A bit of coding makes for a better experience.

Apple buries it on their web site, but there’s a lot you can do to enhance the Quicktime experience by adding a few parameters to the HTML code which runs the Quicktime movie. Apple calls this ’embedding tag attributes’ – which sounds pretty offputting.

Click below and, once you are done, click the back arrow to return here.

I have used six Quicktime parameters to enhance the viewing experience. The code looks as follows – I have numbered the lines to refer to them; in practice, no numbers would be used:

Line 1 – This tells your web page where the movie file resides.

Line 2 – The size you want the movie on the screen. 600:338 is 16:9 widescreen.

Line 3 – This sets the background color – red being appropriate to this subject. You can also use standard hex numbers – if there’s a color on your screen you want to match, run Apple’s DigitalColorMeter utility to determine the number and insert the siz aplhanumerics between the quotes.

Line 4 – This is an important one. Once the viewer has finished watching, a single click anywhere on the movie will direct him to this page on your web site – in this example I am redirecting the viewer back to this blog page. Note that the ability to pan with the cursor in all directions and to zoom in and out with the keyboard Shift and Control keys remains unaffected.

Line 5 – This prevents the viewer from downloading your movie and saving it.

Line 6 – All Macs come with Quicktime, so no plugin download is required to watch Quicktime moves if you use a Mac. If you are one of the unenlightened many still using that lock-up device known as Windows, and if you do not have Quicktime on your PC, this line will automatically direct you to the download page of Quicktime for Windows on Apple’s web site.

Line 7 – This scales the movie to preserve its original aspect ratio rather than forcing it to fill your frame.

If you go to the panorama page on my web site and click on any of the thumbnails to watch a movie, you will see these enhancements at work, in full sreen mode.

The full range of Quicktime parameters can be found on Apple’s web site here.

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.