Recently in Photography Category

The history of Photography

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A wonderful multi-part post - well written. By Roger Cicala writing at DP Review.
The first known photograph was taken in 1827 so this is still a very new technology.

This fragment caught my eye - fun bit of history:

The lenses were generally simple; single concave or convex pieces of glass. These were fine for spectacles but had massive chromatic aberration which was an issue in telescopes and microscopes. Newton had suggested that different types of glass could be combined to counteract ‘chroma’ making an ‘achromatic’ lens. An English inventor, Chester Moore Hall, figured out a way to do this around 1730. He wanted to keep the idea secret, hoping he would have a better telescope than his colleagues. So, he had paid one lensmaker to make an element of crown glass (low refractile glass), another to make a matching element of flint glass (high refractile ‘leaded’ glass), and planned to combine the elements himself.

The two lensmakers Hall contracted with were both rather busy, so each paid a third lensmaker, George Bass, to actually make the two lens elements. Bass noticed how the two elements would fit together and figured out the achromatic nature of the paired lens elements, but he sent the two separate lenses back to the original lensmakers without saying anything. To them at least. He did quietly make some achromatic doublets himself and a few other lensmakers copied them.

Years later, Bass mentioned this achromatic lens to John Dollond, whose son, Peter, was a lensmaker. Our boy John established the sleazy side of lens making, reproducing these lenses and writing a paper in the 1758 Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society claiming he had figured it all out himself. Dolland, of course, patented the invention. Bass and about half of England sued Dollond over the patent. The courts agreed Dolland hadn’t discovered the achromat, but because he was the first to state the business application, his patent was upheld. He became quite rich, getting a royalty from every achromatic lens made for several years.

There are five parts out now - a fascinating read:

Fun stuff - I do hope that Roger expands this out into a full book - I would get this in a heartbeat.

And having some fun - new lens

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From the original RAW file. I zoomed waaay in and applied some mild sharpening:

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Pretty damned amazing for 4,000 feet away. Nikon makes really nice glass.  Always has.

(I know that the other brands are also good - they have their various strengths and weaknesses, Nikon included.
I started on Nikon when I was in my teens and once you start with a system, the impetus is to keep going)

Object of desire - camera lens

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This is why the trip to Bellingham this afternoon.

This lens was manufactured around 1975 so that makes it 45-46 years old.  They only made 200 of them and the last one came off the line in September 1977. This one was #36 so it was in the initial batch. This was the last of the original (classical) 600mm designs but it was the first to incorporate Nikon's new Enhanced Dispersion glass (noted as ED). After this, they went to a design using a relay lens - this shortened the overall length but introduced more elements into the optical path. There is a trade-off between compact size and optical quality.

It is in pristine quality - the people at the camera store and I were both thinking that it had seen almost no field use.  The focusing mechanism is silky smooth, no grit. The glass is flawless - no scratches or mold.

Most of what I do are either critter or landscapes.  I also do technical photography and love closeups but landscapes are my favorite medium.  I have been wanting a really long lens for many many years and this puppy finally came to live with me.

Alright you are saying - photos or it didn't happen:

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The top unit is the optics.  The bottom unit is the focusing tube, iris, camera mount and there is a cute little sliding drawer that can hold an internal filter.

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Big hunk 'o glass...

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Off the deck with a Nifty 50 - shooting at F8/1200 at ISO640 - lots of smoke in the air so crappy day to try to show any sort of image quality...

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Same camera, same location, same crappy air but shot with the 600 - again, F8/1200 at ISO640    Talk about: "Reach out and touch someone"  The boat is roughly 4,000 feet distant.  To be able to resolve the bow line is amazing. Especially since I cut the resolution of this photo down to 640 pixels wide so it would not hog the bandwidth.  There is a lot more detail on the original RAW file.

And finally - the whole package:

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Needless to say, I will be building a rigid case for it.  Big enough so that I can carry it fully assembled.  I also need to re-jigger how it mounts to the tripod.  The camera makes it a bit back-heavy.  Figure something out. A fun project.

This part of the world is smack on several major bird migratory paths as well as home to resident populations of interesting critters. Looking forward to some fun times ahead...

Tides - take two

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Last fall, there were some King High and Low Tides and I wanted to do some time-lapse photography.  Missed it.

Next really good sequence that happens during daylight is May 27th, 2021 - low at -4' and high at 12'

There is a nice sequence happening this Thursday with -2.99' to 12.52' - about the same range but not quite as low.

Spending this evening getting the camera out, got the AC power adapter ready and working up the exposure data.

My last attempt was ruined when the camera tripod shifted.  This time, I am hanging cement blocks on it.

A fun commercial from Japan

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Latest from Pocari Sweat:

Wow! Looks like a lot of CGI doesn't it. Nope - all practical:

Ho. Li. Crap. - drone photogaphy

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This is one of the best sequences I have seen in a long long time:

Loved the Lebowski references 😁
YouTube channel here: Jaybird Films - be sure to watch the other videos.  An amazing talent.

Well crap - RIP Russell A. Kirsch

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Russell A. Kirsch? He invented the pixel. From Digital Photography Review:

Russell Kirsch, inventor of the pixel, dies in his Portland home at age 91
Computer scientist Russell Kirsch, best known for inventing the pixel, passed away August 11 at his home in Portland, Oregon. He was 91-years-old.

Kirsch, who was of Jewish descent and the son of immigrants from Russia and Hungary, was born to in Manhattan, New York City, in 1929. It was there in New York City he would go on to graduate in 1946 from the Bronx High School of Science before heading off to New York University in 1050, followed by Harvard University in 1952 and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).

In 1951, While still in school, Kirsch joined the National Bureau of Standards as a member of the Standards Eastern Automatic Computer (SEAC) team, which was in charge of handling the U.S.’s first programmable computer, which was created just a year prior.

It was in 1957 though that Kirsch would forever make his mark on the world when he, alongside a team of researchers, developed a small 5cm by 5cm digital image scanner for the SEAC that went on to capture the first digital images, including a now-iconic image of Kirsch’s three-month-old son, Walden.

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More at the site - a fascinating life.

Minimal posting tonight - new toy

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Doing a firmware upgrade and spending this evening learning the new camera. Of course, the lens diameter does not match any of my other lenses so none of my filters will fit directly -BUT- I do have some adapter rings which will make this work. Looking at polarizing and neutral density.

Here are three snaps to give you an idea of the zoom range of this lens:

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Now that is what I call some nice telephoto. This is not as fast-acting nor does it yield as good an image as my "better" camera but it will do fine for keeping in the car and taking the critter shots that usually get away. Lots to learn...

A fun video - shootout

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In Chinese but with English subtitles:

I have an older high-end video camera that shoots gorgeous HD (great lens and awesome dynamic range) but the thing is huge and weighs about ten pounds. Been using my cell phone for basic B-Roll stuff and was looking for a tripod mount - found this one that hits all my buttons:

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All metal construction. The odd bevel on the foot makes it fit into an Arca-Swiss tripod head so no fussing with screwing it on to a tripod although it does have the 1/4 and 3/8 tripod threads as well. It has a hot-shoe mount on the top of the phone holder - great for a small spirit level (these - $8 for pack of six / free shipping). That way, you get your horizon level - not something people think about but boy is it ever obvious when it is off by the slightest - ask me how I know this 😁

A very well-spent $20 if you are doing a lot of video work. I had seen a few of the cheaper units and they are flimsy as hell and cost about ten bucks. This is twice the money but more than ten times the build quality and ruggedness. I trust my phone and my photos to it.

More software to try - digiKam

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Photo processing software - looks interesting: digiKam

Open source so free to use - Linux, Windows and Mac. The most recent is version 7.xxx so this is a mature product.

Just keeps getting better - Darktable

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I used Adobe's Lightroom for organizing my photos as well as doing minor tweaks to them. Adobe has been moving toward a software subscription business model which I do not like. Looked around for alternatives, I found Darktable and have been using it for the last couple of years. Love it love it love it!

They just released version 3.0 - open source and free to use.

Glad I shoot Nikon

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Been a Nikon shooter for the last 40+ years. Got a nice collection of lenses and currently using a D810 full-frame and a D7100 FX Bodies. Love them both. Canon also makes good stuff. They are very generous with loaning camera equipment to established sports photographers so you see a lot of Canon gear there but overall? Not so much.

From DIY Photography:

CANON IMAGING PROFITS DROP BY NEARLY 60% IN Q3/2019
Canon recently released its Q3/2019 financial report and the results are once again pretty bad in the imaging division. The trend of declining sales and profits continues, with a 13.9% decrease in sales and a 56.8% decrease in profits compared to the Q3/2018.

At the beginning of this year, Canon predicted a grim future for the camera business. Canon’s president Fujio Mitarai said back then that the digital cameras market could shrink by 50% within the next two years. And it seems that this is happening.

According to the latest financial report, the overall camera sales have declined in the Canon Imaging System. The company notes that this is due to the impact of global market contraction, but they have still seen a growth in the unit sales of mirrorless cameras. However, the overall drop in net sales is decreased by 13.9% compared to the same period last year, while operating profit has declined by 56.8%.

Ouch! Markets change but it is the job of the CEO to see these changes happening and to compensate for them. They make good stuff but for a major manufacturer to take such a misstep hurts the entire market.

The Holy Grail - photography

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Now this is interesting - from DIY Photography:

SCIENTISTS DEVELOP AN ALGORITHM THAT RECOVERS DETAIL IN YOUR BLURRY PHOTOS
A group of MIT researchers has come up with a way to recover lost details from your blurry images and even videos. They have developed an algorithm that recognizes and automatically recovers blurred parts in your videos and stills.

The algorithm is called a “visual deprojection model” and it’s based on a convolutional neural network. The scientists trained the algorithm by feeding it blurry images and their high-quality counterparts. This way, the algorithm “learns” a pattern that allows it to recreate the blurry bits and make them sharp.

In one of their experiments, the researchers tested the algorithm on 35 videos of 30 people walking in a specified area.

“They collapsed all frames into projections that they used to train and test the model. From a hold-out set of six unseen projections, the model accurately recreated 24 frames of the person’s gait, down to the position of their legs and the person’s size as they walked toward or away from the camera. The model seems to learn, for instance, that pixels that get darker and wider with time likely correspond to a person walking closer to the camera.”

Not a panacea - it needs to be trained with photos that are blurry and then the same photos that are sharp but still, once the database gets large enough, it might have some use.

A new Mike Olbinski video

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I will leave you with this: Vorticity 2 from Mike Olbinski

Needless to say, click the full-screen button and crank the sound.

I had covered his other stuff here (three posts). This deserves the word Epic.

Awwwww

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Ran into this little guy on the internet - talk about cute:

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Craft beer - Super Eight

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Now this is interesting - from Dogfish Brewery:

SuperEight
We have a saying here at Dogfish Head, ‘Analog beer for the digital age.’ Whether it’s a blissfully inefficient brewing process, high-quality (and often obscure) ingredients, or simply the handcrafted care that goes into the making of an off-centered ale, you’ll find it’s at the heart of everything we do.

That same spirit can be found in our latest collaboration with the analog creators at Kodak. They’re bold. They’re storytellers. And well, they’re our kind of people. Which is why we’ve teamed up with them to ‘develop’ a one-of-a-kind partnership that’s full of creative chemistry.

It all started when Dogfish founder & CEO Sam Calagione learned during a Kodak podcast that if the pH of a beer is low enough, it just might be able to develop their Super 8 film. Challenge accepted.

Insert SuperEIGHT (the beer). This sessionable super gose is brewed with eight heroic ingredients: prickly pear, mango, boysenberry, blackberry, raspberry, elderberry, kiwi juices, toasted quinoa and an ample addition of red Hawaiian sea salt! Okay, so technically that's nine, but it 'gose' without say that there's going to be salt. These unique ingredients give this beer a vibrant red color, with delicious flavors of berries and watermelon, along with a tart - yet refreshing - finish.

But that’s not all … it also effectively develops Kodak’s Super 8 film. From the can to the stop bath, there’s a whole lot of science and alternative processing that takes place to bring the imagery to life. And it’s so totally worth it.

There are a lot of unusual developers for film. Coffee for one - you need Vitamin C to lower the pH but it works.

RIP - Ross Lowell

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Ross Lowell? From Digital Photography Review:

Ross Lowell, founder of Lowel-Light and the creator of gaffer tape, dead at 92
Photographer, cinematographer, Lowel-Light founder and creator of gaffer tape Ross Lowell died on February 15 at the age of 92, according to PDN. Lowell lived in Pound Ridge, New York, at the time of his passing, leaving behind his wife Marilyn Shapiro-Lowell and four children.

Over the course of his long career, Lowell pioneered numerous lighting solutions for photography and cinematography, ultimately registering more than 25 patents, founding lighting company Lowel-Light and publishing the book Matter of Light & Depth. Among Lowell's inventions is gaffer tape, a type of cotton cloth tape popularly used during production and staging work.

From the mid-1960s through 1985, Lowell also shot, directed, wrote and produced multiple documentaries and short films, including Oscar-nominated Oh Brother, My Brother. Lowell received multiple awards during his career, including a Technical Achievement Academy Award, the John Grierson Gold Medal and Lightfair Technical Innovation Award.

Quite the career - gaffer tape is kinda like duct tape except it does not leave a residue if left stuck for more than a day or two. It also comes in a broad pallate of colors to make it blend in on a set. Great stuff!

Ho. Li. Crap is that ever tiny

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4K Video at 60 fps, three-axis gimbal with image stabilization for $350.
From Drone maker DJI check out their new Osmo Pocket:

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Shooting arcs

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I do welding and was wanting to take some videos. Found two great resources for filtering the camera:

Your Day in the Sun: A Guide to Solar Filters - more for astronomers wanting to directly observe the sun but the principle is the same

How do welder's glass shades translate to stops when used as an ND filter?

Good stuff!

Just gorgeous - Prairie Wind

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Prairie Wind | 16K HDR Film from Martin Lisius on Vimeo.

More at Vimeo:

Prairie Wind | 16K HDR Film
Imagine standing on a grassy hill overlooking the prairie in western Nebraska. It’s early summer and you are surrounded by yellow fields of Goldenrod, and whipped by a warm wind from the east. A storm approaches from the west. It’s getting bigger and darker. Soon, the sky above you is filled with swirling black clouds and you are lifted upward, light as a feather, tossed by the storm.

I’m fortunate to have grown up on the Great Plains of America where I can touch the sky often. A storm there can transform you. It’s a conduit to God, an interaction with Wakinyan, the Lakota thunder spirit. While you are part of the storm, the bonds of earth are lifted, and you are free.

Finding new ways to convey this experience to others is important to me. In early 2018, I embarked on a mission to capture storms on the highest resolution motion picture format I could reasonably acquire, which for me was 16K (15,985 x 5792 pixels). It didn’t actually exist, so I had to create it. After much testing, I decided on using two 50MP cameras fixed to a custom-made calibrated mount. It was a daunting task, but I was able to make it work.

When you watch this short film, you will see just one, large, beautiful picture. But, you are actually watching two carefully stitched images. If you swear it’s just one image, then I have succeeded.

Please like, share and comment if you enjoy the film.

Simply gorgeous work - be sure to go to the Vimeo website to see it in its full glory.

Say hello to the National Screening Room - from their about page:

About this Collection
The National Screening Room showcases the riches of the Library’s vast moving image collection, designed to make otherwise unavailable movies, both copyrighted and in the public domain, freely accessible to the viewers worldwide.

The majority of movies in the National Screening Room are freely available as both 5 mb MP4 and ProRes 422 MOV downloads.

The National Screening Room is a project of the Library of Congress National Audio-Visual Conservation Center. The goal of this digital collection is to present to the widest audience possible movies from the Library's extensive holdings, offering a broad range of historical and cultural documents as a contribution to education and lifelong learning.

These selections are presented as part of the record of the past. They are historical documents which reflect the attitudes, perspectives, and beliefs of different times. The Library of Congress does not endorse the views expressed in these movies, which may contain content offensive to users.

Looks like they have 299 videos available - a great start. Great idea and resource for everyone.

Talk about fast - from Phys-Org:

World's fastest camera freezes time at 10 trillion frames per second
What happens when a new technology is so precise that it operates on a scale beyond our characterization capabilities? For example, the lasers used at INRS produce ultrashort pulses in the femtosecond range (10-15 s), which is far too short to visualize. Although some measurements are possible, nothing beats a clear image, says INRS professor and ultrafast imaging specialist Jinyang Liang. He and his colleagues, led by Caltech's Lihong Wang, have developed what they call T-CUP: the world's fastest camera, capable of capturing 10 trillion (1013) frames per second. This new camera literally makes it possible to freeze time to see phenomena—and even light—in extremely slow motion.

Doc Edgerton? From Infogalactic:

Harold Eugene Edgerton
Harold Eugene Edgerton also known as Papa Flash (April 6, 1903 – January 4, 1990) was a professor of electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is largely credited with transforming the stroboscope from an obscure laboratory instrument into a common device. He also was deeply involved with the development of sonar and deep-sea photography, and his equipment was used by Jacques Cousteau in searches for shipwrecks and even the Loch Ness monster.

His memorial website at MIT is worth checking out if you are at all interested in high-speed photography. Some amazing images.

Very interesting - Nikon cameras

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From the wonderful Nikon Rumors:

The plot thickens: Nikon just registered the “NIKONOS” trademark
Another very interesting development: similar to the NOCT trademark, two weeks ago (on July 31st) Nikon also registered the "NIKONOS" trademark which was already expired back in 2008. This is what is listed under "goods and services":

"Cameras; optical apparatus and instruments; photographic apparatus and instruments; digital cameras; camera lenses; digital camera lenses; lens filters; rechargeable batteries for cameras and digital cameras; battery chargers for cameras and digital cameras; straps for cameras and digital cameras; caps for camera bodies; computer software; lens caps; camera cases; USB cables; audio video cables; LCD monitor covers; instruction manuals in electronic format; electronic publications."

A purpose-built underwater camera? Interesting. Used to SCUBA dive a lot and had a Nikonos camera. Well designed but a pain in the a** to use.

A great expose on the real price of ink-jet printers.

Note that laser printers are a lot more economical to run and the bigger the machine, the more the economics of scale comes in to play so the lower the cost per page.

There is a brisk market for 3rd party ink cartridges. These are off-brand, manufactured by a different company and are usually a lot more reasonably priced. Google. Amazon sells them. For photographic printers, there are some companies that make Continuous Ink Supply Systems (CISS) - these are external tanks which replace the ink cartridges entirely. Bypassing them. Here, here, here and here.

One problem with photo quality ink jet printers is that, over time, the heads can dry out and individual nozzles clog up. This produces white bands across the image. I like this software - it allows for a lot of flexibility in printing and it can also kick out a small print every few days to keep the heads wet. It's only $80 for the full version. Check out QImage Ultimate

Super slow motion

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From video card maker NVIDIA:

Transforming Standard Video Into Slow Motion with AI
Researchers from NVIDIA developed a deep learning-based system that can produce high-quality slow-motion videos from a 30-frame-per-second video, outperforming various state-of-the-art methods that aim to do the same. The researchers will present their work at the annual Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (CVPR) conference in Salt Lake City, Utah this week.

“There are many memorable moments in your life that you might want to record with a camera in slow-motion because they are hard to see clearly with your eyes: the first time a baby walks, a difficult skateboard trick, a dog catching a ball,” the researchers wrote in the research paper. “While it is possible to take 240-frame-per-second videos with a cell phone, recording everything at high frame rates is impractical, as it requires large memories and is power-intensive for mobile devices,” the team explained.

With this new research, users can slow down their recordings after taking them.

Very interested in this technology. I can shoot at 240 fps which is an 8X slow down but cameras that can work at higher framerates are simply too expensive for me. The Edgertronic SC2X does 1,910 fps @ 1920 x 1088 but costs $15K - the Fantoms start in the $100K range. This is a very interesting work-around.

I was at the grocery store this morning and this copy of Time Magazine caught my eye in the checkout line. Here is the cover:

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Montgomery stole this from the wonderful photographer Arnold Newman who sadly passed away in 2006. He did this 1963 portrait of German industrialist Alfried Krupp in one of his factories:

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From Arnold Newman:

"There's only twice I ever tried to deliberately show an individual as bad, and that was Alfried Krupp and Richard Nixon. Actually, I didn't do it on purpose to Nixon -- he did it to himself.

I deliberately put a knife in Krupp's back, visually. He was a friend of Hitler's and Hitler let him use prisoners as slave labor. If the prisoners fell, he just unchained them and they went directly into the crematoriums in Auschwitz.

Krupp's people realized I was Jewish, and they were worried that I might not be kind to him. I was trying to figure a way to show who he really was without being obvious. I lit from both sides and I said, "Would you lean forward." And my hair stood up on end. The light from the sides made him look like the devil. It's an un-retouched photograph. He actually was a handsome man."

Given the right lighting, Jeff Sessions looks like one of the Keebler Elves. Philip Montgomery had an agenda and copied a classic. And that is a big -1 for originality Philip...

Changes - Fuji and Xerox

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Fugi is buying Xerox for $6.1 billion. From DIY Photography:

FUJIFILM BECOMES FUJI XEROX IN ACQUISITION CREATING AN $18 BILLION MONSTER
Yes, the Japanese company, Fujifilm Holdings, which makes everything from cameras to makeup is acquiring Xerox in a $6.1 billion deal. The merger is reported to have a combined revenue of $18 billion. The two companies have been partners under the brand Fuji Xerox for over 50 years, but now Fuji will become the majority stakeholder in the American company, made famous by its photocopiers.

A fairly complex swap - more at the site. Ilike both companies - should do well.

Do you have an Android device

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Tablet or phone? Check out these two applications:

Cinema FV-5 is a professional video camera application for mobile devices, that puts professional manual controls in your fingertips. Tailored to enthusiast and professional videographers and filmmakers, with this video camera application you can capture the best footage with top-of-the-line controls for perfect postproduction purposes. The only limit is your imagination and creativity!

Camera FV-5 The professional camera application for Android, that puts DSLR-like manual controls in your fingertips. Tailored to enthusiast and professional photographers, with this camera application you can capture the best raw photographs so that you can post-process them later and get stunning results. The only limit is your imagination and creativity!

I'll be playing around with both of them over the next week or two - looks really good from the website.

Seattle time lapse

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Gorgeous short video:

More information here: Seattle 3 Year Time-lapse Video from the Space Needle

Photography software

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I use Adobe Lightroom for organizing and "developing" images - it is great but Adobe is moving towards a subscription business model so I am looking at alternatives.

I have been very happy with Affinity Photo for a Photoshop replacement and Affinity Designer is a great alternative to Corel Draw. I do own an earlier version of CD but it has become bloated, slow and very expensive. No desire to upgrade. These are commercial programs but very reasonably priced at $50 each.

Just found out about Darktable - a free Adobe Lightroom alternative. A few items from their Features page:

  • Non-destructive editing throughout the complete workflow, your original images are never modified.
  • Professional color management: darktable is fully color managed, supporting automatic display profile detection on most systems, including built-in ICC profile support for sRGB, Adobe RGB, XYZ and linear RGB color spaces.
  • Cross platform: darktable runs on Linux, Mac OS X / macports, BSD, Windows and Solaris 11 / GNOME.
  • Filtering and sorting: search your image collections by tags, image rating (stars), color labels and many more, use flexible database queries on all metadata of your images.
  • Image formats: darktable can import a variety of standard, raw and high dynamic range image formats (e.g. JPEG, CR2, NEF, HDR, PFM, RAF … ).
  • Zero-latency, zoomable user interface: through multi-level software caches darktable provides a fluid experience.
  • Tethered shooting: support for instrumentation of your camera with live view for some camera brands.
  • Powerful export system supports G+ and Facebook webalbums, flickr upload, disk storage, 1:1 copy, email attachments and can generate a simple html-based web gallery. darktable allows you to export to low dynamic range (JPEG, PNG, TIFF), 16-bit (PPM, TIFF), or linear high dynamic range (PFM, EXR) images.
  • Automate repetitive tasks: Many aspects of darktable can be scripted in Lua.

I love that it uses Lua - nice language for scripting. Python is very overrated.

Just beautiful - iron filings

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I'll never look at them the same away again:

From German photographer Roman De Giuli website / about the video

Fun time-lapse video

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25 hours compressed into three minutes. The subject? A cheap plastic film camera suspended over some acetone - the fumes melt the plastic:

From the folks at Amazing Timelapse

Been shooting Nikon cameras ever since high school. I know there are other brands (and I actually own some of them - the Canon PowerShot G series is a nice small point and shoot) but for "real" photography, I always choose Nikon. It does not hurt that I have a 40+ year accumulation of lenses and optical adapters to play with.

Here is the Nikon website: Nikon 100th Anniversary - a lot of history there. Some fun videos too.

Above Bellingham

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Gorgeous drone footage from Bellingham photographer Kjell Redal:

From his website:

The city of subdued excitement. Just like Bellingham, this video starts with a slow fuse, but if you stick with both of them, you get epic as your payoff.

Tucked into the far northwest corner of the United States, Bellingham reps its location well. Within arm’s reach of town you’ll meet big peaks, empty beaches, hard-charging mountain bikers, harder-charging skiers, and enough microbreweries to satisfy even the snobbiest of beer snobs. Bellingham’s character is steeped in the wet weather that shapes its outdoor pursuits. Everything from bottomless powder at Mt. Baker to rolling whitewater over Whatcom Falls provides a silver lining to the clouds that characterize the Pacific Northwest.

And yes, this area really is that gorgeous.

Fun:

Just wow!

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Watch this one full-screen - gorgeous!

A look at Mars

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An amazing video - three months in the making:

From DIY Photography:

PHOTOGRAPHER CREATES STUNNING VIDEO OF MARS FROM NASA IMAGES
One day, humans will probably land on Mars and take photos, like Apollo astronauts did on the Moon. But probably not in our lifetime. So photographer and videographer Jan Fröjdman created a fictive flight above Mars using real images of the “red planet”. He has hand-picked reference points on anaglyph images from the HiRISE camera. It took over 33,000 reference points and 3 months to create the film, but it was worth it. Jan has created a mesmerizing video.

For the video, Jan has taken the images from HiRISE camera, which are available online for everyone. This camera has taken over 50,000 high-resolution stereo images of the Martian terrain from the planet’s orbit. It has created anaglyphs anyone can view in 3D using special glasses. However, the 3D glasses aren’t always handy or available, and Mars’ varied topography is certainly more impressive in the video.

As I mentioned, it took Jan 3 months of work and over 33,000 reference points to create this video. He needed to color grade the clips because the anaglyphs are based on grayscale images. He points out that the video is not scientific, but he only tried to visualize the planet his way as a space enthusiast.

Jan's website is here - gorgeous work: Jan Fröjdman

Wonderful news - PhotoPills

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PhotoPills is the photography app to die for when shooting landscapes. It can calculate sun, moon and star positions in relation to terrestrial sites. Want to take a photo of the sun setting through that archway, PhotoPils will tell you the date and time to show up for it.

Only problem was that it was for iOS (Apple) only where I am a solid lover of the Android operating system. Just found out today that they have an Android version in beta. Take my money! (Only $10 too - keep the costs low and sell that many more copies. Good business strategy.)

Here is just a brief example of what it can do:

I do time-lapse photography but only for periods of an hour or so - cloud movement, sunrises/sunsets, etc... A lot of times, when a new building is going up, the owners will want a time-lapse video of the process spanning several months. From Digital Photography Review:

Enlaps Tikee time-lapse camera packs two lenses and a solar panel
Tikee by French company Enlaps aims to simplify time-lapse photography by combining a 4.5W solar panel, wireless connectivity and a pair of lenses into a single capture device. The device itself is described as completely self-sufficient, weatherproof and accessible via a Web application.

The idea behind Enlaps is that long duration time-lapse photography can be difficult depending on location due to potential power source and weather issues. Tikee and its more sophisticated counterpart, Tikee Pro, solve this by providing everything necessary for time-lapse photography in a single wireless and weatherproof product.

Very clever - they do not have to worry about replacing the battery every so often and with the two lenses, you get up to 220° of panoramic vision. $750 for the Standard and $900 for the Pro (adds digital RAW files, GPS and 4G modem) - if I was putting up a building, this would be pocket change for a very wonderful resource.

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