Pages Tagged “Photography”
Reviews
- Fossify Camera ★★★☆☆ Basic camera app with support for flash, timer and video, optional EXIF. Lacks advanced processing like night sight. Images are slightly noisier than Google’s camera.
- Image Toolbox ★★★★☆ An extremely powerful image editor for Android. And not just the usual features like crop, adjust contrast or brightness, maybe apply a filter, but you can do batch edits, format conversion, scaling the actual pixel image, editing metadata…all the things that mobile apps tend to hide behind the curtain. And it can preserve EXIF data when you want it to.
- Instagram ★★☆☆☆ Like checking out your friends’ vacation photos, but every other photo is an ad, and half of your friends’ pics are full of product placement.
- Mobile Apps and Preserving Photo Metadata You’d think that ‘don’t change the stuff that the user isn’t changing’ would be a low bar, but most image editors I’ve used on Android tend to mess up the EXIF metadata one way or another.
- PixelDroid ★★★★★ Optimized for photo sharing and viewing, works smoothly and integrates well with the system. FOSS, won’t vacuum up your personal data.
- Samsung Galaxy S4 (Phone) ★★★★★ Much as I like newer phones, there are a few things that I really miss about the S4, especially the ergonomics.
- Under the Influence
★★★★☆
Trey Ratcliff
Trey Ratcliff details a fascinating look at a side of Instagram that I’ve mostly ignored.
Tech Tips
- Batch Adjust Photos for DST with ExifTool I always forget at least one camera when switching to/from DST, and I always forget the command for exiftool to batch-adjust the image timestamps.
- Remove GPS Tags After Taking a Photo Google Photos won’t remove GPS data from an image, but you can easily remove just the location data using a desktop or laptop.
- When digiKam Failed to Connect (Obsolete) File permissions. Always check the file permissions.
Blog Posts
- No, those aren’t brush strokes. It’s just digital zoom.
After several days not being able to see any of the birds I could hear when I went for a walk on break from work, I saw a whole bunch of them hanging out on a lawn, eating seeds or bugs or whatever it is that these particular birds eat. Of course since I’d been […]
- Going Mirrorless: WonderCon 2019 Cosplay Photography
Last fall, I conceded that phones have caught up to casual cameras and I’d have to get a nicer one to get better image quality. Well, I finally bought a mirrorless camera. The kiddo found my old SLR, and we’ve split a few rolls of film (re)discovering how to shoot with it. Then he started […]
- First Try With The Old Film Camera
We got the negatives and scans back from the two rolls of film we shot with the old manual film camera. Despite the damage to the case, it seems to still be light-proof, as the second roll of film came out about as well as the first. It was an interesting experiment. We mostly took […]
- Bringing Back the Old Camera
A couple of weeks ago, the almost-8YO found my old manual SLR camera – the 1967 model my grandfather gave me. I bought some film, and picked up a light meter app while waiting for the battery to arrive (the light meter is the only powered part of the camera), and I showed him how […]
- The Old Camera
The 7YO was looking through the closet the other day and found my old camera bag. Inside it: the old film SLR camera that my grandfather gave me when I was around 12. It’s older than I am, a Sears camera that appears to be a rebranded Ricoh Singlex TLS from 1967. It’s completely manual […]
- Catching up on photos
Somehow this year has just gotten away from me as far as posting general photos. Oh, I made sure to post albums from events like comic conventions and hiking trips. But the random one-offs and two-fers? I’ve been tossing them up on Instagram, Pixelfed, and/or Mastodon, but I haven’t been maintaining my Flickr gallery. Part […]
- The Lesser Evil of Selfie Sticks
I’ve known about portrait distance for a while, and often thought that was a downside of using fixed-lens phone cameras for portraits. To frame someone’s face in a phone you have to either zoom (losing detail) or hold it close enough that the viewing angles distort the face. I prefer using my phone for long […]
- Ordering Photo Prints: Not Quite Interoperable
On the plus side: I was able to order photo prints while hundreds of miles from home on a business trip, and my wife was able to pick them up from the store the next day, which is pretty cool. On the minus side: It was a heck of a lot harder than it should […]
- Phone vs Camera
Over the past year I’ve found myself using my camera less and less, and my phone more and more. There are good reasons for it, but something’s missing.
- Nighttime HDR Test: Yerba Buena Gardens
While in San Francisco on business, I wandered into the Yerba Buena Gardens and around the Moscone center. My phone took better pictures than I expected.
- The Culture of *Now*
Are you sharing something about a current event online? It had better be really current, because the internet has a very short attention span.
- Is *Now* Better?
We can instantly post photos, video or words for the world to see, from anywhere, anytime. But should we? Immediacy can be useful, but is it always better?
- Links: Humans.txt, Nighttime Photos, Evaporating Cloud and More
Very cool! 175 Photos of Day Taken at Night Humans TXT: We Are People, Not Machines. Cool idea, but I’m not sure how practical it is without (ironically, I know) a machine-readable standard. If we can’t get most people to watch the credits on a movie, who’s going to go looking for a text file […]
- Links! Alarms, Ghosts of History, Firefly Trek, WW2 Star Wars & More
Hazards of too many alarms; Merging historical and modern photos; Computer lightning safety; Allergies, Star Wars as World War II; Firefly as Star Trek, SMBC’s Logogeneplex.
- Re-creating Ansel Adams’ UCI
Here’s a cool project: In Ansel Adams’ Footsteps, re-creating his photographs of UC Irvine from the 1960s. There are a lot more trees now. (Or, as a friend pointed out, the trees that were there are a lot taller!) It’s a really impressive look at how the campus has changed…plus it’s always fascinating to look […]
- Digital Disadvantage
Disadvantage of going digital: no film canisters to carry quarters.
- Stock Photos Never Die
Ha! One of the pics from the “Unsolicited Commercial Love Story” is being used in the QOOP ad on the Flickr homepage!
- Pinhole Bridge
Cool: A 6-month-exposure photo showing sun trails above a bridge, made using a pinhole camera made from a soda can.(from APOD)
- Lunar Eclipse pics
I decided to go for it, and set my alarm for 2:30 AM (ick) to see the eclipse. The moon was nearing totality at that point, with a too-shallow crescent near the bottom and the rest in slightly reddish shadow. My original plan was to lie down on the balcony and watch, but it turned […]
- Blurry
I set up a slide-show screen saver on one of my computers at work. To start, I dropped in some of my wallpapers, including several from the Astronomy Picture of the Day, then snagged some photos from my website to add a little variety. Of course, 800×600 (or smaller) images don’t look so great blown […]
- “Alicia” Returns
Remember the guy who noticed the same model in a ton of spam and started stringing the ads together into An Unsolicited Commercial Love Story? In the past week I’ve noticed the same model showing up in ad banners on various sites, particularly IMDB and Comics.com—some of them using the same stock photos. (And someone […]
- Love is in the spam!
Rob Cockerham of Cockeyed.com (home of the fascinating How Much is Inside? series) noticed the same model showing up in a lot of his spam (often wearing the same dress). He collected the advertisements, and linked them together in what he calls An Unsolicited Commercial Love Story. Since he first wrote it up, other people […]
- Shooting the Moon
Some idiot is out there taking flash pictures of the eclipse.