Photography
See also Digital Images for more on processing and organizing images. See my /Learning Journal for goals and progress.
Techniques
When you take pictures, there are basically three things you control:
- Composition: What's in the frame
- Focus: What you're focused on
- Lighting: How much light reaches your camera
Today's cameras do 90% of the focusing and lighting work for you, which means you can focus on composition.
Focusing on story.
10% of the time, your camera does the wrong thing. This is where the quality of your camera comes into play, specifically:
- Quality of your camera's lens
- Quality of your camera's sensor
- Ability to control manual settings easily
"The Big Picture About Exposure" from the The Bastards Book of Photography offers a great, simple explanation for how to control the amount of light your camera receives using manual settings. You start with your camera's exposure setting, which essentially manipulates:
You can also manipulate these four settings manually.
Focus:
- Focal length and aperture
- Don’t Zoom, Move: Treating Your Zoom Lens as a Series of Primes
Kelby Training a possible source for online courses.
Lighting
Introduction to White Balance. Use an 18% gray card for better color balance.
ND Filters
Aperture
A nice explanation of apertures and focal lengths, and why you can't get good depth-of-field in point-and-shoot cameras (like mine).
In general, to [get shallow depth-of field], especially w/ point-and-shoot cameras:
- Lower F-stop numbers (larger apertures)
- Longer focal lengths (zoom in)
- Get closer to the subject
Online Depth of Field Calculator
Dynamic Range
Panoramic
My Camera
My primary camera is an Olympus OM-D E-M5. I also have a Canon PowerShot S95.
Old cameras:
When I was considering the Lumix, I also considered:
For my upcoming BurdensLanding:Korea trip, I'm considering a new camera:
Camera | Thoughts | Links | Examples |
---|---|---|---|
Canon G11 |
| ||
Canon S90 |
The Olympus E-PL2 seems like a good option for a Micro Four Thirds camera.
One day, I'm going to get a Leica M8:
Other possible equipment:
- Solica ST500 Tripod
- 15 Low-Light High-ISO All-Star Digital Cameras. My S95 wins the compact category here.
Managing Photos
Most of my public pictures are on Flickr. View analytics via flickrstats. One day, I'll upload some of these to Wikimedia Commons. I'm intrigued by ThisLife.
I'm migrating over to Adobe Lightroom for editing and photo management.
I wrote some of my own tools for cataloging my digital prints, which are now heavily outdated. They were inspired and based heavily on Gerald Oskoboiny's digital photo publishing software.
I'm experimenting with exiflow for managing my digital photography workflow (renaming files, metadata, etc.). F-Spot has an extension that supports an exiflow workflow.
I'm constantly disgruntled by F-Spot, but I keep returning to it, because it keeps getting better. I'm not crazy about F-Spot for importing images off of my digital camera, so I'm thinking about switching the default to gThumb.
I pondered a move to Google Picasa, but decided against it due to lack of development of its Linux client. If I ever do make the move, I'll need to import my F-Spot albums.
And now I've moved to Shotwell, because that's now the default in Ubuntu. I'm thinking about Lyn on my Mac.
Other tools of interest:
- DVD-Slideshow
- PhotoRec. Recovering photos from faulty flash memory
Services for scanning old photos:
Notes
Tags + types. Tags can have types. If I want to get really funky, types can have relationships -- an ontology! For example, the "Eugene Eric Kim" tag could be of type "People." This would allow me to do faceted classification.
Collections (or albums) cannot be tags, because you want to be able to do special things, like define cardinality and other metadata within a collection. However, you ought to be able to assign a photo to multiple collections.
I'd love to integrate Greg Elin's Fotonotes for granular annotations.
Favorites from Eugene Chan
- lobsters
- under the golden gate
- pig pastries
- piano
- leaf
- underwater calder
- Bay Bridge
- sailboat
- ray
- jellyfish
- rays of light
- bus
Photo Mosaics
The best tool for doing these on Linux seems to be metapixel:
- Generating Awesome Photomosaics on Linux with Metapixel
- Create Photo Mosaics with Metapixel
- Three photo mosaic apps compared
See Also
- The Bastards Book of Photography: An open-source guide to working with light
- The Ideal Digital Photographer's Workflow, Part 1, Part 2
- Top Ten Digital Photography Tips
- Legal Misconceptions
- DIY Photo Booth (on Mac)
- How to make a time-lapse video from stills (using iPhoto and QuickTime)
- Tom Robinson Photography. Love this guy's photos.