Since Pup seems to be slacking off , I figured I should get the next round started. Don't be a boring git - show us what you've been up to in the couple of weeks before Chrimbo!

Anyway, I'll post some actual pics once I get home tonight, but I'd love to be able to show what we've been up to at work. We've been taking pics, all right, though they're slightly larger than average. How does 19k by 19k pixels grab ya? Megapixel madness - 374 of 'em, to be exact. Well, not exact - kinda rough, actually. The sad part is that's only a quarter of the size of the final system - this is just a prototype.

Maybe one day some of the pics will be made public, albeit in scaled-down or cropped form.

OK, here (finally) are a couple of recent shots taken with my TZ1.

The first was just completely random. I was getting ready to go to work when semi pulled up with an excavator on a large flatbed. They're building a Safeway just across the street from us, so I though it was destined to go there. I was watching them wondering how the heck they were going to get the truck round the corner to the building site, when they dropped the ramps on the trailer and drove the excavator off the back.

I just thought they were being creative in getting the excavator over to the site, so I went back to getting ready when I heard crunching noises. I looked out the window again and saw the excavator tearing in to the little run down house across the way. I figured it might be fun to see what I could do with the TZ1's zoom, especially as I was facing almost directly east at about 7:30 in the morning. The shot was a bit washed out, but didn't need a huge levels adjustment to get it looking a bit better.

The second is just a random shot of Kamali'o near the window where my computer lives. She was lying quite peacefully in my arm as I checked my email, and I wanted to see how the camera would deal with the highlights and shadows from the light coming through the window.

The third is an argument for a good burst mode on a camera. Compared to our Canon S230, the TZ1's burst mode is fantastic - it can shoot 2fps at top quality indefinitely with a decent speed SD card. We had just come home and we hadn't taken Kamali'o out of her car seat as she was quite happy for a while. She then started making faces and squirming, so I grabbed the camera and held the button down for about a minute. This little gem of an expression was captured somewhere along the way.

The last was taken at our local Best Buy. The previous time we were there I had shown my wife Guitar Hero on the demo Playstation 2. That time, however, I only had my mobile on me to capture her playing. As much as I love my Razor (partly because I helped create it), its camera royally sucks. I had vowed to take a real camera with me the next time we went, but I neglected to check the battery before we left. This was one of two shots I got off before the battery died.

Oh, and on the humungous shot mentioned above, it might be going up in some form on our website soon. If and when that happens, I'll link to it here.

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Phew! in the final hour, I took a picture that I thought was reasonably presentable. Hooked up with my brother this weekend, for a day of fun with his family at York University. The seagulls are very well trained there and, with my brother's new Nikon D200 and Nikkor 70-200mm f2.8, they were very easy to snap. Two small children in tow meant I didn't get to play with the seagulls as much as I'd liked, otherwise I'd have experimented with stopping down the aperture a couple of f-stops for extra depth of field...

As it is, I had to resharpen this poor gull's head with Focus Magic's Photoshop plug-in.

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Nice. Any chance of a before-and-after comparison of the head so we can see what Focus Magic is capable of in real-world use?

I'm tempted to plunk down the $45 for a licence, myself...

My brother didn't send me the full res version, and I'd rather do a 100% crop comparison with something full res. Fancy sending me a blurry/out-of-focus image?