m a n n i n g t r e e

Photo TED

2010-04-27T16:10:00.001Z

Three different talks on Ted

Frans Lanting's lyrical nature photos
David Griffin on how photography connects us
Jonathan Klein: Photos that changed the world

while you’re there you might want to explore.

Polar Seattle

2010-02-16T07:46:00.001Z

I had some fun making this picture of Seattle’s water front, as seen from West Seattle, thanks to Dirk’s article on Photojojo. It was pretty easy using ICE and Photoshop…

Here’s the steps:

Take some pictures. For this I used a set of snaps of the downtown Seattle skyline from across the bay in West Seattle.
Stitch them together to build the panorama. For this I used the Image Composite Editor (ICE) from Microsoft Research

Which resulted in a rather large TIFF file – 24,101 x 2890 pixels. But only because I was being excessive…
Clean up in Photoshop by cloning the sky and cropping out the water to compensate for the poor job I did aligning successive frames when taking the pictures (note to self, next time use a tripod or find a flat surface to rest the camera on)
Compensate for the change in cloud cover because if we just wrap the scene difference in cloud density and texture from left to right results in a noticeable join. To compensate I masked out the buildings; grabbed some cloud from the left; flipped and stretch and placed behind the buildings on the right; then used a gradient mask to blend into the original sky.
Here’s the sky at the right end of the panorama before (left) and after (right) the compensation:
Convert to polar coordinates by

first resizing to a square image (Image | Resize… ensuring constrain proportions is off)
flipping vertically
and then using the Polar filter (Filter | Distort | Polar Coordinates…) to convert to polar coordinates and get the wrapped circular effect

Tweak using the imaging tool of your choice.

Enjoy.

New York on 9/11 from the air

2010-02-11T15:07:00.001Z

On NPRs The Picture Show blog.

Wobbly Flickr with IE8?

2010-02-09T07:28:00.001Z

Is it just me or is flickr wobbly with IE8…

Following #photo in the Twitterverse

2010-02-07T23:14:00.001Z

Stumbling across interesting things that you wouldn’t have gone looking for can be fun, but time consuming. Recently, in an attempt to cut out the time consuming bit, I’ve had a Seesmic Look session running in the background. Look is an interesting take on Twitter; no need for an account and channels (apparently sponsored in many cases) to help you find stuff without resorting to # and @.

Here’s a snapshot of the Kodak Photography channel in ‘playback’ mode. I think this is how I stumbled on the Daily Shoot...

Practice with the Daily Shoot

2010-02-06T03:06:00.001Z

Practice makes perfect someone once said.

One of the tricks to improving at photography is to practice capturing images that convey something that someone else set the brief for.

The daily shoot does just that. Follow @dailyshoot on twitter; you’ll get a new brief | assignment | challenge each day, take a picture and then post a link.

The humble effort above is for assignment 77, wherever there’s an edge, and is a partial reflection of Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.

Thank you James and Mike for executing on such a great idea.

Sure, of course I can do an album cover

2010-02-05T15:20:00.001Z

I’m glad it was chucking it down with rain this morning. Instead of the bike or bus I drove and had NPR/KUOW for company. Marcie Sillman interviewed Jini Dellaccio: musician, graphic designer and photographer.

Proof that news doesn’t, nor shouldn’t, be angst-inducing or depressing. Feeling good & inspired and it’s only just gone 7…

Not enough Disk Space

2010-02-05T04:35:00.001Z

After backing up the catalog, Lightroom helpfully informed me of low space on the C: drive. This is what Explorer thought of the situation:

Or, in command prompt-speak:

Lightroom quirk or Windows quirk?

McCullin

2010-02-04T04:30:00.001Z

The BBC has an audio slideshow with Don McCullin talking about some of the photographs he’s taken. Part of the ‘Shaped by War’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. More in the Image Gallery.

OMG 20 years of Photoshop

2010-01-31T21:31:00.001Z

Youch. Photoshop is twenty years old this year. Scoble has an interview [link via John Nack] with John Knoll, Photoshop co-creator. I remember messing with an early version on the Macs in the Riding House Street basement, getting tips on how to use the thing from PDC, and having to get up really early to get time on the speedy boxes.

I also remember the first year PhotoSci magazine cover project – doing masking; multiple images; dodging and burning the old fashioned wet way in the darkroom. It’s all pixels now.

Cameras & Photography on Vintage Ad Browser

2010-01-14T05:18:00.001Z

Some of my favourites appearing on Vintage Ad Browser…

Olympus OM-4

Olympus XA

Praktica

Canon T90

Ilford film (scroll down, couldn’t figure out deep linking)

Enjoy browsing.

Nothing new after Seventy Two

2010-01-13T05:28:00.001Z

“Every picture after 72, I have seen pre-72. Nothing new. But it took me some time to detect its death. The first person who twigged was Henri Cartier-Bresson. He just stopped”

Brian Duffy, as told to Leo Benedictus in The Guardian. If you’re in the UK, you can catch The Man Who Shot the 60s on iPlayer.

How to dry a Camera

2010-01-08T05:57:00.000Z

Patience.

What happened: the camera, a nice pocket-able Canon SD1000 was snuggled nicely in a bag. Also in the bag was a nalgene bottle, almost full of the clear liquid known as water. Unbeknown, the lid was not tightly secured, the bottle was upside down, and a litre or so of water filled the bag and drowned the poor little camera.

Kaput.

In the past I’d successfully restored various electronics from immersion with a combination of gentle heat, sunlight and some patience. Stripping the device down as much as possible also helps, as it did with Paul’s phone after it had come off badly in an argument with a bowl of washing up...

So I opened up the camera, removed the SD card and battery, and carefully propped it next to a heating vent to dry.

A day went by, and there was no life to be seen.

A week came and went and the screen began to flickr. Occasionally.

A month later, and the lens started to move. Sometimes.

After another two months I gave up, ordered a replacement SD<something> with more megapixels and Image Stabilization (but not better image quality it turned out), and dropped the SD1000 into a drawer, and tried to forget about it.

Fast forward a couple of months and a hurried exit for an overnight winter hike. In the rush to get up and out I grabbed the wrong camera, only noticing my mistake some hours later when we were already up in the mountains. My heart sank, a little.

Then something unexpected: the camera worked, with focus and exposure improving rapidly with successive pictures:

As ever there’s a lesson to this, I’m just not sure which one:

Drying electronics out takes a long time and lots of patience.
Drying electronics out is helped significantly by a reduction in temperature, in this case going from +15 to –10 Celsius in the space of about 6hrs.
You can break a camera out of a sulk and persuade it to work properly again by making it feel jilted.

Inspiration: Trains of Japan

2010-01-07T01:11:00.000Z

Faisal Sultan has some great pictures of the trains of Japan.

The colours are great; but I prefer them in monochrome.

Inspiration: Monochrome Wildlife

2010-01-05T21:58:00.001Z

Kalyan Varma shoots the wildlife and landscape of the Masai Mara in monochrome (with a Nikon D700):

“when I landed in Africa and saw the grasslands stretching as far as the eyes could see up to the horizon, it totally changed my perspective. For a change, one could think about the light, the composition, the perspective, the sky, the background, the position to shoot wildlife […] I realised the only way to do that was in Black and Whites. The monotones let me focus purely on the aesthetics in their simplest form”

http://kalyanvarma.net/essays/mara/

Thanks Ram for the tip.

Compact

2010-01-05T08:00:00.000Z

A long time ago, on the search for a perfect compact, I mused as to whether the Sigma DP1 was the answer. It wasn’t. A year plus later and the perfect camera still isn’t here, but why?

There have certainly been some excellent candidates. The advent of Micro Four Thirds with the Pen E-P1 (and P2) from Olympus, and the Panasonic Lumix DMC-GF1; together with cameras like the Samsung NX10 and Ricoh GXR which also boast larger sensors with a corresponding lower pixel density and offer support for interchangeable lenses, have made 2009 a very interesting year for those waiting for a pocket-able cameras without wanting to compromise on image quality.

Looking back at the criteria I had – pocket sized, great photographers control, superb image quality, ~~cheap~~ reasonably priced – I can see that a couple of the examples above fit the bill, so why aren’t any of this current crop sitting comfortably alongside the keyboard as I type this? Two reasons: first I wasn’t complete in defining my requirements: I’d now add fast accurate auto-focus, accurate exposure metering and be more precise about defining image quality (great resolution, good dynamic range, low noise at higher ~800 ISO). Second is feature creep. With these cameras now offering HD video capture, something that was never previously a requirement for me, I find myself marking them down for things like poor audio support.

I guess there’s two lessons here:

We really do judge things relatively – my requirements have increased because what’s on offer has got better.
If you wait, something better comes along.

So I’m still happy with the little Canon, because having a half-decent camera in your pocket is better than having no camera (or “the best camera is the camera you you actually use”). Here’s a recent pic to prove it:

I’d also note that the Sigma which was ~$800 is now around $530 which brings me to:

3. If you wait, consumer electronics, including cameras, get cheaper

Sigma DP1

2008-03-28T01:49:00.001Z

PopPhoto.com tests the Sigma DP1.

"The DP1 sets a new standard for image quality in a compact camera, especially at ISO 400 and 800. Its fixed 28mm-equivalent f/4 lens has incredibly low distortion and minimal light falloff that adds to image quality"

The downside? Looks to be slow AF and poor lowlight ability (slow lens, and no image stabilization to compensate) and that it'll set you back $800.

Technorati Tags: equipment,photography

Perfect Compact?

2008-03-15T02:16:00.001Z

Still on the trail of the perfect compact and, based on dpreview, it looks like the R8 isn't quite it. Looks like low light and image processing/noise are weak spots.

The new consumables

2008-02-06T03:48:00.001Z

Digital cameras killed film, and with it 50% of the consumable business (the other 50% being prints, that's a rough 50% BTW). But have camera's become the new consumable? I think Stephen Fry thinks maybe...

Independent best travel of 2007

2008-02-03T01:02:00.001Z

The Independent has chosen its best travel photographs of 2007.

Does anyone else find it odd that, with one exception, you have to follow a link to see the pictures that won?

I get the impression a lot has changed since I was inspired by Brian Harris' pictures in that newspaper.

More perfect camera

2008-01-31T15:39:00.001Z

On the trail of the perfect camera, maybe Sigma will be worth keeping an eye on...

The perfect camera

2008-01-30T06:53:00.001Z

The perfect camera: Pocket sized, great photographers control, superb image quality, ~~cheap~~ reasonably priced.

Ricoh came close except for the noise thing.

Canon arguably got closer.

But what I was really waiting for was a digital something that crossed an XA with an OM-4, only 'more so'.

Then I realized that the real advantage of a pocket sized camera is that it's with you all the time: in your pocket. And while you're waiting for the perfect pocket camera, it's obviously not, well, in your pocket. Thus, waiting for the perfect pocket camera defeats the whole objective of a pocket sized camera.

So I bought one of these & happy I have been.

There's a moral there somewhere...

Flash is bad

2008-01-30T06:39:00.001Z

Actually, it's not flash that's bad. It's on camera flash that gives flash a bad name. After all, just what is natural light?

Two steps to getting flash off camera:

1. One of these for the flash bit

2. A set of these for off camera bit

Now, if only I could remember what I learnt about lighting at college...

RAW Windows

2008-01-12T03:52:00.001Z

One of the problems with RAW formats has been the need to use specialized tools to work with the files. Pro photo tools now typically understand many RAW formats, but that doesn't extend to all the other apps that I want to use with photos, or use photos in. In Windows Vista (or more precisely, WIC) that's been made a lot easier by support for image codecs for RAW formats. You can grab a codec for the RAW format used by your camera and then any app that uses WIC to access images gets automatic support for that file type. Great for users and also great for developers, who no longer have to worry about loads of complex code changes just to support the latest RAW format variant.

There's a list of codecs available from different manufactures on the Microsoft Professional Photography site [link] which, interestingly for me, also includes a link to a DNG codec.

Although I shoot with Canon (and therefore .CR2 RAW files), for various reasons I convert to DNG. At the moment that results in a hybrid workflow where I shoot RAW+JPEG because some apps I use don't like DNGs. Looks like we might be getting closer to the time where I don't need to do stunts like that :-) so I'm off to play with codecs for a bit!

Digital Lomo?

2008-01-09T22:31:00.001Z

Nik's been playing with a Lomo with some results that reminded me of playing with pin hole photography with an OM-4 (the joys of Off-The-Film-Plane metering ;-).

I'm not sure I quite get the 'getting away from digital thing', but that's probably because for me the whole renaissance thing was getting into digital with a DSC-V1 having burnt out on photography. Probably one too many wedding. So I'm quite intrigued with the idea of sticking a lomo-lens on the front of a DSLR body. Litratista has the details on do it yourself, or you can grab a pre-built one for a variety of lens mounts from holamods.