CogBlogged Tagged ‘photography’

Lifehacker’s Top 10 DIY Photography Tools is a mine of nifty gems for photographers to up their own photo mojo. Besides what I learned (see below), I am finding myself thinking more about the rise of the DIY (Do It Yourself) culture on the net- there surely is a future blog post relating that to education. Or maybe some crazy dude will write it for me. But back to cameras. I am going to ASAP try 9. Make a remote camera trigger by modding a $3 cell phone hands set (looks like a matter of disabling the microphone). There is a very clear instructables bit to walk you through it. What I am looking for is the ability to take long exposures Make a remote shutter release for your canon digital camera (and some other brands such as Pentax, sony, and some nikons) for about 3 bucks in under 5 [...]

Telegraph Hill Tilt Shift by cogdogblog posted 19 Oct ’08, 12.10am MDT PST on flickr Inspired by a link from kotke to the Fenway Park "Model", I experimented with the Fake Model method. Essentially it is a PhotoShop play of careful gradient selection and lens blur to create effects that convert real photos to images that look like miniature models or train set models. This one is from my original photo taken near the top of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco I was more curious to see how hard it was to create one of these- the lens blur filter in PhotoShop gives the short depth of field that a macro lens would make on a real model, and some toying with color curves is supposed to make it pop more like a plastic model. Again, according to the site with the instructions: With a very little effort, you can [...]

Photosynth was one of those “cool demos I saw and bookmarked for later” that I was recently nudged to go back and look at– this week I saw a very cool scene created by the folks at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. In a nutshell, PhotoSynth magically creates a navigable scene that lets you move through a 3D space made by stitching together photos of a place or object taken from different angles. Sure it is a Microsoft thingie and only works on Windows, but sometimes, a cool thing pushes one over their threshold. If you had not seen the demo from last year where Blaise Aguera y Arcas wowed the Ted-ites, it is worth a peek: I’ve had this interest in the last year with complex scenes rendered from photos, e.g. the nifty explorable stitched images created with the GigaPan… but the beauty of PhotoSynth should be it does [...]

I did not discover the barfing flickr panda just followe dlinks in my gReader from sites like Mashable. The panda provides a different way to Explore flickr, the 500 most “interesting” photos as identified by the magical algorithm. The Panda just seems to be a new way to vew them; just sit and watch as new photos are upchucked: There is a bit more information, but no explanation, in Of Pandas and Rainbows. To some people, Explore is the ultimate beauty contest. It’s the pinnacle of Flickr, the achievement of achievements. They fret and conspire and worry, and actually get angry and frustrated, when their perfectly fine photos, never “get into” Explore. Except it’s basically random. No matter how artificially “interesting” you try to make your photos (Explore photos are selected via Flickr’s “Interestingness Algorithm”, affectionately known as the “Magic Donkey”), Explore is still only 500+ images each day. And [...]

More Moo Goodness by cogdogblog posted 2 Aug ’08, 6.19pm MDT PST on flickr My moo note cards arrived today! I got a set of 16 cards with photos from my journeys to Australia. Yep, got more moo card goodies- my set of 16 notecards came today; I made a set of selected photos from my trips to Australia. Not seen is the text I put on the inside (which also includes photo information, link, etc): Some glimpses of but a few beautiful places within Australia! I want to see more… What can I say but

I’ve tried to formulate it in my head and cannot put exactly to words why I love so much taking photos. And now I decided I dont really have to have it in words. It’s what energizes me. And so much has been rekindled just since January on taking on the challenge of the 366 photos project, where now 40 different people, around the world, have taken up D’Arcy’s lead in posting one picture a day to flickr. I know only a handful of them, I have met Simon in Brisbane, who has access to some interesting mechanical locales, and got to meet Jen at NorthernVoice who moves between humourous shots (getting pulled over for speeding) to lovely scenes, Dean with his wild sense of humor and dog chewed photos. But what about RightAntler, who not only takes a photo a day, but always gets a photo of a crow? [...]

flickr foto New Toyavailable on my flickr I just got this new camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XT– going back to being a newbie learning a whole new interface. 8 MegaPixel SLR, wahoo! I’ve been saving up my spare change and with some help from sideline consulting, I bought a new digital camera, this Canon Digital Rebel XT. My previous 2 personal digital cameras and ones bought at work were all Olympus brands (I became enamored of their lenses with my first portable 35 mm Stylus used for many years), and had grown weary of the lag time and data writing lag of my Olympus 4040 (like the Elk cross the road in Colorado, but the time the 4040 was ready, I ended up with a photo of my rear view mirror), though it has logged unknown thousands of images. The reports on the Canon so far live up to [...]