myself "it would be perfect if I could scrobble the tracks I listen to on YouTube", but I never even tried to look for a way to fix that because I thought it wouldn't be there.

But today I did, and it really made my day because there is a great Greasemonkey script which does exactly what I wanted. It's called youscrobble and it looks like this:You get a nice "Scrobble" button which pops up a form to submit the song. You can even fix the artist and track name if necessary.

woensdag 27 januari 2010

zondag 22 november 2009

A small review of the Massa CPL polarizer filter

Lately I bought the Massa CPL polarizer filter (58mm) at DealExtreme, for only $7.89. I'm planning to use it mainly for landscapes, so today I tested it on some skies. First, here's a picture of a sky with the polarizer filter deactivated.

(Almost) the same picture with my polarizer filter activated looks like this:

Pretty cool huh? I think the contrasts between the sky and the clouds make the picture a lot nicer. Just to see the differences in one picture very clearly, I made another picture with the filter halfway in front of the lens.
I don't have any other polarizer filters to make a comparison, but I think this filter does what it should do.

zondag 25 oktober 2009

Comparing the Canon 55-250mm F/4-5.6 IS and the Tamron 55-200mm F/4-5.6 lens

Yesterday I bought the Canon 55-250mm F/4-5.6 IS lens, replacing my Tamron 55-200mm F/4-5.6 lens. Now I'm really interested in the differences in image quality, so I decided to put the two lenses to the test. I shot the same objects with different settings, modifying the focal length and the aperture. The test results are on a different page, so I was able to use a full screen layout.

My conclusion is that the Canon lens has a much nicer bokeh and more intense colors. However, I don't see very much difference in sharpness. I think the Canon lens is worth the extra money, because it produces better pictures and moreover has a 4-stop image stabilizer.