Category Archives: Photography

Always carry …. a sound recorder?

QTVR, Sound

A new twist on an old saying.

Which of us has not heard “Always carry a camera”? The exhortation is rarely informed, of course. Any Englishman will tell you that it never rains when you carry an umbrella, and for most, the same applies to cameras. You never see good pictures if you just happen to have one along for the ride. Good pictures are made, not found.

However, just to put a new twist on it, how about “Always carry a sound recorder”?

This past weekend I was with our four year old at a local park and, as is the case with kids, Winston made straight for the play area. This, you must understand, is fenced. Not to keep anyone out but rather to keep all those threats to society, little children, in. And no, this was not in the Bronx or Brixton. The reality, I suspect, is that one of the city councilmen just happened to have a relative in the fencing business and …. well, you know how the rest of it goes.

Well, Winnie was struggling with the latch to the gate so I gave him a hand, only to be met with the most appalling squeaking as the gate opened. Payola for the gate oiling program must have been missed this year, I suppose. But the emotion I felt most was one of excitement. This was a fantastic sound effect! So I whipped out the Edirol sound recorder (from its newly acquired 99 cent canvas case found at Target – Roland being too cheap to supply one) and had at it with the gate, much to Win’s amusement. We whanged the gate back and forth a few times and had a jolly old time doing it, I must say. Creepy! Adults like funky sounds too!

I had already added wind howl sounds to the Piedras Blancas motel QTVR picture but this project just called out for a creaky gate sound to complete the feeling of desolation. It was a moment’s work in Audacity to superimpose the squeaky gate on the wind howl and then to parcel the whole thing up in CubicConnector.

Here’s how the sound tracks look in Audacity – the wind howl is at the top. Subequently I copied and pasted the squeaky gate to match the length of the wind howl then told CubicConnector to loop the whole thing:

Now I’m not about to lug the Canon 5D/KingPano head/Linhof tripod with me wherever I go, in the search of new panoramas. But the Edirol may just make the trip.

* * * * *

A few words about this old motel. It has been on Highway One, close to Hearst Castle for as long as I remember. Back when I first saw it on my inaugural drive up the most beautiful road in California – that would have been 1979 or so – it was replete with gas pumps and was a hive of activity. A half decent restaurant and those same jolly white and electric blue colors. Then over the years it began to fail. Nothing wrong with the location, just lousy management and marketing. Finally, last year, the State of California bought it for an obscene amount of taxpayers’ money and promised to convert it to an educational institution, whatever that means. After all, this is the state that made America’s best public schooling system into the worst in a short twenty years, so it’s not as if they can claim to know anything about the subject.

A year later what you see is what is in my picture. A couple of old paint buckets sit outside the deserted main entrance. Weeds grow everywhere. The gas pumps are long gone and a couple of abandoned cars soil the parking lot. It’s an incredibly sad scene. Desuetude and detritus in this otherwise pristine area, with a brown State of California sign ‘Closed for Restoration’ tacked by the doorway. That’s a sign that needs to be posted on the Capitol in Sacramento.

The best $140 you will ever spend

Photography

Lacie’s 250gB Porsche hard drive.

It’s fifty years since IBM shipped the first computer hard disk drive. Its platters were some 24″ in diameter and it weighed one ton, requiring delivery by fork lift. There were 24 disks in the pack and you can see them here:

It stored 4.4 megabytes. Suffice it to say that only fat bankers could afford them for an annual lease payment of $35,000, or $400,000 in today’s money.

When asked why they didn’t increase the capacity for another three years, IBM responded that Marketing had concluded that there was no way they could sell something larger, as no one would ever need it….

Today that drive woud not store one photograph taken on a Canon 5D digital camera. My iPod stores almost fourteen thousand times as much data.

You can buy Lacie’s 250gB desktop hard drive for $140 from Lacie. Products from other reputable manufacturer’s abound – I mention Lacie because it works for me, comes in fast Firewire for use with Macs and is almost bearable to look at. You don’t need a fork lift to install it. And you will sleep well at night knowing everything is backed up. If Apple’s contention that only 4% of users back-up daily is correct, chances are you are one of those who does not. And with all photographs being digital nowadays (even film users have to scan their originals for printing or back-up) those originals are simply too precious to lose.

And don’t wait for Apple’s latest operating system, Leopard, with its built in back-up functions, to ship next spring. Buy good back-up software like SuperDuper! now. Want to bet that you will not crash over the next two quarters? There are other products but Lacie’s Silverkeeper (now ‘1-Click’) has never worked for me and my copy of Dantz’s Retrospect not only failed all the time (and Dantz could not/would not help), the software was written by someone with a grasp of English comparable to that enjoyed by the Hispanic laborers who pick the grapes every year in my vineyard.

Storage is cheap. Good pictures are not.

Digital tampering

Photography

Science in the service of truth.

I wrote recently of the need to Be sceptical in the face of a dishonest press corps with questionable ethics, illustrating the piece with the crudely altered pictures taken by a schmuck with a political agenda working for Reuters.

Well, someone has decided to apply science to the process of uncovering digital fakes, and more can be found in this excellent web site. That someone is a member of the Dartmouth faculty (though I recognize that’s no guarantee of integrity) named Hany Farid and he is to be commended for his work. It’s instructive to realize that the many illustrations on his site of tampered ‘news’ pictures are from across the political spectrum and academia. No party or ideology, it seems, is above blame ot guilt. Anyway, Dr. Farid sounds like the real thing – check out his research papers to get an idea of how he goes about the discovery process. Here’s someone applying a forensic approach to photographic crime, which seems entirely appropriate.

Some digital camera makers are now beginning to offer ‘original digital signatures’ as part of the information stored with digital images. Sounds like these should become required equipment for the staffs of major magazines.

True, cheating is as old as the world – Farid’s examples amusingly include Lincoln’s head on another politician’s body (as if Lincoln needed any help!) – but it’s nice to read that someone is trying to institutionalize the process of discovery using mathematical techniques. Nor does he restrict his work to still pictures, for he addresses video fakes (no, not newscasters, but that’s pretty close – that’s a subset that should see elimination of humans, replaced with inexpensive cyborgs, with no loss to viewers and considerable financial savings to the networks) in one of his papers.

Enhanced QTVR interactive features

QTVR

CubicConnector does the trick.

That rather intimidating title is nothing more than the addition of ‘click here’ functionality to a QTVR movie/panorama.

This is best illustrated by the enhanced version of the 360 degree panorama of my home theater which has graced these pages before.

Once the QuickTime image loads – click below – cursor over any of the pictures on the walls and the cursor will change to a finger pointing to a globe. Click and you will be take to a high quality image of the picture. Click the ‘back’ button on your browser to return to the panorama.

Click here

This is done using CubicConnector which allows ‘hotspots’ to be defined in a panorama. Each hotspot can then be connected to an image – not good as the file size swells and the image is distorted – or to the URL of an image on your web site. I used the latter approach as it maintains the relatively small size of the QTVR movie and gives you complete control over the size and quality of the image displayed in response to the mouse click. The CubicConnector software is so well designed that the process is intuitive and the whole thing – including learning time – took me one hour to do, which involved creation of fifteen hotspots, one for each hanging picture.

Click on the arrow at the lower left of the QuickTime screen and you can toggle hotspots on or off so that you can see where they are:

You can still zoom in or out in the QuickTime panorama using the Shift and Control keys on your keyboard. The panorama was made using HDR techniques; the photographs on the walls are all straight prints as I had no idea what HDR was when I took them!

In addition to a hotspot for every picture on the walls, try clicking on the snuggle ball to the lower right of the projection screen. The owner was away when this was taken. And, yes, the box he is sitting on contained none other than the Canon 5D used to take the pictures for the panorama, but not one of those on the walls.

Canon 5D sensor dust revisited

Canon 5D

Not an unknown issue.

Mention of the dust removal system in the new Canon 400D prompts this column.

I pointed out how easily the guileless are fooled by horribly overpriced sensor cleaning solutions here.

I have since added another very effective tool to my sensor cleaning arsenal, on top of that little $5 brush. It is made by Hakuba, the ‘Lens Pen Pro’, and sells for all of $10, coming with both a retractable brush and less pliable spongy end when the going gets tough. It has far better reach than the film brush. In fairness, I have had few sensor dust problems with the 5D, but then again I live in a part of the USA where prevailing humidity levels are average; I cannot help wondering whether those in dry, static bearing, climates are more affected?

Well, the other day some of my pictures were plagued by a couple of spots on the sensor, requiring retouching in Aperture. Now I really don’t want to do this for a living, so I attacked the sensor – or more correctly the protective cover glass – with the brush end of the Lens Pal Pro, but to no avail. Whatever was there was well and truly stuck:


Dust spots on the sensor – greatly enlarged

So, screwing up my courage – the alternative is sending the camera to Canon at great expense and interminable delay – I had at it carefully with the ‘hard’ spongy end of the Hakuba, with the following result – the spot is almost gone and certainly good enough for me – the image would be 30″ x 40″ if printed:


Dust spots after using the ‘hard’ end of the Hakuba

I prefer this approach to using lens cleaning solution as my experience shows that even with Kodak Lens Cleaner, it’s quite hard to get drying stains off the cleaned surface, and the sensor is not that easily reached.

My first Hakuba Lens Pal Pro no longer wants to click the brush into the open position, so while it remains usable, I have another on order. At $10 it’s hard to complain.