Photo This & That

Natural History – How Flashguns Are Made

Posted on July 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

As I’m in a silly mood, I’ll share a funny one!

Those who were under the impression that flashguns are made in a factory might want to check out this.

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Posted in Camera Equipment

Screen Calibration

Posted on July 21, 2008 | Leave a comment

This is such an ignored practise that its astonishing!

We all put a great deal of effort in getting to the right place at the right time, take our pictures making sure they are technically correct, download the images to our computers and then completely mess up the colour on an uncalibrated monitor!

Every single monitor, be it a separate screen or a laptop’s screen behaves differently. No two are identical. Each one shows a completely different tone to the colours we see on screen. On top of this, we change the brightness on our screens (especially on laptops) depending on the ambient light and then proceed to change levels, curves and saturation settings on our images.

These are then saved as jpegs and sent to the office where someone on a calibrated screen proceeds to try and correct our mistakes and as a result the image becomes degraded.

One of the most important things in image processing is to start by having a calibrated screen. For those who have never tried this, it seems a scary and expensive prospect. Surprisingly, its both easy to do and relatively cheap.

You can pick up a good screen calibrator from around £150 up. My personal calibrator is a Gretag McBeth Eye One Display 2 (now owned by and rebadged X-Rite). This came with its own software which was pretty decent. However, I discovered something called Color Eyes by Integrated Color which gives even better results and supports a host of calibrator pucks. You can download a free trial and compare it to the results you get from the supplied software that came with your system.

I’ve used this on Apple 30″ Cinema Screens, an aluminium iMac (which doesn’t calibrate perfectly as its screen is way too bright) and several MacBook Pros and a MacBook Air (which calibrated perfectly).

Go on, invest a little money and get your screens set up properly; you won’t regret it!

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Posted in Computers and Software

Nokia E71

Posted on July 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

At long last, the Nokia E71 has arrived to our shores after its recent launch. Vodafone has it listed as “coming soon” and its available SIM free from several outlets.

I’ve been using the phone for over a week now and must say that I’m extremely impressed by it.

I had the E61 previously which served me well. The E71 does everything the E61 does, but better and in a much smaller and more stylish package.

Although the E71 is much smaller, the keyboard is a work of genius and is surprisingly much easier to type on than its predecessor.

The phone supports push email on both POP and IMAP services which is handy for checking out emails on the move without resorting to taking out the laptop.

The web browser on the device is also very capable and makes it very easy to check the internet when needed on both 3.5G and WiFi.

The user interface has been improved and the phone’s screen and hard key shortcuts are fully customisable. What’s more, the Symbian OS is much faster and there is practically no lag when using it.

I’ve also found the battery life (which is changeable) to be excellent, easily lasting for over two days of solid use.

The only negative point so far is that when syncing with a Mac using iSync and the Nokia plug-in, the descriptions field in the calender is cut short and will only carry a long paragraph. The E61 didn’t have this problem and long text could easily be added and synched from computer to phone and back again. I find this a huge problem as it means I can no longer put long details for assignments on the phone. I do hope this is sorted out soon.

Apart from that, I’m very impressed by the phone and can’t recommend it enough. The only other phone which has caught my interest is Apple’s new 3G iPhone which I’m toying with getting on a separate phone line.

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Posted in mobile phone

Parking in London

Posted on July 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

Probably the single most annoying thing about working in London is the parking problems one encounters from borough to borough.

I came across Park-Up which is a great web site which helps out a lot with details of where to park on and off the road. Check it out!

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Posted in Travel

Axis of Evil Photoshop Technique

Posted on July 16, 2008 | Leave a comment

Its nothing new; photography’s been used as a form of propaganda for decades. All you have to do is research the Soviet Union’s use of picture manipulation.

However, the newest form came out of Iran a few days ago when images of the missile tests got released.

Apparently one of the four rockets didn’t fire and was “photoshoped” in later.

Read more about it at The Guardian and the National Post.

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Posted in News, Photography, Pictures