David Hockney’s thoughts on the Art of Seeing

Those coming to the next Sketch Crawl, Sunday 18th November (there is still time to register at eventbrite) might like to view this BBC documentary which covers much of David Hockneys views on photography and the important Art of Seeing. The documentary does run for almost an hour and mainly covers Hockney’s revised inspirations from landscapes and lead up to Hockney’s Bigger Picture series of landscapes. The PhotoWalk/SketchCrawl is based around many of the same issues. So this You Tube is not only a very interesting in itself, it is also great context for the walk.

The harder to look the more you see.

Camera to Instargam via WiFi

I needed a break from the angst of my microsoft upgrade frustrations and the Melbourne weather was being itself and changing dramatically everyf ew minutes and going from decent rain to glimpses of sunshine, perfect for seeing a rainbow. So I had my new Olympus OM-D M10iii and the great little pancake EZ lens all ready to capture its first rainbow. Well that never happened!

A real weather mix #janesweather

A post shared by norm hanson (@normhansonphoto) on Jun 15, 2018 at 12:13am PDT

What really  happened was that towards dusk there was a very brief few seconds where the sun broke through the clouds and the clouds turned beautifully but subtly colour. I just had time to grab my camera and take a few photos and then the colour was gone. Back to more grey clouds and darkness soon set in.  Nice

Then I turned on the Wifi in the camera (a really well thought out implementation) which makes the cameras a private Hot Spot. Started the Olympus Ol.share app on my phone, selected the best photo, downloaded it to the phone and clicked the share to instagram feed. I was straight into instagram and able to upload the above image within a couple of minutes of it being taken. Also I am constantly amazed at how good the Olympus jpeg files are straight from the camera (ie there is no post processing of filters applied just the cropping to a square within instagram.)

Right Place, Right Time … now where is the camera?

I was visiting the New Eastland and there was a lot of special entrainment in each of the mall. These performers dressed in complete black where standing like statues and then moving in an elaborate synchronized dance. Wonderfully creative photo opportunity, but where was my DSLR?

However most of us always have a smartphone in our pocket. So I pulled out my LG Android and suddenly there was a crowd all filming on their smart phones, making it a little difficult to get in the prime position for the best composition. So please excuse the clutter and people in the backgrounds.

   

I have the flickr app on my phone so it also loads the phone capture up to flickr, as private, once I have WiFi connection. Which is a nice feature however when I went to straighten the images in aviary (ie within flickr) I was surprised to find there was no small adjustment rotation, aka straightening tool). These may not be wonderful photos but the are great figure gesture sketch reference photos.

The moral of the story is, don’t miss a good photo opportunity, if you don’t have your regular camera hand use your camera phone.

Right Place, Almost Right Time & Not Quite Right Tools

As I was taking the dusk HDR set for the post below, I noticed a pelican in the last frame gulping down something at a great rate. It was fishing, and very successfully, so I quickly changed over to my telephoto lens. However the pelican was in the shadow and the light was failing, and the pelican moving so much it just became a white blur. I opened up the f-stop and cranked the ISO higher so I still had a exposure time of 1/60th second, but hand holding a long (lens 300mm) is a challenge. Back button focus (which usually helps when trying to pan on moving birds in flight at dusk) didn’t help, mainly because it was difficult to follow the pelicans movement (eg panning). How I wished I was closer (I could have walk around the lake but the pelican may have move on and I would be looking into the light) or had my tripod with me, or that it all happened a little earlier in better light. So I had to do the best I could (and accept that I would not get a perfect photo) just enjoy the moment, use my memory as inspiration and the blurry photos just as reference.

This is a prefect example of my constant message that “Being in the right place at the right time is difficult but being there with the right tools is more important to creativity”

When RAW+jpeg comes in handy

There are times when shootng RAW + jpeg really pays off. I have been attempting some night photography (there was an outside chance of seeing auroa australis but it was cloudy, so nothing) and the camera was still on 1600 ISO and fully open (low F stop). So when I took a photo on the beach in the bright midday sun it was not surprisingly it was burnout. Picasa tried hard to correct it but I figured it was an opportunity to see how onOne 10 handled an overexposed RAW file (a .CR2 in this case). It did reasonable well, I used the Autotone fix in the basic enhance filter and pull back the saturation slider a bit. next was the decision about where to striaghten on the vertical post of the sign or the horizon. The horizon won.

What of that race?

It only seems like a short while ago but it was back in April & May, both flickr and google where re-inventing themselves as the place to store all your photos.  So in June I frivolously started a race to let them do what they wanted (just on my phone). It began simple enough but Google Photos kept administering self-inflicted injuries in the form of upgrades. Too many of them. Mostly that just meant I had to restart the autobackup (or turn off of the upload features to tone down the bandwidth usage). However I now notice the Google Photos logo has gone (I do realize that google have been updating logos and typography) and been replaced by the little green android robot with an obscure title that it is an android app. The underlying app is still google photos but with a screen that is at least a fortnight old and nothing showing for the current phone gallery (it looks like its in hibernation). My original concern that this race might end in tears was perhaps a bit prophetic. I trust you, my readers, have not put all your eggs in the google camp.

For the record the clear winners are Dropbox (which wasn't even supposed to be in the race) and Flickr.

Another “Feature” on Google Photos

Have you notice that google photo have added another feature to the assistant you can’t control called Rediscover the day. Basically its basically the same as the flashback feature in the now extinct everpix. It goes back and reminds you what you photographed back in time (I’ve only seen it do years ago) rather than a particular date. It does seem to do a reasonable job selecting the most infocus and well exposed images from your google photo collection.

I’m not sure that I really see this as much more than a time wasting distraction, because it is simple enough to scan back through the photo and find “all” your photos from that day, or more likely any date you are interested in

The other thing that puzzles me is that this is one feature google hasn’t included sharing.

A bandwidth comparison as the photo upload race continues …

Its no secret that I am disappointed with google photos and particularly in the crippling of picasa’s wonderful sharing capabilities. However I am trying to be fair in the comparison and thus want to try and follow as much detail of the race between google photos and flickr apps on my phone as I can. So here is a comparison of (mobile) data use for last month including the period I was travelling (the light blue area of the usage graph on the right).

In theory the same photos have been uploaded to both services (in practise there are differences BUT more photos have been uploaded to flickr!). So the observation that google photos has used almost three time as much of my bandwidth for essentially the same task, is another stumble for google photos. The better news is both have used only a fraction of the space taken up by the actual photos, so they are obviously doing good things in terms of compression and effective image size/quality trade off.

Google Photo falters at the line … …

I doubt the race is over yet but the google photos, google+, picasa team failed to deliver while I was travelling in two aspects. First the uploading of images from my phone was very erratic (I suspect an automatic upldate to the google photos app didn't load correctly and was queued on my phone for a few days). Second from about Wednesday last week till this morning I have not been able to reconnect into my google account from my laptop. This came about because I was continually getting an error message when trying to upload an album from picasa (the progressive album of my travels for my family) So I log out from picasa and when I tried to load back in I always got a blank pop up screen. Gmail was logged in so I tried logging out and back in …same problem!

I was still seeing google notification of new items in assistant (aka annoy-ant) and could usually click on the link and see those items, but alas trying to look around google photos from there usually resulted in the dinasaur screen (webpage not available). I suspect my lack of access was a google problem.

Thus I abandoned using and of the google team to preview,cull & share and went over to aftershot, perfect photo suite and  lightroom (painfully slower than picasa) and uploaded where necessary to flickr. The flickr app on my phone was slowly keeping pace with phone photos. The tortoise is well ahead now.

Once I got home I was able to, after a few tries (getting the same blank pop up screen) to eventually log via picasa. Then after a few more tries upload some photos in a picasa album to google photo’s collection. Then several on my previous retries showed up and it was clear I was attempting to upload the same thing several times. It took a while to abort everything and start again, then I notice I had a strange email (shown on the right). Whilst I do still have windows explorer on my laptop, I always used google chrome? I can only assume this was picasa (using a microsoft’s internet explorer pop up window). I’m not seeing a very consistent approach here to photo management from google. It appears more like the rabbit is chasing its tail.

Clearly the competition to gobble up all my photos is far from over, Now that I’m back home I found the desktop apps for google’s auto backup and Flickr’s Uploadr had both decided to pop up and ask me (yet again) to start uploading everything. Perhaps that are just letting me know they have been updated. Perhaps that is were the real race is. Needless to say I declined.
 .vs. 

not so fast now

Neither of the two runners are drawing away, in the smartphone photo upload to the cloud race, while I am in low connection - infrequent WiFi land. Not that that worries me, I’m used to uploading photos from my phone regularly. A few images are getting through to the separate clouds, but interestingly they are not the same photos and appear at different times. I haven’t counted exactly but google is probably ahead

The biggest issue I am having is trying to group the one’s I want not those chosen by the google photo assistant (aka annoy-ant). Put simply I don’t like google photo not allowing me to use those new potentially good tools and wasting my time with photo I’d rather overlook. Changing the name from autoawesome to assistant doesn't help, it just annoys me now. Also there is the confusion of terminology now that collections are being used instead of album in some places but not in others, For example if you click on a photo on-line it says add to album but the default view is via collections (aka albums). I also ran into a catch 22 when trying to create a new album from a selected photo when I click on add to album it just showed a dialogue of selected album thumbnails to click on, I could not find anywhere to create a new album of collection on the web version of google photos, BUT it appears you need to be on-line to do it. I had to resort to using the old reliable picasa to create a new album. I can add a collection on the phone and it becomes an album! Its all a bit messy and to be honest I just still prefer to do my organizing in picasa on my laptop

The second issue is how to share the images privately with just nominated family and friends. I have for a long time used picasa web albums (and later google+ albums) to share a progressive updates to an album dedicated to my travels. However some time last year this facility was changes so that the photo could only shared with those that had a google account (which annoyed a lot of people to the point where they would bother looking). Has google photos fixed this? It claims it has. You can get a link you can share and it seems to work. However it is not clear if the collection/album remain private. This combined with the restrictions on staying organized if I’m not spending a lot of time on-line, has made it a bit to difficult to set up my normal progressive album/slideshow just for family. I am still preparing an album in picasa of my travels at the moment but…,. I’m frustrated by try to understand what’s going on with the sharing

This is where flickr is streaking ahead, it is really clear what is private and what is public (via a sharing icon watermark) and when you share private photos you get a link and it clearly states that the photo can only be seen by those that receive the link. If you email this link to a family member only they can see the photo (which is the way it should be) Once again you need to be on-line (ie connected via 3/4G data or WiFi) before you can do any organizing of your uploaded photos in the flickr app. However the phone app and web features are much closer to each other, so you get an integrated feel and they do the job simply and well. I’m actually changing over to using flickr for my progressive trip album to share with family & friends

Mostly Harmless :: The race continues

I gave up trying to stop the new apps on my phone uploading all my photos, well I really just decided to let flickr & google photos tough it out and see which did a better job. Well my findings so far is both are essentially harmless, they don’t seem to interfere with me at all. Google photos has turned itself on from my computer, which is annoying as I try to figure out how to turn it off, and flickr keeps adverting its Flickr Uploadr (just another image vacuum cleaner).

What about difference in the systems otherwise, well there are many similarities. The best way to view the images is clearly as time lines (flickr calls this the camera roll). Both systems attempt to auto classify the images (via adding tags or allowing search by common themes) and flickr seems to be a slightly more accurate here, but neither is really reliable yet. Flickr now has a small filter above any display that lets you select between private and the various public views. I have not found an equivalent in google photos (yet!). Flickr displays everything uploaded in view all mode, but I found google photos often slips into “highlights” mode (where it selects the “best” photos to view). Once again I am going to have to search to find out how to avoid this.

It seems that sharing is the area where the two system differ most. Flickr is miles ahead here, well in my view, following much the same way it has always shared (including direct and simple links to facebook & twitter). For sharing into blog posts (or web pages) I like the snippet of html code approach (see photo link on the left and share dialogue on the right) this approach is tried and reliable. The google photo share option still doesn’t have a link to the actual image, the get shareable link goes to a webpage that then connects to the image so the common methods of linking to am image within embedded HTML won’t work. You have got links back into google plus, facebook and twitter not that I have tried these. So there is no photo directly shared from google photo here (despite blogger being a google product!). So I definitely prefer the turtle here, not that the race is over yet.

My biggest disappointment with google photos is actually to do with the total lack of information about the licencing and sharing of photos when you view your photos. This is really unforgivable since this information can already be associated with each image, and really only needs small icon to be displayed either as watermarks on an image or beside the photo. As I suspected all auto backed up photos are private, to find out I used the special link to view the photos in Picasa Web Album view, and there are the little padlock icons, to indicate the auto backedup photos are private!

SO WHY NOT ALSO DISPLAY THESE PRIVACY ICONS IN THE GOOGLE PHOTO VIEW?

Instant Photos (in a digital age)

I notice target are promoting the very cute little Fujifilm instax mini 8 camera,(its also available in other chain stores like JB HiFi and even officeworks and comes in a range of colours not just pink) which use a polaroid like style of instant picture development system. It is not digital and uses special film (which is freely available and not prohibitively expensive) to create small photos,  …but almost instantly.

Most kids today will not know of the excitement of watching a polaroid develop for the first time and the thrill of getting the physical picture immediately. So there will me a period of wide eyed wonderment! However these one-off small pictures may not be what a modern kid wants since you can’t upload them to instagram, doesn’t come with a phone app etc…

So what has happened to instant photography in the digital era? Most significantly Polaroid (and Kodak) famously stopped production of their instant films. A dedicated group of enthusiast banded together, the are now called the impossible project, bought the polaroid equipment and now produce a range of film (albeit expensive, it works out at about $2 per shot), So the charm of those white bordered prints lives on, at least for some. There is a nice summary of the Status of Instant Photography in the blog post by Cameron Knight.

The other way to get an almost instant prints is to pair up your phone or digital camera via Bluetooth or WiFi to a suitable printer (not all camera and printers allow this but many of the most recent models do). The difficulty is finding a suitably portable printer and this is where polaroid are currently betting their future, they have teamed up with Pogo, which have been producing portable printers that use Zink technology (it stands for zero ink and use special paper impregnated with dye crystals that start transparent but change to colours when heated)

Its about Workspace, not Workflow

Something has been niggling me recently about many of the changes in digital photo management. Its not the move to store everything in the cloud, or the move to lite apps, auto “Awesomeness” versus subscription services. Ok this trends are not thrilling. I realised what it was when I read Matt Kloskowski’s recent post for lightroom killer tips about the difference between managed and referenced photo organizers.Then it hit me I have always resisted as soon as a software suppliers or “experts” starts talking about “the” workflow, because I know that means they want me to follow a set prescription and they want to take total control. As a creative I want to be in control of my work.

This is not the way an artist wants to works. Certainly they need skill to use their tools and media, which will include knowledge of how to use those tools and media to make the marks, forms and create well made images and object. The procedures and layout of their work places are likely be highly personalized. I suddenly realised the issues that are bothering me, at least the artist side, is about workspace not really the workflow. Providing I am able to assemble the tools I need into the space (both physical and computer based) I have at my disposal, I should then be able to craft photos and images in my own special ways. What’s more as an artist I want to be able to do that in a manner that maintains the integrity of the medium. Further I realise that often it does require a quiet space and time to reflect to bring out the fullest potential of an image. So I am starting with the spaces and computer hardware I have been using and rethinking how, when and why they are connected and where and when I should be using each. Next I need to reassemble the tools to best suit my more creative workspace.

Google+ Stories, yet another “leave it to us” offering.

I noticed yet another autoawesome style offering from from google called Stories, which seemed perfect to add into my week of autoawesomeness. It is basically a on-line slide show that has been automatically prepared by yet another google algorithm to automatically select your best shots and is being prompted as a tool to  “brings out the richness of the memories behind the photos” and present them as “beautiful, interactive stories so you can relive your adventures”. Ok thats the hype, what actually happens? Well it does choose your adventures for you. At the moment you can not create your own from scratch! For me this is a very puzzling omission. You can however “tweak” the slideshow by adding or removing photos or videos and can change the cover photo. Thats about it!

 

The stories are supposedly about your “memorable” travelogues and it would appear these stories are triggered by either locations (geotags) information embedded in your photos or by landmark detection tools shifting through your images (and possibly including having your home address already known, eg. typed into google maps). Perhaps I am not the only one just a little concerned about who or what knows I’m not at home and when. 

This is an interesting in the context of a recent program titled “Digital photography: message and memory” on the ABC Radio National’s Series Future Trends. Which presents a different view, the rush to photograph every moment may be leading to us remember less and less. 

So should we leave our memories to google+ to manage?

Not sure I want that, and I worry many will not even realise their real memories have gone and been replaced by something else.

I guess the one redeeming feature is google+ stories (and movies) are private until you share them.

What is the Future of Google+?

Some time ago I wondered What is the future of Picasa?, I’m still genuinely concerned that this popular photo manager might be abandon. What I have seen is Google+ Photo take over some of the roles and all the development effort. With the departure from Google of Vic Gundotra, the force behind all things Google+, some commentators are starting to suggest Google+ is about to be walking dead. There have also been persistent rumours that google+ is a ghost town, and this was one of the main reasons I decided to participate in The Patch, a Google+ community based around a themed photography challenge. I have to admit I am still a bit lost at times in the Google+ world which seems to swirl past without adding a lot, but at the more personal level within a community I see many worthwhile things.

So in the short term I don’t think Google will turn off Google+, they haven’t killed Picasa, or Orkut, but they have bought things like Picnik and abandoned them and they have shut their own Google Reader, Google Knol, Google Buzz and Google Wave, while they still showed promised, all that was missing was a really large take up by users.  I see the suggestion that Google+ will become a platform, rather than a social network, as an important hint. This suggests to me that the individual pieces might become stronger as independent single purpose applications (particularly on mobile systems, like smartphones and tablets) while using a specific set of standard architecture for sharing over the internet (cloud) and with other applications. I really doubt things like Google Hangouts and Google+ Photo will be jettisoned, but I do think they might be set free to fly on their own. I would also be surprised if Google didn’t leverage the authentication issue within the shared web-based world using its google account connection and tools. It might just be the name google+ that disappears, while the most useful software tools within it are likely to remain, and it is likely to be your google account that links them.

PC melt down, was Google+ AutoBackup the Culprit?

Whilst travelling in New Zealand I was able to connect to free but relatively low bandwidth access to the net, eg most libraries offer free WiFi and many cafes have 30minutes free WiFi  etc. With this sort of free access it seem unnecessary to pay the exorbitant data roaming charges of telstra. The downside was the bandwidth is very limited but still. First I noticed it was almost impossible to shut my computer down. Then one night I was on line and loading a number of photos from several cards and the card seemed to hang. Everything on the computer just got slower and slower even when not connected to the net and I had to kill the system and restart it in safe mode. My first step was to get everything backedup to a backpack USB drive I always carry but being so busy I hadn’t done in a few days. Given all the publicity about the heartbleed vulnerability, virus and malware check was by first though but things checked out fine. I even did the full check disk thing, still ok. Then when I reconnected to the net I saw google+ autobackup was waiting to rebackup every photo on my laptop and suggesting it would take 73days! I did check the photo size it was trying to upload and it was still set to standard. If you select the standard size google+ autobackup only stores images at 2,048pixels in maximum dimension, which is fine for web display and small prints, and this size and smaller the storage is free (ie unlimited). I paused Autobackup immediately. However I ended up uninstalling it, rather than restarting it. Mainly because there is no obvious help files that I could find. Magically the slowness of my system and glitches loading photos disappeared. Sadly the specific card reader I was using at the time of the melt down has completely die.

Was Google+ AutoBackup the culprit?

Did I miss it, the highlights and autoawesomes. Not at all I was still able to share, with my family (not the world) via a new album I set up in Picasa.

Following the Morning Shadows

This was really just an experiment in time lapse. The subject is just part of my back porch taken with the 50mm prime lens on my little canon rebel at 5 minute (ish, not to precisely timed) intervals that where just included in my daily photostream, thus uploaded to google+ backup and then I waited expecting a motion AutoAwesome. It came later and it isn't so bad. I wanted to capture the movement of the shadows (and light). There clearly is a lot to do to make something like this wonderful but does add an addition dimension to a simple snapshot, without a lot of effort. the down side is a lack of creative control.

Imposing AutoAwesome filters

I think my concerns about the explosion and mindless application of of "zanny" filters, has triggered a bit of cosmic Karma. After a few days struggle I had finally got google's AutoBackup operation. A short time later

I had a series of notifications congratulating me about the great Auto awesome photos added to my Google+ Photos. A couple of the motion items where probably expected but I must admit I had a chuckle to myself that the automated algorithms in the depth of google has choosen an out of focus image of a cormorant taking off to add a falling snow effect to the scene. Its summer here in Australia, and despite being a bit overcast its not that cold. How do I turn off this AutoImposing?

Last Days for those Christmas Photo Gifts

I have been bombarded by a lot of email promotions related to personalized Christmas Photo Gifts over the past week. If you look around there are some good discounts (from free postage, which means slow, to half price) on selected items available right now but they may not last into next week. Anyway it is time to act now if you want your creations ready to give at Christmas.  Probably the most common photo gifts are calendars and they are pretty easy to set up these days via on-line services. In simple terms the quality and price are intimately related, spend a bit more and you will get thicker paper, perhaps be able to insert photos in the date cells (eg. to identify family birthdays) or have more control over the layout. Having said that there are a number of good templates around and once you have selected 12 (or 13, one for the cover) decent photos you will probably be able to set up the calendar and order it within 10 to 20 minutes, including uploading time. $20 to $25 seems to be the going price for a monthly per page wall calendar printed on decent card stock and spiral bound. Remember when you order on-line you will have to pay shipping, anything from about $8 for standard (14 days deliver) to $15+ (rush). I can recommend the calendars from Vistaprint (inexpensive), Snapfish and Momento (more expensive but more options) having created calendars will all these services at different times and pleased with the results. Just remember most people only need one wall calendar, and maybe one desk calendar not a dozen (eg. one from each relative with a camera). So it might pay to ask around if others in your family have similar ideas.


This year mobile phone photo cases (providing they are an iPhones or possible a Samsung Galaxy) also appear to be a hot item. However I suspect that mobile phones are such personal items it is worth checking that it will be well received before you create an expensive cover so it doesn’t languish unused in a draw or cupboard. Photo mugs are much more affordable and more likely to be used and appreciated. Mouse mats are disappearing from desk but they are still used by a lot of us.

If you are a much more real world only person (you don’t like ordering things on-line). Head for the photo shop in your local shopping mall (if it still exists), alternatively Big_W, Harvey Norman and Officeworks also offer some photo gifts, especially calendars.

What's in a megapixel?

I found this table buried deep in a Pentax manual but it does give you a good idea of the size of image you can expect to create with a given camera megapixel resolution. I've added the couple of lines to add context of common screen displays & web sites.

Megapixels	Size	Print/Display
14.6	4672×3104	A2 paper	14"×17"
10	3872×2592	A3 paper	10"×12"
6	3008×2000	A4 paper	8"×10"
3.1	2048x1536	Google+ (free)	6"x8" LR5b smart preview
2	1824×1216	A5 paper	5"×7"
0.5	800x600	Web Pages	Older computer screen

For those that like there information graphically, Design 215 has a great megapixels chart. (also shown below)

Finally here is a great little megapixel calculator that will back calculate a lot of useful information, given your image size in pixels. It will calculate such measures as aspect ratio, file size in various formats,  approx. number of photos that will fit on your memory card at that resolution and suitable print sizes. It is worth noting that the 300dpi requirement so often claimed by otherwise knowledgeable photo sites, is a little misleading. The dpi (dots per inch) is actually a measure that dates back to traditional printing whereas modern ink jet are more truly measured in ppi (pixels per inch). Each pixel normally being produced using 4 tiny dots of CMYK colour, Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, Black, in a 2 by 2 dot pattern. Frequently these dots overlaps on purpose. So at the simplest level 300ppi is equivalent to 150dpi. A lot of common ink jet "photo" printers normally only have a standard print density equivalent to 120 or 190 dpi, but with good results. Some of the more expensive ones may offer a High Res, setting that will be equivalent to 200-300dpi. So if you are a keen home printer you might be able to "push" the maximum size a little.

Remember that megapixels are not a measure of the true picture quality, which relies on a number of other factors, exposure, focus, composition, points of interests, colour balance etc. Megapixel is purely just a measure of size.