TaoSpace

Is this for real?

Is this is for real it is both utterly hilarious and scary at the same time...

Tip #4: Shoot more, cull more

The best thing about digital photography is that you can take as many pictures as you want (within the limits of your memorycard(s) obviously) without increasing the cost of it. That is very good news indeed as you will be able to experiment more with your photography.

Try and shoot the same scene multiple times with different settings. Change things like white-balance, color-tone, aperture, shutterspeed, preprogrammed scene-modes (if you are so inclined) etc.

Give exposure bracketing (or any other kind of bracketing your camera might have) a go. This takes several shots (usually 3) of the scene with different exposures, which can work miracles on hard to shoot scenes like snow-scapes or beaches.

Another tip is to always keep your camera in continuous drive mode. Usually this works by holding down the shutter for as long as you want to keep shooting. This way it shouldn't interfere at all when you just want to take a single shot, but is a boon when you suddenly find yourself in a situation that requires a quick response to get that perfect picture. Even when taking a posed shot this can help: A single shot of a group of people will always have people in weird poses, with their eyes closed etc. If your camera can take several shots per second you'll have shot them several times before they even realise you've started. Of course if you are using flash this will be a problem...

Now that you have a ton of photos however you need to think about something that is way more difficult, namely picking the ones you want to keep. Plenty of people keep every single shot they make, as if somehow they will lose the moment if they throw something away. Such a collection however becomes both hard to manage as well as boring to look at. Looking at oodles of photos of the same subject is quite yawn-inducing to look at and might have people skip over the real gems in there.

I for one tend to go by "one photo per situation" rule. If I have several shots of the same thing I allow myself to keep only one. The best one. Of course deciding on that is hard. Especially if the shots look really similar. In that case, just delete any one of them and be done with it. Otherwise, check for sharpness, noise, focus, bokeh etc.
Ask yourself the question: what is the subject of these photographs and what brings it out in the best way?

This all may seem really obvious, but it is important none-the-less. Newspapers, for instance, employ people just for this task alone. So if you want to end up with a collection that is both manageable and interesting to other people, you have no choice but to choose.

Digital Negatives

OK, this should interesting to watch. Adobe has announced something called the Digital Negative Specification, which aims to unify the various RAW formats produced by digital SLR cameras and the like.

Although the idea itself is interesting from a conceptual point of view, it is a very obvious play by Adobe to break into digital photography in a big way. Adobe isn't much of a player in that field, besides Photoshop obviously (which pre-dates digital photography!). Adobe might be trying to "pull a Microsoft" here by getting the camera producers to support a format that will put Adobe into some position of power. Compare this to Microsoft's hold over the PC hardware platform specs.

At the same time, supporting a lot of RAW formats doesn't seem to be too much of a stretch for most Photo Management tools. Almost all of them support all common formats (Nikon, Olympus, various Canon flavours, etc.). Sure it might take a bit of extra effort, but since any (important) cameras supporting this format will be at least 6 months away. This because not a single real camera vendor (sorry, not counting HP as one at the moment) has pledged support and all of them have just announced new cameras in preparation for Photokina. This basically means that any real support is at least a product-cycle away. Add 18 months to 2 years for most pros to buy a new camera again and you're looking at supporting all the different RAW formats for at least another 2 to 3 years.

Still, in the long run it might be for the better. Especially if the format supports digital signatures for images as well, so the negative can be proven to be both the only "original" and owned by photography X.

Since I'm going to Photokina on friday, I'll have a chat with the Adobe guys to see what they are really up to. Expect a full Photokina report on saturday.

Immortel

Hans found out that my favourite series of comics has been made into a film! Immortel is a film adapted from Bilal's Nikopol trilogy, which consists of La Foire aux Immortels, La Femme Piege and Froid équateur. The comics are excellent; In fact Bilal comics are just about the only comics I still read.

I haven't seen the film myself but the trailer looks promising enough. Apparently almost all the sets are totally digital. The DVD will be released towards the end of October, so I put in an order with Amazon.fr immediately.

Update: Someone should definately make a movie out of Partie de Chasse, which deals with the days before the fall of communism. With Poland (which is the location of the book) now being part of the EU and all sorts of European grants being given for cultural exchange etc. it shouldn't be that hard to get money together to do so...

Journalism under fire

This piece by a veteran american journalist is required reading, as it once again reiterates the poor state of the american democracy.

The marriage thing...

Well, it seems it is official.

I'm getting married July 30, 2005 in Oslo.

A formal invitation to all the usual suspects will follow, but you might want to pencil it in already.

Skype

Oliver posted about Skype a while ago. It has just been released for MacOS X, with Windows and Linux clients already available.

At first I had no idea why people were making such a big deal about it. VoIP clients seem like a dime a dozen these days. That was until I actually downloaded it when I had a few minutes to spare and had a call with Oliver using it.

I must say I'm impressed. The voice quality is excellent, the app looks nice (which is not often the case with multiplatform apps under MacOS X), it is full duplex and the lag seemed to be negligable. Now of course I need all my friends to install it as well, so we can see if it will really be useful in the long run.

One odd thing though...I never knew my PowerBook had a microphone! I've tried recording sound with it before and it always complained about lacking an audio input. When Oliver called me and started saying how I didn't have a mike, but would probably be able to listen what I had to say, he noticed that there was sound coming back all the same. I'm not quite sure where the mike is though. I suspect it is under one of the speaker grills besides the keyboard. Apparently it works perfectly, even when I don't sit close to it. Nice!