climate change activist and science communicator; event photographer; amateur mapmaker — advocate for a stable global climate, reduced nuclear weapon risks, and safe human-AI interaction
Equipment, examples, history – all matters photographic
These are the shots taken on film, hence their late emergence. As has often been the case in the past, getting back the photos from my expensive film camera has been a reminder of just how good a deal my cheap point and shoot digital camera was.
Getting interesting angles sometimes involves hanging out windows, alarming the guards, and looking a right fool.
Parisian coffeehouse
Boat in the Canal St. Martin
A kind of shabby encampment beside the canal.
Every time I turn on my Canon Powershot A510, it now asks me to enter the date and time. This suggests that the backup battery, which is used to store that information, has died. Having the right time programmed in is valuable, because it helps to organize thousands of photos. Do any of the A510 owners who read this blog have the manual? I need to know (a) where the battery is located and (b) whether it is user-serviceable.
Thanks a lot.
[Update: 18 July] I got a new battery from the key cutting shop in the Covered Market. It seems to have dealt with the issue.
[Photograph removed – 21 October 2012]
The individual pixels in the sensors inside digital cameras cannot collect information from across the entire visible spectrum. To get a full colour image, it is therefore necessary to combine information from several different pixels, each of which has a coloured filter in front of it that acts to establish which part of the visible light range it observes.
Virtually all digital sensors rely upon the Bayer Pattern, invented by Kodak. This allocates half of all pixels to the green portion of the spectrum, with 1/4 devoted to red and blue, respectively. The process of combining the data mathematically is fairly resource intensive. This process is called interpolation. It can be done either using a generic of-the-shelf processor, which is cheaper per unit but not very fast or energy efficient, or with a custom chip, such as the DIGIC chips in Canon digital cameras.
Today, Kodak announced a new pattern for use in CCD and CMOS sensors. The new system uses both filtered and unfiltered pixel elements. These will record brightness data from across the entire spectrum. The new interpolation algorithms then use this panchromatic data to create a luminance channel, to which colour data is added using data from the filtered elements. Doing so may require much more processing power, which suggests that new custom chips will need to be designed.
The benefit of the new pattern is that it will supposedly double the sensitivity of sensors, allowing for better performance in low light. Given how small and inexpensive the lenses on cheap cameras and camera phones are, this is a very important design parameter. Of course, all this constant development in digital photography makes one a bit wary to invest $1000 or more in what is available this year. Chances are, the offer next year will be rather better. For this particular technology, it will probably be necessary to wait until the first quarter of 2008.
Compressed walkers.
Sheep are never far away.
One third of the way around the Kentmere Horseshoe.
If you are in a proper place for walking, the landscape will dwarf you.
Dry stone walls take a lot more effort to build than to climb over.
Once you reach a peak, a bit of a rest is surely in order. Actually, Rob and Sarah were ill during the whole trip, so their fellwalking demonstrated particular persistence.
Walkers atop Wetherlam.
The hiking boot: noble symbol of our determination.
Which isn’t to say we never take them off…
If you can shear a sheep, you can arm wrestle two humans at once and win.
For the Paris trip, Hilary kindly acted as courier for this small tripod, sold by Mountain Equipment Co-Op. While it is not without some good features, it is a disappointment overall. The main reason for this is bad design.
The first mistake has to do with the rubber pads at the base of the legs. They fall off very easily: particularly the one shaped like an L-joint. They should be tighter or glued on. The second problem is with the velcro strap. It has no convenient place to go when the tripod is unfolded, except wrapped around one leg. It should be positioned more intelligently for situations where you want to fold and unfold the tripod often, or it should be made removable. I have never used it once, but I am a bit hesitant to irreversibly cut it off.
Far and away the biggest problem has to do with the knob controlling the ballhead. Even if you twist the knob with as much torque as you can possibly muster, the tripod head remains somewhat loose. If you want to keep the tripod on the side of your camera with the legs folded up along one side, the friction between the ball and the plastic socket for it is not enough to keep it there. Even more annoyingly, when you have tightened the knob as much as you can, it often becomes badly stuck. You will find yourself frequently using your teeth to loosen it. I have had to resort to pliers on several occasions.
While light and promising in its form-factor, this little tripod does not live up to its potential. I am grateful to Hilary for bringing it, but my search for a small, always-on tripod for my A510 is not over.
PS. ThinkGeek sells the same device.
Thirteen Oxonians on a mountainside.
An enthusiastic fellow Canadian.
This was one of the few bits of actual rock climbing we did. Note how much more impressive it looks when done with a gear-filled leader’s pack.
This scramble on the Coniston Horseshoe was the most enjoyable bit of walking on the trip.
Having climbed a Wainwright, it is sometimes necessary to climb the marker and present as unusual an expression as possible.
Here is a simple map of my trips in the British Isles so far. Blue is for London, visited many times (1, 2, 3, 4, 5) . Orange is the the trip to Chichester for Sarah Webster’s wedding, with the eastward jot to Arundel shown also. Yellow is the reading retreat to Devon, while pink is for my day in Bath. Green is the excellent Ireland trip: to Dublin and then across to Galway. Light blue is the Walking Club trip to Snowdonia. Red is their trip to the Scottish Highlands, and light green is this weekend’s trip to the Lake District.
All told, it’s not too shabby an exploration. That is especially true when one considers the number of papers I wrote, the thesis, exams, and other trips to Estonia, Finland, Malta, Turkey, Vancouver, and Paris.
1) Remember how our flat got deprived of refrigeration? One week on, we are still subsisting off of bread and cheese we keep cold in the metal cages outside our windows. We call them the ‘alternative fridges.’
2) Remember how I lost the ballot for the Lake District trip with the Walking Club? Well, somebody dropped out. Because I expressed so much interest in it, they offered the spot to me. As such, I will be climbing mountains again from June 1st to 3rd. The only thing that would make it better would be having more than 16 days left before exams.
3) Remember ‘Studio Photography on the (very) cheap?’ Well, I have figured out how to build a large and effective diffuser for under $3. That was the purpose behind this query. Two sheets of A1 tracing paper turn out to perfectly cover the lower section of the window.
Note how English tea stains glassware. The picture would be a lot more attractive if I propped the glass objects up on something, cleaned them before taking the photo, and photoshopped away the tape holding the paper to the window and the place where the two sheets overlap. This was meant to illustrate the assembly, not be artistic of itself.
Here is a useful iPhoto trick that Mac users may not already know: if you select a batch of photos, then select “Share > Export” you can create a QuickTime movie. You can have each image show for whatever length of time you like, set the size of the movie generated (in pixels) and add music. You can do this by simply selecting a collection of images in the library, by selecting an album, or by selecting a slide show. If you want to add music, you need to do the last of those.
Exported Quicktime movies seem like a pretty good option for sending photos of a trip or party to people who request them. The file sizes are very manageable, the image quality is decent, and it is easier than mucking around with sending dozens of individual files.
Here is a random example. It consists of some graffiti from Paris, Vancouver, Helsinki, Dublin, Tallinn, and Oxford. One annoying quirk is how adding music massively increases the file size. The same collection of images with an mp3 playing in the background produced a file of over 65 megabytes.
After iPhoto?
I have always found the slide show system in iPhoto a bit awkward, largely because of how you cannot drag images out from it into other applications, as you can with normal albums. That means if you want to edit one of those images in Photoshop, you need to track down the original in your library or an album.
If I ever do get a dSLR, I will probably need to switch to something more robust for storing image files. Even working with the jpeg files from my 3.2 megapixel camera, it gets cranky when too many are being worked with at once. That is with 1.25 gigabytes of RAM, drop shadows off, thumbnails at one of the three default sizes, and a minimum of other programs running. One can only imagine how it will treat 10 megapixel RAW files.
Another problem with iPhoto is that it doesn’t offer many options for having different versions of the same file. At the very minimum, I want to retain the original jpeg at maximum resolution and then have a 1024×768 pixel version that has had the contrast and levels adjusted an appropriate unsharp mask applied. Being able to store additional versions would be an advantage, especially if they are intelligently linked to the original. I don’t want it to be confusing which is which: a situation largely unavoidable in iPhoto, unless you want to look at the image properties for every file you glance at.
