Tag: photo

Free Beanbag!

2006-07-21 rolfje No Comments

When you are using a (digital) camera and need to place it on an uneven surface to keep it still long enough for your long shutter speeds, or you want to make a shot on the release timer (or both), you’ll need a tripod, or a beanbag. A beanbag is an ideal option, you can tuck it into your backpack, take it everywhere you need and it fits all camera’s.

Sure, you can buy a beanbag from a nice company like this, and spend about 30 euro’s or more. But, If you’ve got a needle, thread, a T-shirt or linnen bag, and some rice, you can make one for free!

Sharpening, denoizing, smoothing, enhancing, vandalizing!

2006-07-17 rolfje No Comments

To every photo-editing, image-manipulating, red-eye-reducing software developer on the planet: Sharpening photographs by default is NOT a good idea! If images aren’t sharp directly from the camera, there was something wrong with them to begin with. Most camera’s nowadays make fine pictures which don’t need sharpening.

Uncategorized

Photo Statistics

2006-06-21 rolfje No Comments

I am trying to decide what lens to buy for my Canon EOS 350D. The first descision to make is what focal length I need. To do this, I found a nice tool which can display statistical info about your photographs. It shows you how many foto’s you’ve made at certain focal lengths, with which aperture, ISO, metering, and other EXIF fields. It’s a windows only tool, and it’s called Smart Photo Statistics. It’s absolutely 100% free software and works as expected. It can even copy the graphs to the clipboard for you to use elsewhere.

I’m gathering statistics right now on all photo’s of all digital camera’s I’ve owned, to see what focal lentgths I need. Great tool!

Software

Canon 350D B/W Sepia

2006-06-03 rolfje No Comments

Once in a while I like to take black and white pictures because the EOS has a nice built in set of color filters. The easiest example of a nice black and white photo where a color filter produces great results is the classic “blue sky with Yellow filter”. You should really check out the great tutorials on Cambridge in Color.

350D Sepia

When shooting in B/W mode, I often use the “sepia” filter, to add a little warmth to the photo. A wierd thing I noticed lately about the EOS 350D (besides the film transport sound) is that “Sepia” mode is not really producing pure B/W Sepia images. There is color seeping through! In the top image, you can clearly see residues of red, yellow and blue in a photo of a baby toy (cropped for privacy reasons). The bottom image is converted to pure B/W on a computer and then sort of “Sepia”-d using a hue/saturation tool just for reference.

I read on some forums that camera effects are generally not as good as the effects in image processing programs like PhotoShop or GIMP. This is supposedly because speed/quality tradeoffs. I really like to spend more time with the camera than post-processing, so I’d like to keep using the in-camera effects. A great tip I read somewhere on a forum is to shoot in RAW+JPG mode. The JPG will have all the processing done by the camera, and the RAW will be the raw data from the sensor. Depending on the results of the in-camera effects, you either keep the JPG, or use the RAW image to do the effect in GIMP later on.

Hardware