Keys Corner » Photography

MyZeil, Frankfurt

John — Sat, 13 Aug 2011 07:22:44 +0000

I read A Daily Dose of Architecture fairly regularly, but not every day. Which is why I only noticed Ken Lee’s photos of MyZeil this morning. MyZeil is pretty spectacular, and Ken’s images show it in all its glory.

More of Ken’s MyZeil images on Flickr here. They are miles better than my own efforts (which to save my blushes I am not publishing!), and were taken with an iPhone! (No screenshot of the photos as I would need to license them from Getty Images, and Getty Images and I don’t get on together).

Nifty way of miniaturizing bar codes

John — Mon, 17 Jan 2011 17:51:37 +0000

The Camera Culture Group at the MIT Media Lab has come up with a way of marking objects with a 3mm wide bar code that a normal digital SLR camera can read at a distance of over 4 meters (a cell phone camera needs to be closer) :

Comparision of the new bokode and a conventional barcode
(Image from MIT Camera Culture Club's Paper about bokodes)

The experimenters at MIT call the new bar code a bokode, to distinguish it from its larger counterparts. The bokode uses an effect known as bokeh which is a characteristic of all camera lenses and often causes the highlights of out of focus objects to appear as groups of circles on the photograph.

The advantages of the bokode are its small size, which means that it can offer very inconspicuous identification of objects, and that it can be read from several meters away, thus allowing new applications for bar codes.

One possible use could be to add information to shops and other buildings which could be read and stored by Google Streetview cars, allowing more information to be displayed on on-line maps. The researchers have several other ideas, and are looking for commercial partners to develop the bokode further.

See a video about bokodes here; read more about bokodes here.

(Via Cool Hunting)

“DRM” for camera batteries

John — Thu, 25 Jun 2009 20:25:56 +0000

We’ve seen copy protection for CDs and DVDs; we’ve seen ink-jet printer manufacturers add chips to their cartridges to make it difficult or impossible to refill them with cheaper ink.

If you have looked at online suppliers, you will have noticed that you can order replacement batteries for your digital camera much cheaper than the manufacturer’s originals. So it should be no surprise that Panasonic has issued firmware updates for several of their digital cameras, which prevent third party batteries from being used in their cameras:

For the protection of our customers Panasonic developed this technology after it was discovered that some aftermarket 3rd party batteries do not meet the rigid safety standards Panasonic uses.

Of course, they only have our best interests at heart and any effect on their profits is a completely secondary consideration…

Abandoned Russian Metro Station

John — Thu, 23 Oct 2008 20:13:21 +0000

Click to start the 360° Virtual Realitity

And here, “The making of…” or how they set up the camera to take it.

(Via Dark Roasted Blend)

Geocoding photos for the Mac

John — Mon, 20 Oct 2008 09:31:21 +0000

When we were in Spain, we took our i-Blue 747 GPS track logger with us and left it running most of the time when we were out with the cameras. I was expecting that it would be a simple matter to geocode the photos when we returned.

But it turned out that there were a couple of snags to overcome first.

Firstly, although the logger is quite sensitive and will pick up a signal indoors in many cases, it does not like being carried in my fanny pack – the material was too thick or the orientation of the logger was wrong, and we didn’t get any tracks logged most of the time. Which was a disappointment. Fortunately I had carried it in my hand or put it down on the car roof on a number of occasions while we were photographing, so I did have some tracks to play with.

In order to geocode (digital) photographs, you need to have to set the camera’s date and time, so that later a program can match the time stamp in the EXIF data in your photos with GPS track recorded by the GPS logger. When you get back to your computer, here are a few things that I have learnt:

Use a Photo-editor which preserves the EXIF data

The EXIF (Exchangeable Image File Format) data is embedded in your photograph and contains information such as the camera model, shutter speed and aperture used and among other things, the date and time at which the picture was taken.

If you edit the photos – for example, cropping or adjusting the exposure – I found that Adobe Photoshop Elements does not write the EXIF data to the new image file. Which means that the time stamp gets discarded. Apple’s Preview program (if you only want to resize pictures, for example), and The Gimp (which you can download as a Mac install package from Sourceforge) do not have this problem, so before you indulge in an orgy of editing your pictures, make a test and check whether the time stamp survives in your favourite graphic editor!

Program to edit EXIF data on the Mac

If you have destroyed your EXIF data, as I did using Photoshop Express on some of the photos, before I realised what was happening, you can add it manually (I had the original pictures in another directory, but didn’t want to have to re-edit them, so I knew the time stamp values), Reveal is an excellent free program which you can use to insert the most important data into the photo again.

Program to add the location data to your photos

The actual goal is to geotag your photographs, and after some experimenting I have decided to use GPSPhotolinker which can update JPG, TIFF and many RAW formatted photographs and which was easy to use and didn’t damage any of the photos that I processed.

It can read the data extracted from your logger in GPX or TCX format. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I use Mountain Rose’s Mac TravelRecorder to download my tracks from the logger to Mac.

Uploading to an on-line photo album

I uploaded my results to Google’s Picasa online album (here the map showing where the geocoded photos were taken), but there are a number of other on-line albums which will also take your photos and show where you took them on a map. For a few tips on using these services, see this page on Early Innovation’s web site.

WLAN SD-cards for cameras

John — Sat, 20 Sep 2008 16:59:56 +0000

One hassle with using a digital camera is that you have to transfer the photos to your computer to process them. There are two ways, usually, that this is done:

use a memory-card reader (often attached by a propriety USB cable which the camera manufacturer sells at a high price, if you ever need to replace it)

by connecting the camera by cable directly to your Mac or PC

Both methods involve fiddling around: with either a cable or with the memory card from the camera.

So its nice to see that manufacturers are starting to offer SD memory cards which can communicate from within the camera to the computer using Wireless LAN. For example, Lexar, who have just announced a 2GB WLAN SD card for exactly that purpose. I haven’t seen a WLAN SD card for sale in Germany yet, but I hope it won’t be long before they are available here.

On a similar note, its nice to see that a similar approach of making life more convenient is starting to appear in other areas. For example, Mark/Space have just announced that their latest software can automatically synchronize data between your PDA and computer wirelessly each time they are within 10 meters of each other.

Getting an i-Blue 747 GPS logger to work with OS X

John — Sat, 13 Sep 2008 08:17:36 +0000

I bought an i-Blue 747 GPS track logger recently. You can pick one up, new, on eBay for around 40 – 50 Euro. The idea is to use it to tag photos with their position – our cameras don’t have GPS receivers built in, and often when we get back from holiday, its difficult to remember where exactly we took which pictures. If you set the clock in the (digital) camera before you set off, the time-stamp from the GPS log, together with the position data allow you add the exact position of each photo to the EXIF data that the camera stores when each picture is taken.

The problem is, few GPS loggers come with any software for downloading and processing the track data on a Mac. I’m not aware of any that supports OS X “out of the box”. However, there is lots of third party software around which can be used to read out the scans and process them on the Mac. It takes time to track them down, however. So here’s what works for me:

Installing the USB Driver
The i-Blue 747 uses a CP210x USB bridge chip. A suitable driver allowing the logger to be accessed via a USB port is the Silicon Labs Intel Mac USB Driver, which you can get here (Silicon Labs Intel Mac USB Driver). (I wasn’t able to get the driver from Silicon Labs own web site, which has a different size, to work.)
Getting the logger to talk to the software
One small problem if you have a Mac with a slot-loading CD/DVD drive, is that the software and handbooks that come with the GPS logger are on a mini-CD, which the drive can’t load. So you’ll need to find a PC or mac with a tray-loading drive to read the mini-CD and burn a full sized one if you want to read the handbook.

Even if the handbook only contains the description of how to use the Windows software, there is still an important peice of information included, which I missed initially and which cost me a lot of time thinking that the logger was defective: to access the track logs and to change the settings of logging frequency etc., the device must be powered up. In other words – it won’t talk to the software, any software, unless you have set the switch on the side of the logger to “log”!
Reading the tracks from the GPS logger / Setting the logger’s parameters
The easiest-to-use software that I have found is without a doubt Mountain Rose’s Mac TravelRecorder. It costs $49 / 37 Euro (but there is a one-month demo version which you can use to to check it out before buying). Use the SLAB_USBtoUART port and connect at 115200 Baud:

Typical settings, which worked for me, are:

For me, a logging frequency of 20 – 30 seconds is often enough to produce a reasonable track of where I have been, and to identify where a particular photo was shot, but if you want really accurate tracks, you can increase the frequency to once a second – but then you’ll only be able to store around a days-worth of tracks, instead of a holiday’s worth!

The tracks, downloaded from the GPS logger look this:

The tracks can be exported from the application into files formatted for use with Google Earth, or several other common formats.

Here is one of the sets of data from the above screen shot, imported into Google Earth. As you can see, even though I was driving at speeds of up to 100 km/h the resolution is high enough, at once every 20 seconds, to see exactly where I have been:
Other useful links
MTK Based GPS datalogger Management SW: I actually first got the logger working using the software described here (Download link for the software). However, it helps if you know your way around the Mac at Unix level, which I don’t, otherwise it is likely to take a bit of time to get the software set up. It has one very useful feature, which I haven’t seen elsewhere – you can change the log format, and the logging frequency without erasing the existing log on the device.

MyTrack can import tracks in GPX format (and from the logger, although I haven’t got that working at the moment), and display them on maps extracted from Google Maps, showing the elevation profile and speed profile, and also allows geo-tagging of digital photographs using EXIF data fields.

Other GPS programs for the Mac: Try this link here, click on the Mac tab at the top of the page, and search for GPS.

We are going to be trying out linking the track records to photos on a trip to Spain in the next month, and if I don’t get round to posting about that before we go, I’ll talk about it after we return.

Nikon / Microsoft tie-up – DRM for pixels?

John — Mon, 01 Sep 2008 13:12:04 +0000

A few days ago Microsoft and Nikon announced a patent sharing deal. At the time a Microsoft employee was quoted as saying:

This agreement is another great example of how industry leaders are coming together to collaborate through intellectual property licensing, and by doing so enabling innovation which that will ultimately benefit the consumer.

However all is not sunshine in Nikon-land. The latest camera announcement (the Coolpix P6000) contains a statement that the RAW format used is not compatible with Nikon’s existing format and is tied to Microsoft’s Window Imaging Component, which only runs under Windows XP SP3 and Windows Vista. Moreover, Nikon has no plans to support non-Windows operating systems. Not surprisingly, Nikon camera users do not like being tied into using only Microsoft software:

The Coolpix P6000 looks like a very sweet camera. The advanced controls, the built in GPS and the ethernet port, and compatibility with i-TTL flash, are just the features I�m looking for in an advanced compact. But if Nikon is arrogant enough to not let me access my own camera RAW data except through a system that makes me a hostage of both Nikon (bad) and Microsoft (worse), I think I�ll pass on this one.

Even if I hadn’t just bought an new Olympus camera last week, a Nikon camera with the new RAW format wouldn’t make it onto my short list either – who wants to be tied into a completely proprietary format on anything as permanent as digital photographs? (Yes, I know RAW is anyway non-standard, and differs from manufacturer to manufacturer, but this is the first time that I am aware of, where it has been restricted to one platform).

Apple at the Beijing Olympics

John — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 07:25:44 +0000

Apple is using the Olympics to market it’s Macs and professional image processing software, Aperture, to the press photographers attending. They’ve set up 50 workstations with 30″ Cinema Displays and all the necessary software (Photoshop, Aperture, and more) for the pros to use in the Kodak Photographer’s Center. The set-up is being managed by Joe Schorr, Senior Product Manager of Photo Applications, who is also learning a lot about how the Apple applications can be improved by watching the pros working under very tight deadlines.

Sounds like a great idea – gets the best possible quality feedback on their photographic applications and the photographers get excellent support using the Apple set-up from the Apple experts.

Incidently, Kodak are publishing the Olympic Picture of the Day on thier web site – their take on the best photograph processed in thier center on each day of the Olympics.

We have just installed Aperture and switched to shooting our serious pictures in RAW format with the goal of using Aperture to organize the 1000′s of images we have on the Macs and to optimize the pictures when we upload them to the Macs. I’m currently working my way through Apple’s “Aperture 2 – Professionally Manage Digital Photographs“, which is a learning by doing course which involves you managing and manipulating several hundred digital images on the accompanying DVD ROM. I’m finding it an excellent way to get familiar with Aperture, depite the book containing a number of typos (mostly wrong command short-cuts).

How to repair your Canon Ixus

John — Wed, 21 Feb 2007 05:15:24 +0000

I noticed a link to this article in Handelsblatt (I think, today I can’t find it again) the day before yesterday. The article is very detailed with lots of photos and I’m sure that if you are good with a very small screwdriver, you can indeed save the 260 Euro that you pay to have a professional fix dirt in the focusing mechanism. But I was still pretty gobsmacked at the statement with the original link, that using this article you would have the camera fixed in a matter of minutes – some people must be a lot better with their fingers than I am.

Six million pixels are enough

John — Tue, 19 Dec 2006 23:09:33 +0000

This week’s Economist has a report about the new Nikon D40 – a 6 megapixel digital SLR camera which undercuts its rivals by several hundred dollars. Their main point in the article subtitled Nikon’s new camera favours quality over quantity is that they think Nikon has recognized that chasing an ever-increasing number of pixels on the image sensor is not the way to go. Thank goodness – I have recently bought a Canon Ixus 60 (which you can deduce has 6 megapixels) and noticed it is becoming quite difficult to find a decent compact camera which doesn’t offer 8-10 megapixels and correspondingly low sensitivity / high noise CCD image sensors.

Hi-res digital camera

John — Tue, 26 Sep 2006 20:09:30 +0000

This 160 Megapixel (!) camera from Seitz Phototechnik AG (in Switzerland) takes panorama or conventional digital photographs and uses a optional 1.66 GHz Mac mini with 2 GB of memory connected via Gigabit Ethernet for storing and processing the pictures. Not for the weak-armed (it weighs in at 2.8 Kg without the Mac mini, which adds another 2.6 Kg), nor for those with weak wallets – it costs a touch under 30 000 Euro including the Mac mini.

(via HardMac.com)