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Bad food

eirikso7 Comments

Bad Food

I am pretty experienced when it comes to low priced long distance air travel. It’s a pain. But I have some advice:

1. Always bring one small bottle of high quality chili sauce. Tabasco will do. Does wonders on the tasteless food on board the plane. And some trivia: the heat of chili is measured on the scoville scale. And the Bhut Jolokia was recently certified as the hottest of them all.

2. Invest in some high quality noise canceling headphones. I am using something like this. But there are lots of them.

Image:
Canon EOS400D, Canon EFS 17-55 2.8 @ 55mm
f/7.1, shutter speed 1/400, RAW

Bad food

Canon EOS 400D – experience after one week

eirikso17 Comments

Dsc07484

I have missed a proper SLR since I stopped using my old Nikon F90S back in 2002. All these years I haven’t found anything that would fit my wallet and my needs. But after playing with a colleague’s Canon 20D and a cousin’s Canon 30D I knew that now there’s something out there that is good enough and within reach.

I went to the shop to buy a Canon 30D and came home with a 400D. They are both pretty similar and and also very different. Because other people might have considered some of the same equipment I have decided to post some thoughts here on my blog.

Why on earth buy a cheaper plastic camera when you went into the shop to buy a solid and pretty professional one?

Img 0974
Canon EOS 400D, EF-S 17-55 2.8 IS @ 17mm F10, Shutter: 1/400, ISO100

The answer:
The 400D came out more solid than I initially thought. It is smaller and lighter than the 30D. And it will probably manage the strain I will give it for as long as I am going to keep it.

So why is the 30D twice the price of a 400D? The most important thing is that it is way more solid. And it takes 5 pictures pr. second compared to 3 for the 400D. And it has a maximum shutter of 8000 and ISO of 3200 compared to 4000 and 1600 on the 400D. And, it has spot metering. And probably a lot of other small details. Like the navigation wheel on the back.

If I was buying a camera for pure photography and not for family snapshots as well I would have selected the 30D. But I know that I am going to carry this camera around on holidays and all kinds of places. The difference in size and weight is absolutely an issue. Trust me, I have been traveling for months with my old F90S in my backpack.

As long as the 400D has the same beautiful type of CMOS chip, RAW files and support the same optics as the 30D I don’t think I will be able to take better pictures with a 30D. The fact that the 400D has automatic CMOS dust removal and a slightly better resolution (10MP compared to the 30D 8MP) also influenced my decision.

Img 1296
Canon EOS 400D, EF-S 17-55 2.8 IS @ 17mm F9, Shutter: 4 sec, ISO100

Because I had decided to buy a very serious lens I also was a bit unsure of the combination. Was the 400D too small and too light for the Canon EF-S 17-55 2.8 IS USM that I had decided to buy? It also depends. I would say that the lens would fit the 30D better, but I have absolutely no problems operating this combination. So far I am more than happy with the 400D and the beautiful lens.

Here you can see the 400D with my lens. Compared to my Canon S2 IS. The red line on the 400D is the approximate balancing point with that lens.

Canon 400D Compared To S2 Is.001

And some more images of the Canon 400D with EF-S 17-55 2.8 IS USM
Continue reading “Canon EOS 400D – experience after one week” →

Canon EOS 400D – experience after one week

A new gadget and a promise

eirikso13 Comments

Marius Arnesen Long exposure London

Yes, I have returned from the Future of Web Apps conference. And I will post an article with some impressions.

And I have invested in a new gadget. Let’s see if you can guess what it is. It’s not me in that image, but I shot it. And in theory you find the answer in the exif data of the image.

And the person in the image? No other than Mr. HappyGoLucky himself.

Update:
You find the image that Mr. HappyGoLucky is shooting here.

A new gadget and a promise

Stealing an image of a kid

eirikso26 Comments

Apparently I nearly killed a reader through pure boredom with my last post, so I hope this stuff is slightly more interesting.

A couple of weeks ago my father-in-law calls me wondering if I have started selling pictures of his grandchildren to commercials. He is talking about a picture of his grandson listening to an iPod. Used in an advertisement in a magazine he just received.

I haven’t sold any pictures of my son to commercials, so I was quite interested in this. As you can see from the picture that I have inserted above, my father-in-law had reason to believe that I was selling images to commercials.

The image is available through this article. And available for sale for editorial use over at shutterpoint. I am selling images both for editorial use and for use in commercials. Any images that include family members are only available for editorial use. The people responsible for this ad have not bought any pictures from me. And this particular picture isn’t even available with a license that would allow use in an advertisement.

Here at eirikso.com it is protected by the simple fact that this image is my intellectual property. Eirikso.com is also marked with a Creative Commons license. Giving people freedom to use my work for non-commercial purposes as long as they give me credit and issue the same Creative Commons license on the work that includes mine.

So what do we have here?
Commercial use of my image in an advertisement. And by the way, no image credit. These people have to follow Norwegian law. This use of my image is a violation to paragraph 1 in the norwegian copyright act. It is a screaming obvious theft of intellectual property.

In addition to this, it is a violation to paragraph 45 c. Use of an image where a person is clearly visible. They need permission from the person in the picture.

At this point I have sent a letter to the shop that is responsible for the advertisement. Asking for a full report on where this image have been used. They have simply forwarded this to their lawyer.

I have made it clear in my letter that this is something that is of interest for my readers and that I will publish articles on this matter. I am awaiting an answer and will of course keep you updated on this!

Stealing an image of a kid

Baloons

eirikso5 Comments

Baloons

Thomas Hawk’s digital connection is one of the blogs that have been in my RSS reader for the longest time. He writes about photography and digital media. Between all the excellent writing he puts some articles that simply contain an image. He is an excellent photographer and these images give a nice little break from all the reading I do when I have my head deep down in Google Reader. I think more bloggers should do this. Post a poem, a drawing or a photo…

So, here we go. I can’t compete with Thomas Hawk, but I have more than 30 000 images in my archive and shoot hundreds each month.

The image in this post is from the Gustav Vigeland sculpture park, shot last Sunday. Two girls selling baloons. I like the contrast between the colours and soft shapes of the baloons and the brown trees with no leaves in the background.

Camera: Canon S2 IS
Filters: unsharp mask, a slight increase of saturation and some adjustment of light and focus in the bottom of the image

Baloons

Adobe Photoshop Elements and MCE

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I am using Adobe Photoshop Elements 4 to administrate my images. To make collections, simple editing, tagging and organizing.

I have more than 30 000 images in my collection and Photoshop Elements is one of the programs that actually handle that amount of pictures.

 

The picture module in Windows Media Center is pretty limited. And it does not support automatic rotation based on EXIF info. That is extremely annoying. And, when I have tagged a series of images with “The best pictures from the summer of 2006” I want to be able to run that exact collection as a slide show on my TV.

Now, if you install Photoshop Elements 4 on your MCE box you will get an option in more prorgrams that starts a Photoshop Elements plugin for MCE. It has the pretty slow and boring navigation like online spotlight services and most of the other plugins for MCE, but it lets you browse tags, collections and calendars from Photoshop Elements in MCE on your TV screen.

I must admit that on my 30 000 pictures collection it is quite slow, but as long as I have made the collection in Elements first this is a nice way to look at it on the TV screen.

And, it lets you view PSD-files in MCE and rotates images based on EXIF info…

Adobe Photoshop Elements and MCE

Quick image comparison – Nokia N80 vs N73

eirikso29 Comments

I just did a very quick image quality comparison between the Nokia N80 (left picture) and the Nokia N73 (right picture). Snapped one picture with each camera. Under quite poor conditions. Both are 3 megapixels.

For me it seems like the two biggest differences in addition to the form factor on these two phones are better image quality but no WLAN on the N73.

So what do you want – WLAN or high quality images? As usual, we want both. Good camera and WLAN…

You can download the original pictures here.

Quick image comparison – Nokia N80 vs N73

Sharpcast rocks!

eirikso14 Comments

For the last couple of weeks I have been playing around with Sharpcast. A combination of a software and a web service that let you organize and share your photos.

The screenshot at the top of this article is from the desktop application. This is the shared and web based version of this album.

Sharpcast is in public beta and the team has a lot of work in front of them, but based on my experience with this beta I can say that these guys have a potential winner on their hands.

What is Sharpcast?

  1. An organizing software like iPhoto, Picasa, Photoshop Album and all other photo management software out there
  2. A web service storing all your pictures and letting you organize and share through the net
  3. Clients for mobile devices letting you browse, share and add pictures from your mobile phone

  Sharpcast on my desktop

So what?

We have iPhoto, Picasa and Photoshop Album for image management on our computers. We have Flickr, Webshots and Zooomr for sharing pictures. We have galleries and photo management software included in our phones. What’s so special? Two words: sync and usability.

Currently the Sharpcast desktop client can’t compare with the features of iPhoto and Photoshop Album. The web service can’t compare with Flickr or Zooomr. But the combination of the Sharpcast desktop client and the web service is something new and extremely useful. They’re always in sync. Completely automatic.

It isn’t very often I find software with a potential to make my life with digital media significantly easier. Sharpcast has this potential. You won’t believe me before you have tried it. And, you need a tiny bit of imagination, because this is a beta and some important features is missing.

A quick use case

I download this image management application from the Sharpcast site on my computer at home. I register for a free account at Sharpcast. I add hundreds of images and organize them into albums, giving the images captions, turning images around etc…

The desktop application is fast and extremely easy to use. For hundreds and thousands of pictures a fast and reliable locally installed application is the only way to go. Sharpcast still lacks some important features, but this is a beta.

Then I log on to my account at Sharpcast. All my images with all the captions and album information is already in there.

So for the really cool part. The next day at work I install the Sharpcast application on my laptop. Log on to my account and it starts to sync immediately. A minute later I have all my images with all the captions and album information on my laptop as well.

I add a couple of pictures and a new album on my laptop at work. Back home the same evening all of those images immediately turn up in Sharpcast on my desktop computer.

Okay. Time for the grandmother test. I call my mother and after a while and a tiny bit of help she has the application installed and an account with Sharpcast. Seconds later she is happily browsing a nice slideshow of the pictures I have shared with her. Not a slow generic web based slideshow, but a blazing fast locally cached slideshow only shared with her.

Then, a couple of minutes later the first pictures that she shares with me pop up on my computer… My retired mother needed a couple of minutes to understand the application and start sharing pictures with me. Sorry Flickr and every single Flickr clone out there. You’re not fast and easy enough. Not for that kind of use.

  Sharpcast on my laptop

This is how I manage my images today

  1. I use Adobe Photoshop Album to manage my master image collection on my computers at home
  2. I use SyncBackSE with a bunch of scripts to make backups on a local drive and a remote server
  3. I use Photoshop Elements to edit my images
  4. I use Flickr, Zooomr, Gallery2 and ShutterPoint to share and some times sell my pictures
  5. I use Adobe Photoshop Album to manage a sub set of my pictures on my laptop at work

If Sharpcast turns into the service I want I can eliminate everything but Photoshop Elements from this list. I don’t think Sharpcast will or should compete with Photoshop as an image editing software.

With some small additions to the current version of Sharpcast I will start the transition before Sharpcast is even close to the combined features of, let’s say – the combination of Photoshop Album and Flickr.

Simply because I am already hooked.

I would compare this with the complete revolution of getting a proper personal video recorder like a Tivo. You’ve had the possibility to record and play back television for decades using a VHS recorder. Still, because of usability and convenience the Tivo completely revolutionize your recording habits.

Mobile in sync

Sharpcast also works on the go. At this point Sharpcast only support Windows mobile, but more phones will be supported later. I currently use a Nokia 6630 so I haven’t been able to test the mobile capabilities. However, they promise an application that will let you manage and sync images to your mobile as well. Snap a picture with your cameraphone and it’s on your laptop, desktop and the web as soon as the phone syncs.

The business case

Currently Sharpcast is funded by venture capital from Draper Fisher Jurvetson, Selby Venture Partners and Sigma Partners. The free beta gives you 2 GIG of image storage. They’ll release premium accounts and probably partner with other companies and mobile carriers to build their own income and business.

My main feature requests

I have been in contact with Sharpcast. They listen and have a responsive customer support. This is what I need before I will start using Sharpcast as my primary image management system:

  1. A commercial service giving me 100 GIG of start storage and about 5 GIG of monthly storage. Adding up to an unlimited amount of space. The storage could be provided by a third party.
    Amazon S3     sounds promising. Big, reliable and secure.
  2. Search functions in the desktop client and in the web service. Search based on image name, caption, description and tags.
  3. Timeline view. Regardless of albums it should be possible to bring up a view with the newest pictures on top and all pictures available by scrolling down.
  4. Automatic image rotation based on exif info.
  5. Tagging. Easy tagging of photos and compatibility with the tags from Photoshop Album. When I export pictures from Photoshop Album and import them into Flickr the tags from Album remains. I want this kind of compatibility in Sharpcast.
  6. Tight integration with the most popular image editing softwares. “Open in Photoshop Elements”. Automatic version sets that keep the original and organize edited versions together with the original.
  7. A “mail this image through Gmail”-function.
  8. Export original image from the Sharpcast desktop client (right now the export function in the desktop client only exports a scaled down version of the original image).
  9. “Print this image” from the desktop client. Printing to a photo printer should be done like in Canon Easy Photo Print. The only application I know of that is user friendly enough when it comes to photo printing.
  10. A possibility for viewers to comment and rate pictures in the web albums.
  11. Support for RAW and PSD (photoshop files).
  12. An open API. Both for the web service and for the desktop client. Let people build plugins and filters for the desktop client and new services on top of the web service.

What’s next

Sharpcast has built an amazing sync engine and are planning to build systems that let you sync more than pictures between devices. Think all kinds of digital media, adress books, calenders etc…

Join them

And if you’re a clever programmer please join them. They’re hiring. …just so I’ll get that version of Sharpcast with all my 12 feature requests a bit faster!  🙂

Sharpcast rocks!