Posts Tagged ‘Photography’

I created a nice little task for myself this week and figured I’d start early. I expect some more changes and updates soon but for the time being I’ve switched to a new theme. It’s basically just the Essence theme created by Jelle Druyts for dasBlog. I’ve modified it quite a bit, swapping the text sides, making the body wider, fixing a minor bug with the columns stacking when in windowed mode, and I popped in a header image. Picking an image was quite hard since there’s only 100px in height to work with, etc. I’ll most likely change it out over time. For those that read in a RSS reader it won’t mean any difference. I just had to do it since I got sick of seeing the same thing when I went to manage the blog here. I also added the GeoURL info to the metadata as well. More changes soon.

Chris and Jake randomly asked if I’d like to review one of the original Lensbabies lenses ages ago. I’m only just now getting around to it. Is it way too late? Possibly, especially since they’ve now released a second and improved version of the lens. Though even taking that into consideration I honestly can’t say that it would change my opinion any. Basically they sent me the lens and I went at it.

After toying with it to figure out the focus and the aperture and such I grabbed a couple shots. I really wasn’t impressed with any of the shots as it really seemed to be too sensitive to movement when it came it getting the specific area I wanted in focus. After taking 5 shots I went to remove the lens and started having major difficulties. Having used non Canon lenses on my 20D before this was a bit unusual. After pressing down on the lens quite a bit more than normal it finally came out. But not without damaging the bracket and pins slightly. Because of this I had to send the camera into Canon for repair which took a week and a half. I received the camera back as good as new but I refused to pop the lens back on.

So in this post we’ve got the one shot I’d actually think that might be worth posting. The end result is interesting but nothing one couldn’t do in Photoshop. Since I’d classify this as a post processing effect I’d say that’s where it should actually be staying. When shooting digital it’s really important that you’re keeping original digital negative, whether that be the untouched JPG or the RAW image. Because this lens is no where near the quality of any one of my Canon lenses it wouldn’t make sense to shoot with it. It would be much better to shoot with the Canon, visualize the concept in my head then apply a Lensbabies like effect to the photo in Photoshop. That alone makes me think that for digital photography the Lensbaby idea isn’t all that great.

Now if I were a film photographer then I’ll admit that this lens would actually be pretty cool. But that’s not how I tested it so I won’t go into that. Now realistically if I hadn’t been jaded by the fact that the lens messed up my camera I probably would’ve used it quite a bit more and probably have gotten much more experience with it to get some decent shots. I’m normally all for cool gizmos like this lens but this is one time where I’d fall back on my Photoshop skills.

So what’s the bottom line? Well, I wouldn’t buy one, nor would I recommend it. Save your money and buy Photoshop and become proficient at using that.

Kerry Skarbakka has some excellent photos in his latest portfolio. “The Struggle to Right Oneself” has some great shots, not sure how many of them are done with Photoshop or if they’re all 100% reality. It’s a shame he’s not posted some tips on his production process. Definitely a cool project though.

After a short down time with Canon Repair, I finally got my 20D back yesterday. Really have missed it which is kind of odd. Think this weekend will be good for some more photography, been craving a nice relaxing weekend doing nothing but that. Annoyingly FedEx had this weird do not release thing going on with the package so I had to shift lunch a bit, get home right at one then get back to 50 by 1:25 so I could catch a meeting at 1:30 which ended up being cancelled. Still didn’t feel like I could eat so I just sat outside a bit to relax and examine the camera a bit to check all the functionality again. Managed to grab some nice shallow DoF photos of some of the random plants around the building before the hour for lunch was up. I think I got lucky once again, they replaced a couple of the parts that I knocked out while cleaning the camera with new ones, cleaned the sensor and the entire camera. Then even replaced the battery grip with a brand new one. Got both in the same package and definitely wasn’t expecting that. Especially when the entire repair only cost me the $4.90 to get it to them in the first place. Am hoping Dom will write that 30 lines of code I need so I can copy over his gallery software and start making it public. Of course then I might actually have to start filtering some of the crap photos I take.

So pretty much since I started hosting my server locally on my home Internet connection I’ve had a trusty Intel CS430 webcam (now CS431 as well) connected to the world. I’ve always used ConquerCam set up as a service and it’s just worked.

For the longest time I honestly lived my entire life 24/7 on the net totally exposed. Hence the reason why the page is called the Naked Truth of… And it’s honestly got nothing to do with the fact that on numerous occasions I forgot it was on after I walked out of the shower naked. Believe me when I say I immediately checked the IIS logs to make sure no one actually grabbed the blackmail worthy JPG’s. It’s also been the topic of many Messenger chat’s as well. One resulted in this little site where Matt Coy just started saving random images and giving them ridiculous captions. And yes most of them I posed for, and all are totally innocent. I really didn’t have any hang ups about just sitting in front of the stupid thing not even bothering to notice the camera on 24/7 even whilst I slept, even while I was sitting around in boxer briefs.

After searching eBay I purchased 4 Intel CS431’s for about $40. I gave one to Sam just because it had a built in mic, and for the rare video chat. I had planned to use the other for my main system for Messenger use if needed. Then I had been dying to do a 3 webcam set up for my website. One would show me. One would show the room. One would show outside my window. Sadly it didn’t quite work because ConquerCam couldn’t recognize the 3 devices separately in the way I use it as a service. So anyway while I’m still working that out I figured I’d post up the most recent idea which is the 24/7 Money Tree cam. Now anytime day or night you too can watch money grow on trees . Enjoy.

UPDATE: Just had another idea… Jon, could you make a quick mod to that webcam app of yours and have it capture my webcam say, every 15 minutes (I think that’s a good amount, but you might have a more logical idea about it). Since it’ll be capturing once every 5 – 30 minutes I’ll grab all those images after, I don’t know, 3 months and then turn it into a fancy little time lapsed WMV . Anyway, bed time now…