Photography – Page 203 – In Photos dot Org

Sneak peak at the Canon 450D

DPReview have a hands on preview of the new Canon 450D DSLR! Specs look impressive, and as the Canon 400D is still being manufactured and sold I’m sure there’ll be some great deals on the older camera.

They also have a report listing what has changed since the Canon 400D. 12MP sensor, spot metering, 3″ LCD, auto lighting, something called highlight tone priority and more. Are you tempted yet? Must keep credit card in wallet …

No, I’m not that tempted. The Canon 20D will do me for at least another year! (via Treasa)

Flickr Pro Stats

If you have a Flick Pro account, check out the new Flickr stats. You have to activate it first but it only takes 10 minutes or so for it to generate your stats.

What surprised me was that my Pink Flowers photo was the most viewed image yesterday. It’s a nice photo but by digging into the stats I see that search engines sent 71% of the traffic. Just goes to show that you should set the title of your photos carefully!

The lights at Finn’s Corner

The lights at Finn’s Corner

A long exposure at f/22 creates the beautiful star like pinpoints of light and enough time to capture the light trail from passing cars.

No tripod, so I used street furniture to balance the camera!

Aperture	ƒ/22
Camera	Canon EOS 20D
Focal length	10mm
ISO	100
Shutter speed	5s

What The Duck flew away!

OMG! During a test flight of the What the Duck balloon for a parade it broke it’s tether and the wind blew it away! Yikes!

Hehe. Yes, yes. it’s fake. Good video though! Via TOP.

How much is your camera worth?

On Saturday I took my Canon 20D into a camera shop here in Cork and asked how much they’d give for it as a trade in against a Canon 40D.

After a few minutes I found out the disappointing answer. €300. Depreciation is a bitch isn’t it? The Canon 40D body is €1200 here. I need to start saving.

In other camera news, the M/AF switch on my wide angle Sigma lens fell off! I noticed it gone this afternoon and can’t find the switch anywhere. Hopefully it won’t be too expensive to replace.

GIMP 2.4 is out

The new release of GIMP 2.4 is finally out! Sven announced it on the Gimp User mailing list this morning. It seems like forever since 2.2 was released but he has promised that 2.6 won’t be as long in the making.

The roadmap for GIMP 2.6 will be discussed over the next weeks on the gimp-developer mailing-list. We can only tell you so much now: It is going to rock and it shouldn’t take as long to get it done as it took to finish GIMP 2.4. If you want to join the effort, your help is much appreciated.

GIMP.org is fairly slow now but the release notes have the low down on changes since 2.2. Some of the biggest user visible changes include red eye removal, healing tool and a better alignment tool. Plugins and scripts now live in the same place, the “Filters” menu. I’m using the rc3 release in Ubuntu Linux 7.10 and it’s been rock solid for the past few days. I’m sure Ubuntu will update their .deb package in the next few days.

After you update, get the GIMP Lomo plugin I posted yesterday. It’s 2.4 ready! 🙂

GIMP Lomo Plugin

This is a slighly modified version of an old GIMP Lomo plugin I’ve used for ages that will now work with the new GIMP 2.4 release thanks to some advice I remembered reading on the GIMP User mailing list. The original plugin is by Francois Le Lay but hasn’t been updated since 2005. It’s a basic script but it’s very effective. Just be warned, if you resize your image, make sure you right click on the Vignette layer and click “Layer to image size” before the resize. Otherwise odd things happen!

Download

Download gimplomo.scm.

Install

Installation is easy. Simply copy gimplomo.scm into your .gimp-2.4/scripts/ folder and restart the GIMP. It will appear as Image->Filters->Light and Shadow->Lomo.

Example Images

Below are two before and after examples of what the Lomo plugin does to images. I have also posted fake lomo photos in the past which should give a really good idea of what it’s capable of.

Before and After Lomo images

Why the change to Script-fu?

Script-fu in GIMP 2.4 requires that variables be defined before using them which has broken a lot of Script-fu scripts unfortunately. In theory it’s a great change because it tightens up on sloppy programming but it hurts the end user!

10 minutes left in Halifax & Late Late Show Extra competition

Just in case you have the perfect image to submit to the Halifax & Late Late Show Extra competition the closing date is today, in about 10 minutes. That’s right. 6pm is the deadline. First prize is €10,000. Is that worth 10 minutes of your time? I’m going to enter if I can find a suitable image!

Photoshopped in real life

If you don’t read xkcd you’re missing out 🙂

Carried away with working on photos

I wanted to take it easy tonight. It’s been a long week but here I am still. 16 photos worked on in the GIMP and ready to upload. You’re in for a treat next week with some of my shots from Kerry, even if I do say so myself!

How to build a pop-up flash diffuser

If you use the built-in flash on your camera you’re probably used to the ugly effect direct light has on portraits and scenes: red eye, background shadows and foreground brightness, lost blown out detail. You can avoid all that by buying an external flash and bouncing or you can build a flash diffuser to sit in front of your camera.

Looks like a fun project to try too!

16 images sold in Mallow

I heard last night at the club that 16 images were sold at the Mallow Camera Club exhibition in Mallow Town Library. That will add something like €2,000 to the Niall Mellon Township Trust fund Sean O Riordan is collecting! Well done to everyone, and thanks to everybody who linked and spread the word!