www.underbjerg.info

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.

Something I keep coming across when working with Ruby on Rails view templates, is wrapping blocks of content in common DIV tags with certain properties, so I can easily style the application with CSS.

For example, a page can have multiple content boxes, and possibly a sidebar with a number of info boxes. What I used to do, was something like this:

<div id="sidebar">
  <div class="infobox">
    Here is some help
  </div>
</div>
<div class="content_box">
	<%= render :partial => "table", :locals => {:people => @people} %>
</div>

Instead, by looking at the implementaton of the content_tag_for ActionView helper, I was able to find a way to do this:

<% sidebar do %>
  <% infobox do %>
    Here is some help
  <% end %>
<% end %>
<% content_box do %>
  <%= render :partial => "table", :locals => {:people => @people} %>
<% end %>

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 :-)

Think about this...

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.

Last weekend we had the biggest Lindy Hop workshop in Copenhagen so far: CopHop 2007. We had 4 teachers come from Stockholm and London to teach us some new tricks, and despite the heat, it was great fun. I've uploaded some pictures to the gallery:

Also check out these videos with Henrik & Joanna as well as Dan & Jessica's performance at the party saturday night.

I've been playing around with my new lens, and have taken a few handheld night pictures. You can check them out here:

I've also tested it out in some other settings, to see how it performs. This lens is definitely going to be living on my camera from now on :-)

Kasper and I defended our thesis last week, and are now officially computer scientists! Thanks to all of you who showed up at Café Castro afterwards - thanks to you, the weather and the champagne, I had a memorable day :o)

Tuesday I'll be starting my new job, and I'm excited to see how things turn out. Adult life, here I come!

My days recently have been filled with learning new concepts related to the non-student life, such as pension savings, mortgage, company registration and accounting, not of all which have been equally thrilling, but I think I'm getting the hang of it.

This weekend I will also debut as full-fledged dance teacher, since I will be co-teaching my first beginners workshop in Lindy Hop.

Life is freshly baked, the sun is shining, and there's a wonderful summer to come, I'm sure. Remember to go out in the sun everyone. Oh yeah, and learn to Lindy Hop, so you can join us in Herräng ;-)

A month after turning in my thesis, I feel like I have barely touched the ground, but things are starting to take shape.

I have set up a small company, UnderWorks, to continue development of the TidTilMere.net application for Engelsholm Højskole. It's turning into a pretty cool piece of software, and they seem quite happy about it.

After a lot (really) of job interviews, I have found a genuine, grown-up job as a Java developer at Jayway, where I will be starting on the first of May. Very exiting! They seem like a bunch of very nice and talented people, and I can't wait to get started.

Before that, however, there's still a little thing to take care of: In just two weeks, on the 16th of April, Kasper and I will be defending our thesis project on "Agile Software Development and Processes of Change", as is custom, at the Department of Computer Science (DIKU). You are welcome to watch the spectacle if you are so inclined: It starts at 14:00, and is open to the public (leave your rotten eggs at home, and bring cava instead).

Oh yeah, and I also have to find a new place to live... oh well, no time to hang around :-)