photography – Page 11 – frans goes blog

ms raw thumbnailer and viewer

Apple has long been the favourite choice of digital imaging aficionados, but also the Windows world is trying to come along. MS has updated their RAW image viewer, and it is going to be a part of the future OS version. RAW images, described as “digital negatives” portray the image data exactly as it was captured by the sensors of the camera. Since their large file size and tricks of handling and editing, RAW files are not as popular as compressed JPEG files among consumers, but in professional photography they have distinctive benefits. As the screens, disks and memory sizes in computers are getting larger and better, it becomes more attractive to use image formats that do not damage the original data, like compressed file types do. Paul Thurrott’s article on Longhorn RAW image support is a good introduction to the Microsoft plans in this area, and the Win XP RAW image viewer is something we can use currently. But the large sizes are still putting high demands on your system – but updating the hardware is of course what we are expected to do too, all the time…

Winter's flowers

Winter’s flowers
Originally uploaded by Frans Mäyrä.

After the obligatory Christmas flu, and the New Year celebrations, I had a little walk with my camera today. There are precious little sunlight hours in Finland at this time of year, and you need to look carefully to find anything among all that snow. But, on the other hand, the darkness, the white blanket covering everything: they have certain calming and eternal quality. Flickr has few of those pictures, my server (http://unet.fi/pics/2006-01-01/) some more.

greyness and colour in november

Autumn is getting very gloomy here, indeed. We were out today, and at early afternoon in Armonkallio (a nice, old district in Tampere, really), it was as dark and wet as you can see in these pics. Luckily, there was Emma’s second birthday party also, so we got some colour and cake in our life from there. Some of the birthday pics are in here.

autumn pics

The wind is getting cold, sky clear and sun golden. Autumn is coming. Here are some autumn pics from a walk at Pyhäjärvi’s waterfront today.

party boy

In Kaarina’s karonkka party, I met this little guy. Jonatan, I believe. Great party, food, drinks, music and people. 🙂 Many thanks!

Edit: I took some really lo-quality video clips in the karonkka party; and put them here:

http://www.unet.fi/videos/KN_karonkka_clip1a.WMV
http://www.unet.fi/videos/KN_karonkka_clip1b.WMV
http://www.unet.fi/videos/KN_karonkka_clip2a.WMV
http://www.unet.fi/videos/KN_karonkka_clip2b.WMV
http://www.unet.fi/videos/KN_karonkka_clip3a.WMV
http://www.unet.fi/videos/KN_karonkka_clip3b.WMV
(The “a” version is a very small, “b” version a bigger, more hi-quality file.)

more canon

Digital Photography Review has a story of the new Canon EOS 5D, which is a 12.8 megapixel system aimed to photo professionals; see story. I wouldn’t turn it down either, but at €3459, it seems that I am nowhere in the target group for this baby.

arrangements

Rainy. Still eating antibiotics. I used some time this Sunday to update my web pages, put couple of articles (one on horror fiction in Finnish, the gameplay experience paper from DiGRA-05 with Laura, in English) available into my university home page, then updated the links in the photo album page (in Finnish; you can also go directly into my server pics-folder with mostly uncommented stuff).

While going through all those materials, I started thinking whether I should have some “selected few” pictures collection somewhere. So, I went back to my old flickr account, and put a few of my favourites there. Hope you like them, too – and find them this way more easily accessible than in the larger achive folders.

images and reflections

After couple of days, I have got most of the Provencal photos edited, and have some kind of online gallery available, here. I tested Flickr service while setting up this, to see whether that would be better than hosting them on my own server. But I did not realise they had a 20 meg monthly bandwidth limit, and while testing with couple of my high-resolution originals, I blew my entire quota for this month. Oh well, I think I will stick with my own server, even if I am then limited to whatever code I am able to set up and maintain there. Currently, I am tweaking with JAlbum, and trying to find the most informative and best-designed skin among the offerings. (Unfortunately, I do not have time to script and design one of my own liking.) Attached are some of the photos available in this archive:

jagged lines of summer pics

I have been thinking about how to organise the images from the EOS I am going to shoot this summer. The Photoshop Elements 3.0 is doing decent job in keeping an archive, but too often it crashes (there are c. 3700 pics in the archived folders so far, wonder if it is the numbers, or if the programme is just inherently unstable) – but then there is the online reference thing. Currently I am pondering between making the online folders from the Elements, or continue using JAlbum, which prints the techical data nicely, but on the other hand, the scaling-down of hi-rez original produces nastily jagged artifacts into lines, as you can see from this sample of a crow in Midsummer evening.