found_drama

Taking the Aperture plunge…

After about four years and approximately nine thousand digital images collected, processed, managed, and shared via iPhoto, we’ve more/less out-grown it around this house.  Yes: this coincides in large part with the DSLR upgrade and the desire to shoot RAW but iPhoto just didn’t seem to be cutting it for us.  But was Aperture really going to fill our needs?  Or was it going to be overkill for this here hobbyist, this admitted amateur?  Did the perceived 120% I needed out of iPhoto translate into 10% of Aperture?  75%?  53.68%?  I had no illusions about taking 100% advantage of Aperture¹ but I wanted to at least get an idea of our utilization level before going all the way.

And so did the 30-day free Aperture trial period come in to the rescue. Read the rest of this entry »

1. I have some sincere doubts that I’ll ever shoot while tethered, for example.[↩]

Well, gentle readers, yesterday I wrapped up the hemming and hawing and took the DSLR plunge.  Motivated in part by the impending baby and in part by a good Memorial Day Sale deal, I picked up a Canon XTi.

A. & I ventured out yesterday to hit a couple of stores and try our luck with the advertised sales and their not-always-advertised deals.  The main objective was to get a little bit more hands-on play time with the front-running models (i.e., the Nikon D60 and the Canon XTi) and shore up the decision.  I had found a couple of good deals online (Amazon.com to the rescue) but figured by the time we factored in shipping, there was a chance I would spent about the same amount at a brick-and-mortar store.  Plus (as mentioned above) the last thing I wanted to do was commit to one without having had another chance to get a feel for the controls.

Our first stop was out of the XTi but we did spend a few minutes with a D60.  After about 10 minutes screwing around, I decided that the D60 would be acceptable but there was something unfamiliar about the controls and the icons that bugged me out.  We left there and moved on to store #2.  They had both the XTi and the D60 in stock but neither camera was sold “body-only” — so that combined with the lack of 50mm primes combined with the less-than-great sale price…  We moved on.

Store #3…  Well, they took care of us.  The price was right, the sales person was knowledgeable and friendly and candid.  And though they carried neither a body-only kit nor the 50mm prime…  Well, she convinced me.  I’m glad I went ahead with it:

Left on the to-do list?  The kit lens is a great starter, I think but everyone keeps bringing up that fast 50mm prime.  Oh…  And does anyone have a recommendation on a good “backpack style” camera bag?

Special thanks out to Chris, John, and Justin for their feedback, recommendations, and tips.

The DSLR hunt continues.  As I mentioned last hit around, I continue to digest all of this.  It feels like a big move.  And while it’s not like a house- or car-level Big Purchase, it’s certainly a large wad of cash than I like to drop outside of true necessity.  Thus do I continue to contemplate, to deliberate, to ruminate, to speculate, and to vacillate.

The latest exercises have been to compare the various available packages (e.g., CostCo’s D60 kit vs. Ritz’s D60 kit; e.g., Best Buy’s Canon XTi kit vs. Circuit City’s XTi kit; etc.) and then compare those against “roll your own” scenarios (e.g., the Canon XTi “body-only” and then add on a fast 50mm prime).  It’s a tough road to travel, I tell you. Read the rest of this entry »

Over the past couple weeks and months¹ I have reached that stage and am now laboring over the decision to upgrade to a DSLR camera.  It’s mostly (as a I admitted to one friend) “lens lust” but there’s also an amateur artistic element to it.  I’m looking for some more control over the pictures (i.e., the aperture size and shutter speed) and I believe I have taken my point-and-shoot about as far as it can go.  Then I came across this quote (via DF) which helped to capsulize it:

Christ on a bike what a difference. I feel like someone handed a slice of hot toast spread with cultured butter after a lifetime breakfasting on Skittles and government cheese. I mean, it does what I want it to! It autofocuses in less time than it takes my eyes to imagine what a proper focus would be! You can take pictures in tungsten light without tacking a fucking white card to the wall and metering fifteen times! You push the button and it takes a fucking picture! I am in consumer ecstasy! I am in consumer ecstasy! NyQuil! Advil! Malt liquor!

Begging the question: if a DSLR also happens to be the best point-and-shoot then why am I wasting my time on the point-and-shoot?

Read the rest of this entry »

1. It’s been months but I put the research project on the shelf for a while and then resurrected about two or three weeks ago.[↩]

I am pretty excited today because several photos that I had uploaded to Panoramio a while back have been selected as featured photos for Google Earth. w00t!I find it a bit funny and “full circle” because I first stumbled across Panoramio by way Google Earth. I was “flying around” Burlington and noticed all the snapshots in the Panoramio layer. The one that caught my attention was the portrait of 135 Pearl Street. The photograph was of the building’s frontage from back in its club days. I thought to myself: My, this is out of date. It’s a Papa John’s now… So I went exploring in Panoramio itself. Ultimately I was a bit disappointed; Panoramio’s entire focus is on geotagging so it doesn’t have nearly the same level of social elements as Flickr. Just the same, I uploaded a bunch of pictures on a whim, to see if they would get picked up as Google Earth features. Much to my surprise, 13 of those photos made the for today’s update:

1. Shelburne Pond (Panoramio & Flickr)
2. Mt. Philo Panoramic (Panoramio & Flickr)
3. Fletcher Free Library (Panoramio & Flickr)
4. Rock of Ages Quarry (Panoramio & Flickr)
5. Bove’s with Icicle (Panoramio & Flickr)
6. Vermont Pub & Brewery (Panoramio & Flickr)
7. Bennington Potters North (Panoramio & Flickr)
8. Lake Champlain Sunset: 23-Nov-2006 (Panoramio & Flickr)
9. Worcester Branch from Rose Lucia Bridge (Panoramio & Flickr)
10. Green Steeple of St. Paul Street (Panoramio & Flickr)
11. Snake Mountain panoramic (Panoramio & Flickr)
12. Bolton Potholes (Panoramio & Flickr)
13. Bristol Falls panorama (Panoramio & Flickr)

So if you happen to be enjoying some Google Earth action today, scoot over to its virtual Vermont and check some of these out!

Spent about an hour messing around with hugin again tonight. The last couple of panoramics I have stitched together in PhotoStitch have been … disappointing. It mostly has to do with the seams; no matter what I try, there appears to be too much “vignetting” going on at those seams. The tripod has not really helped with that much; nor has cleaning the lens more frequently. I am left with the belief that PhotoStitch is what is doing it to me.

I keep getting tips via Flickr for AutoStitch but the Mac software that incorporates their API¹ is all on a trial basis. And while the Autopano Pro demo gave me some nice (watermarked) results, I just don’t know if I’m ready to drop 99 Euros on that part of my hobby.

So back to hugin…

I gave it a whirl a few months back and didn’t get too far but decided to give it another go after my most recent pano. Faint as the seam may be, they have started to grate on me. Though there is a certain “charm” in the intentional discontinuities of a hand-stitch (and/or the pride of a well-executed hand-stitch), I’ve gotten used to spending a few minutes instead of a few hours putting each of these together.

At any rate, tonight’s experiments did not yield the results I was hoping for. I got the hang of the control points and some of hugin’s other features but the end-results were not much improved. There were still some pretty obvious seams, I thought. Except rather than vertical, blurry grey lines, these were… Well, they were all manner of strange angles. I have not given up on hugin. I intend to try again with a different batch of images, for one. There are also vignetting controls that I am assuming are there for exactly the reasons I have in mind. If only I could figure out what those cryptic fields mean.

1. If that’s the correct term here. Maybe “framework” is more appropriate here?  Whatever.[↩]

When breakfast was over, John recited “To Autumn.”
He recited it slowly, with much feeling, and he articulated the words
lovingly, and his odd accent sounded sweet.
He didn’t offer the story of writing “To Autumn,” I doubt if there
is much of one.

–Galway Kinnell, “Oatmeal”

Sniped from the del.icio.us home page: “Breakfast” is a photo series by Jon Huck.  Pretty damned interesting, too.  While I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s a particularly novel approach or subject matter, it is extremely well-executed.  I’m captivated.

Also: for all the diversity he represents here with respect to the food choices, let’s not kid ourselves.  There’s really only two that matter.  What we want and what we actually get.

Another “big winner” in the A+++ group on Flickr. (Special thanks to A. for finding and posing with the critter.)

• You can’t have everything, where would you put it?

  via destraynor (via DF): follow-up piece to Tantek’s UI essay (the same points but without the math?)

  (tags: essay UI usability design todo)

• waffle → Now in glorious HTML5

  (tags: html essay todo)

• PTGui

  Photo stitching software 360 degree Panorama image software

  (tags: panoramic software photography todo)

• Kekus (Calico Panorama)

  Kekus photo stitching and correction software. Panoramas made easy.

  (tags: panorama photography software todo)