The fruit bowl that became a set of mosaics

I have been testing out my new camera body, a Pentax 20D, it has a remote controlled shutter release and an “expanded” dynamic range. I figure a strongly lit “still life” would let me test both. I also put on my long lens set it in macro and took a sequence for muti-image stitching later. The photos where beautiful but I ended up having some fun afterwards transforming the set into some wonderful mosaics.

RAWing or not?

I am often asked why I don't take all my photos in RAW format. I do take a few, usually experimental shots in RAW format often enough but generally I just take JPEG. Originally the main reasons were the vastly bigger file size and the limited number of programs I used that could read the early propriety formats (different for each camera manufacturer and often even different camera models by the same camera manufacturer) and the fact that the conversion and tweaks took time (actually it was tedious wasted time when trying to review a large set of shots). Further a lot of "part time" photo enthusiast just got scared off trying to even understand what RAW was and how to use it.

Fundamentally RAW is a little deeper than a digital negative, the analogy adobe are using to sell their "proposed standard" DNA RAW file format. RAW files are in my view more like the undeveloped image, a full dump of exactly what the  camera image sensor read. It is like an undeveloped film waiting for you to process it. Because there are a number of different sensors used in today's digital (CCD and CMOS) and many different configurations of these it is no surprise that the dumps of the data read from the sensors are different. The DNA format does require a little conversion processing but no where near as much as a JPEG (or TIFF) file.

Having access to the "pre-developed" image does give powerful software, like Photoshop CS or Lightroom, the ability to "fix" existing shots by reprocessing them. However I suspect most new digital cameras users will not see these improvements or even know how to do such post processing. To them RAW files are still just way bigger, require special conversion and/or processing, compare with the compact, quick and easy to use jpeg format that is compatible with most software, website, photo processors. 

Shooting in RAW format is likely to remain the domain of the perfectionists and those that loved working in the darkroom, for a little while to come. Those with less time to fiddle will lag back in JPEGland.

The one area that might just force DNA's popularity is in the long term archiving. Future generations may greatly appreciate that they can easily enhance your old photos using a fancy new piece of software or service. The problem being that will so many different formats around, will yours still be processable in the future? (probably not!) So converting now to a "standard" RAW format could be desirable. Adobe have recognized this and provided a free format converter(Windows, Mac) Their logic being if you camera doesn't itself support the DNA format you can easily convert to this format now and possibly "future proof" your digital photos.

More on geotagging

David Crandall, of Cornell University has analysed the 35 million geotagged photos already uploaded to Flickr and produced a gallery of photos organised into maps, created accurate global and city maps and identified popular snapping sites.

I have been geotagging a selection my photos since back in 2005 and was an early member of the flickr geotagging group/community. This is probably the best place still to find out how to tag your photos and what's new. Even if you don't use flickr other sites like picas web albums and photobucket let you make your own maps.

selfportrait of the artist

 

Cropping & Rule of Thirds

I was scanning some older photos, colour prints, taken on film on a Cannon compact camera. Whilst this one was a fraction ”misty” I saw it had potential but falls down, as so many holiday snaps do, compositionally.

“Good composition gets the viewer to look into the picture, not scan across it”

    ….quote from my upcoming workshop

Cropping is one of the easiest ways to improve the composition of a photo, and typically that means identifying the areas of interest, and placing then is a good place for the eye to settle. The rule of thirds is often quotes a the gospel for photographers, but it is just a simplification of the golden ratio used by artist for centuries. The idea is to put the most important compositional elements, like the shore of the lake , the villa and the silhouetted trees, onto or straddling the imaginary lines dividing the image into thirds. Some digital cameras now even come with a mode to display these lines on the LCD “viewfinder”.

Yes I used the picasa retouch (cloning tool) to hide the date stamp.

developing my rock art

I finally got around to joining YouTube not that I have gone over to the dark side, like replacing my SLR with a movie camera, no I just wanted to start showing a slideshow/documentary style thing of the creation on one of my rok art pieces, it was all made in picasa movie option. It tells the story from a future geological perspective, after the sea level rise

What does “internet friendly” mean?

It was time for a family member to get a new camera, and there are so many around. It just had to be a camera and take nice pictures (and be easy to use and see the pictures), which narrowed the range down to a few hundred compact cameras! There is a pretty good range available now and most are not so expensive. After looking around for a camera that used SD cards (a card standard I like), used standard batteries and had a decent screen that was readable in sunlight, I was leaning towards the Pentax E60. So we choose the Fujifilm Finepix Z30, reason: it comes in a hot pink colour!

What got my attention first was the sticker that announced it was internet friendly. What the heck does that mean? I scoured the manual (which is in PDF format on one of the two CDs supplied). The interent is mentioned only 8 times and as shown below it warns you, you will have to pay for internet, actually it is very legal about it “the user bears all applicable fees”. Like most other compact cameras it comes with a USB cable that connects it to a computer, and presumably then onto net friendliness.

It did give me an excuse to revisit an old theme of the self referencing screen wallpaper.

The little pink camera is already well loved, takes great photos (and movies)

Emailing photos

Digital cameras have advanced in photo resolution at a much greater rate than the average Internet connection capacity (and remember RuddNet is pretty much still a pipe dream). Further many companies and ISPs have limits on attachment size, frequently this is only a couple of megabytes and that might only be enough for half your photo! So here are a couple things you might want to considered and set up before you start emailing lots of photos from your new camera to aunty Flo with her old (and very slow) bigpond dial up internet connection.

Go JPEG

Most camera will allow you to take photos in JPEG format (the file will end in .jpg or .jpeg) or the camera manufacturer will normally bundle software to convert its .RAW format to jpeg. This jpeg format has two very important advantages

1. Compressable, there is a trade off between image file size and quality but 10:1 compression can normally be achieved with with little perceptible loss in image quality.
2. (almost) Universally supported for the format by software (especially file & photo viewers, browsers)

Photographing directly in jpeg format will mean you can fit many more photos on your camera card.

Use a photo email feature

Most new digital cameras (and that includes mobile phones with cameras) come bundled with software, to upload, manage and do some editing of photos. Usually there will be an option to email photos and a ability to select the size to email, it may called share rather than email and it may involve reading the dreaded manual, assuming you kept it.
Alternatively you can use tools probably already on your computer, for example in vista when you just click on an image in a normal explorer view, you will see the menu bar change to include and email option  If you click on this you will get a submenu to select the photo size for the attachment. Usually the small (800 by 600 pixels) is more than adequate for an emailed photo and the files size is likely to be less that 300kb.
If you are still using XP you can get the same feature by downloading the Windows Live Photo Gallery. The most recent version of which gives you some fairly nifty formatting features inside Windows Live email so that the photo is part of the email, much more aunt or grandma friendly, instead of as an attachment that must be downloaded and/or opened separately.
However I prefer to use the excellent email feature within picasa, which lets you edit and crop the image and just press the email button. You can both select a number of default formats and size or choose between using your default email and gmail on the fly. If you have outlook you can also create a HTML story book (ie photos are embedded in the email rather than as attachments.)
Having shown you all this one thing I definitely don't recommend is resizing your photo directly, because you can so easily accidentally overwrite the original and lose a lot of detail if you ever wanted to get a blow up printed at a later date.

pearl beach multi-image panorama

I have been forced back to my old faithfull olympus, but the panorama feature semed to be malfunctioning so I did this in autosketch. I still like the extra wide angle

Not good

Is it sadder that I have just worn out my third pentax body in 30 years, or that I still have the other two?

My much loved K100D gave out last week when I was taking some shots for the virtual gallery try-out. One moment I took the card out and loaded the photos onto my computer (via picasa import as usual), I put the card back and turned on the camera and a momentary flash of the familiar then nothing, and nothing is what has been happening ever since. The real problem is I can not longer find a place around here to get it fixed (the typical camera shop says, “Is it under warrantee?” “ No” “Ok, it will be cheaper to buy a new one”. The K100D is just three years old, the others lasted better (ok the second film body is still officially working, if I keep the rubber band around it to stop the back opening unexpectedly). I would so dearly like to get it fixed at a reasonable cost

well not exactly free anymore

At first I thought the email from kodak may have been an april fool’s day joke, or maybe a phishing scam, sadly it was neither. I have stopped uploading to easy share long ago, but I did get a few photos printed and was happy enough with the services, Now the Free service isn’t quiet as free anymore, from now on if you don’t make a purchase to won’t have free one line storage. Once upon a time the brilliance of Kodak easy share was sharing your family and special occasion snaps with your friends & family in such a way they could also order prints, not anymore!

Special Note to Members: In order to maintain free storage of your images on the Site, you need to make purchases totaling at least $4.99 or $19.99, depending upon your storage usage, at least once every 12 months.

extract from the fine print in kodak’s easy share gallery terms

There is no need to panic there are plenty of other “free” on-line galleries, try picasa web album, flickr, photobucket, they also allow security for relatives and friends, download photo and purchase prints

an insight into my art

There is a bigger perspective to my art, than what you might just see in here. This Xmind mind map will let you get started (and keep track of things I am interested in and doing).

DestoryFlickr

I have really been having my problems with flickr of late, actually just using it via Telstra's Next-G (more on that below), but this isn't a hate campaign its a new application. DestroyFlickr, by DestoryToday, is an alternate way to view and share flickr content, based on Adobe AIR so it will work on Windows, Mac & Linux. It is slick, displaying photos on a dark background, offers drag & drop uploads and downloads and seems fast, but to be honest it does not offer anywhere near the functionality of Flickr.com, but it is worth a look.

So what are my problems with Telstra Next-G? I am a moderator for the VIC/TAS thread of the Australian Photographers!!! group and each fortnight I need to access the competition thread and tally the scores. Sound easy enough BUT it is virtually impossible if I am trying to access flickr via my Next-G wireless modem. It just times out, disconnects, hangs half way through displaying the page or other frustrating misbehaviour, and all this frustration is expensive. Whilst flickr may not be bandwidth efficient I do suspect the issue is a simple technical issue in Next_G, because so many other web applications work beautifully. But how do I get anyone to listen when the problem is not on telstra's support scripts? Well I given up ringing telstra support anymore I just don't have hours of my time to waste and pay even more in phone bills.  It seems I'm not the only one seeing these problems. Telstra Business actually has its own photostream on flickr showing happy customers logging in, ok its just three of them and I'm not one of them. So I'm sure they must have noticed the issues by now!

A virtual gallery

I'm experimenting with ways to create a virtual on-line gallery, which the viewer can browse through in their own time. This is just a trial based on microsoft''s photosynth with some of my recent "rock art". If you have already used photosynth click on the link to download the driver for your browser.

patterns in the mist

It was dark, wet & cold but the patterns in the stray at the base fo a waterfalls made a wonderful abstract composition

very disillusioned with blogger & google

I still think blogger is a good tool and a wonderful way to record what I am doing and thinking about my photography as I go along. Best part it is free.

However, trying to maintain a some enthusiasm and pride in what I am doing is becoming very tedious.

1. I am finding my photos used in a lot of place without any acknowledgement to me, presumably that have been found in google images or flickr. Ok I am putting copyright noticed into many of the likely to be stolen images now, but I would rather trust people just to acknowledge me. I actually like the creative commons approach to sharing.
2. At least two groups of "camera reviewers" steal my blog posts, copy and paste the lot and repost it as their own in sites. in total. The moral problem here is I am not acknowledged and the sites involved use google's own ad sense, so google is potentially rewarding them for stealing my and many other bloggers work.
3. I have a very persistent "hacker" automatically posting gibberish Chinese comments as me (they are reported as if they were comments by me, which they are not). They have numerous links in the comments. I haven't checked where the links go and I strongly advise you not to follow any of those links, i'm present certain no good lurks there.
4. The final staw is, have you ever tried to report any of these or similar problems to google? The silence is deafening.

These are not really problems I should be wasting my time on, or am I naive in thinking they are issues google should be addressing? In the very least I would like someone in google to stop paying those who steal my post and if they want to pay someone give that revenue to charity.

What a contrast

I am returning home from New Zealand to bush ravaged Victoria, and the fires are still burning (seems like everywhere). Such a contrast

click, click, click

 
Today was bright and sunny, so attempting to photograph the dappled light in the beech forest, on the Kepler track, gave a very contrasty result. The strong light is appealing but the shadows are dark and featureless and the spots of light burnt out. So I set my camera to bracketting, for two reason. Firstly it might give me a better ideas of the right EV adjustment (but judging this by comparing small images on the LCD screen outside is not really a reliable approach), Secondly it gave me the opportunity to post process the set of photos as a HDRi image (using the three exposures to get detail into the murky darks and/or washed out whites). I had plenty of card capacity (doing the three clicks at every photo soon eats up storage space if you are not careful) so most of my photographing in the forest was bracketted
To keep everything simple while I travel I just have picturenaut on a memory stick, so I have been relying on its fairly automatic tone mapping selection. However they were in my opinion changing the “greenness”. Ok, I know some parts of Lord of the Rings was filmed nearby but the green was just not what I had seen. The remedy lay in the gamma adjustment settings, I change that from computed gamma to none. Suddenly my forest photos was beautifully lit again without the artificial green glow.

Mirror Lake

rainforest HDR

Stream just below the glow worm cave