I usually don’t write much about gadgets such as the Ipad, but this feature I just discovered is too cool.If you have a Mac there is an app which allows you to to share your screen on the ipad. Check it out for yourself.
Archive for the ‘Geek Talk’ Category
Use your Ipad as extended display
Tuesday, June 29th, 2010In-camera sRGB or Adobe RGB?
Friday, April 9th, 2010
I noticed something interesting the other day and wanted to share it with all of you.
Many of the modern SLR’s give you the choice of shooting in-camera sRGB or Adobe RGB – which one would I use?
Well it depends if you shoot raw or jpeg.
If you shoot jpeg only (god forbid 
), I highly recommend you set your camera to Adobe RGB. Its color space is a lot larger compared to sRGB (image to the left) and you can always convert your image back to sRGB later (e.g. when you want to post it on the net). So why not get the most out of your pixels?
Which brings me to the second point:
Why shoot jpeg at all? I know it’s an old discussion and I won’t go into the merits of shooting raw, however since you are reading this, you are obviously interested in retaining the largest amount of image information your camera can handle. So rather than simply shooting jpeg in Adobe RGB color space, you may as well shoot RAW.
Now here is where it gets interesting for the RAW shooters: I bet some of you were wondering whether to set the camera to sRGB or Adobe RGB?
If your answer is: It does not matter, shooting RAW format allows me to change the color space after the fact (i.e. in your raw processor) anyway. My answer is: Not exactly.
There is one merit to setting your camera to one of the two color spaces and it is the one that you would have suspected least: sRGB.
Here is the reason: Our cameras have a neat little feature called highlight warning. I prefer calling it blinkies (coined by Moose Peterson). It shows you on your display when and where a channel has blown out.
When you set your camera to sRGB color space those highlight warnings will be more sensitive to the blown out colorful highlights.
So since it does not make a difference in post, which color space you set in-camera (when shooting RAW), next time you play around with your camera, set it to sRGB and take a look at those blinkies. Amazing hey?
Painting with light at its best
Thursday, March 11th, 2010It was about time I got around to processing the following shot. It’s been in my database for several months and on my mind for just as long, so one quiet evening I got to work. Layer-blending 13 different exposures takes time. Esp. when you only use little details from every image.
The whole shoot took about 2 hours, just to take one single image. It’s not like taking pictures on mobile phones where you can do it over and over again. If you don’t like the composition, that’s too bad because there is only one chance. Once you have decided on a location, angle, lens,… there is no changing. No going back. It’s what it is.
Every lighting technique you see in this image has been captured in a separate exposure with the help of either Brent or Gavin.
The image is called ghost. The ghost (being me) to the right of the image – trapped in some psychedelic prison made of light.
Hope you like it!
Sync your Photos with ChronoSync
Sunday, February 28th, 2010I am using a lot of hard drives. Lots of Terra Bytes. Usually when I upload my images from my camera to the Macbook, I back them up at the same time to two additional hard drives. Those drives are two 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives 500 GB Mercury on-the-go drives with FireWire 800 connections. They are lightning fast and can be daisy-chained so you really only need one FW 800 plug at your computer. It is really amazing and the transfer speed of FW800 makes USB 2.0 look very bad. I am really looking forward to the new USB 3.0 to be released. It is supposed to be 10x as fast as USB 2.0 (in theory).
But I digress… what I wanted to tell you about is how I keep track of all those files on several hard drives. It sometimes happens that I forget to backup my photos automatically when I upload them, or I only have one of the two additional hard drives handy. Also due to disk space issues, I only temporarily upload those photos to my main hard drive inside the Macbook Pro. Shooting RAW, you will notice sooner or later that your drive is full of photos, so that’s when I sync all my hard drives to make sure I do not miss any photo, then delete them from my main hard drive as well as from the two Mercury’s. I do this every time those 500 GB have filled up. I then sync them with my two 1 TB drives for permanent storage.
When I go on holidays I also take one of those 1TB drives containing all my photos off site and give it to a person I trust.
Ok this was the short story of my backup plan. Without syncing, you can quickly lose control over all your photos on all those drives. This is where Chronosync comes in. It simply checks two folders against each other and copies left to right, right to left, or both ways.
After several days of research and testing multiple syncing software products, this is the most sophisticated one that I found. After all it is an important task and you would not want to lose any photos, which may happen all too quickly without a good piece of software. It also allows you to analyze the folders and files before giving the go.
Make sure you have a sound system figured out for yourself. This is the one I use and I am very happy with it. Simply using the finder and keeping on top of all those files and folders on multiple hard drives is an almost impossible feat and prone to errors which may result in accidentally deleting photos, you had not yet archived.
Don’t let disaster hit you – use software like ChronoSync and always have at least 2 copies of every photo that you take.
New tool: Fluidr
Wednesday, February 10th, 2010If you are anything like me and you can not fall asleep occasionally, what I do is turn on the laptop and browse the flickr galleries of my friends, always looking to push my photography and get some inspiration.
However everyone who uses flickr knows, that it can be quite a bright expierence – the white background is not particularly contributing to viewing images well. Especially at night when you are half asleep.
Here is the solution: www.fluidr.com turns flickr’s lights off.
It is a lot of fun to browse flickr via fluidr. It’s free and easy to use. Just let it allow to access your flickr account by loggin in and you’re set.
Give it a try, you may just like it even more than the original flickr
If you click on the link below you will jump straight to my photostream on fluidr.
