tumbleweed, tumbling
Originally uploaded by JKönig

Ok so it’s been almost two months since my last post! The irony is that because I have been very busy I have a lot to write about, but because I’ve been really busy I have not hand any time to sit down a create a post.

However, I do think this blog is important, as important as any other part of the job I do as a photographer. With that in mind I’m going to be trying to hit two posts a week. And posting more pictures, after all this is a photography blog (I’m not going to repeat the cliché concerning a specific volume of text).

In the meantime here’s a list of cool stuff I’ve seen on the internet:

• 78 Photography Rules for Complete Idiots A long and in places pretty tenuous (”It’s better to photograph clouds, when there are clouds”) list of the pretty blindingly obvious, worth a read though to see how many ‘rules’ you have have broken and actually produced great photos (I make it 24)
• Evolution of Photoshop: 1988 – 2009 A trip down memory lane, if you’re anything like me!
• Let your darkside outGood marketing, even better T-shirt!
• Manhattanhenge History repeats itself. Some very interesting images.

MG

MonaTweeta II
Originally uploaded by Quasimondo

Came across this interesting project today - the goal is to devise a scheme to compress an image so that it can be transmitted in a single tweet, which comprises a mere 140 characters - barely long enough to describe the four course meal you’re part way through consuming.

To illustrate the magnitude of the task at hand, that opening paragraph weighs in at about two tweets. Quasimondo’s solution utilises some neat tricks.

Firstly using Chinese characters increases the available storage as the set is larger than the standard western character set (which presumably enables anyone fluent in Cantonese to exchange essays over twitter).

The clever part as far as I’m concerned is the decoded image is generated using the Voronoi tessellation, which means each of the multi-sided shapes that make up the image can stored as a single point with x and y coordinates (plus a colour).

This enables large and potentially complex regions to be transmitted very efficiently. This does, however require the careful placing of points to generate salient shapes, whereupon the next clever idea is utilised. The points, or ’seeds’ are generated randomly at first and then mutated over many generations of a genetic algorithm to find the arrangement that best replicates the original image.

Click the thumbnail for a more complete description from the man himself.

MG

short gap filler
Originally uploaded by smussyolay

Posts have been a little scarce recently as I have been very busy. This does mean however that I have a lot to talk about, so stay tuned! In the meantime here are a few interesting things I’ve come across recently.

♦ Firstly, one of the reasons I love the internet: honest product reviews by people with no mandate to keep manufacturers or editors happy, such as Scott Kelby’s review of the Jobo photoGPS, a piece you’d be unlikely to find in a photography magazine! (ps if you haven’t read it already check out The Online Photographer’s review of the Nikon 24-120mm ƒ/3.5–5.6G, which is in a similar vein)

♦ Canon have announced the latest in the line of affordable DSLRs, a market segment it created back in 2003 with the release of the Digital Rebel. Check out a hands on preview of the new 500D here. The one good thing about this announcement for amateur photographers (who want to shoot pictures, not video) is that it will likely push down the cost of the 450D.

What’s wrong with the new 500D? Well they’ve equipped it with a 15 megapixel sensor, when there are widespread concerns that 15mp was too much for the 50D. To put this in perspective, 8mp is still fine for the professional sports shooters using the 1DmkII. The 35mm film that was used by some of the worlds top photographers for over half a century barely equates to 8mp. According to the stats of people visiting this site in the past year, the vast majority of users screen resolutions only correspond to a 1mp image (and that’s if it fills the entire screen). Don’t get me wrong, high resolution is not in and of itself bad, but I really can’t see including a 15mp sensor in an entry level camera as anything other than a marketing gimmick.

♦ At some point I’ll write an essay on film vs. digital, and my whole take on the debate. But to summarise, my position has always been that no matter how sophisticated the technology becomes it will always be the artistic vision and skill behind the equipment that dictates the ultimate result (until such time when computers become truly intelligent, at which point us photographers will be totally out of a job).

The sentiment was echoed by Michael Johnston in a recent post on The Online Photographer, but this time accompanied by a video which demonstrates the point far better than I could hope to do.

Disclaimer yes it’s a viral ad for Samsung and as a result you have to take what you see with a pinch of salt. But the point is it doesn’t matter if the entire thing isn’t 100% real, having seen “One Man and His Dog”, I know it could be done!

I had to post this as soon as I saw it - vandals/subversives/pop-culture philosophers/bored design students have pasted photoshop toolbars and menus over heavily airbrushed advertisements displayed in the city’s subways, in a bold and candid statement about the spurious nature of the images beneath.

Or so it seems. The cynic in me at leasts entertains the idea that this was in fact carried out by the Ad agencies themselves as part of some guerrilla marketing campaign. Weclome to the age where nothing is real and even some of the hoaxes are a hoax.

It’s fairly clever either way, I’m sure it brightened the odd commuter’s day! And before anyone accuses me of referring to a cream cake in my headline, take a look at this.

MG

Chains
Originally uploaded by
Michael Nilsson

• Firstly, Phil at DPreview sets out to objectively test the widely held belief that noise in high resolution images is mitigated by downsampling, and further highlights the disappointing trend of marketing over content which causes manufacturers of compacts to push megapixel counts ever higher at the expense of image quality.
• Here’s a great blast from the past courtesy of Ken Rockwell’s fantastic photography satire website. This is sure to make you “LOL” (and possibly even “ROFLMAO”), look out for the following phrases: “pick up your tool in your own bare hands”, and “Tripods are no longer required, and actually often degrade sharpness”. Classic stuff.
• As all serious photographers know, Apple products are intrinsically better for any creative task than PCs (even when running exactly the same software). You will then be pleased to hear that Apple has once again revolutionised the computer market with it’s revolutionary new keyboardless laptop. I can’t wait to try Photoshop on it!
• Finally, is this the worst photograph ever taken? Whilst you decide, this followup post goes onto to shed some light on what probably went wrong and demonstrates that money does not always buy quality (and that branding distorts markets).

MG

Ok this is the first (and by far the most important) link/piece of advice I can offer for aspiring photographers.

I’ve always hated the look of flash in photos; nuclear white deer in the headlamps subjects in front of an underexposed background. When I started to become serious about photography I did everything I could to make use of available light to take photos including investing in expensive wide aperture lenses and some dicey handheld long exposures. I was totally anti-flash.

I knew that studio photographers used big flash heads all the time but had dismissed this as the preserve of the rich[er than me]. This was until discovering David Hobby’s blog: strobist, which demonstrated what can be accomplished using an inexpensive battery powered flashgun and little bit of brainpower.

This lead me to the following realisation: photography is light. And if you are not doing everything in your power to bend light to your will then you are not realising the full creative potential of a given scene. It doesn’t matter if you don’t have a suite of big mains-powered strobes, the key is to control the light by any means possible, whether it’s changing the colour or firing the flash remotely from an oblique angle or simply bouncing/modifying the onboard flash.

MG