While writing my previous post on the Canon 400D camera, I came across a site that advertises one such camera at €380 – with ‘free international shipping’. The 30D they sell for €480 and the professional 5D for €1400. At a respectable online shop like Foto Konijnenberg, those prices are €739, €1199 and €3139, respectively. So is this too good to be true? Yes indeed, it is!
Uk-based(?) webstore DexDigital.co.uk (gone, but resurrected as MobiTeh.co.uk, EastElectronics.co.uk, Gonex.co.uk, AnviDirect.co.uk, cxMusic.co.uk, wMusic.co.uk, aigars.co.uk, orvisinc.co.uk and StarkDigital.co.uk) has given this concept a new, and far more sinister, twist. Read on to learn how the scam works.
(from heim.ifi.uio.no)
Continue reading ‘Starkdigital: fake web shop’
The new Digital Rebel
It might be me, but it’s like everyone around me is buying the new Canon 400D. OK, that’s exaggerated, but I’ve spotted at least 2 people I know per week in this last month.
At €739 for a 10 megapixel digital SLR, it’s a sweet deal. The ‘old’ 350D (now €649) was already a really nice camera, but the added resolution (10 MP instead of 8 MP), the EOS Integrated Cleaning System and certainly the larger screen will probably make this one even a bigger best-seller. Which means I will have to cope with a lot of “Yours has only 8 megapixels? Mine has 10!” For the record: that doesn’t matter!
We blew up a photograph to 16 x 24 inches at a professional photo lab. One print had 13-megapixel resolution; one had 8; the third had 5. Same exact photo, down-rezzed twice, all three printed at the same poster size. (…) I’m telling you, there was NO DIFFERENCE.
Continue reading ‘The popular Canon 400D’
Printing in larger sizes
I have a Canon 350D digital camera. At 8 megapixels, it’s in the semi-pro league, and allows me to make 293mm x 192mm (11.5″ x 7.7″) hi-quality prints. That’s slightly smaller than an A4 (or Letter) sheet. Imagine now I would want to print on an A0 format or 1189mm x 841mm (46.8″ x 33.1″). That’s 16 times as big (height x 4 and width x 4). I could take a ‘normal’ image and rescale it to that size, but what would that look like? For every 16 pixels of the new picture, 1 would be an original one, and the other 15 would have been guessed from that and the surrounding pixels. This process is called image interpolation and there are different algorithms to do this. Let me show what that looks like.
Interpolation algorithms
Continue reading ‘How to upsize an image’
Just a thought I had:
if the “rule of thirds” is so effective for photo composition, could it also be used to create more pleasing Powerpoint presentation designs?
An example of the layout dimensions could be like this (don’t focus on the boring picture/font, just the relative placement):
Well, it has been recently discussed on Presentation Zen, with some really nice pictures. However, judging by the standard templates in Powerpoint, the people at the ‘Microsoft Office Powerpoint’ team are not yet aware of this rule and other design principles.
Keep in mind, this is just a tiny make-up aspect of a presentation. There are more important issues like, … erm, content:
Presentations largely stand or fall on the quality, relevance, and integrity of the content. If your numbers are boring, then you’ve got the wrong numbers. If your words or images are not on point, making them dance in color won’t make them relevant. Audience boredom is usually a content failure, not a decoration failure.
from Powerpoint is evil
and
* Use a lot of slides. Change them rapidly.
* The slides go with the words–they aren’t just there as backdrops.
* The slides are NOT the words. They represent the idea you’re talking about, either directly or emotionally.
from Kathy Sierra
Wired just released an article on digital camera technology: why megapixels alone are not a good indicator of camera and photograph quality.
For years, resolution was considered the main measure of image quality in digital photos, but continual improvements have only shown up the fallacy: Grainy, blurry and underexposed photos look just as bad at 8 megapixels as they do at 5.
Camera vendors are concentrating on other fields to enhance camera quality:
- Low-light shooting
- While camera’s used to be limited to a sensitivity of 400 ISO (i.e. almost worthless in night situations), new image processing algorithms and larger sensors allow newer models to go up to 3200 ISO
- Flash
- Soft-flash (Casio) and i-Flash (Fujifilm) are ways to use a flash without ruining the natural lighting completely.
- Zooming further in, or out
- By using a right-angle construction within the body of the camera, the Panasonic Lumix DMC-TZ1K can get to a 10X optical zoom (35 mm to 350 mm). Kodak uses two 5X zoom lenses to get the same zoom capability
- Keeping steady
- Image-stabilization technologies, both optical and gyroscopic, avoid blurry photo’s.
- Capturing bright and dark
- enhancing the dynamic range of the sensors by using e.g. variable pixel size
- Protecting shooters from themselves
- Find the face in the picture and focus on it, or advise the photographer on how to improve his pictures.
And I would add to that: networking. Kodak, Canon and Nikon already have cameras with built-in Wifi, and for the ‘old’ ones that don’t have it, Eye-Fi might have a solution (via Scoble).
Read the article @ Wired, or dive even deeper in thetechlounge.com
Just strolled onto this post: “Converting a colour photo to a single layered stencil with Photoshop” (via furl.net) and I thought: you don’t need no friggin’ Photoshop to do that! Let me show you how it’s done with (free) Irfanview (Windows):
START
We start with the same picture as the Photoshop procedure above (actually I blew it up to 4x the size, double width, double height):
STEP 1: convert to grey
Use Image\Convert to Greyscale: Continue reading ‘Converting a color picture to a stencil’
A friend of mine, Kurt Deruyter, has just spent most of last year travelling around Europe taking pictures of the most idyllic golf courses. How’s that for a job? The result is not just any photobook, but the biggest coffee-table book on golf ever published. Funny detail: when you buy a copy, you actually get a coffee table with it. The book, when opened, measures 60 cm by 140 cm (22.6 inch by 55.1 inch).
Continue reading ‘Golf, a tribute’
Amusing idea from Paul: upload your own picture of you, photographing yourself in the mirror. The ideal chance to show off that 12 megapixel €2500 camera beast your girlfriend almost didn’t let you buy.
Contribute to the fun! Shoot your picture in the mirror and upload it here! (how long can it take? 3 minutes?)
http://www.pixagogo.com/7249135829
Technorati: camera – photography – mirror
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