12 posts tagged “photography”

Last week Kellan from Flickr published my interview on code.flickr. I'm still somewhat amazed that they chose me to ask, but then I'm also pleased at how much people are liking snaptrip, and I'm happy to see my words in print, as it were.

I actually compiled my answers a couple of weeks before it was posted, hence the reference to groupr as a "lost project". Now, of course, it's back, but I've already posted a couple of times about that. What I would like to do is - finally, and belatedly - document (and update the released version of) my EXIF machine tagger.

Why bother with such a thing? Flickr will extract EXIF metadata, but it won't allow you to do any aggregate queries on it. (Well, that's not quite true; at dConstruct 2007 Tom Coates leaked some URLs which I picked over, but they don't cover all the useful things I'd like. Plus, it's not documented.) By extracting all the data from my photos into machine tags (and a local SQLite database), it becomes possible to point people at all the photos taken at the wide end of my widest lens, or those taken with a particular make of camera (and to do more complex queries locally).

With that out of the way, how do you go about such a thing? Well, as usual, it's actually a fairly simple joining operation. Get a list of photos, and for each of them, get the EXIF data (using flickr.photos.getExif), then store the data locally, and add tags back to Flickr. There's not much munging invovled - I convert spaces in the EXIF field names to underscores, and some things get put in the "file:" or "camera:" namespace, rather than "exif:" - so it's all pretty straightforward. (I do preserve spaces in the EXIF values, though, by quoting my arguments to the addTags method.)

I also add an meta:exif field with either "none" or the epoch seconds of the time of tagging, so that it's easy to exclude previously-tagged images from being examined again. Another minor niggle is that, to add tags, a script has to be authorised. I copied the code chunk from the flickr_upload script in a Perl module, and it seems to work for me.

However, the fact that users need to get an API key, secret, and then a token, is naturally going to limit the audience for such a script. A few other users have metadata in the "exif:" namespace, but it's not exactly common. It's hard to turn the script into a web app, too, since it needs about a second per image to run, and the first run has to examine your entire library, which these days is typically thousands of images. I may still do it, but I haven't bothered for months, so I wouldn't count on it.

Another drawback is that machine tags are normalised at Flickr. This means that when I query on exposure bias, both -1/3EV and +1/3EV show as just "exif:exposure_bias=13ev". I've been thinking about ways around this - by querying raw tags - but it's not straightforward. (Ways around this normalising, and ways of getting all predicates for a namespace, and values for a namespace (at least within a given user's photos), would have made my list for "things you'd like to see in Flickr" if I'd felt able to get away with being so demanding.)

One final observation is that the script's in Perl, and uses XML (which is, apparently, sometimes compressed at Flickr's end; at least, I had to add Compress::Zlib at one point for some reason). If I was to redo it, either in Python or Ruby, the data would all be fetched as JSON, and it'd probably get a few more users. Ah well. Installing the prereqs shouldn't be too hard.

That said, of course the script, as is, proved useful. I run it manually after an upload, while Tom, who is (as ever) a bit more sensible, has his fork running as a cron job. Either way, please download it, play, and feel free to let me know what you think.

I've finally launched a new version of groupr that includes a view that I've wanted for ages: recent photos in your groups. Like this, in fact:

The obvious inspiration for this is Flickr's own recent photos from your contacts page, which, as the name suggests, shows photos that your friends, family and others have posted to the site, in reverse chronological order. It's a great leaping off point if you want to follow other people's work, and I'm sure that without it I wouldn't use Flickr nearly as much.

It's pretty self-evident that a similar page for your groups would be a good idea, then, and it has been much requested over the years. The problem is that building it isn't easy. You have to deal with the API join: to get information on the photos in each group you have to make an API call, so for 140 groups, that's 140 calls, each taking up to a second.

For a while, I thought this was an insurmountable problem for groupr: nobody's going to wait for over two minutes for a page to load. However, this problem also exists on the groups page, and so I solved it the same way: by using client-side calls (AJAX, if you like, although technically I use JSON by preference), cached by the server for later use in generated pages.

Last week I started putting the theory into practice, and the final conceptual leap was in the order I made the group calls. Initially, I queried the groups in alphabetical order, but it occured to me that the more photos were in a group, the more likely it was to have recent updates. Of course, this isn't perfectly reliable, but having made the change, it seems to work; typically, the "recent photos" page fills up with the most recent photos fairly quickly.

(I use a similar technique on the page that lists your groups, and lets you sort them in various ways. The list page needs a little more work, but I expect it's still handy.)

Having finally implemented this, I'm pleased at how easy it was now I've laid the groundwork, and also a bit surprised that nobody's ever done this before. Hopefully the recent view page will prove useful to some of you. Feel free to leave comments here if you're seeing errors or have suggestions on how to improve it.

This year, more than most, the Photokina trade show seemed to produce a lot of interesting news in photography. Most of it filtered down to people outside the industry through sites like Digital Photography Review, who covered the long stream of product announcements from the beginning of August through to the end of the show in late September.

Of course, the big names were there; Canon started with the 50D announcement - which was fairly dull, being an incremental upgrade on the 40D - and finished with the long-awaited 5D Mark II, which brought full HD video to SLRs (a month or so after the other big name, Nikon, launched its D90, also with a movie mode). In between there was the usual string of compact camera announcements, with the most interesting probably being the rather ugly G10.

Personally I've always been fascinated by the market segment the G10 sits in, being somewhere between the SLR and the compact camera. However, the Canon range doesn't really do anything for me any more. Sure, the G10 now goes out to 28mm equivalent, but it's been years since the competition did that. Panasonic, in particular, have always been good at it, and the Leica-badged version of their player there, the DMC-LX3, finally emerged at Photokina. The D-Lux 4 is, somewhat hyperbolically, labelled as the "Son of M8", but it's certainly tempting.

One thing both versions of the camera get right is a commitment to reduce noise. In the press release for the LX3, for example, there's this:

Panasonic also redesigned the peripheral circuits and other components to further minimize noise generation. These enhancements greatly improve imaging performance, boosting both sensitivity and saturation by around 40% compared with ordinary 10-mexapixel compact cameras.

Meanwhile, here's Fuji, whose F30 and F31 still command amazingly good resale prices on the back of their low-light performance:

Fujifilm says its new Super CCD EXR technology will allow its next generation of premium compacts to produce high-ISO images "superior to the F31fd," while also offering improved dynamic range in other shooting conditions. The technology is already fully developed and will be integrated into the first camera in time for a spring 2009 launch.

This is promising news. For a long time, camera manufacturers have been pushing megapixels over quality, with the rare exception - like the aforementioned F30 - still a rarity rather than a market leader. Of course, these are marketing quotes, not from real-world tests, but I'll be keeping a keen eye out for reviews of the cameras as they make it to market.

Panasonic are also involved in another very interesting idea - Micro Four Thirds. This is a new system for interchangable camera lenses, and is apparently "the most significant announcement in the camera market this year" and "an important moment in digital photography's short history". DPReview and Imaging Resource probably do a better job of explaining why than I do, but the summary is that they close the gap between compact and SLR digital cameras by shrinking the latter to the size of the former, whilst still allowing a choice of lenses.

The drawback? By losing the mirror box and pentaprism, these aren't true SLRs: you can't look down the same light path that the sensor will have. However, these days, most compact camera users couldn't care: you can look at a screen on the back and see. not what the sensor will see, but what it is seeing. The G1 - Panasonic's first body in this format - uses an screen that you look at through a SLR-style viewfinder.

However, the camera that seemed to get the most attention - at least if ffffound is anything to go by - is the Olympus prototype, which manages to mount a pancake lens on a so-retro-it-hurts body. Obviously, it's far too early to tell how good the image quality is, but these could well carve out a niche, although I worry they'll find it hard to beat the big players on price. (On the other hand, it won't hurt that as the laggards in the SLR space, behind not only the big two but also Pentax and Sony, Olympus and Panasonic have little to lose.) Certainly I look forward to seeing what the reviews say and how they perform.

It certainly seems to be an interesting time for digital photography, even if it's coming at the expense of film. Now, if only I could carve out the time to actually go out there and start shooting...

I'm a bit late to this (it's a whole week and a half old), but a recent Stephen Fry Dork Talk column covered the Canon/Nikon camera rivalry, and more specifically, the Canon EOS 1000D. I've not really talked about it, but unlike a lot of the earlier commentators, I wanted to wait until it had found a street price, which it has: about £375.

So, what's the 1000D? Well, it's a new category (four digits, as opposed to the three-digit 350/400/450D, or the two-digit 30/40/50, or the single-digit (and expensive) 5D and the various 1Ds) of entry-level SLR. It comes with the same improved 18-55IS kit lens as the 450D (usually) does, and loses a few features compared to the model up (spot metering, for example) while saving about £100 off the price.

I'm sure it'll do very well, since the things that make me happy I've got a 450D (a replacement for a stolen 350D, although I'd have been tempted to upgrade anyway) rather than a 1000D won't occur to many people. (For example, the viewfinder's a lot better on the 450D, but no new SLR purchaser will even notice.) I'd also recommend it over Nikon's entry-level cameras, because it's compatible with all of Canon's EF lenses.

(Technically Nikon's backwards compatibility is better, since they never had the same sharp break for electronic kit as Canon, but the D40, D40x and D60 don't support autofocus on some lenses, and unfortunately the cheap-but-useful 50mm f/1.8 is one of them. Since I recommend this as something you want to buy either with your SLR or within a couple of months, this is a big deal.)

However, beyond the low end I'm increasingly minded to recommend Nikon. They have a much smoother progression in their range, whereas Canon have a vast chasm between the roughly £1000 50D and the well-over-£2000 5DmkII. (I'm assuming the 5D will vanish quickly; possibly not.) On the other side, the D90, D700, D300 and D3 are each much closer to each other in price (although it starts to get a bit rarefied towards the end). I have no idea what Canon's thinking is here, and of course there's more to an SLR system than bodies (there's lenses too), but even so, it's a bit strange.

Still, SLRs are more affordable than ever (especially if you look outside the big-two duopoly: Sony's entry-level Alphas are under £300 now, I believe), and so it's as good a time as ever to consider one.

Reasons I've been told not to take photographs since work moved to the edge of the City of London three weeks ago:

• They were of the back of a police station
• There were children (five to ten metres away, in a nursery just south of Christ Church, which is what I was actually interested in)
• I was standing on the art
• I was on private property

However, in each of these cases, I wasn't asked to delete any photographs (which is, I know, something you can work around, but not if you only have one card). Be grateful for small mercies, I suppose.

What's the best photo you took this year?  Show and tell!

Well, there's a small chance I've taken a really good photo and not bothered to upload it to Flickr, but let's assume not. Given that, it's fairly easy to search for the most interesting photos I've taken this year and have a look through them. Two of them are among my most popular photos ever, and both are from within a mile of each other on London's South Bank; St Paul's and Southwark Bridge from Nando's, and  Maman at sunset, outside the Tate Modern. However, both are also, frankly, London clichés, so I'd resist chosing them even if they are good eye candy.

Two other photos got a bit of attention. My shot of Brick Lane, at the Truman Brewery, was used by my employers for an internal brochure, which is nice, but again it's just a question of good light and good support. I'm more happy about the timing of Smile, which was very lucky indeed. It's also the only of the photos I mention to be taken with a compact, which just goes to show. Anyway, it's not as crisp as the others, but I'm still fond of it, and I hope to be able to take more photos like it as time goes on.

However, although not towards the top of the popularity chart, I think the photograph I'm happiest with this year is this portrait of Matt Biddulph, taken during a dinner at Etech at San Diego. I never did get around to processing many of the shots from the conference, but this one turned out really nicely and I'm glad I did at least get it onto Flickr before the conference was done.

Matt Biddulph

There have been a couple of posts since Apple's press event on Tuesday, which saw the launch of the new .Mac Galleries - an online, read-only version of iPhoto, kind of - that state that "Apple doesn't get the web". Jeremy Keith says

in the fast-moving, messy world of online services I don’t think the genius-led design of Apple can compete with the truckloads of nimble young upstarts making snazzily addictive products on the Web

and Chris Heathcote writes

Whenever Apple strays towards software and the web recently, there’s a lot of flashy interfaces, and little substance.

I think there's a slight qualification to be made here. I think Apple are great at web publishing. Their site is one of the best product sites I've seen (despite the fact I dislike the new bigger-than-800-pixel width). I've been going on about the elegance of URLs - it's possible to guess that there's something at apple.com/keyboard, for example - since 2001 or something, and even when they drop in AJAX their pages still have usable permanent links.

When designing for consumers, Apple takes the same approach. They produce tools for publishing, using a one-to-many, one-direction mode of thinking. As James Duncan Davidson notes as he writes about the .Mac galleries, "It’s not Flickr, and comparing it to Flickr is probably pointless." Well, no. Flickr is the archetypal Web 2.0 application, being almost as much about community as about photographs themselves. The .Mac gallery, on the other hand, is all about putting your work online. There's no comments, no notes, no tags, but the people who it's aimed at don't want that. They're about publishing, not interaction, and while they pages are undoubtedly heavy, and probably scale badly, they're also slick enough that a lot of people will like them.

Similarly, iWeb-generated blogs have no comments, but well-designed templates (from which it's hard to stray.)* Again, it's designed for publishing. The problem for Apple is that it's not 1999 any more. People expect more from their sites now, and thankfully more and more of the sites I use are applications, not brochureware. So perhaps the statement needs to be refined, because despite the JavaScript libraries and slick visuals, Apple doesn't get Web 2.0.

* One point where iWeb fails is that it doesn't preserve Apple's nice URLs; the ones it generates are distinctly ugly. At least, they were in the first version.

Lots of people will offer you - fairly poor - reasons to buy a digital SLR in preference to what Flickr have rather annoyingly called "point and shoot" cameras. (I'd label them "compacts", personally.) Instead, I'm going to offer you five reasons not to buy one- or at least, to consider not buying a cheap one.

They're expensive, or compromised

The Nikon D40 - and the recently announced minor revamp, the D40x - have major compromises, in order to keep the price low. There are far fewer autofocus points than on professional DSLRs that cost more, but also fewer than on compacts that cost less. The EOS 400D has no LCD display on the top of the body. One could argue that's something you don't realise you need until you've seen a better model, but it does make things more finicky. There are also very few SLRs with live displays on the back, and for people who've got used to using digital cameras at arm's length rather than through a viewfinder, that's pretty jarring.

To avoid these problems, you need to be looking at the level of SLRs above the entry level- the D80s and D30s, in other words. These will cost you nearer £800 than £500; for that you could get any compact you wanted, or even both an ultracompact and a more able model.

Compacts perform nearly as well

There are surprisingly few photographs that an SLR is capable of taking that a compact isn't, and, perhaps surprisingly, the converse is true; there are things compacts can do that SLRs can't (especially not the body+kit lens combination that many people end up with).

In the first category, there are some low light shots, long exposures, and the use of narrow depth of field. However, the first of these is increasingly the focus of improvements in compacts; ISO 800 and 1600 are becoming common on them, as is image stablisation. Neither Nikon nor Canon offer in-body IS yet; both make it a feature of the lens instead, and you'll need to spend around £300 on a lens that supports it.

Narrow depth of field remains a differentiator for SLRs, but it's also easy to overdo it when you first get a lens that's capable of it (I certainly did), and as I've noted before, kit lenses aren't significantly better at it than compacts. Wide angle is also becoming common on compact cameras now.

A field where compacts typically outperform SLRs is zoom range. Even ignoring the "superzoom" class - cameras like Canon's PowerShot S3IS and Panasonic's DMC-FZ7 - the average compact has a 4x zoom, whereas the Canon 350D comes with a kit lens that only does 3x zoom (a range of 18-55mm). Obviously, the point of SLRs is that you can swap out lenses, but then you're, once again, looking at a few hundred pounds to replicate a camera that you could have bought for not much more.

The one point where SLRs can claim a true advantage is sensor size: they're much closer to 35mm film than the 1/1.8" sensors commonly found in compacts. On the other hand, people are evidently happy with cameras in phones, even though they're even tinier; if you post to the web, do you care that pixel-peeping will reveal a bit of fuzziness?

Size

SLRs are pretty big and heavy, and that's just with the kit lens. When you start packing a second (or third) lens and a couple of filters, you're suddenly moving around a lot of stuff. Most owners of SLRs pack them for special occasions, but don't carry them around every day. (I'm a bit odd in that I do carry mine, but I got used to carrying a laptop around, and that's even heavier.) Compared to that, a compact that can fit into a pocket - or at least a shoulder bag - is a lot more likely to be on you when you need it.

Extensibility - blessing or curse?

Obviously, one of the biggest selling points of SLRs is that you can replace the lens, and therefore get the ideal camera for every occasion. This is true, but it carries with it drawbacks. As noted above, there's both the expense of multiple lenses, and the annoyance of carrying them around.

Even the camera manufacturers have (finally) acknowleged another drawback of changable lenses: sensor dust. Every time you swap your kit lens and the 50mm prime, you let in dust to the body, and some of this will settle on the sensor. There are cameras with shake mechanisms to remove the dust, and also with software that detects and repairs it on taken photos, but it's still a problem that needs to be worked around. Unlike on compacts.

One final point - shared by a few, but not many, compacts - is that the file sizes of photos taken with SLRs, especially raw files, might be bigger than you're used to. It's not uncommon to produce a gigabyte of photos on a good day out, and when laptop hard drives are still mired around the 150GB mark, that's a big chunk of your space gone, just in one day.

Video

SLRs don't do video, which is increasingly becoming a flaw that people don't want to tolerate. There are good technical reasons for this, but it's still going to be a bit of a shock for people who've come to expect that option on their digital cameras. It's something I've missed, too; there are some things where motion is a part of what you're trying to capture, and while it's possible to do that if you're a great photographer, it's harder than shooting a quick movie.

In Conclusion

Before spending your £500 on an SLR - and remember my previous advice that you should probably be budgeting that amount again to get the most out of it - have a look around at some of the digital compacts. You could save money and be happier, with only a little less.

Ironically, after going to the London Vox meet and saying that I used it because I felt more able to write here than elsewhere - something that's still true, but that I'm also still not able to explain - I seem to have run into the buffers here as well. So this is kind of filler. Sorry about that.

Speaking of the Vox meet, it was good. The bar wasn't the nicest in the world, but there were lots of goodies and plenty of people to talk to. I made a beeline for "the photo table", where the 350D owners seemed to have congregated, but later actually did reasonably well at the "mingling" thing (which is usually a problem for me: at London.pm I always talk to the same people, for example). Eventually I might post photos, but this week's been busy. Thanks to the organisers, and the 6A entourage who made it there.

At least it's nearly the weekend.