A great utility program to gauge your picture size.

Free Ruler is just that. A small OS X application that shows a ruler on your screen which can display inches, centimetres, pixels or picas.

Here’s a screen shot in Photoshop S2 with FreeRuler set to show inches:

The ruler can be dragged around with the mouse and either vertical or horizontal rules can be stretched as required or hidden if you prefer.

A quick calculation, for example, in regard to this picture, which Photoshop reports at 21.02% of actual pxel size discloses that an actual pixel print would be 29.7″ x 58.8″ – the 9:16 format of the Panasonic LX1 used to make it.

You can have regular or widescreen flavors.

It’s no great secret that I am very excited after my early experiences with the Canon full frame fisheye lens and ImageAlign software. I discipline myself to think ‘hyper wide’ by venturing out with just the 5D and the fisheye. It’s not a rational step from 24mm to 12mm but rather a completely different way of thinking.

As I have been experimenting with that wonderfully sharp and flare free Canon lens, I have been learning how best to place the subject in the frame so as not to lose things once ImageAlign ‘de-fishing’ is applied. I rarely leave the image with its original fisheye look as it’s a gimmick which gets tiresome quickly. The fisheye + ImageAlign results in a lens with an effective focal length of some 12mm on the full frame 5D.

On a few occasions I have been frustrated with losing corner details using ImageAlign’s adjuster which retains the original aspect ratio of the image when removing the lozenges disclosed at the top and bottom of the frame once ImageAlign is used. Phew! That’s a mouthful. To make things clear, here’s an original fisheye image from my beach series:

Wet suits, Cayucos Beach. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm fisheye, ‘de-fished’ with ImageAlign.

I was just inches from the wet suits when taking this! Someone saw me taking the picture and, judging from their reaction, must have concluded that I was some sort of rubber fetishist, as a regular camera would have captured just part of one of the suits. What we do in the cause of photographs….

Now apply the ImageAlign slider to remove the white spaces (in this example I also had to apply 3.5 degrees of rotation to get the sea level, hence the strange shape of the white sections) and this is what you get:

Wet suits, Cayucos Beach. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm fisheye, white spaces removed.

The image remains in 3:2 format, like that of the 5D’s sensor. But lots of edge details have been lost.

So rather than use ImageAlign’s correction, I took the first image and cut out a rectangle to get rid of the white spaces, but preserving the full width of the image:

Wet suits, Cayucos Beach. Canon EOS 5D, 15mm fisheye, cropped in Aperture.

Quite a difference. And guess what? The proportions are roughly 1.79:1. Now widescreen is 16:9 or 1.78:1 (what you can get with the Panasonic Lumix LX1’s sensor) so you end up with a widescreen de-fished image which preserves far more edge detail – ‘wideness’ if you like – than the constant image ratio version from ImageAlign. Plus that wide look really goes well with beach and sea scenes! If you print to, say, 24″ wide, the image height will be 13.4″. Oh! and your 12mm ‘rectilinear’ fisheye just became a 10mm full frame wide angle lens.

Now retro-tech can make your work look like Sarah Moon’s.

First I should explain that ‘filmie’ is a new noun used to describe those poor boobs who mourn the passing of film. They rue the passing of a tired technology, messy chemicals and a medieval production cycle. So if you are a filmie, read on. Indeed, I might be mistaken for one of those twits with all those recent ramblings about Kodachrome.

Back in the Sixties, French photographer Sarah Moon discovered Ansco’s GAF500 color film. Nominally rated at 500 ASA – it was actually a bit slower but the marketers got to it first – it made over-exposed and over-developed TriX look fine grained by comparison. The film was very low contrast so everything looked sort of …. filmy, if you get my drift. Had it been around in Georges Seurat’s day he would have put down his paint brush, shaken off incipient carpal tunnel, and used a camera instead.

Seurat does GAF500. Or was it the other way around?

Sarah Moon does Seurat

Moon was working for Pirelli doing their calendar when she took the above; someone at Pirelli decided mechanics preferred their women blurred and grainy so they retained her to do the photography. I confess I have yet to meet such a mechanic, but maybe they are all French?

GAF500 has been unavailable for decades and the original slides made with it will long since have faded. I took a roll to Paris once and confirmed what Georges and Sarah knew. It was a great film.

Pindelski does Seurat. Eiffel Tower, Leica M3, 35mm Summaron, GAF500

Well, I’m obviously not the only filmie around as a company named Alien Skin (What? Hard to think up a less appealing name) has come up with a product named Exposure which, they say, will allow your digital pictures to look as if they were taken on GAF500. Or Kodachrome. Or lots of other emulsions. Now at $100 I’m not rushing out to buy it, but it’s nice to know that if I ever get another GAF500 urge I can indulge in grain excess using this product. The demo is fully functional for thirty days, by the way.

Pindelski does Moon. Pentax 6×7, Kodachrome, Alien Skin’s GAF500 conversion

And here’s a babe in monochrome:

Pindelski does Bailey. Alien Skin’s TriX conversion

I actually think I like the ‘Cross Processed Agfa Optima’ version:

Pindelski does drugs. Alien Skin’s Agfa Optima conversion

Finally, the glamor lighting version.

Alien Skin’s glamor lighting conversion

Fair’s fair. The AS people (oh! dear) do that one really well.

A great HDR application.

I took the plunge and bought the whole megilla, meaning the OS X Photomatix bundle, which removed the watermarking from the stand alone application and also provided a Photoshop CS2 tone mapping plug-in. Not cheap at $95.65, but a bargain for a new way of seeing. The only snag is that you must use CS2. Earlier versions will not work.

The beauty of this plug-in is that it provides a one step HDR experience. No multiple pictures. No tripod. Just take a RAW file converted in ACR, run the plug-in from the filter menu, and you are done.

Here are ‘before and after’ pictures of much the same scene shown in yesterday’s journal entry:

     

As you can see, the extreme dynamic range in this test snap is not converted as well with this one shot approach – take a look at the five shot version yesterday – but it’s not half bad and a lot less work. A nice tool to have.