Trip to Brussels in Belgium, April 29 - May 5, 2006

2006-04-30T17:12:00.000-07:00

I AM currently in Brussels and it's 2:11 a.m. local time, because of jetlag. Tomorrow will be another day to adjust my clock while looking at this town.
I started from Davis, California, USA, at 4:11 a.m. when the airport shuttle picked me up. This was obviously too early to say good-bye to my son Felix. And the previous night he was so tired from our playing in the park that he ended up like this:

So, I'll just have to telephone him good-bye from the next airport (see below).

It's 7:06 a.m. but most people on this flight from Sacramento to Denver, Colorado, had to get up around 3:30, like me...

So, let's speed things up a bit and get on the next plane in Dulles (not Dallas), Washington, where they put up several of these spectral walls (which remind me of Miami Vice) to make the airport less, hmm, dull:

The flight out of Washington was a bit bumpy, even the MEGA O.I.S couldn't compensate for it anymore. Ah, yes, before I forget: I'm testing a Panasonic Lumix LX1 on this trip and MEGA O.I.S is their silly name for image
stabilisation, i.e., anti-shake to prevent blur. As may be glanced from dpreview.com etc., this camera has a serious noise problem. Otherwise it seems to be the ONLY camera this size which offers all the bells and whistles for a serious photographer. Everything can be set manually, it has a genuine 16:9 sensor (i.e. the format is not achieved by cropping), >8 megapiksel, a great Leica zoom lens which starts at 28 mm (35 mm equivalent) and what I discovered today and what I'm all excited about is that when in manual focus, it shows DOF as a sliding bar! (DOF is Depths of Field, the range of acceptable focus, i.e., from what near distance to what far distance the image will be acceptably sharp. A nice interactive tool to learn and understand DOF dependence an aperture
and object distance! And a nice tool to set the hyperfocal distance as well. The manual doesn't mention this DOF-bar at all --- why are all camera manuals so bad?) Maybe other digital cameras do this too but not my Canon EOS 5D which costs six times as much. That's why I'm testing the LX1. Speaking of the EOS 5D: It's currently at Canon Irvine because the sensor got so dirty that I couldn't get it clean anymore --- something that never happens with a point-and-shoot (the LX1 really shouldn't be called that). But back to the trip for now.(OK, the sensor of a camera with a fixed lens can get dirty too if you drop it into a can of old motor oil but then the sensor isn't the problem.)

Just one more thing: It's 3:18 a.m. here now, I'm running out of very expensive bad Belgian beer from my mini bar and I should be working on what I'm actually here for (evaluate European research proposals NOT related to digital cameras).

But here I arrive in Brussels at my hotel which doesn't have a room for me yet (it's 8:03 a.m. and 4 deg Celsius = 38 stupid Fahrenheit and California was at 30/90 already so I didn't really bring any warm clothes). So I deposit my two bags and try to find the boulangerie where they have great breakfast, according to the reception woman. I never find it but the sun peeks through (lucky, later it rains). So I see/shoot this (I HAVE my camera because it's so small that it sits snugly on my belt, the fundamental reason why I started looking into point-and-shoots at all):

I don't like the way the blog-editor inserts photos only at the top of the document. Maybe there is a HowTo somewhere... RTFM or what?

to be continued...
Good morning! It's 1:50 pm Monday May 1st here in Brussels and after a long hot shower, I feel fit to go out and find some food. It's a public holiday and the weather is bad so I'll have time to continue my tale after eating... stay tuned. (Taking pictures in good light yesterday upon arrival reminds me of the story of Richard l'Anson who groggily arrived at a nice beach in Indonesia, saw that beautiful volcano at the horizon and made a mental mark to shoot it the next day. That vista appears only once or twice a year... Wow, I headed my own advice: Shoot it when you see it!)

I'm back. It's 4:54 am on Wed, May 3, here in Brussels. My real work here has started so I'll have to keep this a bit short...
Some pics from my looking for breakfast excursion on sunday:

So, one may say that Brussels, the "capital of Europe" is quite remarkable in that it's a mix of really old and sometimes very delapidated buildings and super-modern hi-tech stuff, mainly all the European Union buildings. I like it. Construction is going on anywhere, perfectly reflecting what's going on within the European Union itself! Quite exciting.

Too many pictures? this HTML-Blog-editor definitely thinks so. OK, just a few more and then I'll give you my tentative conclusions on the Lumix LX1:

Sunday night I went to the Grand Place, like a good tourist. Of course I used a tripod (micro version which fits in my pocket), had the camera on manual focus and aperture priority and shielded it from the the nearby lanterns. Exposure times were around 5 secs at ISO 80. In general, I don't use anything above ISO 80 because the noise problem gets too bad. Btw., this is luminance noise,
not color noise as I seem to have read soemwhere else. This luminance noise can be remedied in Adobe Camera Raw quite efficiently as it seems. However, obviously the ultimate test will be to print the images... I don't have a printer here. If anybody is interested, I can post larger versions of the images, unsmoothed and smoothed. The pictures here were developed using Camera Raw and luminance noise smoothing was set to 25 (sharpness and color noise as well - simple to remember). It is interesting to note that the camera took several seconds after each shot, presumably to do it's internal denoising --- in fact there was less noise than when shooting daylight pictures!! It seems that Panasonic sacrificed ideal noise processing for speed in those cases. As far as I can see, this cannot be set. How about a little firmware hack?! (They don't even make an update available, so far :-()

Summa summarum, so far, I have mixed emotions about the LX1: It is a sexy little camera which I can always carry with me. It allows all creative freedom. This is great. It has a serious noise problem which means that I have to shoot at the lowest ISO setting, ISO 80, all the time. The luminance noise can be fixed in Camera Raw (Panasonics own RAW converter is useless). It seems that CS2 (and probably things like Noise Ninja) can also fix this noise in jpegs (Btw., when shooting RAW, a jpeg is always saved in parallel. This cannot be disabled and is ok.)
Therefore, this is NOT a point-and-shoot. Don't buy it to shoot casual snapshots. They will be blurred. I don't have the impression that the image stabilisation is up to it's promises, unfortunately.
I tried handheld shots with one to two stops below the 1/focal length rule (e.g., at f=120 mm, shutter speed shouldn't be less than 1/125 sec) and they did NOT work.
I will look at prints to see if I keep this camera. I like the camera but if prints are not up to my expectations, I will look elsewhere (although it might be really difficult to find anything that allows this much creative freedom). Ah well, were is the ideal camera?

wugga blog

Trip to Brussels in Belgium, April 29 - May 5, 2006