NPR had a great little segment on all things considered covering the sale of the Magnum Photo Agency’s archive to MSD Capital (Michael Dell, of Dell Computers, investment firm). The archive is currently on loan to the University of Texas, Austin. Take a listen…
February 17, 2010
February 16, 2010
Polar Seattle
I had some fun making this picture of Seattle’s water front, as seen from West Seattle, thanks to Dirk’s article on Photojojo. It was pretty easy using ICE and Photoshop…
Here’s the steps:
- Take some pictures. For this I used a set of snaps of the downtown Seattle skyline from across the bay in West Seattle.
- Stitch them together to build the panorama. For this I used the Image Composite Editor (ICE) from Microsoft Research
Which resulted in a rather large TIFF file – 24,101 x 2890 pixels. But only because I was being excessive…
- Clean up in Photoshop by cloning the sky and cropping out the water to compensate for the poor job I did aligning successive frames when taking the pictures (note to self, next time use a tripod or find a flat surface to rest the camera on)
- Compensate for the change in cloud cover because if we just wrap the scene difference in cloud density and texture from left to right results in a noticeable join. To compensate I masked out the buildings; grabbed some cloud from the left; flipped and stretch and placed behind the buildings on the right; then used a gradient mask to blend into the original sky.
Here’s the sky at the right end of the panorama before (left) and after (right) the compensation:
- Convert to polar coordinates by
- first resizing to a square image (Image | Resize… ensuring constrain proportions is off)
- flipping vertically
- and then using the Polar filter (Filter | Distort | Polar Coordinates…) to convert to polar coordinates and get the wrapped circular effect
- Tweak using the imaging tool of your choice.
Enjoy.
February 13, 2010
Side-grading and a lesson in open
Manningtree (and crossoak) run on [update: used to run on] blogger, something that’s worked consistently since sometime in 2005. Now, Google, who acquired Blogger, are phasing out support for the mechanism I use to sync from the blogger platform to aiddy.com. For various reasons, I’m not about to jump on the suggested alternative: custom domains so it’s going to be bye bye to blogger and hello to something else.
First Gotcha: Open services are limited
“Openness” is a good thing, some people think so good that “open systems win”. The trouble is that open is a slippery thing, I can’t just grab the blogger code and run it on a server I control because that code is available to me. The code for blogger isn’t “open”. This is one of the problems of the services world – the service can change, or go away, and you have no control. That’s a contrast to the software that runs on my computer where I decide whether the value of upgrading is worth the cost (in $ or time).
This meant that I couldn’t just move the blog without some surgery, the surgery meaning choosing something else to run the blog. I went with WordPress. Nuff said.
Open data to the rescue
Fortunately, although closed at the code level, blogger is open at the data level. You can export to an XML file (formatted as ATOM file) either directly into another blog platform or manually from the blogger dashboard to party on with your own code. Google provide the details.
Using this capability I was all set to move to an alternative way of hosting, without loosing too much (see the third gotcha). The auto import into WordPress failed (I suspect that was because of the way I FTP publish but I couldn’t be bothered to explore further) but someone wrote some code to convert between formats and helpfully hosted it on appengine.
Second Gotcha: Deep Linking
Deep linking is one of those great things that you miss only when it’s gone. Deep linking lets people link to content within a site. Moving from Blogger to Wordpress meant changing the way pages are referenced (actually it doesn’t, although it’s a real PITA to get the two to mesh) which means that although you can easily import posts, existing links to content from external or internal pages break unless you retain the existing structure.
Third Gotcha: Devil in the detail
It’s all the small things that get you. Importing (or not) comments; finding plug-ins to replicate things like recent posts; figuring out why imports failed (process memory limits on the server) and how to work around; getting the custom root configured; tweaking CSS; and having to do it all twice.
Reflection
It all appears to be up and running now, and it’s better than before since I have more control to tweak and customize, except it was good enough before so the “better” isn’t really better. This little episode highlighted some of the good things about ‘openness’ and also some of the limits, and why it’s an idea to beware of open services that aren’t. I’m sure James will remind me of that.
February 11, 2010
February 9, 2010
February 7, 2010
Following #photo in the Twitterverse
Stumbling across interesting things that you wouldn’t have gone looking for can be fun, but time consuming. Recently, in an attempt to cut out the time consuming bit, I’ve had a Seesmic Look session running in the background. Look is an interesting take on Twitter; no need for an account and channels (apparently sponsored in many cases) to help you find stuff without resorting to # and @.
Here’s a snapshot of the Kodak Photography channel in ‘playback’ mode. I think this is how I stumbled on the Daily Shoot…
February 6, 2010
Practice with the Daily Shoot
Practice makes perfect someone once said.
One of the tricks to improving at photography is to practice capturing images that convey something that someone else set the brief for.
The daily shoot does just that. Follow @dailyshoot on twitter; you’ll get a new brief | assignment | challenge each day, take a picture and then post a link.
The humble effort above is for assignment 77, wherever there’s an edge, and is a partial reflection of Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear.
Thank you James and Mike for executing on such a great idea.
February 5, 2010
Sure, of course I can do an album cover
I’m glad it was chucking it down with rain this morning. Instead of the bike or bus I drove and had NPR/KUOW for company. Marcie Sillman interviewed Jini Dellaccio: musician, graphic designer and photographer.
Proof that news doesn’t, nor shouldn’t, be angst-inducing or depressing. Feeling good & inspired and it’s only just gone 7…
Not enough Disk Space
After backing up the catalog, Lightroom helpfully informed me of low space on the C: drive. This is what Explorer thought of the situation:
Or, in command prompt-speak:
Lightroom quirk or Windows quirk?
February 4, 2010
McCullin
The BBC has an audio slideshow with Don McCullin talking about some of the photographs he’s taken. Part of the ‘Shaped by War’ exhibition at the Imperial War Museum. More in the Image Gallery.