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Depth.

Posted 21:59 CET Wednesday August 25th, 2010 (9 days ago). 121 views. 3 comments. Tagged with Photography.

One of the really cool things about using a SLR camera when taking pictures compared to using a compact, is the immense power you get in your hands. You can literary control everything and create a spectacular photography of an everyday situation. The problem with all this power is that it takes a lot of practice to master it.

I’ve got a theory about what Jane Q. Taxpayer considers a good photography: It’s a familiar scene shown in an unfamiliar way. I’m sure you can agree with me. A good example is the cross processing with vignette effect that has become very popular this year. I’ve fallen for the temptation of taking a few myself.

Depth of field is one of the many magical powers you get when shooting with SLR than can make the simplest scene look quite impressive. In my humble opinion, it can easily make or brake a portrait, for instance. A few years ago I got a dead cheap 50mm lens from Canon. With an f-number as small as 1/8 it enables some really funky depth of field images. But it’s very hard to get it right. Continue reading "Depth." →

On the Boat.

Posted 19:27 CET Thursday July 15th, 2010 (50 days ago). 152 views. No comments. Tagged with Photography.

While leaving Nesodden on Sunday, I played a little with fxCamera on the boat. Here are a couple of the pictures. There is also a new version of WordPress for Android available, and I’m testing it to write this entry. The previous version wasn’t able to upload pictures for some reason, and if there are none in this entry either, someone’s got to go back to the drawing board and fix some bugs.

Update: Or I have to set the correct permissions on the server. Oh, well. At least now it works.

Green.

Posted 22:10 CET Sunday May 23rd, 2010 (103 days ago). 241 views. No comments. Tagged with Photography.

There are quite a few camera application available for Android. As far as I can tell, Vignette is the one with the most options, but the demo version is limited to taking 0.3 mega pixels pictures. Even though the full application is a bargain, that doesn’t help me much since Google World Domination Corp. still hasn’t enabled paid application here in the night of the midnight sun.

So I’ve settled with FxCamera, a free application with less options, but it still covers my funky-effects needs. One of the effects is ToyCam, which comes with a load of various options, like green cross-process emulation. During a walk this evening, I took some photos with my HTC Hero. Continue reading "Green." →

Hairy HDR.

Posted 20:21 CET Sunday February 28th, 2010 (187 days ago). 450 views. 2 comments. Tagged with Personal, Photography.

As per popular demand, here are a few picture of me with two and a half weeks worth of facial hair. I have the impression that I might have created an illusion of actually having a massive beard, but, as you can see from the pictures, that is far from the truth. As you probably also notice, I’m not very comfortable in front of the camera, at least not when I have to take the pictures myself. Don’t I look all jolly and excited!?

Since I was going to force myself to take some portraits, I decided to try to take some high dynamic range, HDR, photos. It’s an interesting technique I’ve been sniffing at for some time, but I’ve never gotten around to try it until now. Done right, HDR can produce some stunning results. To create an HDR picture, you take several picture of the same scene with different exposure and magically (or “mathematically”, if you will) merge these pictures to create a greater dynamic range of luminance between the lightest and darkest areas in the resulting image. Continue reading "Hairy HDR." →

And the Winner is…

Posted 15:06 CET Tuesday July 21st, 2009 (1 year, 44 days ago). 262 views. No comments. Tagged with Gadgets, Photography.

As a follow up to last week’s “Snapshots” entry, here are a few words about the digital compact camera I bought in the end; the Canon Digital IXUS 100 IS.

In the store I also looked at the Canon Digital IXUS 870 IS, a camera that, according to its specifications and the store clerk, would take higher quality pictures than the 100 IS. The price was the same, but the 870 IS a bit larger and as my shopping helper pointed out; I already have a huge camera that takes high quality pictures, what I was looking for now was something really compact. And the 100 IS is really compact.

Even though I’ve not had the chance to test the new camera properly yet, I’m very pleased with what I’ve seen so far. The camera is snappy, the automatic mode works well, there is a myriad of presets if you don’t want to use the automatic mode – one example is a preset for “fireworks”, not sure how often I’ll need that – and it’s possible to manually control the ISO value, white balance and exposure control. I wish it was possible to control the shutter speed and aperture, though.

Over the next two, three weeks, I’ll most likely take a few pictures with the 100 IS and there’s a chance I’ll post some of them here for you to glare at. The photos used in the Candy Test Part I were all taken using the new camera in automatic mode, which correctly switched to macro mode when the object was moved close enough to the lens. The quality of the images is about as high as my expectations for a compact in the 100 IS’ price range.