The Shifting Goalpost

Happy day today - effortlessly captured a macro shot of my son’s favourite toy - his racing car.

A few days back, we had been to Banham Zoo in Norfolk - first zoo visit for my son, Advaita. It was a good day out. I think this was one of my best shots that day.

My photography experiment after a long time…

Finally, I managed a family photo-shoot, more than two months after Advaita’s arrival. I have been playing with an external flash I bought recently (will write a separate post about it soon). And I must say bouncing flash makes a huge difference to the photos (I am no big fan of direct flash and the unnatural way in which it lights subjects - but bouncing flash is altogether different).

Though I have had the Canon Powershot G9 for more than a couple of months, I had not tried the manual controls and the RAW shooting mode. But I started experinmenting yesterday and since iPhoto 6 doesn’t support G9 RAW, I tried the Canon Raw Image Task. I was impressed with the post-processing that can be done with RAW images but cannot say the same about the Canon utility.

There is at least one freeware out there for Mac OS X - RAW Photo Processor. GIMP + UFRaw is also available, but I am not sure how elegant it is on Mac (or whether it works) - couldn’t find much information. But these do not provide photo organisation / library features and the workflow (download from camera, process, organise, print/export/publish) tends to become complicated.

There are a few options available to incorporate RAW/Post processing and workflow - Apple Aperture, Adobe Lightroom, Adobe Photoshop Elements + Bridge. Apple’s Aperture 2.0 is available for a 30 day free trial and I am giving it a try. Also, Connected Flow has a free plugin for Aperture to export photos to Flickr and so the workflow for photos from camera to flickr via post processing is painless through one application itself.

One of my first tries -

There is loads of information on RAW vs JPEGs available and I cannot add much value here at this point of time, but I am sure that I will never go back to in-camera JPEGs now.

Just when you think what more can be done - you come across a new concept and then you think why it took so long to be discovered. HDRI is a technique to combine highlights and/or shadows from a set of photographs taken at different exposure settings. The results can be stunning and I want to try it out soon.

There is a good introduction to HDR at the dPS (digital Photography School) site. And if you want to have a look at some amazing HDR images visit http://stuckincustoms.com/.

Announce to the world

Aai went through a lot

Baba is very happy

Pensive

And now, rest

Meanwhile, read more about his name at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advaita_Vedanta.

1. Canon HV20: I had already decided for a HD camcorder as I didn’t want to be stuck with a SD (Standard Definition) camcorder while HD (High Definition) takes over the delivery mechanism (TV - HD and players - Blu-ray).

After much deliberation on the recording format (Tape or HDD - Hard Disk Drive), I decided on Tape as it still offers better quality than the compression formats on HDD, especially if you go for HD. This is because HD requires substantial storage space and hence rigourous compression if it has to be stored on HDD or Flash Drives (some camcorders have started offering that). This leads to convoluted workflow while editing and publishing. Also, contrary to my assumption, tape is considered to be a good archival medium.

And my research says that Canon HV20 is currently the best consumer camcorder to record HD on Mini DV tape, especially with its fantastic CINE setting.

Soon, I will post the results on Vimeo. Not Youtube. Vimeo lets you upload better resolution videos including HD.

2. Canon Powershot G9: This was a result of another painful and long decision making process. By paying 10% extra than what one pays for the G9, it is easy to acquire a DSLR (Digital SLR), but I decided against DSLR as I am still not dedicated enough to photography to warrant a DSLR.

On the other hand, I wanted complete manual control to be available for those genius moments and G9 fits the bill (my other camera Fujifilm Finepix E550 offered manual control but it has started showing its age). G9 is a compact with a retro rangefinder look rather than the sleek compacts/point and shoots that have flooded the market.

But the learning curve is not for the faint-hearted and currently I am a bit worried when I will be able to master it.

3. Wacom Bamboo One: Finally, a cheap pen tablet compatible with Mac and from a company dominating the product space and rightly so. What a difference a pen tablet makes in Photo editing!? It is unbelievable - a 3-5 minute lasso selection task using mouse or trackpad in an image editing software can be done in 10 secods flat.

Shevonne

Here is a digitally altered image of a photo that I had captured long time back. I was working on how to make it striking and the ‘posterise’ effect seems to do the job.

The photo album is evolving and includes pictures of some beautiful ladies.

JAlbum looks like a good software for designing photo galleries quickly. A few of my experiments can be found here and a few photos from a trip earlier this year to the fantastic Eden Project, Cornwall are here.

Some snaps from my holidays last month can be found on my flickr page.