Fencing Off Private Geo “Hot Spots” on Flickr

Flickr now allows you to create hotspots, which it calls geofences with specific privacy settings. These are useful for locations such as "home" or "school" or anywhere else you would like to make more private than your global default. You can have up to 10 geofences, that can automatically block the accidental public display of your location. Many smart phone users do not realize that the location of the photo is frequently also captured and embedded in the photos EXIF metadata data . Posting that photo on the net then will allow others, who know how to read the EXIF data to determine a lot more about your private life than you intended. The real problem is there are now a lot of common social tools that can look for and share this location detail with wind more importantly often without your knowledge, the geofences, accesses and content filter are a good reason to consider doing most of your social network sharing of photos via Flickr.

Alternative you could

• Use Picasa Web Album, and remove the location data from specific photos.
• Turn off the geotagging (it might be called location) on your phone (this may not always be in the phonaes cameras settings and might require reference to the phones manual)

Check out your geo privacy page in Your Account Settings on Flickr for more details. You can  also hide your camera’s EXIF data in Your Account Settings.

While the DSLR is away the Androids come out to play

My Pentax DSLR started to chew up my SD memory cards. (actually it was just forcing the small plastic strips between the metal contacts out of shape, rendering the cards unreadable on other devices) I assume either something has fallen in to the card reader or the card insert mechanism was slightly out of alignment, Anyway the camera has gone of holiday to the camera repair shop. Life without it is not the same but I do have my android camera phone to play with and satisfy the urge to experiment with camera techniques.This  is another HDR camera shoot, Captured as three separate images. Damn that pedestrian walking across my image. I didn’t see hime when I tap the screen release button. Click… Click … bugger where did he come from …Click ….right in the middle of frame now. The three images are processed in camera in a HDRI style tacking the exposure range across the three photos and producing an extended (High Dynamic Range) image.The beauty of the HDR camera software is it doesn’t lead to ghosting when the camera is moved or people in the photo move. The moving man appears to been totally ignored, actually not totally his final position is hinted by a shadow shape on the footpath).

A wish for PhotoContests to use Creative Commons

I noticed Catherine Hall‘s invite on Google+ for a TWIT Photo contest and investigated because TWIT is a web savvy group but I was discouraged by the same old same old detail in the conditions of entry.

Once upon a time I entered a lot of on-line photo contest, they are fun and a good way to get recognition but I no longer do so because I now always read the terms and conditions of entry. They normally have been written by lawyers (or cut and pasted from rules written by lawyers) and have terms like “irrevocable, royalty-free, non-exclusive, worldwide perpetual” when all they really want is the right to publish the winning and running up photos. Unfortunately that click that you accept the competition conditions is assumed to mean you have in theory have given away your normal common law copyright rights to those mentioned in the conditions I’m not a lawyer but such “agreements” may not be all that enforceable “worldwide” (specifically outside the USA) and are really only there for the USA-centric litigious fantasyland of sue or be sued. It is my observation that having lawyers and agents involved with the threat of litigation just suck the creative side dry rather than feeding and encouraging it. I don’t want to play in that space.

I for one want photo competitions to just use the creative commons guidelines. They are really ideal for what I understand the competition organizer’s want, which to be able to reproduce the photos without expressed permission of the photographer (this is the basic Attribution 3.0 license. CC BY, and the author is granting the right to share and adapt the work. The 3.0 is just the current version of the creative commons licenses. This does allows for commercial use of the work (because it is not excluded, in the same way it is usually not mention in the legalistic competition rules) Commercial use might including the photo in a book which is for sale. It is this right to potential commercial use that creative types should worry about.  Fortunately there is a nice creative common solution, the Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license CC BY-NC. This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work non-commercially, and although their new works must also acknowledge you and be non-commercial, they don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms. In other words you are sharing your work buy not for other to make money from. Any completion organizer should still be happy with this.

So I would be happy to click acceptance on a competition that just requires those entering must license their entry Attribution-NonCommercial, CC BY-NC. End of conditions.

Other photographers might be happy to enter competition with a requirement for Create Commons Attribution, CC BY. Which I think is all the TWIT team really intended after all.

Flickr and Picasa Web Album are examples of two web services that understand this need to include the creative common licensing in their web based display of any photo or art work and including the ability to have default settings. If you look at any single photo in either of these services you will see the little CC logo, or failing that a convention copyright (all rights reserved logo). The intention in Google+ is not as clear in that creative commons isn’t found in the help forum and sharing images bring you to discussion of public versus sharing with your circles. In theory because Google+ images are also in picasa web album they get a default license (which is for me at least is a full copy right). I can change that in picasa web album for specific photos or albums but anyone looking at the image(s) on Google+ will not see these CC license logos. I think this is an important small step for Google+ to fix right now

The big advantage of creative commons for content creators is they are don’t affect the author’s moral rights to the intellectual property and that the author could also grant waivers or stricter conditions to others wanting to use the same image.

Meet the Frogmouths

Mr. & Mrs (order unknown) and the two kids. The Tawny Frogmouth Podargus strigoides, these owls are very equal opportunity parents sharing egg incubation and brooding duties. These two chicks are delightful little bundles of fluffy feathers

Tripod Easel ver 2.1

I have used my tripod easel a few times now and decided sitting down to sketch/paint in the field is not my thing. I’m very used to perching myself wherever and holding a light drawing board, and turning it around as I want (often to play with the wash flow direction). The tripods I have both extend up to bring the camera virtually to eye level so getting a higher board height is really easy (you just crank the handle on the extension tube). Further the heads on both my tripods have a lockable swivel arm so that the camera is easily reposition with one hand (or the drawing board tilted and rotated).  After a bit of experimentation I opted to have the swivel arm pointing up, which meant I have to reach under or around the board but it does seem to give me better control (however it makes the arm harder to see in the photo below). So all I needed to do was make up a wider drawing board (still 3mm particle board sheet) and find a palette with deeper wells, so the washes don’t spill out as I tilt the board). Using common bulldog clips (anything similar will do just fine) I then clamped my mixing palette on the right and sketch book on the left. A couple of big blobs of blu tac help my keep brushes and pencils handy.

I had tried to find the spot Charles Conder had painted his larger Holiday at Mentone work. The old mentone seas baths, and beach boxes are long gone and the current “jetty” is enclosing a storm water drain and more western along the beach. In my memory conder’s painting faced the other way. So I am probably in much the same location of condor’s easel but looking in the opposite direction. for my sketch. For a wider view see my photosynth below. The standup painting position works better for me, and I could work faster with the washes and tilting the board was very easy. Finally I like this simpler design (less parts to carry) 

Mentone Beach Photosynth :: Full 360°

Further Investigation of AutoFocus up close

My previous investigation only wetted my appetite to find out more about the close up focusing on my android phone. So I reinstalled PRO Paint, something of a mistake (see the footnote) and also grabbed my Pentax DSLR and my wife’s FujiPix (a nifty little point and shoot) and I went out to take some things in the garden up really close. I was primarily interested in the difference in depth of field, as the lens got smaller. I was expecting the depth of field to get wider on the smaller cameras and largely it did. This narrower depth of field on my big DSLR does give a pleasant effect where the subject is in focus but the background blurred. Also these photos are clearer and possibly closer to the true colour saturation. I did use the special macro mode on The FujiPix and my touch and hold method for my HTC camera. What I did notice and I have seen before is that some subjects (eg purple & white flowers) give autofocus a hard time. I suspect these subjects don’t have sharp enough contrast in themselves for the autofocus to play with. See the single lavender bloom (second row) I was trying to focus on the petals of that bloom and only the DSLR let me do that (after a lot of ranking back and forth of the lens) the other cameras just focused on the foliage behind. 

CONCLUSION: You’ll still do better with marco subjects if you go for a DSLR and exploit the depth of field to highlight your subject,  All cameras did a good enough job to get the detail. Some white & lighter purple subjects are harder to get auto-focus to work.

Pentax D20	FujiPix Z30	Android HTC	Android PRO Paint
			Not Taken *
			Not  Taken *
			Not Taken *

* The PRO Paint app kept crashing my phone, whenever it used the flash which it did unnecessarily, so I gave up and uninstalled it again.

Echos of the Buzz

Whilst Buzz was initially included within google+, albeit as a side show. Google has taken the sensible step of sidelining it altogether. However the Buzz like overwhelming noise does still echo within in google+

The Animated Gifs are at epidemic proportions on Google+ at the moment. However I felt this one by Drunken K Bliths was so good on several levels I needed to share it. 

The other aspect of google+ I am finding very distracting are the excessive posters, those that keep popping up every few posts with a few lines and then a link to someone else’s posts/blog/website. I’m not trying to shame Robert Scoble, his posts are usually informative even on topics like android camera phones and geotagging, but if you are following him you’ll know what I mean.  Most of this this stuff would be better as comments on the original post or blog. I think the only solution is to keep unflowing such individuals until your stream returns to a flow that suits your tempo. I’m looking for a babbling brook in the forest of what interests me, not a mosquitoe infested swamp buzzing with “everything” remotely social webish.

Macro Focus on a Cameraphone

In a discussion thread on Google+ about android phone apps,  Remi Valade asked about android cameras apps with a macro feature. Since close ups are a feature I often use/need I figured this was something worthwhile investigating. I am a geologist and I often need to take close up pictures of rocks, not works of art so much as photos  that show the specific detail. I recently found this exotic rock (ie it did not match the local geology) in the spoil of shells and charcoal below an aboriginal midden, in a large dune blow out. It is highly weathered, but looks hard and probably volcanic, when I turned it over I could see what appears to be a skilled chipping of the edge to produce a cutting or scarping shard, maybe even a spear tip. By the way when taking “scientific” close ups, it is good practice to include a scaling reference, such as a coin or pencil, or make up you own scale reference, laminate it and keep it in your camera bag

Searching google and just doing an android macros focus query then looking in various forum, It show that the common complain was that whilst the screen could be focused on something close, it would usually drift out of focus when the button was pressed (and the delay before the shutter fired) and the photo was taken. I wondered if this was a camera movement thing, up close even a small movement would mean a close object could go out of focus and refocussing takes time. I also noted the large number of Phone magnifiers app that seemed to display similar focus sensitivity and short comings. This got me thinking perhaps I might do better moving back and using the zoom.
I had already discovered that if I pressed and held my finger on a specific part of the image the HTC camera would focus and set the exposure  to suit that point (and it could be anywhere on the screen), Then after a short delay (maybe 3 seconds) still hold my fingure on that spot on the screen the shutter would fire, with flash if necessary. The press and hold is a much easy way to stay steady, and I use it all the time. Adding a bit of zoom gave me a quiet acceptable photo of the chip. You can see the texture of the split and several phenocrysts in the unweathered part of the rock.


My next stop was the android market place, and using the key words Macro Focus. I  saw there where only a few camera apps claiming macro capabilities amongst a larger number of magnifiers. The most obvious free photo app (I wanted free so I could test it out) was PRO Paint (they have a paid app version called Pro Zoom Camera 5X). First results where awful, every time I focussed and tapped the screen to take the picture it would go out of focus (just like the user comments in the various forums) plus the frequent nagging screens suggesting I upgrade where driving me crazy. Eventually I pressed the AF button (I now realized it stood for AutoFocus) down on the far left and it worked beautifully (see below). Ok about as well as the HTC camera held steady (see above). Anyway I don’t like nagware so I have delete this app already.

Unexpected

I was down Ricketts Point, Beaumaris on the bay south of Melbourne. and spotted a group of black swans. I hadn’t many along the coast for the past few years and this is the second group I have seen this month. I went to get my DSLR camera and the battery was flat (sad face) but I did have my android phone and as is my preference at the moment I took at HDR camera shot (actually its three shots)

As is typical taking such a series with a moving subject (the sea gulls, the waves and even the swans themselves) I was expecting ghosting. However looking at the final result the waves and seagulls and swan on the right are all nice and sharp and just as they where in the first photo. Even though Almalence, the creators of the HDR camera app, claim the correct handling of moving objects and de-ghosting I do find this pretty amazing.

Going Wide Angle on a Cameraphone

 

For PhotoFriday‘s Topic Wide Angle

I’m sure something like this must have has already been tried. Here I have used 4 photos taken on my android cameraphone, stitched them with Microsoft Research's ICE software and uploaded the resulting image to Microsoft Research's Photosythn. Zoom in with your mouse and look around, not bad resolution for a cameraphone. The big drawback in this image however is the horizon is a very wobbly line.