Category: photography

About taking pictures

From Photo to Finished—Automattic

10 Minute Lightning Talk for the Automattic Meetup at Seaside, September 2010

Automattic is the company I work for. The company is distributed worldwide and once a year we gather at a remote location and meet face-to-face. This year, all the employees are taking a little time during the meetup to compose and give at least one presentation for each other, talking about any subject we are passionate about.

For this presentation I chose the subject of photography. Specifically, taking one photo from start to publish describing how I took the shot and the editing steps I chose.

Like many bloggers—Automattic is also known as WordPress—I’m passionate about photography and I felt that many of the other people it the room might be interested in it also—our founder and CEO’s online handle is “photomatt.”

I hope you enjoy this presentation!

This was the second presentation I gave that day. I composed it just after I finished the first.

Photo to Finished

View more webinars from terry chay.

This presentation will be expanded into a post around Christmas. Look for it!

Posted on by tychay 4

Nikon D3100

Last month, a friend asked me purchasing advice on a Nikon D5000. I told him, “Don’t. Nikon will be introducing a new D3000 replacement before Photokina.”

Today, Nikon has officially announced the Nikon D3100 entry level dSLR camera.

353_25472_D3100_front

If you recall the big spreadsheet in my complete guide to purchasing an entry dSLR camera (etc), the big specification upgrades are: 14 megapixel, 1080p video and continuous AF.

Two other overlooked features of the D3100 are the improved ergonomics: the shooting mode is now chosen with a dial, and a lever now activates the movie mode. Both are going to be very welcome (for reasons I explained in my guide above).

Continue reading About the D3100 after the jump

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Sunrise at Mt Whitney

August 11, 2002

I took one look at the crowds at Trail Camp and said, “There is no way we’re stopping here” so we climbed the 99 switchbacks, and pitched our tents at 14,000 feet in the dead of darkness. Because I hadn’t acclimated to the altitude, I woke up hours before sunrise and prepared my camera for an attempt to make the peak in time for the sunrise. Hearing me rustle in the tent, Tim woke up and said that he’d accompany me.

Since we only had flashlights for a guide, we got lost and ended up doing Keeler Needle instead. Even in the dark, I could tell we somehow ended up on the eastern slope—you suddenly feel the cool air coming from your left and know there is nothing there but a gaping void. Because of my acrophobia, I just lit the rocks in front of me with my headlamp, took one step in front of the other, and prayed.

When we righted ourselves, the light was starting to change and Tim ran ahead to make the peak by dawn. I slogged on, out of shape and out of breath.

Less than a quarter mile from the peak, I could see the sunlight peeking through the cracks in the slope. I wasn’t going to make it. So, I found a gap in the trail, set up my tripod and prepared to shoot the sunrise.

Sunrise at Mt. Whitney

Sunrise at Mt. Whitney
Mt Whitney, Inyo National Forest, California

Olympus C-2500L
7 exposures, exposure data missing

It took seven photographs and a stitch to encompass what I saw that day, and I still missed the cliff that I was peeking through.

Continue reading about my Mt. Whitney hike after the jump.

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Retinal burn

I suppose musings like this are very common among Apple haters. Basically the complaint boils down to:

“325dpi? Bah! Even a 1986-era laser printer does 300dpi and my newspaper does at least 600dpi. Until you get there, the print is smudgy and causes eye-strain.”

Apple - iPhone 4 - Learn about the high-resolution Retina display

The facts in the Apple’s advertising blurb are 100% correct. If you have a beef, don’t take the advertising head-on. The whole thing is essentially a misdirection in all but a few cases.

What a crock of shit.

Continue reading about eye acuity and displays after the jump.

Posted on by tychay 11

Family Photos

Take photos of your family.

Bernadette’s 1st Communion

My mom, aunt, and uncle in Kyoto Japan 1941. My other aunt (who hadn’t been born yet) sent me this photo today.

Distance is no object—that’s why we have Skype and screenshotting (Cmd-Shift-3 on the Macintosh).

Ken, Dad, and Mia on Skype

My brother, father, and sister-in-law in Providence 2010.

I’m going to try to use ScanCafe to digitize my parents old photos quickly. I am receiving it as “a thank you gift” during KQED Public Radio’s last pledge drive. The idea is they send you a box, you fill it with photos and slides, and then they give you DVDs with them digitized.

We’ll see how that goes.

Update: Here they are (and some of the ones here).

Posted on by tychay 5

Geolocation sharing in Aperture 3

A lot of people are complaining that the flickr sharing feature in Aperture 3 is missing geolocation data (Places).

This is not true, all you have to do is go to Aperture > Preferences… > Web and check the box to “Include location information for published photos.”

Geolocation sharing in Aperture 3

Then click on the “radar” buttons to the right of the Flickr sets in Aperture to force a resync. Your image geocodes will be re-uploaded (I noticed in my case, it re-uploaded the images instead of just resyncing the metadata, but that bug may have been fixed in Aperture 3.0.1).

Here is a photo I uploaded via Aperture 3’s flickr sharing:

The Concourse Level

The Concourse Level
Westfield San Francisco Centre, Market Street, San Francisco, California

Sony DSC-WX1
1/30sec @ ƒ2.4, ISO160, 4mm (24mm)

I was so tired after the run, I could shop no longer…or rather, watch my friends shop. I decided to hang outside and take photos of the curvy escalators in Westfield San Francisco. And I actually needed to buy a suitcase from the Tumi store, too.

You can see it has been placed on the map automatically.

Sync, not Upload

One thing a lot of people don’t realize is the flickr sharing is a synchronization, not an upload. This means that edits you make on flickr appear as metadata modifications in the original file. (I think it does not sync down changes to the image, but new images in a set do get brought down.) It also means you can’t do an upload without creating a set. It also means you are limited in the tags by what tags you explicity upload (instead of tag hierarchy). It also means you are limited to the amount of resizing you can do on export. It also means you can’t do things like add a watermark on your export. It also means you can’t batch add to a group, or another set, or anything without using flickr’s online organizr.

If you don’t like that, then that’s why Frasier Spears is still selling FlickrExport and has recently updated it for 64-bit. I own it, and use it.

Frasier, Bernie, Greg and Amy

Fraser, Bernie, Greg, and Amy
Buzz Andersen’s 5th Annual WWDC Party
111 Minna, South of Market, San Francisco, California

Nikon D3, 24-70mm f/2.8G, SB-800
1/30 sec @ ƒ/2.8, iso 1000, 24 mm

Fraser Speirs with some of my friends. I got really shit-faced that night (it was my birthday so I was making everyone buy me drinks).

I believe I uploaded this image with his software. 🙂

Oh yeah, the “check mark” you see next to the image in Aperture’s Flickr albums is the image actually uploaded/synced with flickr. I have no idea how to change it other than deleting it and dragging a new one. This is a major bummer for me.

Faces sync in Facebook

Faces are synced back in Aperture. You can tell because Facebook added faces are now searchable. Right now, getting the Facebook Faces back into your Aperture faces is a little buggy. The only way to do that is to go to the set, click the “Name” icon, and manually go through each image confirming the facebook entries by clicking the “f” icons and hitting return. Still it does guess faces well.

Faces Facebook syncback

Photo from this article was synced to Facebook and Flickr.

Basically click on the “f” and then hit return and those names will be synced back. Notice that even though Alicia Kenworthy has only been tagged in a different Facebook photo, it guessed the face here.

I hope they fix that.

Posted on by tychay 7

Camera manuals to go

Buried in a previous article, instead of carrying the paper manuals around, I mentioned that you should download your manufacturer’s camera manuals onto the iPhone for reference. But I didn’t explain how this could be done or why it is useful.

Here are three applications I’ve used that render PDFs:

Three apps: Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader

Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader

I’ll be talking about Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader. If you want to know the solution I use for camera manuals, skip to the section on GoodReader.

Continue reading about reading PDF manuals in Air Sharing, Dropbox, and GoodReader after the jump

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Camera testing bias

Ken Rockwell goes on a tear with his new camera, a medium format digital.

As his habit, Ken Rockwell exhibits a bad case of selection bias. For example, let’s take this quote from the first article:

All the 35mm rangefinders and DSLRs look pretty much the same, and the point-and-shoot is the worst.

I’ve also shown the fallacy of falling for claims of 12-bit, 16-bit or 24-bit image processing in-camera.

As those of us who have done this for a living since the 1980s know, the noise level of any of these sensors is much larger than even 12-bit processing. Throwing more real bits at the ADC only serves to quantize the noise more accurately; there isn’t any meaningful image data needing that precision.

Well anyone can see from his sample the 35mm cameras are not the same: the Nikon D3 exhibits tonality better than the Canon 5D Mk II and the Leica M9, as it should. And those aren’t even the right 35mm cameras to be testing against—I will bet you’ll get nearly the same result as the Mamiya DM33 in the Nikon D3X (with a Zeiss ZF optic on it). He does similar manipulations of outcome bias in order to get the result he is wants to get before hand in his high ISO test.

Continue reading about Ken Rockwell after the jump

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