Archive for the 'Photography' Category

Rails

3 April 2009

Rolling stock on Bushmaster siding:

Rolling stock on Bushmaster siding

Leaving Leupold tunnel:

Rolling stock leaving Leupold tunnel

Rolling stock leaving Leupold Tunnel

(click for full-sized versions)

Turning negatives into something useful

9 December 2008

I sent off ~150 negatives to ScanCafe Monday; I bought the 35mm negative + pro library option. This should result in 3000 dpi TIFF files + “processed” jpgs for $0.48 per frame; with shipping, the total order was around $80.

At 3000 dpi, 35mm images (36mm*24mm) should end up around 11.5 megapixels.

Sadly, they don’t scan black & white negatives. At least 20 of the negatives I sent are of this type; fortunately, you don’t pay for what they don’t scan. I should have read the fine print more clearly.

I’ll report back when I get results. If I’m happy, I’ll send the rest of my color negatives off. It will be nice to get all of these pictures in a usable form.

When the kids ask where the college fund went…

13 November 2008

well, here you go. You see that? 261 megapixels. 1-25 FPS. You read that right – 261 megapixels. If anyone is looking to kick in, just paypal me. I’d appreciate it.

IV50, bit rot, and Boomershoot

29 October 2008

I have a bunch of videos that I encoded using a great (at the time) codec: the Intel “Indeo” codec. Sadly, I no longer have the source to these compressed videos and the installer and vodec I have for Indeo no longer works; I even tried installing the codec on XP, no dice. Wikipedia led me to Ligos, the current owner of the Indeo vodec. $15 later, I have a version of Indeo 5.2 that works on Vista! I transcoded a bunch of videos from Indeo 5.2 using Windows Movie Maker; these were published on Soapbox and Flickr. I appreciate that the quality of the videos is degraded due to transcoding; I hope you appreciate that staving off bit-rot is a painful task.

You love me! You really love me!

21 October 2008

Capture

I’m a professional!

15 October 2008

I took a bunch of pictures for a video game artist in France, expecting nothing of it. The project was interesting to me (take a bunch of pictures to someone else’s specifications); that was, really, payment enough.

Today this "cookware" (how it was declared on the customs forms) showed up from France. At the current exchange rate, it’s about $115 (115 € with tax and shipping; $155)

I guess I can hang out a shingle now! At an hourly rate of, oh, $4 an hour or so.

I’ll keep my day jorb

The story of Red

15 October 2008

If you’d like to read about the birth of Red One, Wired has a great article on the topic.

New Nikkor 50mm

22 September 2008

Nikon has announced a new 50mm lens; at f1.4, it is plenty fast. Not sure about spending $440 on a prime, but I might.

TinEye results

9 September 2008

Before, I was kinda… meh. I searched for a picture of a soldier, and TinEye came back with two other pictures of the same soldier. Different angles and backgrounds, but it’s the same guy. The image is a subset of a filmstrip of four.

Unfortunately, it doesn’t seem like there is a way to share search results when the source image isn’t online somewhere. Trust me, TinEye is pretty boss.

Image search engine

27 August 2008

TinEye claims to be able to do image searching. I was able to scare up some results of outright copies of images, but pictures of iconic items (AK47, M16, 1950’s Jeeps) turned up 0 hits. Searching for outright copies of some of the images from UltiMAK resulted in some hits, but not many.