Andy (aka Squep) DJ'd at Rohstofflager again and this time I had my new Canon EF 50mm f/1.8 II lens with me.  Unfortunately, the DJ 'stage' was much more challenging this time around, a shaky little stand slapped up beside the bar in a small space. 


Regardless, a couple of the photos came out pretty fracking groovy. And I learned allot about what what works, what does not and ideas to experiment with next time. (Initial blog post on my first shoot with Andy: Squep @ Rohstofflager) Here are a couple thoughts:

• I need something to provide a vibration-resistant surface on which to place the camera. Much of the stage, anything wood, and even my monopod are to susceptible to the boom-boom-boom bass from the speakers.
• The fixed zoom on my new lens limits where it can be used more than I expected. Also, the slower lenses I have are great for more 'artsy' photographs. I need to start swapping lenses out mid-show, which concerns me--the environments at such venues are usually somewhat hostile, with all the humidity, smoke, people, spilled beers, and other hazards.
• There are some dark, hazards corners in clubs.  A small flashlight would be a great tool to have with me next time.
• In some of the photos there are these globe-shaped halo distortions that seem to come from light sources.  I'm not sure what the proper description of these are in photo-geek circles, but need to find out.  I suspect the answer to to start using one of those horse-blind like things mounted on the end of the lens.  They always struck me as some sort of silly penis extension device every time I'd see a tourist with them, but apparently they have a purpose beyond looking 'serious'. 

The servers I work with generate fairly large http log files which we archive away for later analysis. Each month a typical log file (tens of millions of 'hits') gets compressed. I used to do this with gzip, but recently have moved over to bzip2 because I had heard it was more efficient.  But beforehand, in the spirit of "measure before you optimize", I compressed five files from last year before 'trans-compressing' them all to bz2 files as a test. The results:

File Size in MegaBytes (% of original) File txt gz bz2 A 6,832 403 (5.9%) 203 (3.0%) B 6,145 366 (6.0%) 184 (3.0%) C 9,092 513 (5.6%) 257 (2.8%) D 7,146 418 (5.8%) 208 (2.9%) E 7,675 448 (5.8%) 223 (2.9%)

While the time to compress files with bzip2 is much, much longer than gzip, the files are half the size of the gzip files, and are a stunning 3% the size of the original files. That means I can file away twice as many of these logs on a single CD, which is very handy! (Yes, some of us geeks really do spend time and effort thinking about such weighty topics.)