Underwater Photography April 12, 2010
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: Adventure, Diving, Outdoors, Underwater Photography
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I like taking pictures underwater and on the surface. The little pocket digital camera I use, bought in 2004, has a housing that is now worth more than many excellent new pocket cameras, which is one of the reasons underwater photography can be very costly.
Last week, I received (by mail order, which saved me about $500) a beautiful new Canon EOS 5D Mark II with a 24-105mm zoom lens. I’d love to use it underwater, but I would need.
- An underwater housing, $1,500 to about $5,000, depending on the depth, features and manufacturer.
- A wide-angle lens, $800-$2,500
- A waterproof case, maybe $200.
- At least one, but preferably two strobes and all the kit to mount and sync it, $1,000-$2,000
- Flood insurance, perhaps $100 year.
So we’re talking another $5,000-$10,000 on top of what I’ve already bought. I really wonder if I could really amortize this over the number of dives remaining in my lifetime where there would be good picture taking opportunities.
Still, it would be a lot of fun to try.
By the way, it’s an amazing camera. I’m enjoying having a useful viewfinder again, and the image stabilization and ISO range make shooting in all sorts of low light and high contrast conditions a breeze, even when it’s in fully automatic mode.
What’s been keeping me busy December 30, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: Facebook, Geneology, Geni, Photography, Picasa
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My regular readers, bless all 2 of them, may have noticed my posts have been dropping off. Aside from the Canadian Winter, it’s been the organization of my photographs that’s been taking up my time lately, and some attempted organization of my life.
I’ve found Picasa 3.6 to be a terrific tool for organizing my electronic photo library, and am now back to scanning old prints until all of them are backed up on my RAID 1 NAS storage unit. The upload capability not only works with Picasa Web, but add-ons are available for Facebook, Geni, and other social networking and web tools.
Facebook, which should require no explanation, is where I hang out with my dive buddies, some old work and school friends, and a couple of family members. Putting my latest dive pictures on Facebook is as simple as connecting the camera to the computer, allowing Picasa to import, selecting the photos and clicking the Picasa Facebook icon.
Similarly, I started a family tree project on Geni several years ago. This has now spread to thousand of people, about 100 of whom have used the site to add or view the relatives. Pictures attract the most participation from other family members, so Picasa’s ability to organize the photos by person is invaluable. Geni is still trying to get the uploader to work properly, and have made some progress lately. The one outstanding item is that currently you have to load 1 photo at a time.
Weather permitting, I’ll be taking my last dive of 2009 tomorrow. Air temperature should be 2 degrees, and the water won’t be much warmer than that.
Strange Connections December 11, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: 1992, Coincidence, Comdex, Google, Happenstance, Photography, Picasa, Serendipity
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I spoke to some of my work colleagues about Google Picasa, the topic of my previous two posts. One of things I predicted, somewhat in just, was a good probability of finding someone in one my photos who I didn’t know at the time but do now. This has indeed happened.
It would have been very surprising if this was in the background of a photo taken while on a trip to another country, but so far that’s not the case. What I did find was a picture I took at the Comdex Canada trade show in downtown Toronto in 1992. Michael was talking to someone at the Hewlett Packard booth (at the time a competitor, now the owner of the company I worked for at the time) when I took the shot.
In the review of the 1700 or so unknown faces that Picasa picked up, I saw it. Michael hired me in 1999 to the company I still work for, although he left in 2006. Strange the 7 years after I took the photo, we would finally meet.
My photos are all indexed now, and I’m getting through all the faces that I recognise. There are lots that I don’t, of course, and plenty where I don’t remember the names although knew them at one time. Every once in a while one comes back to me after staring at the picture for long enough. I also upgraded to version 3.6, although it hasn’t made much difference so far.
More on Google Picasa December 9, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: Google, Photo Album, Photography, Picasa, Underwater Photography
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Another 24 hours of crunching through photographs (this time hardwired into my NAS box, so it ran perhaps 5-10 times faster) got through a good portion of my high resolution photograph archive with success. The only additional problem encountered is that I was cleaning up some of my podcast files (managed by iTunes) which were no longer needed on my C drive, and now Picasa can’t be persuaded to forget about them no matter what I try. Once the initial inventory of photographs is complete I’ll try again, which I think will take at least another 24 hours.
With the faster connection to the disk, Picasa is much more responsive, without the ghastly 10-15 minute waits I was experiencing with the Wifi connection. Still they’re a minute or two but I can live with that considering the size of the files.
Classifying all the faces takes quite a while. I think it works better if I leave it alone for a while as it seems to eventually get around to processing the files and identifying the faces automatically well after it has made the picture available for viewing.
I also found out there some APIs available to extend the functionality of Picasa. I doubt I’ll ever do that but it’s good to see. Perhaps someone will eventually do a fish ID module. That would be cool.
First Impressions of Picasa Desktop December 8, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: Google, Photo Album, Photo Organization, Photography, Picasa
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My wife has often complained about 2 things when it comes to photography. First, that I don’t take enough pictures of the things she’s interested in, like the garden, and second, that the digital pictures disappear and are never seen again, as they’re stored on my computer (actually on a network drive at home).
To address the first issue, I’m buying her a nice pocket camera for Christmas. For the second, I searched around for some organizing software, and came across Picasa desktop 3.5.1 from Google, which has the very nice attribute of being a free download.
While I write this, my computer is busily going through all my photographs, which it has been doing for a couple of days now. I don’t blame it for being slow. Five years ago I digitized all my negatives and many of my father’s slides with a 4000d dpi Nikon Scanner at full resolution in 14 bit mode. Each file is about 120mb and takes 10-15 minutes to process. So it will take maybe a couple more weeks to crunch through everything. That it can read these files at all is pretty impressive, and it goes much faster through the 3mb files from my pocket camera at max resolution.
The coolest thing about the program is face detection. Faces in photographs get treated in 1 of 4 ways.
- Automatically detects the face and who it belongs to (after having you identify the face in another photograph manually, of course – it would be pretty scary if it could tell without that).
- Automatically detect the face, and guesses who it belongs to, asking you to verify it. Most of the time it is right. Sometimes it thought I was my brother or vice-versa, especially with pictures during my beard phase.
- Automatically detect the face, but is unable to guess who it is. It’s curious sometimes that some faces you’d think would be easy it misses, yet some obscure and fuzzy pictures it gets correct. The fact that it can do it all is pretty amazing though.
- Doesn’t see the face at all. Again, sometimes you’d think one that it misses should be really obvious, then other times it picks out faces that you’d miss with a quick glance. Sometimes it even notices faces in mirrors, pictures or on magazine covers. On one picture from the dive shop it picked out a model from a PADI poster. I was tempted to call him “PADI guy” but thought better of it.
I also like that while scanning my photos I could do other things with the software (i.e. it had some level of asynchronous operation). However while it was doing my 120MB files I was subjected to long (like 10 minutes) periods of looking at the hourglass. In the software’s defence I was running it over a 11mb/sec wifi link to my network hard drive at the time.
There are many cool features that I won’t go into here, but I will mention the two main issues I have with it.
- It handles video which is great, but when you load it to YouTube it always fails after performing the upload. This problem has been reported frequently in message boards. As Google owns and controls YouTube, I’m surprised the software was released with this bug.
- Uploading to commercial printing services is extremely limited. If you’re located in Canada, the only one that is offered ships from the UK. Given that even here in the great white north Walmart, Costco, and many other services are just a few minutes drive away, this is plain stupid.
Still, in my brief research it seems to be the best option around. I’d like to hear if anyone uses anything they consider better and why.
Now if it could only automatically identify fish I’d pay real money for it! Upload to Facebook and WordPress would be nice as well.
Depth and Colour August 15, 2009
Posted by Chris Sullivan in Photography.Tags: Big Bay Point, Diving, Lake Simcoe, SCUBA, Scuba Diving, Underwater Photography
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It’s amazing how the eye compensates when a camera cannot. These pictures, both taken of the same object at 40′ in the fresh waters of Lake Simcoe on the first dive last Wednesday Night, were taken a minute apart. The first was with flash, and the second with natural light.
This gnome sits on the bow of the inboard/outboard boat, and you can see its outline in both pictures, although the remaining background is black with the flash photo, as the exposure time is too short to pick up the ambient light.
Even at much greater depths in the same location, colours are still quite apparent. On the Deep Adventure Dive, I’ve pulled out coloured objects and we’ve noticed that even orange and red are quite discernable at that depth, but every photograph taken even at shallower depths is predominantly green.
Chronicle of an older diver 