Category: photo
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i like to caress rusty cameras …
Derek just bought an old view camera on eBay. If you’re quick, you’ll still find the original item listing. Here’s an image of its ground glass:
Now, look at that, and tell me that it’s not the image of David Firth’s disturbing Salad Fingers character?
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points you see, points you don’t
So I’m busy doing windfarm photomontages in hugin. Trouble is, the site I’m working on is in the prairies, so here’s some ASCII art of what I’m seeing:
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This, as you might guess, is just a little short of control points for stitching images. I find myself scrabbling for clods of earth, interesting blades of grass, and what looks worryingly like roadkill by the side of the range roads to use as common points of interest.
So far, though, most of the panoramas have come out looking pretty good. But then, I am 1337 VV1NDF4R^^ D3516N0R …
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my digicam’s better than your digicam
There’s a minor Canon vs Nikon thing going on at Toronto Photobloggers right now … as a D70 owner, I just know I’m right 😉
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art by the wayside
Dumped by the side of the CN “GECO” spur by our house: three paintings on fibre board, in acrylics. Unsigned. They seemed to appear this morning.Further photos in my Found Art gallery
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Jings, fast photo!
My Future Photo just arrived. I didn’t know that Canada Post could move so quickly. The quality’s great, too.
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nice scaling
My Nikon D70 makes images that are too large for the web, so I have to scale them down. Most image scaling routines use simple linear interpolation, which can lose a lot of detail, but some packages use cubic scaling. This keeps most of the detail.
I was looking for a scriptable cubic routine, and I found it in Image::Magick, aka perlmagick. The syntax is simple:
$x = $image->Resize(geometry => '50%', filter => 'Cubic');I used this routine to resize my 2004 Ontario Renfest pictures.
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photo printers
I want to print some of my D70 pictures, so I asked the GTABloggers what they used:
- Henry’s, by Custom Colour — though their system is Java-based.
- pikto — ‘very high-end, fancy-pants, colour-profile snobbery types’
- Future Shop Future Photo — ‘if you just need a print dammit’
- shutterfly
I’m looking for a non-proprietary upload system, so Ofoto is out. I’d like to try photocentre.ca, but I know no-one who has tried them.
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whew!
Well, as of noon, the Ontario Renewable Energy RFP deadline has passed. That means I can take a short break from wind farm design.
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biggest vee-hickle ever
Seems it’s a big weekend down at the rental lot. This Buick LeSabre — approximately the size of Clackmannanshire, for Scottish readers — is all they had left.Oh well, at least I’ll be stylin’ on the way to the Rennfest, and at the airport to meet Catherine. Or, since it’s about the size of a Zil, I guess I could be Stalin.
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Monkeys
Gabe the Gibbon — image copyright Jill Greenberg.
First mentioned in The Walrus, and now picked up by BoingBoing, Jill Greenberg took studio portraits of monkeys. -
Saving me the bother
I was going to start documenting my experiences with the Nikon D70 and Linux on a wiki of my own, but it looks like there’s a better place to do it: the Digital Photography and Linux wiki.
It’s slightly out of date, but we can fix that.
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They put up a gas station at our wind turbine!
Okay, so maybe it’s a hydrogen gas station for a demonstrator fuel cell car, but it’s still a big ugly gas station. I think it spoils the lines of the park in which the WindShare turbine is cited.More pictures here: http://scruss.com/gallery/wind
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One ridiculous vehicle
One of these vehicles is a ridiculously unsafe vehicle that should never be allowed on the road. The other is a Speed Machine recumbent bicycle -
gone digital
I got rid of nearly all my film camera equipment yesterday. Digital was calling, and I was barely using what I had. To Burlington Camera, I traded in:
- Cosina-Voigtländer Bessa R 35mm rangefinder outfit, comprising:
- Bessa R 35mm rangefinder body
- Ultron Aspherical 35mm-f/1.7 lens
- Nokton Aspherical 50mm-f/1.5 lens
- Apo Lanthar 90mm-f/3.5 lens
- Pentacon Six TL outfit, comprising:
- Pentacon Six TL MF SLR body
- Carl Zeiss Jena Biometar MC 80mm-f/2.8 Lens
- Pentacon Six TL WLF
- Pentacon Six TL metered prism
- Pentacon Auto extension tubes
- Voigtländer Vitoret 110EL 110 camera outfit with matching V200 flash
- Yashica Yashicamat MF TLR
- Yashica Electro 35 GTN 35mm rangefinder camera
- Olympus Stylus Epic Infiniti 35mm AF compact
- Metz 20BC6 Flash
… all towards a Nikon D70. I like it a lot.
There is some film equipment I kept, like the amazing 15mm f/4.5 SW Heliar lens. I even bought a Bessa L body from Cameraquest so I could keep using it with my Kaidan KiWi panoramic head. I also kept the Zero Image pinhole camera, as it’s too nice to sell.
Coming back from the camera store, the taxi driver was an artist fae Balornock. I guess there’s a lot more people fae Balornock than in Balornock.
- Cosina-Voigtländer Bessa R 35mm rangefinder outfit, comprising:
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cron, gone
This is the sign that used to be at the farm on the corner of Steeles and Warden. If you go there now, it’s just a mini-mall. The geese that used to roost there will be confused.This sign is vaguely amusing if you know the famous Unix scheduling tool, cron.
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Cor, strike a light!
The best life-advice I’ve ever seen was written on the side of a matchbox. -
Yay! Even better panoramas with enblend
(Click the image to see the original in its full 1.1MB, 7264 × 992 glory.)I’ve been working with Hugin for a while, but found its colour matching when stitching less than perfect. I just built and tried enblend, which promises much better quality stitching — at the cost of some serious CPU usage.
The above is 8 images, taken when standing at the near the bridge over the Ottawa River. It was handheld, with just a basic Nikon 2MP digicam in auto-everything mode. Can you see the joins?
Hugin just got a load easier to build on Gentoo. You no longer have to jump through hoops of tweaking source to get things to compile. I like the package a lot, and I look forward to using it with my Kaidan panoramic tripod head.
