Introducing a DIY Calibration Chart

Why You Should Calibrate Your Screens (And How This Little Chart Helps)

Ever wondered why a photo looks perfect on your phone but flat and washed out on your TV or a print? It is not you. It is your screens. Even the best cameras, monitors and printers cannot capture or display the full range of light and colour that your eyes can see. That is where a simple calibration card comes in, and once you understand how to keep your equipment acceptably accurate.

Photographers talk about dynamic range, the span of light a device can capture, measured in stops. Each stop doubles the amount of light involved. Your eyes can handle around 15 stops. A good modern camera manages 9 to 11. Most TVs and monitors only reach 7 to 9, and even quality printers top out around 6.5.

That gap matters. When a device cannot handle the full range, it clips the extremes. Dark tones near black collapse into pure black. Bright highlights blow out into pure white. Detail and colour simply disappear at both ends.

Colour is its own puzzle, it doesn’t really exist as something physical, and there are two divergent interpretations of what creates it. How a device captures and reproduces colour is pure physics and maths of energy and light. How your brain perceives colour is much more personal, shaped by cognitive psychology and the lighting around you. Neither view is more "correct" than the other. The calibration chart will not give you laboratory precision, but it will nudge your average colour rendering and tonal contrast in the right direction.

Step One: Calibrate the Input (Your Camera or Phone)

Tonal calibration, getting the brightness and darkness levels right, is the single most useful adjustment you can make for realistic photos.

Look at the calibration chart and you will see a grey scale gradient running from black to white, with small grey rectangles down each side. On the right, the rectangles start light grey and get progressively lighter toward an almost white target. On the left, they start darker and step down toward a very dark target. Each little step represents a 2 percent shift in light intensity.

Here is the trick: point your camera or phone at the chart and check how many of those rectangles you can actually distinguish. You will probably lose a few, especially near the very dark or very light end. That is completely normal. Digital sensors simply cannot match your eyes' range, and cameras are designed to expose for an average middle grey tone anyway, so they will usually “clip” the extreme tones.

Start with your camera on an automatic exposure mode (A, P, or the green auto setting on a DSLR or mirrorless camera, or the default mode on your phone). Manual exposure is not necessary here.

Check the result somewhere you can actually see the screen properly. Camera and phone screens are notoriously hard to read in bright daylight, so review indoors or in shade.

If you can only spot a few rectangles on the dark side, the chart probably needs more light. If you cannot add light, try adjusting the exposure value (EV) on your camera or phone instead.

Advanced camera calibration (colour accuracy, white balance, lens distortion, sharpness) varies wildly between brands and models, so this card will not replace a proper colour profiling system. What it can do is flag obvious problems, like a consistent colour cast, or tonal issues worth investigating further.

Step Two: Calibrate the Output (Your Screens)

Now views a photo of the ca on your monitor, TV, phone or projector. This is where brightness and contrast come in, usually tucked inside a picture or display settings menu, accessed through a settings button or remote.

Start with brightness. Push it up and the screen gets lighter, revealing more rectangles on the dark side. Pull it down and you will see more detail in the light rectangles instead. The goal is a balance where you can see a good number of steps on both sides.

Next comes contrast. This stretches or compresses the range of visible tones. Getting it right is a bit of a balancing act between contrast and brightness. If you can see plenty of rectangles on one side but hardly any on the other, nudge the contrast up slightly, then pull brightness back to rebalance.

A quiet warning here: if you regularly use your screen in a bright room with strong light behind you, chances are your contrast is already cranked to maximum, which clips both ends of the tonal range. If that sounds like you, reset contrast to the middle, adjust brightness first, then slowly bring contrast back up while rebalancing.

Screen technology has changed a lot over the decades, from old cathode ray tubes to today's LED and LCD panels, and every manufacturer implements these settings a little differently. Materials also degrade over time, which is worth remembering if your screen seems duller than it used to be. When in doubt, the factory reset option is usually a safe, well calibrated starting point.

Step Three: Get Your Colours Right

Once tone is sorted, it is time for colour. Look for settings labelled colour, tint, colour temperature, hue, saturation or intensity, though the exact wording  and what bit changes depends on your device.

Saturation is often cranked up by default to compensate for ambient light, so check the row of coloured dots on the card. They should look natural sitting against the mid grey background, not artificially intense.

Many screens also offer picture modes such as vivid, natural, cinema, standard or eco. These bundle together saturation, brightness and contrast settings, so cycling through them is often the fastest way to find something that suits your eyes, though be aware they can override the careful brightness and contrast work you just did.

The chart itself has a colour temperature section running from warm reds, oranges and yellows through to cool blues and violets, sitting on a clean white background. If that background does not look properly white, you likely have a colour cast issue.

Small reference squares next to this section are arranged in 5 percent increments of colour strength. The top row handles colour temperature, from yellow through to blue purple. The bottom row handles “tint”, from magenta through to green. The middle row, goes from a red to a cyan .

To use them, simply check which square looks whitest against the background. If the background leans slightly green, for instance, a square on the magenta side will probably look closer to true white. That tells you which direction to nudge your tint control.

One last thing worth remembering: your room's ambient lighting will influence how you judge all of this. Do not calibrate for magenta while sitting in a room bathed in green light. Match your adjustments to the conditions you will normally be viewing in, and you will end up with a screen that shows your photos the way they are meant to be seen.

You should now have better screens to judge your images, that may be photographing your art, a portrait or to judge your results as you edit or modify your photographs with filters and app.

Last night of dodgy one-eyed sight and trying to take some photos

The evening before my corneal graft surgery, I decided to venture out with my camera despite my severely compromised vision. With my right eye essentially non-functional any bright or contrasting lights causing lasting effects in both eyes, photography has become a challenge of trust in my camera rather than precision.

Adapting to Visual Limitations

My relationship with photography has transformed dramatically. Electronic viewfinders are now unusable, and even the flip-out LCD screens present a significant challenge. I've adapted by:

• Returning to spot metering in the centre of the frame (reminiscent of my old Pentax Spotmatic days)
• Trusting my camera's autofocus setting to use that centre point
• I don’t fully trust the cameras “averaging” exposure so I set up my Olympus's back wheel for quick exposure value adjustments
• Taking multiple shots to compensate for uncertainty

Despite these adaptations, my photography outings have become rare as my vision keeps me indoors most days.

An Evening in Parliament Gardens

I stayed near the hospital and across the road from Parliament Gardens for my pre-surgery evening. As sunset approached, I noticed St. Paul's spire beautifully illuminated by the fading light. Just as I captured the scene, the bells began to ring—perhaps marking the time or the beginning of a conclave to select the next pope.

After uploading to my computer, I enhanced the raw file using Olympus's Vivid Mode, I had slightly underexposed the scene to preserve the golden hour tones, so lightened the shadows marginally, and cooled the overall temperature to deepen the sky. Not bad for someone with compromised vision!

Moonlight and Palm Trees

The moon caught my attention next, visible at that perfect moment when its illumination balances with the sky's brightness. I framed it with a palm tree swaying in the strong breeze, slightly underexposed again, and trusted my focus on the centered moon. Back at the computer, I applied the same vivid treatment, cooled the colour temperature, and cropped the image to position the moon slightly off-center.

Dinner on Spring Street, with a bit of creative post-processing

We continued our evening at a café on Spring Street opposite the Parliament building. The ambience was magical—lights just coming on while the sky remained bright, creating that challenging exposure scenario where automatic settings typically give you a bleached-out sky and detail-less shadows.

Rather than being discouraged, I saw post-processing potential. Using Luminar Neo's AI sky replacement and relighting features, I enhanced the scene to reflect the warm, pleasant Melbourne evening we experienced. The result captured the ambience of outdoor dining perfectly, despite not having a spectacular natural sunset.

In these moments before my surgery, photography became not just about seeing perfectly, but about adapting, trusting my equipment, and finding creative ways to preserve memories despite visual challenges.

Return to the Old Chestnut :: Scaning Versus Photography

I have looked at the issues of the best way to get a digital copy of your art work many times. I'm still open to finding the best way, but realise there might be different solutions for different media and how the image is to be used. With watercolour possible the most difficult to find a good solution, because much of it's magic lies in it's transparent colours.

 

Now it's your turn. The above images have been capture with webcam, phone, mirrorless camera and scanner (in no particular order).

Which best shows the watercolourness? 

Which looks best?

The Self- appointed Camera Obscura

I was surprised when I looked at the reflection of the late afternoon sun to see a classic camera obscura style upside down image of not only the sun but also the silhouettes of the trees outside my front door. there wasn’t the classic “dark room” (although the stair well is naturally darker at that time of day) or the pinhole to let in only the stronger outdoor light.

The angle of the sun was such that it did hit the glass panels of the front door at a low angle and the light then traveled onto a beveled edge of a large mirror on an adjacent wall in the entry, then onto the wall of stair well. An amazing phenomena, a nicely inverted image, that my photo don’t really do justice to. It was all over in a few moments as the reflected sunlight moved up (opposite direction to the setting sun) and across the mirror and off the beveled edge.

Goodbye old mate …hello new chum

I had been putting off jumping into mirrorless because I’m quiet happy with my two (sometimes 3) DSLRs. You know those very old fashioned big clunky cameras with mirrors. Well my Canon slipped from its camera bag a couple of week back and a favourite lens separated rather than broke (its the second lens to suffer this fate but this time it is still kind of usable at a pinch.) However it was time to seriously consider getting a mirrorless!

I’ve had the Canon EOS 1100D (she’s called the Rebel T3i in the USA, but I just call her Tess) for over a decade and it has been a perfect camera for what I used it for in my business. Filming training clips and documenting various procedures involved in mining, pretty well always in harsh environments, The video was pretty damn good, well except the sound was ordinary (no external mic port) and it was difficult to get anything but jerky results handheld (no stabilisation). Yet the video could be great (on a tripod) and the still photos even better. It has just the right balance between automated features and classic settings. In my view this would make it the perfect sort of camera to give someone young as their first camera to learn on. Similar models are still available today but there should be plenty of second hand ones around also. I’ve already figured out mine can go to a friend and be well looked after. So Farewell and Bon Chance my old friend.

Even though I have a higher megapixel camera already in my Pentax K20D, I opted to stay around the same megapixel size as the Canon, because I really don’t see the need for any more. So I was happy looking at micro 4/3rds systems and once I picked up the new Olympus OMD 10 mark III I knew that’s what I wanted. It is more than capable of doing all the work the Canon performed (only better). Despite being a tiny camera, its a metal build so it feels substantial and it is full of the features only found in a lot of the top models. Better still other than a few things I could not find straight away, I just picked it up and got decent photos straight up. So its back to learning new dials and menus, hmm… that M S A P stuff, but I bet that will be fun. The dials are nice and big so I’ll manage.

Welcome to a new chum and I trust you will be happy in my hands.

Day 7 :: Getting ready for the next Endless Summer Project

Repacking my camera bag in preparation for my next trip. Rather than pack on the last day I repack a couple of weeks out so I have time to realise if I am missing something important. During my year long art project travels I have been progressively trimming down the stuff I carry around.

My revised camera bag packing list has, starting at the top right and moving clockwise.

1. My Pentax K20 (my favourite camera, with my favourite lens a Tamron 18 to 200mml zoom Note this camera now has a wrist strap, rather than cumbersome neck strap.
2. In the side pocket of the camera bag I have cables, spare batteries etc in a zip up mesh bag.
3. My Sigma 70-300 Zoom Lens
4. A couple of white "Face washers" (to clean the cameras not the lenses)
5. Blower Brush
6. Lens pen (microfiber cleaner and brush)
7. Business cards & pen
8. My home made string monopod
9. My ThinkTank Mirrorless Mover 30i Camera Bag. Although it is designed to carry a mirrorless camera system & Ipad mini I find to perfect for my gear in a relatively small shoulder bag. I also a small kit of sketching gear in the Ipad slot (not shown here but includes an A5 sketch book, couple of pencils & pens, waterbrush & small Cotman's watercolour Sketchers Box)
10. Sealed packets of alcohol lens wipes (I haven't used these for a while prefer the lens pen)
11. Spare SD cards (I'm taking 4 16GB cards & 6 8GB cards of my next trip, 20 days)
12. An old Smartphone (with no SIMS card, but the camera and GPS still work fine)
13. A polarizing filter
14. Tone Reference cards

Redecorating a place for my smallest camera(s)

My android phone started to complain about lack of space  a while back. I had been putting off deleting things when It ran out of battery (thanks to leaving the gps on). Once it was charged and restarted all the screens including the home screen had been reset to the factor defaults. Everything else was there including recent photos, so I’m not sure what happened. Anyway it was a chance to rearrange the screens and particularly my photo tools, which had become over-crowded (perhaps 7 different cameras is to much?). So I rearranged things mainly removing viewers altogether, with drop box, tumblr and flickr going to a separate page. I did mull over google photos, because I haven’t been using it for some time now but with the demise of picasa I may have to. The simple little cameras Camera 51 and Open Camera are getting more use, I like the simplistically of the open camera GUI, and the leveling aid that can be displayed on the screen is a great idea. Another goto favorite now is QuickPic, its simple, fast and shares with everything I need. I haven’t joined the free CM Cloud space (yet) so the tile asking me too is starting to feel like nagging. But once again I might have to find an alternate on-line “cloud” space, so I’ll tolerate the silent reminder a little longer.

Six months ago I playfully suggested I was having a race between google photos and flickr in a contest to see who could manage my phone phones. It was a real tortoise and hare epic but in reality Dropbox actually won. It remains my preferred method of uploading and backing up from the phone (because its simple, reliable and no wire have to be involved) but I also like the flickr app both to view photos on my phone and upload new ones. Its no fuss and does wait long enough for me to cull the bad images (it like Drop box only works when I have WiFI access, it is also polite and seems to always let dropbox go first). Importantly both dropbox and flickr load the photos as private. If I want to share drop box is my first choice because I just need to email a link  (the recipient doesn’t have to have drop box). Thus I don’t see an urgent need to embrace google photos on my android phone just yet.

Across the Generations

I’ve managed tp keep up with the daily photo regime, by not being too concerned about what I photograph. More realistic I’m just letting myself see something as a photo, rather than trying to go out for a specific shot. The back story here was I was re-oragning where I shore my cameras and just had these out on an untidy desk so I just moved them outside. Arranged them “collaborativel”.

Ironically the photo I choose to post was taken with my Cannon EOS, not one of the Penatx family.

Remember that Spare Battery

Battery life can be a real spoiler for a lot of digital cameras, specifically for those without a separate optical view finder, such as most compact cameras or the newer mirrorless cameras. The problem is you need a fair bit of power to light up the LCD screen on the back. Especially to get it bright enough to read in ambient light. A few mirrorless cameras offer a view finder with a tiny LCD screen. My experience was these has been mixed, the earlier versions of such systems where very “laggy” and not so clear but the technology has improved a lot and perhaps also the power consumption. However with one of these cameras it is pretty likely you battery will run out at a crucial stage. The solution is a spare battery in your camera case

Owners of the traditional DSLR, with the mirror that has to flip up, generally get much better battery life. I changed the battery today after 83 days and 2643 photos taken (but I have taken only a few flash photos). I always take a photo of the discharged battery when changing batteries as a easy way to keep track of my battery rotation (and likelihood of being low on stored energy). I must admit I probably only consult the LCD screen on the camera occasionally, usually on the first few shots in a new location/lighting. Evidently moving the mirror must take a lot less energy that lighting the screen.

It doesn’t matter which sort of camera you have

Buy yourself a second battery for your camera and keep it fully charged and in you camera bag.

A Beautiful Dawn and being Accustomed to My Camera

Even though I was still half asleep and had not put in my contact lenses, I couldn't help but notice the magnificent sunrise. So I quickly grabbed my camera, despite being dark and not being able to see clearly I was able to get the camera in Exposure Priority and dial up what I thought might have been a higher ISO (I got both right) But I could tell the exposure would be way to slow (ie 1/4 second) to be hand held (click on the image on the right to see how blurry the resulting photo turned out). I didn’t even check the screen and cranked the aperture wheel down a few notches (not knowing or being able to see). These sounded better, possible quick enough, and I took a couple of overlapping images to make a panorama..

The image above is just a quick collage created with picasa. I think my beloved Pentax has done a great job even though I wasn’t able to visually check the setting or button I was pressing. Naturally I could see enough where to point the camera in the right direct and could hear the autofocus tracking my lens back and forth.
This story continue (I took a few sets of bracketed), after using my muscle  memory to select my user programmed mode on the main dial (which is preprogramed to create a series of EV values)

I had breakfast and put my lenses in, upload the photos and like the initial pano set. So I have taken it though Autostitch and used Perfect Enhance to hold down the digital noise.

The exercise of using your camera without looking at the dials, and just taking the picture is highly recommended. (Even in the Dark)

PhotoEditingTools :: White Balance, When & Where

Colour correction, usually just called white balance these days, has been an issue since the earliest days of colour film. Some aspects even stretching back further into the martials used in the construction of black and films. Looking around current net explanations the need for colour compensation might be related to a technical limitation of colour film or modern digital sensor, actually the truth is they are pretty good at capturing the true light and they are getting better. The issue is the human eye (and yes a lot of this pre-processing is done at the back of the eye and on the way to the brain) is very good at accepting that a wide range of illumination is actually a “white” light source and reflection of it in the surroundings. This acceptance of what is supposed to be white is general subconscious and takes a very short time. Yet light sources (particularly artificial ones) can vary in strength and their colour profile, which can be measure on the Kelvin Scale (shown on the right), which actually an absolute measure, but it has been adopted in photography as a measure of colour temperature. These measure all very technical and somewhat theoretical but essentially different light sources emit light that corresponds to different hues (colours). A candle or tungsten globe seen in daylight will appear quiet yellow/orangish but in a room just illuminate by that light source our eyes will happily convey the image as if illuminated by a white light. The camera however will “correctly” capture the image a with distinct orangey bias. Objects that our eye saw a white will actually be orange and other colours will have excessive yellow and/or red tints. Thus the photo may look wrong.

Cambridge Colour  website has a great tutorial on the theory of colour compensation (aka white balance) as well as good practical advice, for those that want to investigate this deeper.

The best place to adjust white balance is in your camera, and this is an area you will need to consult your camera manual but most digital cameras, even the less expensive point & shoot ones will have a number of white balance options typically indicated by icons like those on the right. They normally cover a decent range of common lighting sources. What’s more AWB Automatic White Balance techniques have become very dependable in most modern cameras, so it is the obvious default setting. Older Camera phones might be the biggest exception here, particularly in low and/or artificial light. So it is worth looking at you camera settings on your phone. understanding the right setting and changing them as required could make a big difference to your low light photos taken with your phone

When It comes to RAW photos the white balance may not have to be set in your camera (ie just leave it on the default AWB) because there is usually enough information stored in the RAW file to allow the colour adjustment to be undertaken on the RAW image, Most RAW photo editors then allow the recalibration of the image to either a given Kelvin temperature, standard light sources or even a better estimate of the “as shoot” balance.

Having advised that AWB (Auto White Balance) is probably the best default I need to point out that there can still be situation that can confused the camera (ie an scene of dominantly warm or cool colours). Alternatively if you are always reaching for the warming slider trying setting your white balance to cloudy or shade.

Which digital camera should you buy?

I have steered cleared of doing camera reviews, mainly because I think any digital camera these days are good enough to take decent pictures. However there is a such a range of camera available deciding where to begin is quiet a challenge. I notice on the flickr blog, they are tackling this very question, and they are in the wonderful position of seeing millions of photos loaded with a wide range of camera. They have a neat summary table of the main classes of camera versus the type of photo you wish to take. I have added colour to highlight the great, versus good versus ok. This is the first in a series of articles planned for the flickr blog so make sure you visit them again and follow the series.

I have to admit I own cameras from 3 of these 4 classes (I don’t own a mirrorless/micro 4/3rds. camera;yet!) Smartphones can be expensive, but the camera will seldom be the key purchasing criteria, the other cameras get more expensive as you move to the right. The interesting observation here is that the micro 4/3 cameras are satisfying the more common photography generas, their reasonable pricing probably make them a better choice these days than the compact style cameras, and if you haven’t already invested in the larger and heavier DSLRs they are probably an obvious choice of a new photographer (in training/aspirations).

If your getting down to the purchase decision it might also be worth checking out the Flickr Camera Finder, you get to see not only the cameras popularity and technical specs but importantly you can get to see a range of photos taken with that camera.

… … Looking Forward

Looking into a crystal ball used to be a common past time at the new year. Rapid Technological change was always a key aspect of these predictions, yet this year the changes in photography might not be gleaming new toys you can pick up.

1. We’ll do better without you, the move to on-line storage and display has been a wealth of Auto-fix facilities. Even your humble photo processing service in the local shopping mall probably uses an “enhance” filter. A lot of this is gimmickry and little more that increased contrast and colour saturation. Some are based on science, particularly from the field of medical imaging and some have come down from fancy photoshop plug-ins. Corels inclusion of Perfectly Clear and Niks Software’s Snap Seed (now Google’s Auto Awesome) are good examples of what can be achieved. However if you are a creative you might need to fight this trend, at least recognise it.
2. Better user interface on cameras (particularly smartphones). In todays world cameras might have a few mechanical and optical functioning bit bits (particularly the bigger DSLR) but at their centre is now a lot of electronics. They are essentially specific purpose computers and as such are programmable. Some existing cannon camera can already have their firmware updated (see magic lantern). However it is in the smartphone camera arena that the changes are most evident. There are hundreds of camera apps, unfortunately many are trival (and specifically the zanny filers I could do without). Yet there is light. There probably is no need to link new cameras back to the three traditional exposure controls, which relate back to the sensitivity of the film, or a diaphragm style aperture control. Even the time taken for the exposure. A simpler set of sliders on a touch screen that corrected over exposure, maybe focus (by just touching the screen where you want it in focus), a slider for depth of field and maybe a drop down set of buttons for specific modes like fast action close up all on the phones touch screen (or on the back of the camera) and the changes can been seen on the screen straight away, This doesn’t sound like much but I bet that would become a popular camera app or even an actual camera.
3. I suspect this will be the year of the photobook, Ok the term has changed a lot some time ago, not so long ago actually serious photographers had exhibitions and very occasionally a publisher might hang the expense and produce a wonderful book of photos, usually with accompanying text but a recognised write, Now the photobook can easily be self published. There are some quiet amazing limited edition photobooks being created today by semi-professionals and gifted amateurs These books have reached a price, mainly due to the technology of the production aspects and old fashion competition where it is can be cheaper to prepare a photobook full of say a hundred or so 5 by 8cm sized snaps of a recent overseas trip compared with getting those snaps printed out individually. The difference is it will probably take some time and energy to create the book and possibly your family will slink away when they see you get the book out, In between there is a place where you can be creative and publish what is important to you. The movement to photobooks is also present in the ebook area where photobooks are starting to gain traction mainly due to the larger screen on IPads and Android tablets. 2014 is a good year to consider creating your first photobook, just start small (in $20-$25 range)

Looking Back … …

Last year was a big year for digital photography, not so much an obvious big fanfare, most of the changes were small incremental adjustments. Three things that have been around for a while but have come into popular view last year.

1. First there is the death of the “mine is bigger than yours” paradigm.Hardware, gear envy and megapixel concerns should be a thing of the distant past. Most camera, from smartphones, point and shoot, through mirror less to the big DSLR are all pretty good. The camera you have is probably the best one to use right now. Go take lots of photos rather than worry about new camera hardware.  The obvious camera for you, will make itself obvious when you get to about 10,000 photos. It may well be the one you already have.
2. On-line storage, This has seen some strong competition with really large amounts of disk space offered for free, most are connected with social network style groups of services. Flickr, Google+ are two I am familiar with, and I have tried out a few like Everpix (now defunked), Photofeed (I’m still persevering) and Picturelife (given up with its slowness). but honestly I have been underwhelmed and I still use the dropbox facility which has been around for a while now. This just synchs my phones via available WiFi, if and when it is available to a place both on the net and on my harddrive. Sending all your images to “free storage” on the net has a dark side it will use up a lot of your precious bandwidth (and from a smart phone that could become expensive) and if you are not careful this may expose more than you might want to the world. That 10,000 photos equal 1.6 terra bytes if they are RAW 16 megapixels images, that might be several months of your bandwidth!
3. Photo Filters and Photo Apps, the zannier the better! This unfortunately is not a good trend in my view, because they get overused and instead of creating something new and exciting, they are just really boring, after you’ve seen the same effect for the third image in a row. It could have been a great trend but it really requires some user constraint and a lot less “copycat”,”look at me”, fashionista social media self promotion. Perhaps I am being a bit judgemental?

The Digital Show Melbourne

This is just a Heads up for the photographic folk of Melbourne, this year’s The Digital Show, will be on in Jeff’s Shed over this coming weekend (13th to 15th September 2013). This years theme is “Unleash Your Creativity,” with some decent guest speakers, as well as a lot of the lastest consumer products on display.

You should still be able to get complimentary tickets by pre-registration using this link.

find your photos, find your camera

I’m sure you have heard the stories about stolen camera and phones being traced by photos posted on facebook or twitter. They all have the element of a luck discovery in their stories, something that might be very hard to rely on when its your camera that has gone missing. Now there is a service called stolencamerafinder, which tackles the problem in a little more analytical fashion. They look for the embedded serial number of your camera within the EXIF metadata header of jpeg files. Unfortunately cameraphone generally don’t embed a unique serial number and are thus not supported (but I did notice one phone in their support list is the IPhone4s). Also most version of RAW don’t fully support EXIF style metadata and are therefore not supported either. The website has a few great success stories including Xander’s Canon (shown here)

Its also an example of a good open source project to I hope it is totally legit and wish the project well. You can even help out their data collection with a chrome extension and/or running a flickr scraper.

The important step, if your camera is lost or stolen, is to report it on their site, free membership give you one camera search, as well as using the free photo search. Professionally photographers and companies with a lot of photographic gear might see the benefit in Pro or Business membership.

Still elegant

This is the back door of the Royal Exhibition Building. This grand old lady, was only meant to be a temporary structure for the “great” Melbourne international Exhibition in 1880, Victoria was still an English colony back then, with newly acquired wealth thanks to the Gold Rush. The building has survived a few partial demolitions and fires, and has now passed into the hands of the Victorian museum and is also now  a listed World Heritage site. She still hold exhibitions and has had many other uses including the opening of the first Australian Parliament (just the opening!) , a sports venue during the 1956 Olympics and as the main Matriculation examination hall (which I remember all to well) during the 56s 60s & 70s and still used by Melbourne Uni and RMIT for exams (also remember these). Today her biggest event is the Melbourne International flower and garden show.

The stark/strong lighting of the Australian summer gives me another good test for HDR camera on my android phone.