Actually, I am honored by the fact that Mitch Joel used my image of Avinash Kaushik in his presentation at Gulltaggen in Oslo today.
I use a lot of CC-images myself and I find it very hard to know exactly how to credit people. In the image? At the end of the presentation?
For this image I had burned in a tiny piece of credit at the bottom. And I feel that I don’t ask for much when I share my images with an attribution-share alike license. I even allow for commercial use. The only thing I ask for in return is some kind of credit. And with the burn-in I kind of suggest how I want that credit for this image…
Not a big deal, but Mitch Joel is an extremely smart guy that just did a very good presentation that I really enjoyed.
And if I wanted to discuss CC and how to credit people I found this to be a good oportunity to do so with a clever person… Personally I find credits inside the presentation distracting. Still, I want to give the artists the honor they deserve. How should we solve this?
And who knows, maybe there was some credits in there somewhere?
Update: As I’ve tried to emphasize in the title and the beginning of this article: I’m completely fine with the fact that Mitch has used my image. And he informs me in the comments here that he has an ending slide with credits. That’s fine. And it’s a solution that I often use myself. I just wanted to start a discussion because I’m not completely sure how to solve this myself when I am presenting. What kind of credit do you expect us to put in?
Recently one of my CF-cards suddenly lost all images and movies from my Canon 5D MarkII. When inserting it in the camera it just said “no images” and when inserting it in my computer it displayed huge amounts of strange files with strange names.
But before booting to Windows or buying one of the Mac apps I wanted to try a small free program called PhotoRec (Mac, Win, Linux). By the way also recommended by @willytk.
And it did the trick. People might be scared of the command line, but it was fairly simple to choose the card, select FAT as the file system, choose a location to store the rescued files and start the operation.
One of the images with some corruption.
PhotoRec is currently ticking away. And it seems to find all the files on the card. Both images and movies. Two of the images have some errors on them, but I can live with that. 8 gigs of movies and RAW images rescued…
So now you know. In case you experience something similar.
Thank you for all the good advice. On twitter and here in this blog. This weekend I did the final shoot-out between the 24-70 f2.8L and the 24-105 f4L IS. Because I do quite a bit of video recording with my 5D MkII I settled with the IS-lens.
So now I’m covered with image stabilized L-sharpness from 24 to 200 mm. With the 24-105 and my 70-200. But it’s all at f4 and up. For really low-light work I have my trusted 50 mm f1.4 and when deciding on the not-so-fast 24-105 part of my plan is to add some more primes. Canon have some tempting primes as well. 24mm f1.4 L II and 85mm f1.2L…
But right now I’ll play around with my current range of glass for a while:
50 mm f1.4 USM
15 mm f2.8 fisheye
24-105 f4L IS
70-200 f4L IS
When upgrading to the 5D Mark II some of my EF-S lenses had to follow my old 400D (EF-S won’t work on the full frame 5D). So I need to buy some new lenses to cover my needs. But I can’t decide. This is what I currently own:
Canon 70-200 f4L IS
Canon 50 mm f1.4 USM
Canon 15 mm f2.8 fisheye
And after posting the following question on Twitter:
If you could choose three Canon lenses. Regardless of price. What would you choose?
Here are the results so far:
Seems like the 70-200 f2.8L IS is a favorite. I already have the f4L version of that lens. Mostly because it’s half the weight and half the size of the f2.8L. I like to travel light. And the f4L is razor sharp and very high quality. Here’s a set of favorites shot with that lens. So I’ll keep that one. The next is the fantastic 85 mm 1.2L. Is it worth the weight and the price? Anyone out there owning one?
Still the problem is that I don’t know if I want to go for a zoom or some primes. I need something wide that’s not as extreme as the 15mm. And probably something for portraits that is faster and hopefully smaller than the 70-200 f4L IS. A couple of alternatives:
I’m also considering the legendary 135 mm f2L when I need more speed than the 70-200 f4L can give me. Or how about the very versatile and razor sharp 100mm f2.8 Macro?
What do you think? I need some advice. And at this point I don’t want to spoil the party by talking price. I want advice on the best solution. Your favorites. Regardless of price. Links to reviews. Etc…
Update:
I’m carrying my camera in my bag more or less every day. I shoot lots of stuff in natural and low light. Don’t like using a flash. Currently I use the 50 mm 1.4 a lot because of the combination of speed and light weight.
I just updated the firmware on my new 5D Mark II. The firmware is the operating system in my camera. The software that decides how the menus on the screen should look, what the buttons do, and basically everything about how my camera handles the data from the CMOS that sits in there, collecting light when I snap images.
I didn’t get any extra functionality, but two issues that I never had problems with are now fixed.
Yes, it works fine. But we want more functionality. We want 25p and manual controls for video recording. And in this world of software it is possible for people to make that functionality. For you. For free. Either by hacking the whole camera. Or if you provided an API. Or even better, if you simply published the development tools and software.
Your revenue is based on selling excellent cameras and excellent lenses. And I guess Nikon and your other competitors have hacked and examined your firmware in detail already.
Open your firmware and you’ll see 25p on the 5D MkII before you can say “development kit”. And you’ll see all kinds of stuff that you and your competitors never thought of.
And because I’ve made the links in this article pretty non-explaining I’ll repeat the link to CHDK as well! A very interesting project that already has enhanced the Canon firmware on a couple of cameras.
Tilt-shift miniature faking has been around for a while. But I hadn’t seen Tiltshiftmaker before. And decided to give it a go. It’s a web site where you can upload an image or give it the URL of an image. Then it adds a simple blur effect and adjust the color to make the illusion of a miniature model. Works pretty good.
The miniature:
The original:
Pretty cool.
And by the way. The image is from Ljubljana in Slovenia. Fantastic city.
So far the video has been viewed 1,087,240 times on YouTube. 10,312 ratings and 9,579 comments. On Vimeo it has 314,193 views. It has been aired at ABC in San Francisco and been featured on countless web sites and blogs. I’ll get back to the details about that video later. I’m learning a lot by following how it spreads through the net, what people comment about, how people use it an so on. Tuesday 30th was most busy. Giving 28,350 page views and 20,708 unique visitors to this blog. I cranked my Dreamhost PS up to 4 GB RAM for this period of time and it handled the traffic fine.
Wrapping up 2008 on eirikso.com. 252,828 Absolute Unique Visitors spending 1 minute and 40 seconds in average on my site. Since I started using Statcounter back in 2005 a whopping 2,090,757 people have visited eirikso. And according to Google Analytics this is my most popular articles in 2008 (you find the 2008 page views in parentheses):
So far I’ve made two videos of the images I describe in this article. The one here at the top and another two minutes version. Read on to learn how I did this, to see the other video and to download the videos and images in high quality. And if you want to watch this video here at the top in HD quality you have to click through to Vimeo.
So I started shooting images with my Canon 400D. From the same spot each time, but not through my window. I found a spot outside that gave more or less the same framing each time I placed my camera. So, I went out on our balcony snapping some images at pretty irregular intervals all through 2008 .
All images shot in RAW. The three exposures where: normal, +2 EV and -2 EV.
In addition to the images I decided to record some audio at the same place. Using my Canon S2 IS and my Canon HF10 I recorded simple background sounds trough 2008 as well. Not with exact connections to each image. More with a focus on getting audio from winter, spring, summer and autumn.
All together giving me a pretty decent range of material to put together some experiments.
At the top of this article you find a 40 second version that show one year. Using the 10mm wide angle images. Right above you find a two minute version made from the 55mm zoomed in images.
First I used Photomatix to make HDR images of the ones I decided to use. Mostly because the HDR effect makes the images flat so that the difference in light and shadows won’t disturb the transitions in my video.
Then I used Photoshop to align all the images. Placing the camera manually at the same spot each time won’t give the exact same spot. So I needed some fine adjustment. Photoshop does this. Here’s how:
First load the images you have chosen into layers by using “File->Scripts->Load files into stack“
When you have found all your files make sure to check “Attempt to automatically align…“
Give your computer huge amounts of time and get back when it has finished. Now Photoshop has adjusted all the images and put them on separate layers in one file. The next thing you have to do is to crop the image. Because of the adjustments the images are not the exact same size. A crop will do the trick.
When the computer is done cropping you export the layers to files. “File->Scripts->Export Layers to files“
Now you have a folder with a bunch of images with the same framing. I decided to do simple dissolves between them.
And ended up with a project in Final Cut Express that looked like the image above. I didn’t want one dissolve at a time. I wanted to make some kind of flow where one dissolve is taken over by the new one before it is finished. As you can see from the timeline my dissolves overlap.
The free downloads
First of all: please comment here or contact me if you use the images. I’ll link to all cool projects made from these files!
For commercial use please contact me. Or you can simply buy non exclusive royalty free use by purchasing the full quality file here: OneYear40seconds1920x1080.30p.H264.mp4
It’s $99,- and the money will be spent on hosting for my projects.
For commercial use of the full quality non branded still images you can buy the complete package of high resolution stills here: EiriksoStills.zip
But I know what I’m doing and want the full resolution RAW files to make something really cool!
Please comment here or contact me and I’ll provide you with what you want. RAW files, video footage, more audio from the same spot etc…
Whats’s next?
Eh. Well. I just upgraded my camera to a Canon 5D Mark II. Giving me a possibility of getting even higher quality footage from this nice view of some trees… Guess I’ll snap some images on my balcony through 2009 as well. 🙂
So now you know. That’s the difference between these different lenses on a Canon 5D MkII fullframe camera. And if you don’t like the distortion of the fisheye you can remove it.
eirikso 