Tilting at windmills for a better tomorrow.
OK, photography experts – I’m trying to understand the effect that’s happening here. A friend took this shot from the window of a prop plane, using Hipstamatic. What causes the blades to look like they’re bending forwards?
Beautiful, no?
Continue reading “Bending Blades (Rolling Shutter)”
A few years ago, we started hearing about intrepid souls committed to taking one photograph per day for an entire year. Shortly after, a web site designed to accommodate people doing the project popped up (365project.org). Yesterday being New Year’s, there was a lot of talk on Twitter from people wanting to dive in. Rapped about it with some friends, and four of us decided to go for it in 2011.
Since almost everyone these days is on Flickr, Instagram, Facebook etc., and since almost everyone has a phone in their pocket capable of taking relatively high-quality images, it’s never been easier. In fact, many people already take at least one photo per day without even trying. There are even 65 people on Bucketlist.org who have committed to doing the project (here’s mine).
I’ll be posting to Instagram as usual, and using the Flickr app for iPhone to push some of those photos up to a dedicated Flickr set. There’s also a very large Flickr group consisting of people doing the project (see instructions on that page).
Here’s an embedded slideshow of my set, which will grow longer as the year goes on:
I’ve fallen in love with the iPhone-only photo sharing service Instagram. It’s kind of like Twitter, but for images only. Instead of a post being limited to 140 characters, posts are limited to one photograph and a title — that’s it! Users build social networks within the system by “Liking” images and following other users.
Sounds almost too simple to be interesting, but I find it incredibly refreshing – at a certain point, we all get overwhelmed by the deluge of words in our lives, and can’t possibly consume another tweet or Facebook post. Instagram lets us share tiny corners of our lives, those little magic moments that otherwise would pass unnoticed, as a pure, nearly wordless photostream. There’s something very simple and refreshing about it. And for me, it’s encouraged use of the iPhone’s built-in camera as a more artistic tool (but be careful of over-using Instagram’s built-in filters).
Unfortunately, Instagram has no real web interface, which means there’s no easy way to share your images with non-iPhone users. But images are still saved on the phone itself, so there’s nothing stopping you from uploading them to Flickr or other services manually. I’ve started a Flickr set, and will upload my saved Instagrams to it periodically.
I’m shacker on Instagram if you want to connect.
Wondering lately where I want to land on the spectrum between convenience and quality when comparing an ultra-portable Canon PowerShot SD1100 IS (Digital Elph) and a Canon Rebel EOS. The PowerShot is the size of a deck of cards and weighs ounces. The Rebel (a DSLr camera) easily weighs five times more and has much more bulk – it’s not going to fit neatly into a belt holster that doesn’t get in your way while hiking or biking. I’m not eager to have several pounds dangling from my neck, but at the same time, wouldn’t mind stepping up my game quality-wise in the photo department. Neither camera at my disposal is the latest model in its respective line, but I assumed the Rebel would take far better pictures by default.
Decided to do an informal test to find out. Running both cameras in fully automatic mode (since that’s what I use most often, and since it’s the only way to compare fairly), I took a handful of shots in the back yard, attempting to make the images as close to identical as possible. Tried to get a range of shots in full sun, mixed shadow, and shadow. Included one flash shot and one macro shot as well.
One significant difference not accounted for here is the fact that the Rebel has a full range of manual options that the PowerShot doesn’t have. On the other hand, the PowerShot has a quite good movie mode, which the Rebel lacks completely.
The results weren’t nearly as clear cut as I expected. Comparing the images below, I have a fairly clear preference for one of the columns, but prefer a few images from the opposite column. Can you tell which column is which camera? Which column do you prefer overall?
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Amy, Miles and I did some experiments with flashlights and a laser pen recently, drawing in the air in the kitchen with 6-second timed exposures. Unfortunately Amy’s camera didn’t have a CF card inserted, so we were able to save only a few of them done with my dinky point-and-shoot (I actually didn’t realize my SD1100 was even capable of doing timed exposures until that evening).
Dig my little Volkswagen? Would like to play with this technique more one day – great possibilities.
Accidental team effort: A while ago, we ordered a set of super-magnetic BuckyBalls from ThinkGeek. Miles soon discovered he could stick them to the nails in our wooden floor, and stack them up in delicate little towers. Amy, with her amazing eye for detail, saw something beautiful in the scene and started taking pictures – close up, and with a very short depth of field. She accidentally left the camera’s light temperature sensor set to Tungsten, which caused this gorgeous bluish cast.
Remembering that ThinkGeek has a section attached to each product in their catalog for “Customer Action Shots,” I submitted the image alongside their BuckyBalls product entry. Next day, amazed to discover we had won this month’s user submission prize!
I’m totally in love with Amy’s shot — and with Amy. And with Miles.
Happy New Year everyone. Love to all.
Digging through some old images, stumbled across this one, shot by Miles (age six) while playing with my camera. Quite beautiful … seems to have a real sense for the camera. He must get that from his mother.
Via Boing-Boing, early example of geocoding? No mention there of how coordinates were calculated back then. I’m picturing a sextant in one hand and a bubble level in the other. Love the use of the wooden arrow, just to make sure we’re talking absolute precision.
For a while now, I’ve been wanting to try my hand at geocoding — attaching latitude and longitude (coordinate) data directly to the EXIF metadata in photographs so they can be precisely positioned on a map.
The easiest way to do this is to use a camera with a built-in GPS. Unfortunately, that’s still a pretty rare feature in cameras, and comes at a hefty premium. Because most people aren’t interested in the feature and never will be, it’s not likely to become commonplace any time soon. Some day we’ll all have high-quality cell phone cameras with native GPS — the Nokia N95 is the current front-runner, and I think it’s a safe bet the coming Google phone will have fully integrated GPS features. I’ve been holding back on taking the iPhone plunge until it has fully realized GPS capabilities (at which point it will also become the ultimate geocaching device).
But the cool thing is, you don’t have to wait for a GPS-enabled camera to start geocoding. Here are the results of my first geocoding experiment, created without a GPS-enabled camera. The icons are clickable; the thumbnails in the balloons are too.
The photos aren’t great, the interface isn’t perfect, and due to several beginner’s mistakes, only some of the coordinates shown here are accurate. This was more a proof of concept than anything – a way to explore available software and techniques. You’d think generating a map like this would be trivial at this point in the game. Well… yes and no. There are a ton of options, but getting things to appear exactly the way you want them to is still a bit of a pain. Click through for the gory details.
I recently picked up an excellent (paper) map detailing 140 of Berkeley’s hidden pathways – concrete or wooden stairs covering the steep stretches between many of the twisting, heavily wooded streets of Berkeley. These were mostly built at the turn of the last century to help citizens without cars get to the local train systems. I recently explored a few dozen of the paths with my family, and started my geocoding experiment there.
When CCDs go bad, accidental digital beauty. This reminded me of a series I stumbled across on LJWorld several years ago — the gorgeous results of having dropped a camera into a pond. Wonder how often people have this kind of accident and find themselves suddenly blessed with a “magic camera.” The only time something similar happened to me was when I was trying to shoot raindrops hitting the surface of the ocean in the middle of a tropical storm in Jamaica. Enough ambient moisture entered the camera body that everything it shot for the next few hours was distorted and smeary – not quite accidental beauty, just bad. And it cleared up by the next morning after leaving it open to dry overnight. Hmmm… I can find a few on Flickr, not nearly as many as I’d expect. Now I want to find a cheap/used digicam just to drown it.
