this is blog
Here’s a great article that’s basically about JPEG compression artifacts: http://www.theawl.com/2014/12/the-triumphant-rise-of-the-shitpic
I like the idea of “counting the rings” to see how old a viral image is. This also opens up a question about tools like Google image search. I wonder if their algorithm takes decay into account when it searches for the “original” image.
Lightroom is a tremendously powerful piece of software, but there’s no way for Adobe to satisfy all the needs of every customer. That’s where plugins come in. There are tons of plugins for giving your photos a certain look, but there are also plugins for publishing your photos. Here’s the difference between publishing and exporting, as far as I understand it:
For example, if you export 0001.raw as 0001.jpg, then upload 0001.jpg to Flickr and then delete 0001.raw, 0001.jpg will remain on Flickr. However, if you publish 0001.raw to Flickr and then delete 0001.raw, then 0001.jpg will be removed from Flickr. Other development settings can be synced with publish as well.
Your workflow may not benefit from this functionality, but I like working this way, specifically while publishing to my hard drive. This gives me the option of having a mirrored set of smaller web-friendly JPEG’s (3200px at 60% quality) that stays in sync with my collection. I can then sync that directory with my cloud service of choice without paying out the nose to host the RAW files. This mirrored set stays synced even if I go back and delete or edit a photo from 2008.
Lightroom’s publish functionality doesn’t mirror your folder structure by default, so I use the Folder Publisher plugin from Jeffrey Friedl. He offers several other “goodies” for Lightroom including several other publishing plugins. Check them out and see if you can’t make your life a little easier.
The low low low prices on micro-stock photographs get a lot of blame for putting working photographers out of business. Whether or not you buy that argument, it’s still a shame that even those low prices aren’t low enough for some companies to actually pay for the photography they steal from the web. Most stock photo sites and a lot of other photographers put watermarks on the low-res preview images that they make publicly available. The idea being that clients would rather pay for the full-resolution image without a watermark. Putting a photo on your company’s website with a watermark over it makes you look incompetent at best.
It’s possible that I just wrote this as an excuse to link you to a hilarious product invented for golfers with small bladders: the Uro Club.
If only there was something like this for photographers who have to pee. Oh wait, there already is!
Do you have plans for Saturday night? If not, how about taking a photo of the largest moon in almost 20 years. Of course, the moon is always the same size, but it will appear its largest since the last super moon of 1983. Confusing? Let NASA clear it up for you.
Remember the Photoblog Alliance site that I mentioned a few months ago? Well, the site’s been expanding nicely and has quite a few contributors now. There’s a new photo posted every day and each photo comes with a short description and some technical info.
If you’ve never submitted your work to a site like Photoblog Alliance, I’d recommend it for a couple reasons. First, it’s great publicity because Brian Haferkamp, who runs the site, has done as much as he can to point viewers to the photographer’s website and/or facetweets. Second, it’s a great way to practice editing your work. The nature of the Photoblog Alliance submission process means that you probably won’t be submitting 100 images per day. That means that you’ll have to pick your best one photograph from your archives to submit. The more you edit, the more you learn about your work. Think of it like this, from least selective to most selective: import from memory card > facebook > flickr > photoblog > Photoblog Alliance > print and frame. Of course, if you’re like most facebook users it goes memory card = facebook and that’s the end of it.
The latest photo on the Photoblog Alliance is called “Man Balances on Giant Egg” and you’ll have to click here to see it. Be sure to read the story behind the photo also.
Way back in July, the Feeling Negative? blog started their Traveling Camera Project. The concept was that a cheapo 35mm camera would be mailed from person to person around the world with each person shooting a roll of film in the same camera. It sounded like fun, so I signed up to take part. The map of where the camera has been so far can be found here, but I’m not sure how well it’s been kept up to date.
I received the camera from Janne in Osaka who blogged about his experience, too. The camera being used for this project is the Vivitar Mariner, available at Amazon in a waterproof case for the extraordinary price of $100, used. Ours was missing the waterproof case and only cost $5. After using it I can say the value is much closer to $5 than $100. It’s basically a disposable camera that you can reload film into. The Mariner is fixed-focus with only one aperture and shutter speed setting. You truly do just point and shoot. Where you’re pointing is not so precise, however, since the tiny viewfinder covers maybe 70% of the image captured on the film. The lens is 28mm and has the typical chromatic aberration and blurry corners of all plastic lenses. Of course, blurry corners implies that something in the image is sharp, which requires luck. It’s a fun camera to shoot with and is capable of some nice lo-fi shots, if you’re into that sort of thing.
If you read camera reviews of modern DSLR’s, you’ll often come across complaints about entry-level cameras having poor build quality and employing too much plastic in their construction. They obviously have never used the Mariner. Without batteries (batteries are optional), the camera feels like it could break at any second. Luckily, simplicity comes to the rescue, so the only things that could break are the shutter, the winding knob, or the light seals. I think the winding knob and the light seals were broken. The frame counter stayed at “1” after I had taken at least 5 shots and then it all of a sudden jumped to “6” on the next shot. Advancing the film in between shots is…imprecise. I was shocked when all of my photos came back and weren’t half overlapping. You can see in this shot that the camera is prone to light leaks, but this was the only picture where it showed up.
It was fun to take part in the Traveling Camera Project. I can’t pass up an opportunity to try out a new camera and it’s fun to watch it make its way around the world.
For a laugh, check out this blog full of pictures of Kim Jong-Il looking at things.
This is a big part of the reason Nikon and Canon bore me.
When was the last true innovation from Nikon or Canon? They sell very high quality products, sure, but where’s the evidence that they are creating anything new? These are some of the big camera innovations of the past couple of years:
Neither Nikon or Canon have sensor-based stabilization, a large sensor compact camera or anything that sets them apart other than market share. I’m not trying to say that Nikon and Canon are bad, they’re just boring. Kudos to Nikon for the D40 and to Canon for the Digital Rebel, but other than incremental improvements what have they done lately?
I read an interesting post the other day about some tips to improve your photography. What struck me about the tips is that they were good, but they aren’t the kinds of tips that are usually found floating all over the web. When I commented on that, the author, J Brian Haferkamp, said that most photography advice is like the amazing diet pills you see advertised everywhere when the best advice is the less sexy “get out and exercise.” I love that analogy. What are some other “diet pill” types of advice that you’ve seen for new photographers? I’ve seen lots:
One cliché that gets mentioned almost constantly is “it’s the photographer, not the camera” (ITPNTC). If that quells some of your equipment anxiety, great, but it’s getting a little worn out. If that’s true, then why do iPhone and Holga photographers feel the need to bash you over the head with what camera they used? Sure, a good photographer can do good work with any camera, but whenever ITPNTC is put out there, there’s never any accompanying advice. Ok, great, my photography depends more on me than my camera… now what? Haferkamp’s advice about finding good light, taking lots of shots of the same thing, moving around, etc. will make you a better photographer. Endlessly spitting out meaningless clichés like ITPNTC might make people feel good, but it won’t improve their photography. Work hard at becoming a better photographer first and then you’ll be able to pick up any camera and create art with it.
Be sure to read Haferkamp’s article and put his tips to practice. It takes effort to get better at anything. You’ll find that the rewards will come quickly and be well worth it. While you’re photographing, if you aren’t annoying the people you’re with and confounding strangers, then you probably aren’t working hard enough.
I work a couple blocks from the Space Needle and everyone who visits Seattle (including myself, before I moved here) wants to see it so as you can imagine I have a lot of photos of the Space Needle. In fact, everyone has a lot of photos of the Space Needle. The challenge is taking a photo that hasn’t been done before. The Space Needle is actually a good subject for exercising creativity because it’s visible from just about everywhere. You can even see the it from the pointy building on the far right side of the picture above (Smith Tower). This means that there are an infinite combination of foregrounds, backgrounds, and angles to include in your Space Needle picture. If you search Flickr for pictures of the Space Needle, you can identify a few clichés fairly quickly. However, the vast majority of the pictures are just a straightforward “point the camera at the Space Needle and shoot” kind of picture. I created a Flickr gallery here that includes 18 pictures of the Space Needle that are unique in some way. I had to go through over 25 pages of search results to find them. I was looking for pictures that were creative, but also well executed technically. I hope you enjoy looking through them. I would also like to share some of my own pictures of the Space Needle that I feel meet those requirements.
I submitted a few pictures to the Epic Edits Flickr Challenge on the subject of street photography and two of them were chosen to be featured on the results page. I didn’t win, but I’ll be submitting something to the next challenge under the subject of Analog Photography.
On an unrelated note, I’d like to share a photo from a recent Flickr upload that I think turned out pretty great. It’s spooky and full of atmosphere and it reminds me of a Tim Burton movie. I want to take more pictures like this.
I’d just like to point you to this. People were asked in a survey to name some colors that were presented to them. The results are pretty interesting and it’s an entertaining read.
My favorite result is this only-in-the-internet-age breakdown of the most common answers for each gender:
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among women:
- Dusty Teal
- Blush Pink
- Dusty Lavender
- Butter Yellow
- Dusky Rose
Okay, pretty flowery, certainly. Kind of an incense-bomb-set-off-in-a-Bed-Bath-&-Beyond vibe. Well, let’s take a look at the other list.
Here are the color names most disproportionately popular among men:
- Penis
- Gay
- WTF
- Dunno
- Baige
I … that’s not my typo in #5—the only actual color in the list really is a misspelling of “beige”.
I’m so proud of my gender…
This news article is about a group of people in Washington state protesting the use of red-light cameras. The private companies that build and monitor these cameras are given a license to print money. Patrick Bedard from Car and Driver has written a couple of times about this issue. I am 100% against both red-light and speeding cameras. Why? Mr. Bedard puts it nicely:
Let’s be clear about the tyranny here. This is not about running red lights. Camera enforcement is a revenuing scheme that depends on an end run around the fundamental American principle of innocent until proven guilty. The glassy-eyed accuser is a robot, and it’s not subject to cross examination. Moreover, it’s a robot employed by a for-profit business that makes its profits from guilty verdicts. It makes nothing on innocent verdicts.
Exactly. In response to the protesters, there is a lot of the old argument, “if you don’t run red lights, then you won’t get a ticket.” Hogwash. How many people can honestly say they’ve never been in the gray area at the beginning of a yellow and chosen to go through the light safely rather than slam on their brakes, risking a rear-ender? An officer can tell the difference, but a machine gets set with a threshold that it applies no matter what.
Washington is a pretty anti-car state in general, unfortunately, but the comments on the Seattle PI story are downright scary. I understand the people who get annoyed at terrible driving and blatant red-light running, but there are apparently people out there who want even more surveillance. How about this gem of a comment:
All those who want to replace cameras with more cops should tax themselves. I rather have my taxes lowered, so the more cameras, the better. I say stick a GPS into each car and transmit speed directly to insurance companies.
Really? Of course, that comment was only in response to this equally crazy suggestion:
When you get caught running a red light the fine is tripled and you don’t get to contest it in court. If you cause an accident while running a red light the fine is quadrupled, your license is suspended for up to one year, and you don’t get to contest it in court. If you cause an accident and a death is involved, the fine is a minimum $10,000, jail time, and license suspended indefinitely. […] With the higher fines, that will help pay for those extra police officers. If you’re not allowed to contest the infraction, the courts will have more space. (Of course this would NEVER happen, violates too many rights I’m sure. )
Since this commenter is against the red light cameras, I guess he is relying on witness testimony to determine who ran what light in that accident. Too bad he doesn’t think you should be able to contest the ticket in court. I guess you’re walking for the next year now. What about the Seattle man mentioned in Bedard’s article who got a ticket meant for someone else driving someone else’s car while he was home sleeping? Should he not be allowed to contest the ticket?
I don’t understand these authoritarian impulses. Are we really that eager to give our money away and let somebody monitor our every move? I find the responses like the ones above to be much more upsetting than the red-light cameras themselves. Wasn’t the whole point of forming this country to get away from thinking like that?
In this entry, I praised Ricoh’s newthink approach to camera design and I wrote about the 12-year-old Minolta Dimage 1500 which sported an on-board scripting language. It turns out (shockingly) that I’m not the only one who thinks programming your camera would be a cool and useful idea. Thom Hogan has thought about this a lot more than I have and he has written an essay about where he thinks camera design should go in the future. His main point is that the camera of the future should be modular, programmable, and communicating. Amazingly, Minolta’s Dimage 1500 from 1998 met 2/3 of those requirements. Don’t be too harsh on Minolta for missing the third (communicating), since WiFi wasn’t all that popular back in the 20th century.
I agree with just about every part of Thom’s essay. Modularity is good for camera companies and their customers. For example, I love the form factor of my current DSLR, but it’s sensor could use a replacement for better low-light performance in a couple of years. Programmability is a sticky issue because it can make a product very painful to use. However, if it’s implemented well, the product can me much more customizable and reach a larger market than a non-programmable device. Communication is really the key to bringing cameras into the future (or is it the present?). Imagine your camera had a 4G connection to the internet. Forget the ability to post pictures directly to Twitter, Facebook, etc. Instead think about being able to automatically back up your photos online as you shoot them. You could spend a month on vacation and only need one memory card. And if your camera gets stolen, you haven’t lost a single picture. What if your camera could search your Facebook friends and match photos of them to automatically tag the people in your photos? It’s not that far-fetched. The latest version of Picasa does an impressive job of face detection and identification. This quote from the essay sums it up best:
My iPhone can tell me where I am, tell me where the sun is and the moon will be, put watermarks on my images, stitch panos, apply tilt-and-shift-like effect, email them or send them directly to places I want them, and much, much more. My US$7999 D3x can’t do any of those things. Doesn’t anyone else find something wrong with this picture?
Image quality has gotten pretty dern good, but the user experience of the camera is still stuck firmly in the past. Why not focus some resources on creating the next truly revolutionary camera? Canon and Nikon may be on top for now, but they are the two least innovative and boring companies to watch, in my opinion. They make great cameras, but they still don’t even have sensor-based stabilization in their DSLRs. The most popular camera on Flickr is not a Nikon or a Canon, or even a camera. It’s a phone. There are two reasons that the iPhone is the most popular camera on Flickr: 1) people always have it with them and 2) it’s easy and quick to post pictures directly from the iPhone to Flickr. Combine that functionality with good image quality and you’ve got a winner.
But what do I know? The camera I’m carrying around with me today is an Olympus OM-10, which doesn’t even have a USB port.
I own several cameras, but I take the majority of my photographs with my trusty Sony A200. Not to be confused with the latest A230 and A3xx cameras from Sony, the A200 is a serious camera for people with fingers. That’s a different story, though. This website has shared a brutal dissection of a broken A200. I have to admit that seeing this made me cringe, since that’s my main camera. Still, the pictures are fascinating. I’d like to see some more detailed analysis, but this provides a great peek at what’s going on underneath the skin of your DSLR. There is so much computing power in today’s cameras that it won’t be long before they develop intelligence and possibly even emotions. Think about that next time you catch yourself complaining about the performance at ISO12800 or a missed autofocus. You don’t want to make your camera cry, do you?
Photographers (myself sometimes included) often lament that photography is so accessible now that anyone can take hundreds of photos and instantly share them with the world no matter how mundane or unoriginal. Flickr is an enabler of this kind of behavior because users can post hundreds of photos of whatever they want even with a free account. Therefore, there is a lot of bad photography on Flickr. However, there is also a lot of fantastic photography. It’s fun to look around and see what other photographers are up to.
Thomas Shahan has some of the best macro photography I’ve ever seen. His favorite subject seems to be spiders, but he has photographed many other bugs as well. What sets his photos apart for me is the color. Shahan manages to make these bugs look glamorous and beautiful, which is no easy task. Bugs are so small that we cannot see their details and colors very well with the naked eye. When viewed at extreme magnification, they become almost unrecognizable from the pests that buzz around us or crawl up our pant legs. Who knew spiders could be so adorable? There are a number of great technical challenges involved in capturing photos like these, which is part of the reason there are so few photographers who can achieve this level of magnification.
Shahan uses a DIY style setup that is capable of phenomenal reproduction ratios greater than the 1:1 found on most macro lenses. He uses a bellows and reverse mounts old prime lenses to achieve high magnification ratios. The bellows allows for variable levels of magnification that can be adjusted on the fly (no pun intended). There are two main difficulties when working with such high magnification: light and depth of field (DOF). Mounting the lens in reverse reduces the amount of light that comes in by about 3 stops. In order to let more light in, a large aperture must be used, which limits the DOF. The depth of field decreases as the focus distance is shortened, so this setup involves paper thin DOF. To get around the lack of light, an off camera flash with a diffuser is used. Shahan usually shoots handheld since bugs are unpredictable, so exact placement of the focal plane is nearly impossible. He solves that problem by taking many many images at a time. Then, he picks the image that is in best focus, or he chooses several images and combines them using a method called focus stacking. Focus stacking combines several images by keeping the parts of the image that are most in focus resulting in an image that has greater DOF.
I’d like to thank Thomas Shahan for allowing me to use his images in this article as well as for providing so much information about his technique for nerdy folk like me to enjoy. Please check out his photostream and be sure to watch some of his videos. They are just as impressive if not more so than the photos.
The Flickr Blog has a great collection of old winter sports photos, including the one above. This application finally provides justification for the invention of the tie clip. You should feel like a wimp if you use a tie clip to keep your tie out of your soup instead of using it to keep your tie out of your face while racing down an ice chute at 90 mph.
Seriously, though. Wouldn’t you rather watch this kind of event on TV this weekend than the Super Bowl? I know I would. Super Bowl? More like, Super Boring.
Bryan Takes Pictures 