20 December 2008

A couple of weeks ago I went out and bought a Canon 40D to replace my beloved 350D (also known as the “Digital Rebel XT” or “Kiss n Digital”, depending on where you live). I’d grown slightly tired of the 350D’s cross-shaped autofocus points that rarely matched my desired focus position, especially when shooting the kid indoors at wide apertures such as f/2.2 and larger. Using the 350D, I often had to focus and recompose which almost as often led to out-of-focus images. And so, after more than three years of concubinage with the 350D, I switched to the 40D and its diamond-shaped autofocus points.

The first thing I noticed with the 40D is that it’s focusing way faster than the 350D. With the Sigma 30mm lens mounted, it focuses almost instantly on any of its focus points. The 350D with the same lens could take a few noticeable tens of seconds to get the focus right, which sometimes meant that I missed the blissful smile on my son’s face. As far as I understand, the 40D is fast thanks to its cross-type autofocus points that the 350D does not provide but for its center autofocus point. Or so I’ve heard.

While we’re talking autofocus points: to select a single of these points on the 350D you press the AF point selection button while turning the main dial until the desired point is highlighted. Far from insurmountable for sure, but sometimes this operation took long enough for me to miss another blissful smile. The 40D works the same way by default yet you can configure it to use its multi-controller button to select an autofocus point directly. In this mode one single push on the multi-controller selects either the center autofocus point or one of the eight outer points of the diamond shape. This, to me, might be the most useful feature of the 40D.

The second most useful feature, then, would be the custom settings that you can record through the menus and recall using one of the three ‘C’ positions on the exposure mode dial. As of now I’ve configured the ‘C1′ position as follows: aperture priority; f/2.0; ISO 1600; exposure compensation +1/3 EV; continuous shooting. These are indeed the base settings I use for 99.9% of my indoor shots and it’s very useful to be able to recall them by simply turning the mode dial.

Also perceptible are the bigger viewfinder (the 40D has a pentaprism viewfinder whereas the 350D has a pentamirror one, whatever it means) and the seemingly better image quality, especially in the highlights. And at 740g the 40D is obviously heavier than the 350D (520g), but it also provides a firmer grip that’s not without its merits.

Now it’s time for me to go chasing the next blissful smile.

14 December 2008

Clong is my first iPhone application. It’s a simple game with absolutely no goal at all. No levels, no high score, no nothing.

Get Clong on the App Store »

More info on Clong »

29 October 2008

Matt Stuart:

“I can’t hide behind lights and technology, I am reliant on a small Leica camera, patience and lots of optimism. But what I get in return is the chance to make an honest picture which people know immediately is a genuine moment and which hopefully burrows deep into their memories.”

(Via Écrans.fr.)

10 October 2008

Every time I need to pick the best photos from a large set, which happens quite often considering I’m the father of a 7-month old toddler, I thank the creators of Lightroom for the N key.

Once basic adjustments — such as white balance and exposure — have been applied, I go to the Library module (G), flag all the photos (Cmd/Ctrl-A then P), activate the ‘Flagged’ filter to show flagged photos only, then hide all panels (Tab).

Next the fun begins. I select a small group of similar photos, usually 3 to 5, then press N to enter the Survey view where I can compare the selected photos. When I spot one that isn’t up to par, I activate it (either by clicking on it or by navigating to it with the direction keys) then press U to unflag it. This has the immediate effect of making the unwanted photo disappear thanks to the active ‘Flagged’ filter. Once all unwanted photos have been discarded from the group, I go back to the Grid view (G), select another small group of photos and start the process again by pressing N.

After a few iterations the photos that are still flagged are my real picks, which I can then email to friends and family, send to be printed, or share on Flickr and Urban Zebra.

All of this thanks to the N key.

7 May 2008

Mike Johnston from The Online Photographer does not like color:

More often than not, color ruins pictures. And here’s why: photographers are color junkies. Give the average Herman or Gertrude a color camera, and all judgment flies out the window. Suddenly, all kinds of things previously recognizable as not being a picture become flat-out irresistible. Why? Why, just because it’s a color.

I would say that I have a tendency to prefer monochrome versions of my photos. That’s where I think Mike is right: it’s more difficult to make a great color photo than a black and white one.

(Interestingly, like some commenters, I happen to like the color version more than the black and white version of the first photo he shows to make his point.)

30 April 2008

A new gallery of photos of the Chinese New Year celebrations in Paris last February has just been added:

3 April 2008

The first public beta of Lightroom 2 is available for download from the Adobe Labs. Support for localized corrections seems like a great new feature. Not for production use, though:

While data loss is not expected, this is a very early ‘beta’ quality build and you should always work on duplicates of files that are securely backed up.
[...]
Develop settings applied in Lightroom 2.0 beta are not guaranteed to transfer correctly to the final version of 2.0. This is particularly true for localized corrections.

27 March 2008

Send By Mail is a Lightroom plug-in that allows you to automatically create new messages in Apple Mail including photos from your Lightroom catalog as attachments.

Send By Mail is free and available under the BSD license.

Download Send By Mail 1.0 »

Send By Mail 1.0 requires Lightroom 1.3 or later, Mac OS X 10.4 or later, and the Apple Mail application. It won’t work on Windows.

How It Works

Once installed, Send By Mail allows you to directly export your photos in a new e-mail from the “File” menu in Lightroom:

Send By Mail also allows to configure the photos in the export interface before exporting them in a new e-mail. The plug-in comes with presets for the usual photo sizes:

Once the photos have been exported, a new e-mail is created in Apple Mail with the photos attached. All you have to do then is to send the e-mail:

Download Send By Mail 1.0 »

30 November 2007

The upgrade to Lightroom 1.0 went smoothly. The thirty gigabytes of photos neatly imported and managed by Lightroom since its first beta release in January 2006 were still present in my library after the upgrade, and the shoots structure of the beta releases, replaced with folders in version 1.0, had been saved as a new collection.

Everything looked fine, yet something was wrong.

While browsing the new folder organization, I realized that the TIFF files created by Lightroom from the original RAW files were always listed at the end of the grid view when sorted by Capture Time. Investigating further, it appeared that the Date Time metadata field of these TIFF files was set to the modification date of the file and not to the date the photo was shot:

date_time_1_en.png

I then opened the Edit Capture Time dialog box for one of these TIFF files by clicking on its Date Time value in the Metadata panel. This showed the same correct value for both the Original Time and Corrected Time fields. Strange. I then shifted the Corrected Time field by one second and dismissed the dialog box by clicking its Change button. After that, the Metadata panel for the TIFF file showed the shifted time for the Date Time Original field, yet the Date Time field was still set to the modification date of the file:

date_time_2_en.png

OK. Don’t panic. After shifting the Corrected Time of the photo back to its original value, I launched a Google search: surely I wasn’t the only one encountering this issue.

Indeed I wasn’t, according to this thread on the Adobe Lightroom forums. The posters in this thread suggested a few solutions to get the sort order back to normal. Someone auto-stacked his photos by capture time then unstacked them, and this seems to have been enough to fix the sort order. Unfortunately this didn’t work for me.

Someone else assigned a color label to his incorrectly sorted images then set the sort order to File Name; after that he reverted to the Capture Time sort order, and luckily for him this fixed the problem. I tried his solution on my library, but unluckily for me this didn’t change anything.

At the end of the day, none of the proposed solutions worked on my Lightroom library. Whatever the cure, the edited TIFF files always had their Date Time field set to their modification date, pushing them at the far end of the grid view.

Until Lightroom 1.1 is out with a proper fix, I’ll sort my photos according to their file name. The resulting order is correct given that, since I’ve been using it, Lightroom has been configured so that imported images are renamed using their capture time, in the form year-month-day, followed by a sequence number.

Lucky me.

30 November 2007

I originally found this technique at Luminous Landscape. It gives better results than the unsharp mask and its effect can be removed from the picture at any time.

Proceed as follows:

  1. In the Layer palette select the layer to be sharpened (most probably the background layer).

  2. Duplicate this layer (Layer > Duplicate Layer).

  3. Give a name to the new layer, e.g. High Pass.

  4. Ensure that the new layer is selected in the Layer palette, then apply the High Pass filter (Filter > Other > High Pass).

  5. Set the filter radius to 10 then click OK.

  6. Select Hard Light in the blend mode drop-down menu (the one in the top-left of the Layer palette).

  7. Play with the Opacity slider until you’re pleased with the result.

The following two pictures show the effect of high-pass sharpening with a radius of 10 and layer opacity set to 50%:

Sharpening (Original)
Original picture
Sharpening (High Pass)
High Pass sharpening

To disable the sharpening effect, simply click the eye on the left of the layer in the Layer palette. To remove it permanently, delete the layer.

Some references: