Pogue's Photo tricksHe's referring to a style of lamp where there's a fairly thick screw at the top of an elliptical loop that the lampshade hangs on.
... It turns out that the threads at the top of just about any lamp--the place where the lampshade screws on--are precisely the same diameter as a tripod mount! In a pinch, you can whip off the lampshade, screw on the camera, and presto: You've got a rock-steady indoor tripod...
Prisoners gathering en masse at distribution point to receive their daily rations of food, at Civil War-time Andersonville prison.It's blurry. Chaotic. Hard to make out. A jumble of mud and anonymity. The men are posing for the camera, while waiting for rations.
Location: Andersonville, GA, US
Date taken: August 1864
Official Google Blog: LIFE Photo Archive available on Google Image SearchSometimes I think of Google as a device sent back in time to create archives for the Skynet's reading pleasure. What wondrous things, she thinks, those apes were.
The Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination; The Mansell Collection from London; Dahlstrom glass plates of New York and environs from the 1880s...
... We're excited to announce the availability of never-before-seen images from the LIFE photo archive. This effort to bring offline images online was inspired by our mission to organize all the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. This collection of newly-digitized images includes photos and etchings produced and owned by LIFE dating all the way back to the 1750s.
Only a very small percentage of these images have ever been published. The rest have been sitting in dusty archives in the form of negatives, slides, glass plates, etchings, and prints. We're digitizing them so that everyone can easily experience these fascinating moments in time. Today about 20 percent of the collection is online; during the next few months, we will be adding the entire LIFE archive — about 10 million photos....
... These amazing photos are now blended into our Image Search results along with other images from across the web.
Once you are in the archive, you'll also notice that you can access a rich full-size, full-screen version of each image simply by clicking on the picture itself in the landing page....
iApp developers aren't too worried about Apple's 30% cute on all iPhone App sales -- "How about we make shitloads of money at 70% and ask questions later?"
Well said. The iPhones application distribution model is fantastic.
I almost ran out and bought an iPhone today. I had to tie myself to a chair and reread my August 2007 list of iPhone demands (rev Oct 2007). Of 9 non-negotiable demands, exactly 1 (a trivial one) was met in the past seven months.
Some of my demands will be met by iPhone developers - after June 2008. Some may be solved with the promised 2.0 firmware update. NONE of them have been met today. Gordon's third law of acquisition was written for this precise situation: "Don't buy on promises or potential. Acquire for real value now. Anything in the future is a plus (or, sometimes, a minus)."
So when the SDK is really available, and when I see the true state of the 2.0 firmware update, then I'll buy.
In the meantime, I've been abusing* the Aperture trial offer long enough. Instead of an iPhone I've ordered my copy of Aperture 2.01.
* If you delete the prefs you get another 30 days of trial. With 2.01 you have to swap a library in and out as well. It took me a long time to decide that Aperture's virtues outweigh its many flaws; I suspect Apple knows about the little quirk that extends the trial.
Not to mention my old neglected web pages. All intimately connected through the 1/Golden Ratio of "1.6180339887". That's a smidgen more than 8/5.
How connected?
To begin with, here's a (slightly revised) discussion from an ancient web page of mine about photographic aspect ratios, long the bane of the art:
John's Digital Photography Page
I thought printing was a peculiar curse of digital photography, but "Socrates" corrected me:
Printing is the curse of ALL photography and has been for a hundred years. 35 mm. has been the most popular format for probably fifty years. Until very recently (with 4X6 paper), there was NO paper available that matched the 3X2 aspect ratio. We had a choice of 3.5X5 or 5X7 or 8X10. The 8X10 was perfect for a 4X5 view camera used by professional portrait photographers. The smaller sizes were "almost" the 4X5 aspect ratio ...
In the case of digital photography, consumer camera sensors follow the convention of monitors: 640:480 = 4:3; on the other hand 35 mm film has a ratio of 3:2. Digital SLRs most often go with the 35 mm ratio of 3:2 (width to height), and some oddball Panasonic cameras use the video ratio of 16:9.
Not quite the same. The most popular print size, 4x6, is a good match to 35mm film, but not to most digital sensors. (BUT, Apple's photo books expect the 4:3 ratio.) If you print to a 4x6 paper; either there's cropping (most common) or dark bands are seen (better really, but unsightly).
This list of aspect ratios helps clarify the problem (here I use height/width as it makes the ratio easier to compare):
4x5: 0.80 (view camera and 8x10 prints)
3x4: 0.75 (most digital cameras and Apple's PhotoBook)
5x7: 0.71 (print size)
3.5x5: 0.7 (print size)
2x3: 0.67 (35mm and 4x6 prints - 35 mm is the diagonal for the old netatives)
5x8: 0.63 (Golden Ratio, more or less)
9x16: 0.56 (video ratio, widescreen monitors)..
So, we clearly see that the so-called 4x6 aspect ratio of 35 mm film and dSLRs is closest to the Golden Ratio. Which makes that the best choice for digital photography sensor size.
Huh? How did I make that leap? Well, it turns out the "Golden Ratio" is baked into the mathematics of the universe, and it has some odd aesthetic appeal to the human brain (Parthenon, art, architecture, music, etc).
The Golden Ratio is derived by looking at the convergence of the ratio of number pairs in the Fibonacci sequence. That sequence was introduced to Northern Europe in the early 13 century by Fibonacci (In Our Time: 11/29/2007), who might have come across them while learning about Arabic (Indian actually*) numbers when adventuring in Northern Africa. The sequence goes like this:
1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, 34 and so on (each digit is the sum of the preceding pair).
the ratios look like this (note the 3/2 -- the 35 mm negative size:
1/1, 2/1, 3/2, 8/5, 13/8, 21/13, 34/21 and so on ..
So we see that our familiar 4x6 photographs are the 3rd item in the ratio sequence, and not too far from the covergent value of the Golden Ratio: 1.6180339887.
There's no arguing with the fundamental structure of the universe, adjusting slightly for tradition.
The 4 x 6 printed image rules. Let no pretender emerge.
* I thought our digits were an Arabic invention. They turn out to be Indian, but they came to Europe via Arabia. This is an interesting example of wrong things I learned as a child that I have not since revisited, an increasingly common phenomena.
Will the Democrats Betray Us? - New York Times - Frank RichAs a commander in chief Petraeus is at least an improvement on Cheney, though it's a bit worrisome that he wasn't elected. Rich continues his editorial with demands that Obama and Clinton declare a withdrawal date, conveniently forgetting that Edwards has received no support for a similar position. Rich's advice is at odds with his key observation: Americans have forgotten about Iraq -- and bin Laden too, for that matter. They won't respond to rhetorical reminders.
SIR, I don't know, actually": The fact that America's surrogate commander in chief, David Petraeus, could not say whether the war in Iraq is making America safer was all you needed to take away from last week's festivities in Washington. Everything else was a verbal quagmire, as administration spin and senatorial preening fought to a numbing standoff.
Not that many Americans were watching .... New bin Laden tapes and the latest 9/11 memorial rites notwithstanding, we're back in a 9/10 mind-set. Bin Laden, said Frances Townsend, the top White House homeland security official, "is virtually impotent." Karen Hughes, the Bush crony in charge of America's P.R. in the jihadists' world, recently held a press conference anointing Cal Ripken Jr. our international "special sports envoy." We are once more sleepwalking through history, fiddling while the Qaeda not in Iraq prepares to burn...
...there were some eerie symmetries between General Petraeus's sales pitch last week and its often-noted historical antecedent: Gen. William Westmoreland's similar mission for L.B.J. before Congress on April 28, 1967. Westmoreland, too, refused to acknowledge that our troops were caught in a civil war. He spoke as well of the "repeated successes" of the American-trained South Vietnamese military and ticked off its growing number of combat-ready battalions. "The strategy we're following at this time is the proper one," the general assured America, and "is producing results."
Those fabulous results delayed our final departure from Vietnam for another eight years — just short of the nine to 10 years General Petraeus has said may be needed for a counterinsurgency in Iraq. But there's a crucial difference between the Westmoreland show of 1967 and the 2007 revival by General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. Westmoreland played to a full and largely enthusiastic house. Most Americans still supported the war in Vietnam and trusted him; so did all but a few members of Congress, regardless of party. All three networks pre-empted their midday programming for Westmoreland's Congressional appearance.
Our Iraq commander, by contrast, appeared before a divided and stalemated Congress just as an ABC News-Washington Post poll found that most Americans believed he would overhype progress in Iraq. No network interrupted a soap opera for his testimony. On cable the hearings fought for coverage with Britney Spears's latest self-immolation and the fate of Madeleine McCann, our latest JonBenet Ramsey stand-in.
General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker could grab an hour of prime television time only by slinking into the safe foxhole of Fox News, where Brit Hume chaperoned them on a gloomy, bunkerlike set before an audience of merely 1.5 million true believers. Their "Briefing for America," as Fox titled it, was all too fittingly interrupted early on for a commercial promising pharmaceutical relief from erectile dysfunction.
Even if military "victory" were achievable in Iraq, America could not win a war abandoned by its own citizens. The evaporation of that support was ratified by voters last November. For that, they were rewarded with the "surge." Now their mood has turned darker. Americans have not merely abandoned the war; they don't want to hear anything that might remind them of it, or of war in general. Katie Couric's much-promoted weeklong visit to the front produced ratings matching the CBS newscast's all-time low. Angelina Jolie's movie about Daniel Pearl sank without a trace. Even Clint Eastwood's wildly acclaimed movies about World War II went begging. Over its latest season, "24" lost a third of its viewers, just as Mr. Bush did between January's prime-time address and last week's.
You can't blame the public for changing the channel. People realize that the president's real "plan for victory" is to let his successor clean up the mess. They don't want to see American troops dying for that cause, but what can be done? Americans voted the G.O.P. out of power in Congress; a clear majority consistently tell pollsters they want out of Iraq. And still every day is Groundhog Day. Our America, unlike Vietnam-era America, is more often resigned than angry. Though the latest New York Times-CBS News poll finds that only 5 percent trust the president to wrap up the war, the figure for the (barely) Democratic-controlled Congress, 21 percent, is an almost-as-resounding vote of no confidence...
Outsourcing Your Crowdsourcing - O'Reilly Digital Media BlogOf course now that we're seeing high-quality online photo editing solutions, we will see Amazon 'Amazing Turk' services for similar post-production services. Home video editing is another obvious example. I'd be glad to send copies of my home videos out for video editing, though that's an example of only the outsourcing part of the equation. The wonder of this story is the clever combination of outsourcing and crowdsourcing. It's a fascinating parable for our times.
... I recently read an interesting post over at AUPN about a company based in New Delhi, India that is doing post-production work for photographers via FTP. The company is called Differential Technologies and you can check them out yourself at their website — http://www.worldofdt.com
... I went and checked out Diferential’s website anyway, because I was interested to see if they might be able to help me with submitting photos to a micro-stock agency. A while back I wrote about my experiences in trying out the Aperture plugin for the micro-payment stock agency iStockPhoto.com. In the end I found that I really liked the plugin, but just couldn’t justify the amount of time that was necessary to prepare my images for upload.
The trick to iStockPhoto seems to be that one needs to submit as many photos as possible, the photos need to be fairly unique and appealing to a variety of markets, and they need to be well key-worded, and adjusted. They don’t, on the other hand, need to be from big budget photo shoots, shot with ultra-expensive cameras, or have hours and hours of post-production work put into them.
... The team at Differential set me up with a personal FTP account and I sent them an exported JPEG of the original Master image. I used the new Ubermind FTP plugin for Aperture to transmit the image, and selected a full resolution JPEG with the color space set to sRGB as my Export Preset.
About half an hour later I received an email from Differential explaining to me that the job was done and I could download the image from the same FTP account. The result is below. Differential’s email also explained to me that the charge for such an image would normally be $2.00 (USD) due to the excessive amount of dust on the sensor. The price, they say, ranges from $0.50 to about $2.00, so I guess I hit the max on this one....
... After I looked over the image, I wrote back to Differential inquiring about key-wording services. They said they would be happy to work something out with me. I think this could be the start of really great relationship.
On the Aperture side of things, the whole experience got me thinking about how I could optimize the process so that I would have to do the least amount of work, and keep things nicely organized. I really like the option of just having an “iStock” keyword on hand, perhaps in one of my Keyword Control bars, and a Smart Album set up to search on this keyword. I could continue using the Ubermind FTP plugin to send the images to Differential, and when they were finished, I could just import them into Aperture, and send them to iStock using the plugin.
The only work I would have to do would be to set the iStock categories for each image. Later, I could even go as far as to connect them with their corresponding Masters using the Stack tool...
HD Photo: Microsoft's next standard?I've waited years for JPEG2000 to come to widespread use, but fears of patent vulnerabilities on the underlying math have kept it mostly in the labs. (Adobe Acrobat can use it for image compression, but it's an almost-secret option.)Last November, Microsoft renamed its JPEG competitor from Windows Media Photo to HD Photo... Ars has learned that the company plans to announce that it will begin seeking standardization for the HD Photo format, essentially bringing it one step closer to becoming the next JPEG.
HD Photo's feature set includes fixed or floating point high dynamic range, wide gamut image encoding; more efficient compression compared to JPEG; lossless or high-quality lossy compression; the ability to store 16 or 32 bits of data per color; and a design intended for use by digital cameras. HD Photo also supports CMYK, RGB, and monochrome as well as embedded ICC color profiles.
Gordon's Notes: Happiness is a selective memory - manipulating memory for good and for profitIt turns out there's a reason humans don't look at old photo albums all that often. I have now thousands of family related images spanning about 100 years that cycle, at various times, on up to 5 displays. I find that images that are older than about 1-2 years, which is roughly the memory range that I live in, are often unsettling. For the children, 6 months is about the limit.
My approach to creating a selectively-false and happy set of memories is a large collection of family photos that cycle across our array of computer displays. These leverage the principle of selective reinforcement of memory -- given two proximate events, unbalanced reinforcement of one will decrease retrieval of the second. It as though as one memory grows it usurps the foundation of its "neighbor" memories. In this experiment the happy photos selectively blur away all other events.
Truth is fundamentally overrated in our current universe.
