Hypo is Live
Hypo got its first public release and goes live with a website. Grab Hypo for free there.
Sit-in
Today I did my first sit-in at a pond. Nadine had reliably seen a grey wagtail on her commute over several days, so while Tilian was at sports, I used the time to settle down by a quiet stretch of water, with dead trees and slightly flowing water.
Warming Up
Spent last night fine-tuning the settings of the Canon R5 and I see myself getting more out of it compared to yesterday. The Sigma telelens combined with the RF-EF dapter seems to have issues with AF. I learned there are likely two issues, first AF pulsing and second a desync between the body image stabilization and the built-in lens one. Before trying out further I’ll update the firmware of the Sigma telelens, yes lenses have firmwares these days - what a time to be alive, and disable the body image stabilizer.
First Steps
I did the first steps with the R5: firmware upgrade, settings, sooo many settings. Overall this is a new setup to learn and it will take a while to master. Especially the Sigma seems to behave slightly differently with the EF-RF ring.
Gemma
Anthropic pulled Fable and Mythos from the market following US intervention, a frustrating move considering Fable was performing for me like Opus was six months ago, before the steady performance degradation across versions 4.6+. It really makes me wonder where LLM proliferation needs to go to ensure we aren’t tied to these frontier labs.
R5
I finally settled on an R5 I. After a lot of fun with the 1D-X II, I had been thinking for a while about how to get around the limitation of its 20MP sensor, and shooting the Sigma at f/8, where it is sharpest, I kept hitting the limit of how much detail I can pull out of a single frame.
Archive
I am consistently one day behind in posting a daily photo. This is from a second tour I made to see the kestrels in the barn across the street, this time with the Sigma TC-1401 1.4x teleconverter on the camera. My original plan was to find Nadine’s old BlackBerry Bold. I wanted to charge it and try it out after watching that BlackBerry movie which surprisingly wasn’t too bad. Liked it more than The Social Network. Taking daily photos that inspire me and feel genuine became a chore, I am forcing myself to keep doing them.
Resting
Kellin is home sick with a fever, spending his days resting on the couch. He is the most cute and grumpy when sick, and it’s sad when you can only do very little to make him feel better.
Sandbox
At 8pm 3.5 tonnes of sand finally arrived for the sandbox, and by 10:45pm 3 tonnes of it had disappeared into the hole. Finally we can see the end of the project. From here it’s fine work: filling the edges, irrigation, a lid for the cistern, lawn edging and plants, lots of plants.
