Tag: photo

Fixing Photo Creation Dates

2011-08-15 rolfje 2 Comments

You know how it is on vacation. You take your camera, shoot pictures, and when you get home you see that you forgot to set the date/time on your camera. Even worse: your wife also took a camera with her, and she actually read the manual and set the time correctly. So now you have two sets of photos with mismatching date/times. Now what?

It turns out that there is actually a pretty simple trick to solve this, and you don’t even haven to install exiftool or do funny command line voodo. If you have iPhoto and a mouse, here’s what you do:

Apple

Why you want a Polarizer Filter

2009-06-16 rolfje 2 Comments

I recently bought a 50mm lens with a circular polarizer. I though I’d share some quick examples to show what a polarizer filter does for your photo’s.

The polarization effect is probably one of the few (if not only) effect which you can not reproduce in photoshop or any other image processing program. Most applications try by increasing saturation, which is nowhere near the effect of a real polarizer.

By rotating the filter, you have the luxury of choosing how much effect you want to have, anywhere between 0% and 100%. The shots below give you an idea what the range of the effect is:

Uncategorized

Shooting 16:9 with a 4:3 Camera

2009-05-03 rolfje 1 Comment

If you have a Canon Ixus 80IS, like me, and you shoot video for your widescreen television at home (like me), you may want to try out this little trick.

The Canon Ixus is a 4:3 camera. The video that comes out of it is almost square shaped. When you try to make a 16:9 video, you can stretch it, or crop it. Cropping is far better, but you need some “headroom” to do that. If you made a closeup, chances are that you do not have enough room to crop to a 16:9 format.

I solved this by making this little chart, which I placed on a memorycard and put in my camera. By previewing the image on the camera’s display, you know where the “16:9 limit” is. I put two pieces of half-translucent tape on the camera, so I can tell what fit’s inside the 16:9 frame. I also included the other formats, like 3:2, and 2.39:1, should you want to make wide-screen theater movies 🙂

Then, I load up the movie in iMovie, and it will be cropped perfectly. Suppose you missed the 16:9 frame or want to re-center your shot, you can always press the “crop” button in your project to tell iMovie which piece of the image you want.

Hardware

DLNA on OSX, done right

2009-01-31 rolfje 60 Comments

My wife bought me a playstation 3 last year, and I’ve enjoyed many hours of gaming on it, finishing Tomb Raider underworld, and now making decent progress in Ratchet and Clank: Tools of Destruction.

I was a bit sceptical about the DLNA capabilities of the PS3, because I read a lot of bad news on this fairly new “Interoperability Guidelines” concept. It sounded like a lot of trouble to go through to simply watch the photos and home videos on a TV. For weeks, I was not able to find a single site telling me how to install a DLNA server on my Mac, or where to find a decent one.

Altgough they’re hard to find, there are a few OSX DLNA servers out there. One of them is actually very good. Here’s what I found:

Read More “DLNA on OSX, done right” »

Apple, Software

Zoom Experience 2008

2008-11-11 rolfje No Comments

Last sunday, I was at the Zoom Experience 2008 in Utrecht. The organization has learned a lot since last year’s debute of the Zoom Experience. There was plenty of room to walk, lots of places to sit down and talk, and the talks were in seperate areas with less noise.

This is what the Zoom Experience looked like on Sunday morning:

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qy8mXREd7Lo]

Hardware

New York online…

2008-06-04 rolfje No Comments

We have returned from our trip to New York. Actually, we’ve been staying in Weehawken, New Jersey to visit Manhattan. Today I maxed out my upload limit for this month to put the pictures online. You can see them at my 32hq account (because Flickr hurts my eyes).

Enjoy the pictures. When the monthly upload limit expires I’ll upload some more, so maybe it’s wise to subscribe to my photo feed.

Fun

23 Kicks Flickr’s ass!

2007-10-12 rolfje 1 Comment

Since WordPress has a 50MB space limit for images uploaded to the blog, I was looking for a place to host my galleries. Some friends of mine have Flickr accounts but I really hate it’s cluttered and non-intuitive user interface.

Yesterday evening I found a very good alternative to Flickr, which actually is much cooler. It has all the features Flickr has, but it’s user interface is much, much more intuitive, and less cluttered. It’s fast, free and has a very cool upload feature which lets you edit the photo’s as they’re uploading! It’s an amaing feature you’d have to see for yourself.

And where can you find all this wonderfull stuff? It’s at www.23hq.com. Try it out, it’s completely free, has no userspace or download limitation, and no spam is sent to you. The only limitation to free accounts is that you can upload maximum 30 photo’s per month. But don’t worry, you can upload 300 photo’s the first week to get your account started.

Leave that Flickr account and join !

Uncategorized

My photo’s on your wall

2006-12-24 rolfje No Comments

Hi, I just discovered oypo.nl, an online service for photographers to sell prints of their photographs. It’s a simple concept, where a photographer uploads images, and the website sells prints of these images to anybody who orders them. Part of the commision is going back to the photographer, and to some extent the photographer can decide how expensive his photograps are to the public.Because opening an account is free, and because I think my photo’s are WAY better than most of the material on oypo.nl, I decided to open an account just for fun. If you like to buy my photographs, take a look at them at

rolfje.oypo.nl

The resolution of he shots should give good to very good results on near poster format, and I try to keep the choice simple by only uploading the interesting ones. Have fun!

Uncategorized

Nice Mac Tools

2006-12-21 rolfje No Comments

As a Mac user, I have absolutely no problem editting, moving and viewing large video, audio and image files. There was one thing I missed though, and that is a tool which is able to quickly view a large JPG (like OSX’s own preview) but then skip to the next image in the directory when selecting “next”. Today I have found just that tool, and it is a dream to work with. It called Xee (not to be confused with the rather lame Xsee).

Xee loads jpg’s blindingly fast from my remote fileserver. Then, using just the keyboard, I can easily zoom in, out, skip to the next or previous file in the directory, fit the image to screen, etc. After testing about 20 or so image viewers, It is absolutely the best image viewer I have found.

During the search for Xee, I also encountered the OSX Power Tools page, which is a list of very handy utilities for the Mac, and from what I can see all of them are free to use (check license to be sure).

Merry Christmas!

Software

Curing lens envy

2006-08-29 rolfje No Comments

Do you still want “that last lens and that’s it”? According to the statistics on this page, you probably already have the right lens in your camera bag. Chances are that you are using your cheapest lens most often. The best quote from this page must be “The cost of the lens is inversely proportional to the frequency of its use.”.

Where did I get that link from? Well, from a brilliant text by Ken Rockwel titled “Your Camera Does Not Matter”. It states that you may not only have overspent on lenses, but on your complete kit alltogether! According to Ken, “Buying new gear will NOT improve your photography.”.

Watching the “Odobenus rosmarus” swim Next time you see a guy with a D200, don’t be impressed. The guy behind him with his old Holga camera could be shooting far better pictures!

I have had a Canon EOS 300 (35mm film), a Canon Powershot A20 and now a Canon 350D. I also have made photo’s with some of my dad’s camera’s, a Canon FT-QL, and an Exa IIB. When changing from one camera to another, my photography (in particular composition) did not change. It just took some trouble away from the process. EOS 200 to Canon A20: no more film hassle. Canon A20 to 350D: Faster bootup and shot-to-shot times. Canon FT-QL and Exa IIB: The romantic feeling of craftsmanship when holding the camera 🙂

Hedge sparrow on a fence, at 200mm, aperture 5.6 Sure the 350D gives me nice resolution and more freedom to play with aperture and exposure times and I still like the camera after reading Kens article. But he is right. Period. I recently spoke to a guy who owned an EOS 300 just like I did. He looked at one of my photo’s from the 350D and said “I’ve got to have that camera, how did you do that?”. I explained “aperture” to him and told him that he could do that with his own EOS 300 if he had taken the time to learn how to use it.

I guess some sales people translate “I want a good camera” to “I want to spend a truckload of cash on a camera of which I’ll only use the full-auto mode to shoot pictures of uncle Zed with.” People who don’t know what “aperture” or “exposure time” means just want a snapshot camera which automatically will produce clear, colorful, crisp foto’s of uncle Zed 95% of the time.

Before buying a camera, read Ken’s article, get out of that chair and start shooting with whatever camera you have right now. That one brilliant moment is waiting for you!

Hardware