mindflayer.net » photography

St Patrick’s in San Francisco

mindflayer — Wed, 05 Sep 2007 04:42:54 +0000

It was difficult to take a photo in the very dark church, get the full details, and not get a lot of ISO noise without a tripod. I bracketed, shot, and used Photoshop CS 3′s merge to HDR to get this image. Could have more pop, but it is a first try.

On color and exporting photos

mindflayer — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 18:23:45 +0000

I found today that doing a color check of photos when converting type is an important final step. For example, take a look at the thumbnail and then full rendition of the photo below:

The thumbnail exhibits the same dull colors and loss of vividness that I noticed today when browsing through photos converted from RAW to PSD to PNG or JPEG. This conversion tells me that I will have to continue to host images outside of the .Mac gallery if color rendition is important.

.Mac iPhoto Gallery quality

mindflayer — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 07:03:49 +0000

I’m hardly a pro-am but I still want my photos to display well. It is argued that today’s consumers more than ever accept “just good enough” when it comes to audio and video and disregard any increase in quality, but I disagree. The quality of content is indeed heavily influenced by the quality of the medium. A grainy photo or film is not going to have the same impact as a vivid representation (unless that is the intention of the medium as in film noir).

In any case, this first photo is from iPhoto publishing to .Mac – click on the thumbnail for the full photo.

This one is hosted locally on the Coppermine gallery. Again, click on the thumbnail for the full photo.

Quite noticeable is the drastic reduction in photo size. In this age of 12MP prosumer DSLRs this is an acceptable price to pay to keep Apple’s bandwidth costs down. I resize the photos as well in consideration of the resolution ranges most people use. How about quality, though? It’s not a superior photo – there is some visible artifacting and non-intentional blur from holding the shutter open while standing in the wind. Is the .Mac quality good enough for this level of photography?

I think so. Thoughts?

Coit Tower and the Pyramid

mindflayer — Wed, 29 Aug 2007 06:11:17 +0000

Lower quality photos when uploaded to .Mac, but easier – and besides, it’s not like I’m Ansel Adams.

New Nikons announced

mindflayer — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 05:52:05 +0000

While I don’t have nearly the skillset to fully utilize the gear, it doesn’t mean I don’t still like seeing the kit. Engadget has the details on Nikon’s new D3 and D300. The former offers a full-frame sensor (23.9 x 36 mm), 12.1 megapixels, 3″ live LCD, and HDMI out for $5000 in November. The D300 is a DX sensor-based body, 12.3 megapixels, 3″ live LCD, and $1800 in November.

A handful of lenses were announced:

AF-S NIKKOR 14-24mm f/2.8G ED
AF-S NIKKOR 24-70mm f/2.8G ED
AF-S NIKKOR 400mm f/2.8G ED VR
AF-S NIKKOR 500mm f/4G ED VR
AF-S NIKKOR 600mm f/4G ED VR

I recall someone betting me Nikon would not release a new DSLR before 3Q 2008. Sounds like I win that D300.

.Mac gallery

mindflayer — Sun, 12 Aug 2007 09:30:34 +0000

I’ve started posting photos to my .Mac gallery that’s a component of iLife ’08. I’m pretty pleased with it so far. The ability to quickly and easily post photos from the iPhone is slick. It would be nice if the photos were at full resolution but I guess Apple figures the pain of EDGE is minimized with a resized photo:

(Click on the image for the “full .Mac experience”.)