Tag: photography

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:

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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

Easy Image Resizing in OSX

2007-12-31 rolfje 1 Comment

A little heads-up for Apple OSX users who have lots of images to resize. There’s a free tool available to do this at http://www.eagle-of-liberty.com/resizeemall/. It’s donationware, if you like it you can send the author money by paypal.

I’ve used it, and it works as advertised. Drag a bunch of images on the application, and batch-resize them without touching your originals. You can save the images with a postfix, and even in a different format if you like. Very easy for mailing a bunch of photo’s.

Apple, Software

Translators ruin good books.

2007-12-29 rolfje 3 Comments

On Christmas day, Santa gave me a very nice book about digital photography, by Michael Freeman. The book contains lots of interesting information and tips for the digital SLR photographer. The only problem with the book is, that the Dutch translation of it is absolutely terrible to read. The sentences do not “flow” naturaly, and almost feel as if they were litteraly translated word-by-word from the English version.

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