Porch: 1/20s f/8.0 ISO400 10mm 0ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF-S 10-22mm

A week and 2474 photos later, and I have some material to process. One of the lenses I rented was the Canon EF-S 10-22. It's an interesting lens, but takes some getting used to. You've got to have something to fill the expanse of space it can cram onto the sensor.

I used it for 288 of the 2474 photos I took, 146 at 10mm and 59 at 22mm. 196 were less than or equal to 17mm.

I rented from Borrow Lenses, taking advantage of pick up at a San Jose camera store.

Tags: Canon, 30D, Lenses, Photography

I've been looking into the practicality of making photo books. There's no single winner as far as I have been able to make out, and I have not yet actually tested any of them. But here's what I believe the practical options are:

Lulu is optimized for text: books with words and some pictures. You send them a PDF and they print you a book. But not any PDF will work: in particular Pages PDFs are shunned. There are ways around this restriction but they cost money and/or are fiddly. Lulu's prices are OK.

Blurb is optimized for photos: books with photos and some words. Their prices are very good, and the quality is good. You have to use their tool, BookSmart, to create the book and upload it. It's template-driven and drag and drop. However, it's written in Java, is incredibly slow, and has enough interface and font quirks to drive a person batty. The templates are large in number, but ultimately limiting because they are it. These are not starting-points. Either the photos go exactly there, or they don't go. The good news is that it can only get better, but to date progress has been slow.

Aperture's and iPhoto's books are expensive and the tools limited, so I didn't seriously consider them.

Everyone else's solution is either aimed at a specific market. MyPublisher is extremely dumbed down and doesn't match what I want to do. But they have a great native Mac application called BookMaker.

I'll probably go for Blurb if I do make a book, but it will be on my terms. I'll design my book using Pages or something and then only as a last step put it all into BookSmart. Another option is to upload full-resolution JPEGs of pages designed outside of the application, so I may use that technique sparingly.

But first I need content.

Tags: Photography, Books, Aperture

The Gallery of Sawn In Half Cameras also includes lenses. Now I know why my 70-200 f/2.8L IS is no darn heavy.

Tags: Photography, Hacking, Lenses

I'm back from WWDC 2008 and catching up with real life. It was fun, busy, tiring, informative, interesting, and packed with people engrossed in their laptops. I met a whole bunch of people who I knew online, as well as seeing many of the regulars from Cocoaheads. I've posted 94 photos at SmugMug, several of which are posted here.

Keynote

The keynote is of course very popular. I arrived two hours before the start and was about halfway back on the right. Here is the view I had of the procedings:

Seeing the real thing was great, but unless you have a good seat there is much real but not very much thing. Lots of excitement, but I was more interested in the state of the union talks that occurred later in the day.

Al Gore was at the keynote, and I snapped a photo of him in his way down on the escalator:

Room and Board

I kept the cost down by not staying in San Francisco and spending >$250 a night. Instead I commuted from the south bay, which, while inexpensive at $10.50 for a round-trip BART ticket, took out four hours from each day, much of which came at the expense of sleep. Finding parking at Fremont BART can be hard if you don't get there before 7am, so that pretty much controlled my timetable. By Thursday I was way too tired and went home early, so missing the bash.

The food was pretty decent, especially considering that there were more than 5000 people there. Pre-packaged cold lunches were served at midday, and there were things to nibble on several evenings. Breakfast materials (doughnuts, bagels, etc) were there at 8am. The afternoons saw snacks and fruit arrive. Coffee and tea was available much of the time. I brought extra food and ate it all.

Sessions and Labs

The sessions themselves were very well done. The sound systems were excellent, so I could sit anywhere and hear perfectly well. Many of the seats had power strips attached to the legs so I could juice up my MacBook while I listened. The speakers, typically engineers and others working directly with the technologies, spoke and presented well. The product evangelists and other engineers were on hand for the Q and As that followed each session.

I didn't get a great deal out of the labs, but that was mainly because I didn't have specific questions or problems, and had no app to show. The User Interface lab was completely sold out. The people in the labs rotate each day, so I only found out too late that I had missed the experts for a certain subject in the Graphics and Imaging lab and those that were there could not help me. So it pays to ask exactly what their schedule is day to day.

Cocoaheads

Tuesday night was Cocoaheads in the Apple store and it was packed:

There were a selection of indy Mac developers present talking about their companies and applications. Scott Stevenson has more information on his blog. Unfortunately there were no recordings made.

Infrastructure

Wireless networking was everywhere and hard ethernet ports were in several areas. On only a couple of occasions could I not get a signal. The infrastructure could sustain an awful lot of traffic: the only time I had to wait for anything was when I needed a 1.6GB installer and found that almost everybody at my table was downloading it at the same time.

Everything Else

There were non-Cocoa happenings too. Juggling took place on level two most days:

and there were many informal groups getting together and chatting.

The Apple Design Awards went quickly as they had a lot to cram in: Mac and iPhone this year. The little cubes light up when you touch the top, as you can see in this photo:

It was a pretty good place for photography, but only if you like taking photos of geeks with laptops and have the equipment to contend with low light and busy backgrounds.

Light levels and color vary enormously. I lugged a backpack with 20 lbs of computer and camera gear with me all week and got some pretty good photos. However I was constantly changing lenses. My favorite lens was the 85mm f/1.8 (about 135mm equivalent). I can see why people with full-frame cameras rave about the 135mm f/2L: it's a very useful length and aperture. The only lens I took but didn't use was the 50mm f/1.8. I used the 17-55 f/2.8 instead. A longer focal length would have been useful at times, but probably not worth the weight.

Next Year

Will I be back in 2009? Probably yes. It's expensive (especially since I'm self-employed) and a lot of work, but it's definitely part of being serious about development with Cocoa and Objective-C. I've come back with all sorts of ideas and a head full of knowledge that I would not have had otherwise.

Tags: WWDC, Apple, CocoaHeads, Laptop, Photography, Juggling, Al Gore

Stripey Hat: 1/160s f/9.0 ISO200 120mm, Canon 30D, Canon 70-200 f/2.8L IS

I'm treating WWDC as a photography opportunity as well as a Cocoa opportunity. I'll be taking a collection of my own lenses, plus two that were leant to me for the week. I don't have a flash (except the one built into the Canon 30D), so I'll be challenged by low light.

The 80mm f/1.8 is equivalent to about 135mm, good for across the room shots of people, and the longest lens I am planning in taking. The 24mm f/1.4L is equivalent to about 38mm and will be good close up. Neither of these have image stabilization, so although they will give me low-light capability, it will be blurry if I can't hold the camera still enough. That's why the 17-55 f2.8 IS may be there as well: it's the widest and has IS. I'll also carry the 50mm f/1.8. It's plastic, very small, light, and inexpensive.

Since I'm commuting each day, I'll be able to switch equipment often, ditching the things I find myself not using. It's possible I'll lug the very heavy 70-200 f/2.8L IS around, but I'll need a very good reason. Other than camera and lenses I'll take nothing special. Maybe a tiny tripod, but otherwise just things like spare cards and a spare battery, download cable and a card reader. I'll be processing the images on my Macbook using Aperture and uploading to SmugMug when I get a chance.

Tags: Photography, WWDC, Lenses, Canon

I'll be at WWDC next week, commuting daily from the South Bay. My iChat handle is bagelturf@mac.com, so feel free to say hi. I'm likely to be wearing one of these shirts, so you might be able to pick me out from the crowd of five thousand or so attendees.

I'll be there with my camera gear, including two lenses that were loaned to me by a friend, so there should be plenty of photos that week. Check my WWDC 2008 gallery for updates.

Predictions? A tough call as always. I have an almost 100% record of being wrong, but here goes:

1. 3G not only in the new iPhone, but in all new laptops from here on

2. A switch to LLVM as a base for all code compilation

3. A paid software update service for developers -- just like Software Update, but with more bells and whistles

4. A new .Mac offering scalable back-end services to iPhone developers

Tags: WWDC, Photography, Wild Guesses, Apple

Apple is starting a world tour for Aperture on March 5th. I plan on being at the San Francisco event on March 26th.

Tags: Aperture, Learning, Apple, Photography

RAW 2.0 on the left, RAW 1.1 on the right. What happened to my yellow?

That's a screen shot of a zoomed-in pair of versions of the same master. That's a startling difference. Neither has been adjusted in any way. And I was unable to get the yellow back without affecting the rest of the image. That may be my lack of understanding of the myriad controls, but I thought it would be straight-forward.

Update: The consensus among the comments is that RAW 1.1 is the culprit here and that I should be glad the bug has been fixed.

I am also noticing that Aperture now sharpens thumbnails. That has the effect of making some images look harsher than they really are when viewed in the browser. Again, RAW 2.0 on the left, RAW 1.1 on the right:

But RAW 2.0 does better on the highlights by default.

Tags: Aperture, RAW, Photography, DSLR

The Fail Blog consists of pictures of things gone wrong and the word FAIL added. Some are set up, some are likely fake (as above), but most are real situations that just ooze failure of one sort of another.

Tags: Photography, Fun, Failure, Accidents, Bone-Headedness, Captions, Novices

Juza has a very practical guide to macro and nature photography at Juza Nature Photography.

Tags: Photography, Macro, Bugs, DSLR

There has been a great deal of speculation as to what will be in the next release of Aperture -- even as to whether it will be called 2.0 or 1.6 -- but now there are rumors starting to appear. I saw this one on DPReview. It's a typical "I have a friend of a friend whos hair cutter knows this guy who overheard two people on a bus talking" kind of rumor. So there is no way to know how accurate it is. There are so many things that could be changed or improved, that practically any subset would be believable. You can even see how people were thinking a while back at MacPredict (the site appears to no longer be updated).

What does appear to be unanimous is that either Apple will announce something at PMA this week, or thousands will defect to Lightroom. Apart from some bug fixes, it has been an awfully long time since any significant changes were made: 1.5 was released September 29, 2006 according to Wikipedia.

Fraser Speirs posted his wishes for Aperture a short time ago. And Eric Barzeski made his wish-list known a year ago and is itching for information. Sören Nils Kuklau has a list that he posted last year. Inside Aperture speculated some time ago, around the same time that Ed Fladung had a go. Chuqui hoped for 2.0 before Christmas 2007, but was disappointed.

My needs are modest, so I'm wishing for things like better speed and better keyboard navigation. For the product, I think the best thing that could happen would be a flexible plug-in architecture so that the application could be expanded by third parties. I would also like to be able to have Aperture handle all media types, not just photos, and to have a lightweight application that can read the database independently. That would allow plugins and automation scripts run at the same time as Aperture, so not interrupting workflow.

We shall see. I hope it's not Leopard-only because I'm still on Tiger, waiting for a compatible update to SuperDuper.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Wild Guesses, Photography, Anticipation

Digital Photography School shows how to shoot light trails. Some good advice on exposure, location, and other technique.

Tags: Photography, Light Trails, Learning, DSLR

A tree against the sky. By enhancing the colors in the original I was able to get some blue, yellow, and red into the image. It needs cropping.

1/3200s f/6.3 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50 f/1.8, adjusted

Dead tree in the form of a leaf. This leaf was blown by the high winds onto the wet window and stuck there. A dreary day, so this took some enhancement to look interesting.

1/250s f/2.8 ISO800 55mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, EF 17-55 f/2.8 IS, adjusted

This is dead tree converted into card and printed with a puzzle laying on more dead tree. You can't tell from the pieces, but this puzzle featured about 20 birds.

1/30s f/4.0 ISO400 44mm, Canon 30D, EF 17-55 f/2.8 IS, adjusted

A tree shape on the ceiling of a restaurant.

1/50s f/6.3 ISO800 28mm -1ev, Canon 30D, EF 17-55 f/2.8 IS, adjusted

Tags: Photography, Color, Trees

There is a Wikipedia for cameras: Camerapedia. One of the things they list is my first SLR: the Olympus OM-30. The on-off switch is on the right in this image: protruding part on the ring around the film rewind knob. This meant that it was really easy to turn the camera on as you were putting it back into its case, and so completely run down the five very expensive button cells that it needed to operate.

Tags: Photography, Canon, Nikon, DSLR, History, Museum, Interesting Stuff, Olympus

My style of photography seems to prefers a dominant color in the frame. I'm catching up with photos taken in the last month.


Caustic Drips: 1/1000s f/5.0 ISO400 200mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, adjusted, cropped

These are drips on a gutter two stories up. I like how the metal crystals are visible and the light forms spikes as it passes through the water. If you turn it upside down it's almost impossible to figure out what it is because so little in the image is recognizable and the shading is unexpected.


Sunlit Gulls: 1/2500s f/5.0 ISO400 200mm -0.3ev, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, adjusted

I adjusted this image of gulls flying overhead to keep the detail on the wing and other brightly-lit areas but did not attempt to brighten the rest of the image. That draws the eye to the bright parts and provides something to look at when it gets there.


Twisted Cloud: 1/125s f/3.5 ISO100 173mm, Canon 30D, Canon EF 70-200 f2.8L IS, unadjusted

I'm not sure what cause the odd twisted cloud to form, but its shadow was projected onto the underside of the cloud by the setting sun. The colors were very vivid and required no adjustment. The 30D had no problem focusing on the clouds, but I found later that the clouds were actually out of focus and the tree was in focus.

Tags: Photography, Color, Sunset, Drips, Birds

That is The Waiter. For The Cheater, The Zombie, and others, see this page on English Russia. Oh and there are also picked cell phones, bikes on top of cars, and more. Plenty of odd things and unusual photos if you dig around a little.

Tags: Russians, Fun, Photography, Interesting Stuff

Vector Magic is a web service at Stanford University that converts bit-mapped images into vector-images. Here is a rendering of an EPS generated by the service that was originally a photograph:

A close-up of the nose:

And here is the original photo:

To use the service, go to http://vectormagic.stanford.edu/ and upload an image of some sort. Answer the questions, make some color selections, and the computers do their stuff. The processing for the image I uploaded took about five seconds. Once the vectorization is complete you are given the opportunity to reprocess or edit the image before downloading it:

I can see this being very useful for creating new scalable artwork out of old bit-mapped logos and graphics. For photos it has a somewhat limited appeal, but could be used for artistic effect that goes beyond simple posterization.

Tags: Photography, Images, Vectorization

See how the photo was taken by watching this YouTube video. It wasn't so much taken as composed: five separate elements were shot a number of times to get the right images, then those integrated and tweaked with Photoshop.

Credit goes to Brandon Voges at Bruton Stroube. To see more of his work, click on Portfolio, then select his name from the list of photographers.

Tags: Photography, Photoshop, Paintball

At the COBA meeting on Wednesday evening at Stanford University I saw a demo of the Eye-Fi wireless SD card given by Ziv Gillat of Eye-Fi. The card (except for its color) looks and feels just like a regular 2GB SD card, but actually contains a processor and a complete wireless interface.

You take photos, they go onto the card, and then the card sends them to your computer via your wireless base station. Their software can then automatically upload to Eye-Fi's servers and then pass the images on to popular photo sharing sites. It all happens immediately and fairly quickly. Wireless encryption is supported.

So far they only have an SD card product, but you can use an adaptor to fit it into a CF slot. The card cannot do ad-hoc networking, so to use it with a laptop rather than a base station you need a portable wireless router. And the current implementation is JPEG only. It's clearly aimed at consumers rather than pros, but it is easy to see how a more sophisticated product for pros could be developed.

Cost? $990 per ounce.

Tags: Photography, COBA, Wireless

From the site:

The rules are simple: I put the self-timer on 2 seconds, push the button and try to get as far from the camera as I can.

He also has pictures on Flickr.

Tags: Photography, Running, Dutch

Photon is a RAW workflow utility designed to do one thing well: let me view and sort my images quickly before I import the good ones into a more heavyweight tool like Aperture or Lightroom.

As soon as I put my card into a reader, Photon starts reading and converting RAW files, putting thumbnails into the area on the left. I can start working with images right away: no need to wait for the download to finish. Photon maxed out both my CPUs as it downloaded at about 7MB per second from my USB card reader.

Across the top are stacks: general purpose bins for images. The currently selected stack populates the thumbnail pane, so clicking on a different stack shows me a different set of images. Each card initially goes into its own stack.

To process my images I scroll through the thumbnails with the left and right arrow keys and restack the images using whatever criteria make sense for me. Each stack has a single-key short-cut, called a hotkey (the numbers 1 and 2 in the screen shot above). I can reassign these to any keys I like. 7, 8, 9, X might relate to ratings. I could add a stack called T for trash and another called P for print. If I were shooting a wedding I could assign hotkeys for different locations or people. There is no need to drag and drop images, just pressing the hotkey moves the image to the stack assigned to that key and shows the next image in the viewer. I can process 1000 images with only 1000 key presses this way.

Zooming is simplicity itself: I click on the image and it zooms to 100% with the click point at the center:

I let go, and it returns to a scaled view. To make zooming persistent I can move the switch bottom right.

Once I have my images sorted, I am ready to export the images to disk. Since many of my images have no value and were either moved to a junk stack or skipped over, I only save some of the stacks. I can save the original RAW, or opt to have Photon convert to JPG, TIFF, or a number of other formats. Once done, I am ready to import my surviving images into Aperture or another application or process them further, maybe adding GPS data or keywords.

I found this 1.0 release of Photo to be stable and fast. There are a few rough edges to the interface and a need for refinement in some areas. Photon is short on features -- but that's good. It does what it claims to do well, and there is plenty of functionality that can be added later once customers start telling Green Volcano what they would like to see. The demo version does everything except save stacks.

Tags: Review, Photography, Applications, Aperture, Lightroom, Speed, RAW

Birthday Cake: 1/800s f/1.8 ISO800 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, cropped, unadjusted

It appears that the retro photo equipment fetish is in full swing. Fraser Speirs is posting about his experiences with the 50mm f1.8, and commenting about John Gruber, Dan Benjamin, James Duncan Davidson, and Bill Bumgarner.

I have this very inexpensive lens on my Canon 30D (1.6 crop factor), it's really an 80mm lens to me.

How do I find it? It's very light, almost non-existent compared to the other monsters I have. I use it when I need to take pictures in little light and have the freedom to move around, like in the birthday cake example above. The only light is from the candles, and I exposed that at 1/800s. I used a high ISO to get a high shutter speed because I wanted to make sure that the blowing out would not be a blur. I was taking pictures before and after in room light and ISO 800 was good for that too.

I can get my 52mm polarizing filter on this lens that I have tried to use on my Canon S3 (it's very hard to use a polarizer on a camera with an electronic viewfinder since I can't really see the effect). I find that darkening the glare with a polarizer does more than that: it increases the the ambient light by compensating with a slower shutter speed. Compare the image below (no polarizer):

Table No Polarizer: 1/50s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

With this one with the polarizer fitted and turned to remove the glare:

Table With Polarizer: 1/15s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

The table looks entirely different since the shutter is now three times slower.

The depth of field control is something I am still learning. It's much more pronounced on large images because the difference between sharp and fuzzy is more easy to see. Here is a photo taken in a restaurant, focussing on the table by the window:

Noodle House: 1/1600s f/1.8 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, adjusted

One catch with the 50mm f/1.8 is that it has no image stabilization like my other lenses. That means I have to take faster exposures than I would normally and/or hold the camera extra steady. This photo was taken in a dim corridor and I was able to get an image without any shake at 1/160s:

Fall Leaves: 1/160s f/1.8 ISO400 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8

I can easily see the difference in sharpness between pictures taken at f/1.8 and other apertures, so if I'm thinking about it, I stop it down for the best image. But I'm usually not thinking in terms of sharpness when I take pictures: I'm concerned more with depth of field or removing movement blur. My other lenses are much more costly and very sharp, so I don't marvel at the sharpness of this lens, though I know some people do. There is plenty to learn.

Tags: Canon, Lenses, Photography, Fetishes, Polarizer, 30D, S3

Justin Quinnell takes photos with his mouth. Or rather with a pinhole camera in his mouth. He'll even sell you one from his website.

Tags: Photography, Teeth

Dog With Toy: 1/1250s f/1.8 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.8, unadjusted

Gary Voth is telling everyone to ditch the zoom that came with the camera and use a 50mm prime instead.

If you are like most photographers just starting out with a new 35mm SLR, chances are it came with one of those ubiquitous 28-80mm (or similar) "consumer" zooms. In the last 15 years these inexpensive lenses have all but replaced the traditional 50mm prime lens as the starter optic for 35mm photographers. The 50mm lens, once the mainstay of 35mm photography, has been all but forgotten by today's photographers.

I'm going to keep my zooms, but I am learning about the primes as well.

Tags: Photography, Lenses

I recently had the opportunity to play with two 50mm Canon lenses: the very cheap f/1.8, and the more expensive f/1.4 (no chance for the f/1.2 yet). The 50mm f/1.8 is mine. The f/1.4 I borrowed from a reader who was kind enough to lend it to me and give me some shooting tips.

Two things struck me immediately: the very bright viewfinder, and the lack of weight. I'm used to zooms, one a very heavy one, so these small primes feel like they don't exist. Being used to zooms means that I tend to frame my shots from one location. With the prime lens I found myself moving all over the place to get the shot I wanted, and of course my shots all had the same perspective, more expressive of a point of view than of a photo of a thing.

The f/1.4 surprised me with the amount of purple fringing it had when wide open -- I guess that's what the f/1.2L is worth the money for. And the shallow depth of field was interesting to experience and something to learn how to use. I can see how people get addicted to its isolating ability.

Here are some examples shot with the 50mm f/1.4. You can see the purple in this one of water shooting out of a grate. This one was intentionally over-exposed.

Water grate: 1/2500s f/2.5 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.4 unadjusted

I can blur the foreground very nicely with the f/1.4 and leave the store sharply in focus:

Le Boulanger: 1/6400s f/1.4 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.4 unadjusted

And I can pick out just the dog I want to in this confrontation:

Big dog: 1/4000s f/1.6 ISO100 50mm, Canon 30D, EF 50mm f/1.4 unadjusted

Another think I liked about the f/1.4 was that I could leave the ISO set at 100 and still be able to shoot in many situations. With my other lenses (f/2.8 max) I have to boost the ISO when the light gets low, and that's just another control to fiddle with. The f/1.4 has good color too.

The 50mm f/1.8 I have now used more extensively. The focusing is slow and not USM, so is noisy. But it is accurate. More about that lens later.

Tags: Canon, Lenses, Photography

Adjusting photos from my trip is not what has been occupying my time: I can tweak three or four a minute and have been using the dark of the evenings to plow through them to the point of being about 80% done. What has been occupying my time is the recent arrival of a Canon 30D, two lenses, and the subsequent photographing of practically everything that reflects light.

Why the 30D? It's about to go obsolete isn't it? Yes it is. The 40D is coming and it almost certainly has more than I need. But the 30D is a very good price right now and it's been shown to be a great, dependable camera. I'm putting the majority of my money into lenses, opting for high quality, large aperture, and image stabilization. This new toy means that I am likely to have somewhat less time for blogging for the near future.

I've also been moving my Canon S3 galleries to SmugMug on my pages at http://bagelturf.smugmug.com/. I'll be posting more photos on SmugMug in my Canon 30D gallery as I get some good ones to share.

Tags: Photography, Blogging, Canon, 30D, SmugMug

Wil Shipley, Brent Simmons, Gus Mueller, and Daniel Jalkut (left to right) answer questions about "going indie" at Cocoaheads held at the Apple store in San Francisco to coincide with WWDC 2007. It was packed. There were at least 200 people there. The speakers were great. Photo credits go to lukhnos.

I recorded the audio for the entire event and hope to have someone clean it up for me next week. I'll then be able to post an MP3 or AAC file for download.

[Update: The audio is available here.]

Tags: WWDC, CocoaHeads, Apple Store, Photography

Canon has announced the Powershot S5 IS and dpreview has the details. It uses the DIGIC III processor, has a hot shoe, and a bigger flip screen. Now 8 megapixels in the sensor.

I have the Canon S3 IS and am planning to replace it next spring. Do I get an S5 or go for an DSLR?

Tags: Canon, S3, S5, Photography, DSLR, Interesting Stuff

As seen on Daring Fireball, Philip Greenspun has a very clear and practical guide for anyone considering buying a digital SLR on his site photo.net. Lots of other useful material on the site to explore as well.

Tags: Photography, DSLR, Buying, Interesting Stuff

Bakari Chavanu is a wedding photographer who posts Aperture tips as short Quicktime movies on his site. The items covered include organizing folders for wedding photography, using full screen mode, and using the tooltips. There is also an iTunes podcast link and an RSS link.

Tags: Aperture, Tips And Tricks, Photography, Podcast

The 3D image on the right was constructed by a computer from the flat photo on the left (it's just a normal photo, but taken with mirrors). Computational photography does this and much more, as described in an article in Science News.

Tags: Photography, Interesting Stuff

I currently have a Canon S3 that is a year old. Next year I expect to replace it with something else (no clue what yet), but if I were in the market right now, I would be looking at the Olympus SP-550 UZ. That's the ultra-zoom camera with the 18x zoom lens. Dpreview.com now has a full review of the Olympus. The only direct comparison to the S3 comes on page 17 where the resolution charts are shown.

High points for me are that the lens goes wider and longer than the S3 and it takes AA batteries. On the down side, there is no flip-out screen, and it's not all that fast a camera. You can't use sound in a movie if you want to zoom. It does RAW, but I don't believe is supported by Aperture.

Tags: Photography, Olympus, Interesting Stuff

Rob Luxton is cycling that machine 25,000km around China in support of two charities. The web site has some great photos and movies of life in China.

Tags: China, Bicycling, Photography

Canon shows how they make lenses from raw materials and then assemble them into finished products.

Tags: Canon, Glass, Video, Interesting Stuff, Photography

Sensitive Light is the creation of Graham Jeffery. One of his subjects is smoke. How does he do it? Photocritic.org talks to him and finds out.

Tags: Photography, Smoke, Interesting Stuff

I visited Macworld 2007 today. It was very busy all day. I took these pictures with my Canon S3 set to ISO 200 since the light was pretty low.

Many people sat to watch demonstrations of the features of Leopard, the iPhone, Apple TV, and others:

Here are some new Mail features:

Apple TV was on display:

Apple TV is much like Front Row but outputs to your TV instead of the computer screen. It can be synced like an iPod. So another way of thinking of it is as a high definition video iPod with wireless streaming added. The unit has a fat rubber base that does not slip and cannot scratch anything. It gets quite warm during use.

Aperture training was popular:

There were about thirty 24" iMacs set up for the attendees to play with and follow the demo. This is the same model that I use for Aperture. Lightroom was also popular.

The iPhone was displayed like the Hope diamond, with security and plexiglass:


Getting close up pictures was tricky, but possible:



It is smaller than you think it should be and very rounded:

The screen is extremely sharp and crisp. I could read the smallest text. At 160 pixels per inch it is about twice the linear resolution of a regular computer display.

Tags: Macworld, Photography, Canon, S3, Apple TV, iPhone, Aperture, Apple

I get quite a few people visiting this site either looking for photos of the moon, or trying to find out how to take pictures of the moon with the Canon S3.

Here is a 100% crop of one I took yesterday. It's unadjusted, so the image is fuzzy and the colors are wrong:

It was taken at 1/200 f4.5 hand-held at 12x zoom. I took three pictures and all of them turned out good.

The trick to getting a good moon photo with the S3 is to select spot metering. Access the metering choices via the FUNC menu and select Spot. If you turn the camera off and on again it resets to Evaluative, so there is no need to change the setting back.

Set the mode to Aperture priority (Av) and try f4.5 as a first choice (that's the sharpest). Point the camera at the moon and zoom in to 12x. If you can't hold it steady, use a bigger aperture or a tripod.

Here is the same photo after some adjustment in Aperture:

I increased the exposure and the contrast a little, added some highlight control, changed the white balance, and added edge sharpening.

Tags: Photography, Moon, Canon, S3, Aperture

Apple has released another Digital Camera Raw update for PPC and Intel Macs.

Tags: Aperture, Updates, Photography

Many of my best photos (or at least the ones I like the most) are taken in the evening light. I like the color, the angle of the light, and the way that the long shadows cause contrast in a scene that does not exist at other times. This picture story is about using contrast and position to create isolation in an image.

Tags: Picture Story, Photography

Much opinion on Slashdot about DSLRs, SLRs, and Point and Shoot cameras. Not as rabid as it could be.

Although I used to have an SLR, it is now a dust collector following a decade of unuse. I got back into photography in 1997 when the Apple Quicktake 200 came out. Apple gave me one free with a new Mac, and I was soon enthralled with the 640x480 images it put onto 2Mbyte Flash cards. I haven't gone DSLR yet because I don't have a specific photographic need, and without that I would end up much poorer and with a huge bag of lenses. I do want the quality, but the freedom and portability of the Canon S3 fits the bill for now.

Tags: DSLR, Interesting Stuff, Photography

I discovered SuperCal the other day. It's a display calibration utility that does not need expensive hardware. It displays patterns and you move sliders to adjust what you see. It is kind of like Apple's ColorSync Utility, but does a lot more and allows for much more precise adjustment. I tried it on my monitor and it seems to work well.

Tags: Calibration, Interesting Stuff, Photography

When I show this picture to people they say "What is that?" It doesn't resemble anything familiar, although I am sure that some people reading this will recognize it immediately. It is viewed daily by hundreds of thousands of people, but not quite the way I have depicted it. This picture story is about creating something puzzling from something already unusual.

Tags: Picture Story, Mysteries, Photography

NK Guy has a web site with some amazing pictures of Burning Man. There are eight previous years too.

Tags: Photography, Fun, Interesting Stuff

I recently added ten more images to the Canon S3 IS gallery, bringing the total to 126. These are all unmodified, full size, and with EXIF.

If you are new to the S3 or are considering buying one, these should help you see what can be done with the camera alone.

Tags: Canon, S3, Gallery, Photography

This picture tells the story of combining moving my vantage point with cropping to get the image I was after. I am learning that one of the skills of a photographer's "eye" is being able to identify small parts of the total field of view as being complete photos in the raw. The task then is to capture, process, and present so the viewer sees only and immediately what I want them to see.

Tags: Picture Story, Photography

I now have a wide angle lens for my Canon S3, a Raynox DCR-6600PRO. This lens multiplies the focal length by 0.66 without affecting the aperture, allowing the 36 mm equivalent wide end of the S3 to become 24 mm. It has a 52 mm mount and screws into the Lensmate barrel that I already have. This is what it looks like attached to the camera:



In this photo, the start of the Raynox is indicated by the white writing. Also shown is the 72 mm lens cap. I have also posted a Wide Angle gallery which contains photos taken with this lens and some comparison photos of the same scene taken without it.

The lens advertises a usable zoom range with digital cameras of 3x. I was able to get it to focus at zooms out to 8x, but not beyond. At about 6x the quality of the image deteriorates, especially at the corners. It is handy to be able to use some of the zoom range because I can get less wide shots without removing the lens. I can see distortion with this lens, especially if I am close to something with straight lines. And I have to be very careful of lens flare. It flares easily and with an ugly line of circles. It is perfectly usable with the macro and super macro settings.

It is particularly good for chasing kids and pets around and shooting movies. The image quality does not matter so much for movies and the added field of view and exaggerated depth of movement allow me to capture their antics very easily. Indoors it is very useful as well. Even in a confined space I can get far enough back to capture what I want to record. One thing I cannot do is use the flash. A chunk of the image is completely black, caused by the shadow of the front of the lens.

I like it because I can now take pictures like this one that include the close foreground and the horizon:



And I can get some unusual perspectives:



It is great for putting close to the ground and angling up. The pop-out viewfinder of the S3 is essential for this kind of use. And the bayonet mounting to the camera body means that I can pop it on and off quickly. If I am out with this lens I wear a fanny pack so I can put it away quickly and find myself quickly attaching, snapping, and detaching the lens as I walk about.

See example photos with originals and EXIF in the Wide Angle gallery.

Tags: Photography, Canon, S3, Wide Angle

From time to time I will be posting one of my photographs on the front page of the blog with a link to the Picture Stories page. On the Picture Stories page I show the original and final images and describe the circumstances of the image and how and why I got from the original to the final version.

Tags: Picture Story, Photography

Neil Turner in the UK has a great photography web site. It includes a very detailed techniques page on which he details every aspect of a particular shoot.

Tags: Photography

Macworld and others report that Apple is hosting a special event at Photokina September 25th. A new version of Aperture? I certainly hope so.

Tags: Apple, Photography, Interesting Stuff

J. Vincent has a brief photo comparison of the S3 and the 5D: $420 vs. $5000. What does the extra money (and weight and size) get you in terms of images? Examine the images and decide yourself.

Tags: Canon, S3, 5D, Photography

Serpent has some deep sea pictures taken with ROVs as part of an image competition, including the microscopic radiolarian skeleton shown above. See photos here and here.

Tags: Photography, Underwater, Interesting Stuff

You can take some photos of an environment and turn them into little planets like these:
  
There is an HTML version of the page that has links to large images here.

Tags: Planets, Photography, Interesting Stuff

Photos of a flock of about a million starlings in Denmark. Click on the picture at the link for a full-sized image.

Tags: Photography, Starlings, Interesting Stuff