Sunny Afternoon Walk

Photo-chemical smog over the bay

Photo-chemical smog over the bay, originally uploaded by imageo.

Big Sky :: Winter Sunset

Clipping Magic

Whilst I know the bigger software groups like Adobe and Corel are trying to provide packages that do everything. I have always been happy with a really good, and usually very simple, utility program that just does the thing I want. Ok like Apps on your phone such utilities can quickly grow into a big menagerie. Yet they usually let you get the job done quietly and efficiently.The same logic really applies to on-line applications. There are more and more becoming available, particularly with google's promotion of chrome. One such application that you need to check out for yourself is called clipping magic, and its still just and Alpha release. I know that Adobe's photoshop and Corel's power clipping can do much the same job but you need a few weeks of learning and a fair bit of skill to use them. Clipping Magic is actually really simple, you just need to draw a bit of green on the "foreground" (the part you want to clip to keep) and red over a few parts of the "background" (the part of the image you want to remove. It really is that simple and at the moment its free to try out.

5 steps to avoid sharing your on-line photos with the world!

There are many services that offer to share our photos on-line, and most, specifically the social media places, make it very easy but have defaults that mean your photos are being shared with anyone with net access. Perhaps you just wanted to share your photos with a few friends of family members. To really scare yourself, try finding some of your own images on-line using google’s neat reverse image search. To do that just drag and drop a photo you want to check onto the little camera icon on the google’s images search screen.

Ok now your scared! Time to pause and check whether that photo also lets others know where you live. You can find the extra information buried in your on-line photo by copying its URL to metapicz

So how do you fix it so your images and the hidden information they contain are not being shared with everyone in the future? Here are 5 steps you can take.

1) Make sure you know and set appropriately the default sharing setting when you upload photos. Most of the specialist photosharing sites like flickr, google+, photobucket, smugmug etc have a multi-level security/sharing system for just family, friends or then the public. Google+ have the added organizational control of just sharing with your selected circles.  Some cloud based photo services like Skydrive, and Drop Box also have multi-level sharing security and the private side normally involves sending those you wish to share with, a secure link (ie it has an access password/switch built into the link). A big limitation of these systems is in the  photo uploaders they provide, which often have public set as their sharing default. So you can unknowingly make your photo available to everyone. So it is in your interest to set the default to private and only set those you intend to share as public on an individual photo basis.

2) Be careful that you don’t share links to otherwise private photo, by reposting to public sites (like you blog or a social network site like twitter). in those systems that do allow you to share your images on another service such as facebook or twitter, Often they use some variant of OAuth to establish the authority to post on the attached site, unfortunately they seldom inherit the same privacy setting from your original post and the photo is posted as public. Generally if there is no mention of sharing security when you do the authorization there will be none (eg Sharing to twitter from flickr, even if the photo is private on flickr once it is shared to twitter it will be publically viewable on twitter)

3) If you don’t want strangers to find out where you live, work, go to school. Consider turning off the GPS in your phone, or finding the setting in your photo uploader to remove geotags/geolocation data. Flickr has a nice geo fence feature that allows you to supress showing location if your are close to sensitivity place (eg home, school etc). Lightroom has a setting to remove any geolocation data when posting an image via their Export or Publishing Services. You can also control the types of metadata exported.

4) Remove the photos from google search if necessary. I haven’t been a fan of the google’s official forums because they are often hard to figure out the context of the advice being given and even what the FAQs are actually asking. My impression has been that google staff must not actively moderate their forums or perhaps even read them (maybe I’m being a bit unkind here). However the Picasa Resources site does provide some good discussion on key FAQs about picasa and its advice on How to remove your images from google search gives some good advice on what to do, albeit quite technical advice. The photos don’t have to have been shared via picasa.

5) Don’t use Facebook (and probably Instagram), for any photo you don’t want to share with the world because someone else liking or tagging your photo will start sharing that with all their friends and so on. These access links can spread quickly and soon many folk you don’t know will be able to see and use your photos. Also the facebook TOS (terms of service), means they assume ownership of anything you post. I don’t have a facebook account, and I don’t want to be accused of facebook bashing but I understand in the past it wasn’t so easy or obvious how to remove and permanently delete photos, I gather facebook has yielded to pressure and here is a link to Steve’s Digicam with instruction on deleting facebook photos and albums.

So don’t panic, make sure you understand the sharing security on your favourite photo service and set the defaults appropriately. It is certainly not wrong to share your photos with others. It might just be wise to do little bit of checking right now for any existing images you don’t want shared publically.

The Super Moon

IMGP6597.jpg, originally uploaded by imageo.

First full moon of Winter was a Super Moon

PhotoProject :: Wet in the City

   

City lights by Nihjt on a wet pavement can make for a great photo opprtunity, but I only had my phone with me. So I took these with DHR Camera+

Photofriday :: Body of Water

Bass Straight in Winter, multi image stitched panorama

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Body of Water

 

This is a different, more immersive, way to view the stitched images created with ICE & perspective view, the uploaded to photosynth

Bigger and maybe brighter LCD screen for you camera.

I think most of us with LCD screens on the back of our DSLR or new digital compact camera know that looking at the LCD screen outside can be a real challenge, Firstly they are typically very small and more significantly they can be very hard to make out what is being displayed with the glare and reflections outside.

Somewhat by accident I discovered I already have a very cheap and easy to use, bigger LCD Screen on my camera. Ok not exactly on my camera but very easy to add. It was one of those (cheap) flat plastic magnifying lens. They are a type of Fresnel lens, a series of concentric lenses that appear as a single lens at around their focal length. I happened to have one inside a A6 sketch book in the back pocket of my camera bag, I frequently carry a small sketch book there. It isn’t exactly magic, you do need to tilt and twist and adjust the distance from the camera to get a decent view. However it is about twice the size of the screen and through a special property of the Fresnel lenses, which can capture more light at oblique angles (a feature that has made them very popular of lighthouses). There will still be glare and reflection on the lens but the image can be enriched and sharpened with appropriate tilts in the lens. The real draw back is it requires and extra hand, so works nicely with a tripod but your will have to juggle your camera in one hand and the lens in the other in most situation. Still it makes a big difference when you need to review your image in the field.

  

My A6 sheet lens only cosy $1.50 (from the $2 shop), but plenty of other (more expensive) forms and sizes are available from newsagents and officeworks.

Finding those forgotten images.

Google has connected up “computer vision” to your google+ photos so you can now use My Photos of … in the search box. This means in theory searching your photos no longer require keywording to help you re-find images. Try it out, it is pretty remarkable but only works on your collection of images on your google+ photo account. However don’t rely on it, it isn’t perfect quiet yet!

The Oyster-catchers

 

Being Less than Creative in the Cloud

I must admit I have given adobe's creative cloud a long look, albeit using its introductory offer, but I've decided its not for me. Not because I think it would be too expensive. I think renting software (and computer equipment) is a well established practise and can be a good way to avoid the up front high cost of purchase and for legitimate a business application more tax effective (ie it’s a legitimate business expense rather than an asset that has to be depreciated). In Australia you can "write off" software that cost less than $300 immediately as a business expense but must depreciate more expensive software over two and a half years (or four years), I must admit I don’t understand the different methods. It was more a disappointment with the performance, and particularly a series of frustrations when I was trying to share my work with firstly myself and especially with non creative cloud users.

The first frustration was my expectation that I could use the creative cloud to let me edit one image from several computers in Lightroom. The reality was equally unwieldy as the other work-arounds I had tried, like exporting and importing collections or using xmp files, or "processed" version of dng files. Thqt multi-computer, muti-user Lightroom catalogue remains a pipe dream.

The second annoyance is the long dance creative cloud wants to take to make sure you are on-line. It is certainly possible to use the creative cloud programs off line (once you have downloaded them). However I do travel a fair bit and often to places with very limited internet access (ok I can use a local wifi hot spot on my phone, but that is slow and expensive bandwidth). It is bad enough waiting for windows to boot up, it is painful to have to crawl long for several more minute while loading spinners on pop-up windows struggle to try andbretry to connect you to the net, when there is clearly no need. I really wish the creative cloud knew that cancel meant cancel the first time!

Over the past few weeks there has been a number of on-line service upgrades. One collaborative project I had really wasted a lot of time on in creative clouds, without real success, I was able to set up in a couple of hours in SkyDrive, and then move to DropBox, to better suit my collaborators, by the next morning. It was an eye opener, a good example of simplicity winning out over sophisticated, but complex systems . The important caveat here is I was delivering jpeg files, not trying to jointly editing RAW files.

Finally it all got a bit tedious and I didn't really want to play with the other adobe offerings anyway, because of their learning curves. Whilst the creative cloud does integrate a number of adobe offerings, particularly at the exchange aspects, they still have their own peculiar ways. Out in the field I don't have the time or bandwidth to sit down and wade through even more introductory instructional videos. I suspect that I am not the only one to get frustrated by this.

One aspect the creative cloud handles well is on-line security (at least from my perspective, I think images are less likely to be "stolen" or turned in "orphans" that on the recent on-line service offerings). However this actually created hassles for those I wanted to share with. So bye for now creative cloud.

Waiting for the Aurora

Milky Way Panorama 1, originally uploaded by imageo.

The K-index has been 3 and over for the past few days which signals there is a possibility that the Aurora Australia will be visible from the southern coast of Victoria. Well it rained a lot but between breaks I got good views of the milky way arcing across the sky. Both these images are prepared from a sets of photos and stitched with Autostitch.

milky Way Panorama 2, originally uploaded by imageo.

PhotoFriday :: After the storm

Yesterday was a very clear beginning of winter. After a stormy night the sun straights to break through.

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Shades of Gray

Starry, Starry Night

Some experiments with trying to map the sky at night. Using a set of 15 second exposures. Autostitch is actually up to the task, providing you have something detailed in the foregrounds, but I much prefer the warmer tines of my simple picasa picture pile collage.

Reassigning a drive letter

For the past couple of months I have been using two 1.5 terabyte USB drives, that contain my photo library, one is the master the other is a backup. I just keep the active months photos on my computer hard drive but the full photo library on theses external drives and carry them between computers when working on or searching for older photos. All was going well until somehow the drive letters became exchanged. Lightroom started to do weird things, which looked like my photos where being deleted, other times it appeared to be duplicating some photos. Picasa just ignore files even when they where present. Eventually I twigged it was a problem with the drive letters being allocated. I suspect it was a couple of background synching utilities, I am experimenting with that where creating the duplicate files and it was probably moving the USB drive between computer that created the drive letter changes in the first place. How then to get out of this mess?



Its easy just reassigned the drive letters, the steps are straight forward, on a windows machine you need to find Computer Management Utility, which is under control panel/[system and security]/Administrative Tools. Once in that window select Disk Management, and wait for it to find what's on your system then select the USB drive and right click to bring up the Change Drive Letter and Path Dialogue (shown above). Click change and set the letter you wish. Remember some drive letters may not be available as other devices are already using them. When you click ok you will be warned some programs rely on a specific drive letter to run correct. Thanks I understand that now, but that message would have been nicer a lot sooner!

Yet another tree collage

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.

The new flickr in fits and starts

I must admit I haven't been on the revised flickr a lot, but I have noticed that I am watching the two colour flickr spinners a lot, ... while I wait ...and wait, for a photo not to be displayed, The "seamless" photo mosaic display seems to be ok but individual photo page and slideshow displays, are definitely tediously slow now.

My solution, at the moment, is to use the lightbox view, which seems to respond immediately. To start the lightbox view just click on the small double diagonal arrow icon beside the three dots on the right hand side of the photo screen. To get out of lightbox mode click on the big X in the upper left.

Harvest Moon

Photo, originally uploaded by imageo.

A reminder that winter is coming.

The frustrations of intermittent lens problems

It would seem that the dreaded "Error 01: Communication between the lens and body has failed" errors on my canon EOS 1100D camera when using my EFS 18-55 lens, is not such a unique problem, nor is the frustration. Seems a lot of other have found changing lenses and removing batteries give temporary respite on a variety of other canon models and lenses, with different error numbers but similar cause, or should I say lack of obvious cause. My manual suggest cleaning the contact, with a soft lint free cloth, but I have found this never seems to fix anything.

The various photography forums are full of request for advice and most have the same recommendations, remove lens, remove the memory card and remove battery, wait a while and then restored the items in the reserve order. This occasionally works for me and never when I really need it to get a decent image. My investigation seem indicate I need to remove the lens switch to manual and set the f-stop lower than f4, and then remount the lens and I just might get a shot of two more.

If all else fails … you can always read the notes on the canon USA site offering some explanation and understanding! For the very important advice don't use an eraser to clean the contacts! Ok cannon might have a communication issue with their cameras owners as well. So that just leaves joining the queue of frustrated camera owners and use a different lens.

Photofriday :: Travel Memories

For PhotoFriday‘s topic Travelling

Blimey, …they do that? ..aka(time for a manifesto).

I had heard the story about a new law, known as the instagram act, in the UK making “orphaned” photos free from normal copyright restrictions on republishing. So how does a photo become orphaned? Most jpegs, the most common format for posting photos on the web, have important detail about which camera, its setting and who took.owns the photos embedded in the photo itself, These are the EXIF and IPTC metadata and because they are embedded within the photo they travle with it when it is copied. Whilst some older programs may not handle them correctly, programs like picasa and lightroom and many others help you expand the details stored here. However then when I started to investigate some of the recent social photo sites I came face to face with the fact that most of the social sites where stripping out the metadata. In fact of the sites I have used only google+ is not altering the metadata. I must admit I was pretty shocked that Flickr was one of the worst offenders.
Right at the moment, posting your photos on social web sites, may not protect your rights much despite anything they might suggest in their terms of service. Add to this this “overlooking” of creative commons licencing on google+ and the web has become a less secure place to “share” your creations. Fortunately there is some good guidance being prepared.
IPTC Photo Metadata Working Group have prepared five guiding principles as our "Embedded Metadata Manifesto":

1. Metadata is essential to describe, identify and track digital media and should be applied to all media items which are exchanged as files or by other means such as data streams.
2. Media file formats should provide the means to embed metadata in ways that can be read and handled by different software systems.
3. Metadata fields, their semantics (including labels on the user interface) and values, should not be changed across metadata formats.
4. Copyright management information metadata must never be removed from the files.
5. Other metadata should only be removed from files by agreement with their copyright holders.

Melbourne's Arcades

Is Flickr "awesome again,"?

Marissa Mayer has stated one of her first task at Yahoo, is to make flickr awesome again. On Monday Yahoo! announced a take over of tumblr and also a significant makeover of the flickr service. She seems to be on her way, but I reserve judgement on whether the awesomeness has returned.The changes are in fact Biggr than I expected and the format so overwhelmingly different you might just think you are in the wrong place when you first arrive.

• Biggr. Your terabyte of free space is massive, and includes extending the limit on video to 3 minutes of HD video. My old photos dating back to 2005 are back on-line again. This is Big.there is no doubt about that, it dwarfs my post last week about all the free cloud photo storage. Essentially you are getting a free external “cloud” harddrive (albeit with some very real bandwidth limitations) and for a lot of mobile photo snappers that probably more than they will ever want.
• Spectaculr. This presumably refers to bigger photo displays (on a desktops, with access to good internet bandwidth!) and a cleaner "seamless" collage-like view that replaces the thumbnails for your photostream, looks good but makes for a very tedious scroll “endlessly” for anything older. It could easily be google+ photo's album page with fewer photos on the screen, so its not new to me. The new slideshow actually would not start for me, I just watched the spinning balls for a few minutes and gave up. I wonder if calling these changes spectacular in the light of other photo sharing sites is a bit of over hyping the new appearance but I have to admit my photos do look better now. (ie all that white space and text were a distraction).
• Wherevr. Is about mobile and the iphone & andoid apps. Unfortunately the new android app is flagged incompatible with my older Telstra/HTC Wildfire, sad but such is life. I suspect flickr are aiming to become "the photo sharing site" of choice from mobile, by being easy to use, massive storage capacity and full resolution display but instagram and others are a long way ahead already in terms of an established userbase.

The flickr blog has a few more details
The one item I haven't been able to figure out just yet is what has happened to the PRO accounts? I assume it is now called an adfree account, and the only difference to the free account is no ads?

If you loved flickr the way it was, don't stress too much all the old features and functions are still there, you may just have to look around for them. However there doesn't seem to be anyway to go back to the old user interface. So far I have found the edit button on your photostream will get you back to a three column thumbnail display a little like the previous photostream. The film strip view in Organizr, under the three dots on the right hand side of your photostream view, will still let you scan through your images quickly enough. The details of each photo are there, still on a white background, but cleverly hidden under the fold, so just scroll down when you have a single picture displayed. So we will just need to get used to it. I'm not ecstatic but happy enough to give it a try but first it appears I'll have to recreated a bigger better Buddy Icon.