Tuesday, October 31, 2006

Dan's quick edit

This is taken of a ditch near where I live. I saw this junk, just dumped there and thought about the symbiosis between the human and the nature...

First, I rotated the picture a few degrees and cropped it. Then I wanted to ephasize the illness of the whole by turning the picture into B&W, except for the rusty barrels and the brown water. I even enhanced the saturation of the barrels to make them stand out more. Mixing B&W with colour is a really easy thing to do and it works powerfully.

How it was done?

I used two layers, the original as the backround layer and a copied layer of the same image. The copied image on the top was turned into B&W just by desaturating it. Then, where the barrels are, I erased the top image with the eraser tool revealing the extra saturated colour image below, thus leaving everything else B&W except for the erased parts.

Monday, October 30, 2006

How you appreciate your digital photography? - Digital Photography Now

How you appreciate your digital photography? - Digital Photography Now
This is an interesting article and provides some context to think about the quality of digital cameras.
Steve

Wednesday, October 18, 2006

Daniel's Flickr

I got my new Flickr site up and running. Good way to share your photos and give them tags for other people to "accidentally" find your pictures:) It's also fun to see what other photos there are with the same tags as yours. The downside is the limited bandwidth.

Tuesday, October 17, 2006

How do I get organized?

I downloaded the Picasa and installed it on my computer. It did a nice work scanning my photos. It scanned all my directories and the directories of the program files, too, which created quite a lot of junk. The junk took a while to clean up. It was somewhat easy to clean it up by simply hiding the unwanted folders. The program is a nifty way to categorize your photos without moving the physical location of the actual files. Giving the names of "albums" i.e. tags, you can group the photos accordingly. You can also do some basic picture editing with it, too. Such operations as rotating, cropping, automatically correcting colours and so on are really easy to do with the program. I created some albums, like 'Holidays', 'Fairbanks', 'Finland' and 'CD Covers'. By right-clicking a picture and selecting it to be moved into an album you have created, you can create virtual albums of any sort. You can also submit photos directly to the Blog if you wanted to. It is a handy tool for an easy way to organize your pictures and even share them online. I don't have that many pictures yet that they would need extensive organizing, but it's good to know that with such a free tool I can do it in a very short time. I will keep this program in mind (though there are other similar programs available, too) and give it a thought when I really need to organize my photos.

Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Photos gone wrong

This is my friend Ruth, her poor chin is my subject blurr

Depth of Field - look at the trailor not the turnouts(I did not use a tripod)

I have over exposed Engine 64 - ISO 1600 with a shutter speed of 1 second

Engine 64 is now under exposed - too dark - ISO 800 with a shutter speed of 1/125

While this picture of Engine 64 is a bit blue I had to really over compensate for the green that comes from the floresent lights






Wednesday, October 04, 2006

My Camera Reviews

href="http://photos1.blogger.com/blogger/301/3786/1600/hp_m417_front_on.0.jpg">


I was disappointed at some of the reviews I read. I have a HP Photosmart M417 digital camera. It is one of the cheapest 5 megapixel digital cameras available. The major problems in the reviews was that it stuggled focusing in indoors and in low light. Many of the users complained that it was very slow with the playback mode. They explained the image quality is too soft and noise is visible at ISO 100. Hearing all these problems, surprised me because I don't have any problems with the camera. This camera has built in help, built in red-eye reduction, good outside images, and has an easy menu working system.


Lesson 4 - Reviews



Taking Photographs: How does the camera work?
Look up three reviews of your camera and summarize their conclusions.
Use http://www.dcviews.com/ to find information on your camera.
Either print out your summary and submit it, or post it to the course web log.

Wow, this was really interesting to read. My camera is a Canon Rebel XT, it is a second generation camera from the Canon Digital Rebel. In all the reviews it talked about how this camera is smaller than the rebel, with more and better components. I can take JPEG and RAW pictures. This camera has lots of automatic function, yet there is still the capability to do many manual functions. This camera uses digital and film lenses, has optional external flash and takes pictures quite rapidly. Overall the reviews were good for this camera that is marketed at the amateur with a price less than $1000(until you start buying lenses and flashes☺). I have thoroughly enjoyed taking pictures with this camera and look forward to using some of the knowledge gained from these reviews to improve the pictures I do take.

Sunday, October 01, 2006

Lessons 4 & 5

Lesson 4,
Summary of Reviews on Canon Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D):
















The predecessor Digital Rebel (EOS 300D) was the first DSLR camera under $1000 for the consumer market. Digital Rebel XT (EOS 350D) is an upgrade of that model. The physical size of the camera is very small. It is one of the smallest DSLR cameras around. It weighs only 485 grams. Technical improvements have also taken place. This camera has a fast processor matching the more expensive professional models. It has a 8.0 megapixel sensor. The startup time is extremely quick, it takes only 0.2 seconds from off to on. The Canon can take 3 frames per second. It takes great pictures which are almost as good as ones taken with a lot more expensive cameras of the Canon family. All the reviews like the camera and recommend buying it. I’m glad I did.



Lesson 5,
Taking pictures wrong:



Subject blurred


Motion blurred


Correct Depth of Field


Incorrect Depth of Field


Incorrect white balance (too cold)


Warm White Balance


Under exposed


Over Exposed


There's nothing wrong with these pictures, I put them out just because they are "hot" pictures from the Nanooks Starvation Gulch Bonfire:)