manalang

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  manalang 01:56:51 am on November 30, 2004 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography

  

  Since getting my D70 on Friday, my love for photography has been renewed. I started taking photos back in high school (for the yearbook). Back then, I used my dad’s Pentax K1000. Then after college, I bought myself a Nikon N80 (now for sale) along with four great lenses (50mm/f1.8, 24mm/f2.8, 24-120mm/f3.5-5.6, 17-35/f3.5-5.6) and a bunch of other crap. All in all, a big investment. I took a lot of great pictures with that camera, but with the money I spent on film, development (including my own time in the lab developing my own pictures), I could have bought myself a nice DSLR. But at the time, there hadn’t been a good DSLR that fit the right price-point, at least, not until the D70.

  Anyway, since getting the D70, I’ve decided to revive my blog so I can post more photos. So, a few changes were in order. I’ve always had the masthead photo viewer on the top of the blog. The problem was that none of those masthead entries made it onto the feeds. That’s no longer a problem. All of my feeds now include the masthead postings.

  Also, I’ve added a new sidebar item that displays the four most recent flickr photos I’ve posted. I love flickr!

  I never wanted to have to maintain a separate photo blog. So, for those of you who could care less about my photos, sorry.

   

• manalang 11:08:01 pm on November 21, 2004 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography

  Let’s see how well this FotoBuzz Viewlet works. If you’re reading this in an aggregator, you’re missing out.

  

  Feel free to add comments on the picture.

   

• manalang 10:24:13 am on March 22, 2004 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography

  Update: this post is broken due to my move over to WordPress. I’ll be building a similar plugin for WordPress. MT users… sorry.

  A few months ago, I wrote about my search for a simple web based photo gallery. Since then, I’ve been using Qdig. Qdig is a basic photo gallery that is dynamically generated based on images stored in one or more directories. It will auto generate the image navigation, resize your images, and create your thumbnails. No need for a database or any fancy settings. Qdig is basically one PHP script that does all of this.

  One of the nice features of Qdig I never took advantage of until now is it’s ability for it to be “included” within other PHP pages. Since my site runs on PHP, I was able to include Qdig into my entries as an embedded photo gallery. Like the example below (photos of our bathroom remodel):

  To get this to work cleanly with Moveable Type, I created a macro using Brad Choate’s MTMacro.

  <MTMacroDefine name=”qdig” tag=”qdig”>
  <?php $chroot_dir = “<MTMacroAttr name=’path’>”;
  if (strtolower(”<MTMacroAttr name=’normalize’>”) == “true”) {
  $normalize = “-normalize”;
  } else {
  $normalize = “”;
  }
  include “/path_to_qdig_script/qdig.php”;?>
  </MTMacroDefine>

  This allows me to easily create a quick ad-hoc photo gallery within my entries like the one above by simply using the following markup within my entries:

  <qdig path=”path/to/your/images/”>

  I added the normalize attribute in there to allow me to have ImageMagick convert my images with the “-normalize” attribute which transforms images to span the full range of colors found in the photo (similar to the “Auto-Levels” command in Photoshop).

  To get this to work the way I wanted, I had to modify Qdig a little bit so that the markup tags it created were identified with class names so I could apply some simple CSS to it. Here’s the qdig.php file with my customizations. To add the scrollbar effect win the thumbnails, I used the overflow and white-space property in css. View my stylesheet if you’re interested to see how I did it (look in the “gallery” section).

   

• manalang 09:46:54 am on January 6, 2004 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography

  Happy New Year! Sorry I’m six days late. I’ve been struggling to get back into my groove since getting back from the Philippines.

  Just ran into this article via the PhotographyBLOG… it’s a great comparison between the Mac and PC in terms of processing speed for digital photography tasks. I’ve been itching at getting a Mac as our next home computer, but maybe I’ll wait. Aside from OS X and the cool looking machines, it’s still slightly behind the PC when it comes to speed.

  [via Rob Galbraith DPI: A report on processing performance]
  Though we haven’t published specific performance numbers for laptops in this report, we did run a Mac Powerbook and a Dell laptop through a subset of the same tests. The 15-inch Powerbook G4, powered by a G4/1.25GHz processor, was thumped in every test by a Dell Inspiron 8500 and its P4-M processor running at 2.6GHz. Until Apple is able to stuff a G5 processor inside one of its sexy Powerbook cases, portable Macs are likely to remain noticeably slower than their PC counterparts.

   

• manalang 12:18:33 pm on December 7, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography, technology

  The next big innovation in the digital camera industry has nothing to do with increased mega pixels, larger CCDs, or faster image processors. I think the next big thing in digital photography is GPS technology embedded right into the camera.

  This past Summer, I bought a GPS receiver for use with Geocaching. And at some point after that, I began to wonder about the technology and how pervasive it has become with today’s latest automobiles. I like the idea of having a navigation system in my car, but realistically, I probably wouldn’t use it as often as the manufacturer would lead me to believe. Plus, I just hate the idea of something else that can distract me from driving safely — I think DVD players, non-hands free cell phones, and other gizmos that take a driver’s focus away from the responsibility from driving safely should stay out of the car.

  Being a digital photography enthusiast, I bring my camera with me almost everywhere I go. I like the idea of being able to capture the moment (whatever moment that is) instantly without the cost of film. Plus, the fact that digital cameras have the ability to record the technical information about a photo is intriguing to me. A few years ago, my wife and I took a six week trip around Europe. Between us, we took close to a thousand photos during the six week excursion. However, at the time, we took our film based SLRs. I discovered many drawbacks to using film even though the photos turned out amazing. One of the biggest drawbacks is not just about not having any technical information about the photos, but also not remembering where some of the photos were taken. After a few years, I pulled the photos back out of the shoe box they’re now kept in. And without immediately tagging and indexing the photos, I can’t recollect where some of them were taken.

  Now, consider this — if I had a GPS enabled digital camera at the time, I wouldn’t have to care about tagging and indexing these photos after they’ve been developed. The camera would have created EXIF or IPTC headers that told me not just the technical data about the photos, but also the exact coordinates of where the individual photos were taken. Now imagine if there was a free web service that allowed me to pull in location information based on a set of GPS coordinates. Also, imagine if there was software that allowed you to download location information and add it directly to your photos IPTC headers. The information could be basic city, state/province, or country details or be more detailed information about where you actually were. For example, if I took photos in the Vatican, the service would actually deliver information to me about the Vatican. Now that’s a killer application!

  So, I decided to search Google to see if anyone’s thought of this before. And so I find out that my idea isn’t very original. The first hit I got was from Gizmodo pointing to Ricoh’s WiFi/Bluetooth/GPS enabled camera. Oh well, so much for the possibility of being original. However, I do think that many digital cameras will eventually evolve to this. I just hope it happens sooner rather than later.

  In the meantime, I’ll settle for a decently priced digital SLR that will allow me to use my Nikkor lenses… the Nikon D70.

   

• manalang 02:47:42 am on November 6, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography

  The W3C has a discussion note about how RDF can be used to describe photos. I have a problem with this. A few weeks ago, I wrote about “Why EXIF is so Important.” The discussion note doesn’t factor in EXIF data in any way. The JPEG images that result from today’s digital cameras all contain rich meta data about a photo. This article doesn’t mention how that EXIF data can be used as a basis for better search, retrieval, and cataloging of images. Although, currently most cameras today only produce EXIF data about technical details of a picture, I don’t think EXIF should be abandoned in favor or RDF. The big benefit of EXIF is the fact that the meta data is tied directly to the image. If the image is shared, moved, or copied, the meta data is still there. I know that EXIF data is fragile and can be changed, deleted and tampered with using different imaging applications, but assuming that it isn’t, I think it’s the best way for data to live with the image.

   

• manalang 05:35:46 am on November 4, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography

  I took the photo above a few years ago when we were in Rome. I took so many great photos on that six week trip that I’m still in the process of digitizing… yes, unfortunately, I took them on film.

   

• manalang 10:30:02 am on October 1, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography, technology

  Frank Leahy’s post on How to Make Photos More Searchable got me thinking about the future of digital photography. With digital cameras enabling people to take more photos than ever, it’s going to be more important to have some way to organize those photos beyond having fancy software like Adobe’s Photoshop Album. The one promising aspect of digital photos produced by most digital cameras today is the EXIF data it produces. EXIF data is typically comprised of the technical data about the photo such as shutter speed, aperture, date/time it was taken, etc. However, it can also contain data like the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken and also comments the photographer might have about the scene. Imagine a digital camera that knew where the picture was taken. All of this stored inside the image file.

  I might have hinted about the benefits of EXIF in my previous post, but to explain further, making good use of EXIF data gives digital photography enthusiasts a great way to catalog and archive their photos. It will also enable them to search through these archives better without the need for complex software or databases.

  Making use of EXIF data in my photos is my current pursuit. Now that I’ve got a gallery that displays my photos EXIF data. I am looking at creating a PHP application that will allow me to edit the user comments attribute of a photo’s EXIF data. Currently, I’m looking at using jhead to be able to write to the EXIF headers of an image since PHP currently only supports reading from the headers. If that doesn’t work, I plan on just using software to edit the EXIF data. Photo Studio is a free application that will allow me to view and edit my EXIF data before posting the photo on the web.

  I’m hoping that more software and hardware vendors begin to take EXIF seriously and realize its potential for enhancing the digital photography experience. The promise of digital photography shouldn’t be just about the image. The data that supports that image is just as important.

   

• manalang 09:18:55 am on September 29, 2003 | Comments | # |
  Tags: photography, programming

  A few months ago, I installed Gallery on this server in hopes to have a decent way to publish my photos to the web. After playing with it for a day, I realized that it wasn’t a good fit for me. I have thousands of photos I’ve kept on my desktop since 1999 (the day I got my first digital camera). I never really spent much time publishing any of them on the web except for a few random shots on Yahoo! Photos — but that really doesn’t satisfy my needs either. Here’s what I want in a photo gallery:

  # Easy photo publishing
  # Automatically generated thumbnails
  # Automatically resized photos appropriate for the web
  # Easy to customize (standards based) UI
  # EXIF data display

  Gallery can do 2-3, but falls short on 1 and 4. It can also do 5, but not the way I’m interested in.
  (More …)