It’s sad it’s over already but at least we still have the photos.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - BarCampLondon7 was awesome

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - More Histograms!

It’s time for a roundup of week 5 of my photo challenges.

This week the theme was “Abstracts” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.

Day 29 – Lost in Traffic

Day 30 – New Flat!

Day 31 – Never Mind the Mess

Day 32 – Storm

Day 33 – Stuck

Day 34 – Surrey Water

Day 35 – Oh, boy

Day 34v2 – Surrey Water Abstract

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Project 365 & 52 Themes – Week 5

It’s time for a roundup of week 4 of my photo challenges. It’s a bit late because I was mainly busy trying to find a new place to live.

This week the theme was “Natural World” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.

Day 22 – The sum of all parts

Day 23 – Greenland Dock

Also my entry for this week’s theme “Natural World”

Day 24 – Boxes

Day 25 – Bye Bye Golborne Road

Day 26 – Isn’t she lovely

Day 27 – Adi

Day 28 – Empty Station

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Project 365 & 52 Themes – Week 4

This week the theme was “The Rule of Thirds” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.

Day 15 – Track Workers

Day 16 – Peabody

Day 17 – Gorgeous

Day 18 – Canada Water

Day 19 – Rain

Also my pick for this week’s theme “The Rule of Thirds”

Day 20 – Candle Light

Day 21 – Starbuck’s Freshly Roasted Cylon

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Project 365 & 52 Themes – Week 3

This week the theme was ”Creative Colors” and I again decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.

Day 8 – Early Nights

Day 9 – Blue

Also my entry for the “Creative Colors” theme.

Day 10 – New Macbook

Day 11 – Little Brother

Day 12 – Bite my shiny metal teapot

Day 13 – Me

Day 14 – Long Exposure

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Project 365 & 52 Themes – Week 2

This week the theme was “New Beginnings” and I decided to pick one of my 7 daily submissions as the entry for the theme. Here they are in order.

Day 1 – Happy New Year 

Also my submission to the 52 Themes challenge.

Day 2 – Boring

Day 3 – Darts

Day 4 – Terminal 

First Flickr explore entry of the year!

Day 5 – New Friend

Day 6 – Alone in Soho

Day 7 – Outside is Scary

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Project 365 & 52 Themes – Week 1

So here are some of my more geeky new years resolutions for this year.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Geeky New Year’s Resolutions

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Joker

The Lenses

The lens comes in two “versions”. The first version, labeled the Nikkor AF 50mm F1.8 was made first released in 1986. It is easily recognizable by the large pushpin on the side.

The pushpin locks the aperture ring into place. On most modern cameras you will want to keep the aperture ring into the highest aperture number (F22) so it’s a bit big for such a useless function. The rest of the lens feels pretty solid, dare I say heavy.

The second lens that’s a interesting alternative to the Sigma is the Nikkor AF-D 50mm F1.8. Notice the little added “D” that was added tot he previous model. By specification the new lens (launched in 2002 and replacing the previous model) is exactly the same. The most noticeable cosmetic changes are the loss of the push pin and a more plastic (and lighter) casing.

Technically there’s one more important difference between the lens with and without the “D”, except for the fact that the earlier version has only one layer of coating. Which brings us to the showdown.

The Showdown

So what is the real-life difference between the two lenses? First off there’s a price difference of about £15 depending on where you get it. This doesn’t sound like much, but as the modern model goes for about £80 this sums up to about 18%. For a student or amateur on a budget the non-D version is therefore an interesting option.

In performance though, the lenses seem to be very, very different. I like most of Ken Rockwell’s articles on lenses, but in this case he seems to be rather wrong labeling the D functionality as a “almost meaningless feature”. To understand the difference between the single coated and multi-coated (D) lens you have to understand that lenses with large apertures quickly suffer from lens flares. Coating on a lens can help prevent the lens flares to some level and this makes a lot of difference.

Here is a photo I took with the single coated lens.

As you can see in the left bottom corner there’s a big lens flare. It’s not that much of a problem in this photo but it also shows up as a more annoying and larger flare in normal conditions (I couldn’t find any of the worst photos because I deleted them already). 

The modern multi-coated lens still has this issue sometimes but not as large and intrusive as the single-coated version. It is for me at least the reason to get rid of the non-D version and get myself a D version. Even with a hood on the older version still generates massive lens flares and discoloration from time to time. A good example is this photo I took of Reinier:

Conclusion

It seems that the AF-D lens performs much better under low light conditions with consideration to lens flares. Yes, the older version can be found about £15 less but it’s definitely not worth the trouble of lens flares and lack of build quality.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Nikkor 50mm F1.8 showdown: AF vs AF-D

Photo: Nikon D40 by Allen Qu

The Nikon D40

The Nikon D40 (announced in November 2006 and since replaced by the 90% similar D40X and D60) is Nikon’s entry-level DSLR. The camera is clear compromise between features and price, scrapping many conventional features to keep the weight of the camera limited and the price low. It is the perfect first DSLR for the beginning photographer and therefore a popular choice among switching amateur enthusiasts. [a full review can be found on dpreview.com]

This low price does come with some clear disadvantages for any amateur that wants to bring his/her photography to the next level. Most importantly the Nikon D40 doesn’t have built in focus motor, which means that it will only auto focus with the relatively new AF-S (since 1992) or AF-I (since 1998) lenses. To make things worse, none of the ultra-light sensitive and affordable prime lenses like the 50mm F1.8 (about £60 on Amazon) are available in AF-S, making the D40 worthless as an evening photography camera unless you want to invest in a decent flash or expensive alternative lens (starting at about £250 on Amazon).

Upgrades

So given the fact that you like the D40, and most likely already have one, what are the options for well priced upgrade? This is exactly the question I ran into when I decided I could spend £250 on the Sigma 30mm 1.4 lens, or £75 on the Nikon 50mm 1.8 AF-D instead and invest in a second body. The options for a second Nikon body within a relative specification and price range of the D40 were the D40x, D50, D60, D70, D70s and the D80. The D40x and D60 are no real contenders as they are nothing more than some very badly designed upgrades of the D40 with the same inherent problems. The D70 and D70s, though interesting, where not on my shortlist because of numerous reasons, ranging from the fact that they used CompactFlash (not SD), had very small LCD screens, where relatively expensive to the other models, and were generally regarded inferior to any of the other cameras. So that left me between a D50 and a D80.

Nikon D50 by deleepgeorge

Nikon D50

I actually managed to get my hands on a Nikon D50 on eBay for about £150 but I must admit that they tend to change hands for quite a lot more. The D50 (introduced April 2005) is the technological predecessor of the D40, containing much of the features as the D40 like the 6MP sensor, new generation menus, SD card for storage, and the optical pentamirror. Add on that the clear advantages over the D40 like a build in focus motor and would think the D50 is a great deal for anyone that is used to a D40. [a full review can be found on dpreview.com]

Well, unfortunately that assumption is wrong. Because it was the predecessor to the D40, it has most of the specs of the D40 in a more bigger and professional body, but with the obvious drawbacks of it being a camera thats an entire generation older than the D40. The white balance is awful, especially inside or in cloudy conditions. Most of my photos ended up greenish, leading to me just shooting everything in RAW and setting the white balance by hand afterwards. The auto-focus is horribly slow and inaccurate, and the menu system is no way near as intuitive as that of the D40. In general the entire camera just felt like a lesser product than the D40, which is not the feeling you want to have when spending this much money.

Nikon D80 by Allen Qu

Nikon D80

Lucky for me the D50 had some other technical issues which meant it had to be send back, allowing me to reconsider my options. I had a look on Amazon this time and found a Nikon D80 body for only £300. That’s more than twice the price than I spend on the D50, I know, but for that you get a 10MP sensor, 11 point autofocus, and most importantly a camera from the same generation as the D40. The D80 was launched in August 2006 (before the D40) but features an identical LCD screen and menu system, full support for SDHC, superior auto-focus, and a fast 3FPS RAW burst mode. [a full review can be found on dpreview.com]

I must admit that I have fallen in love with the D80 about as much as I have with the D40. Although it only offers a few major upgrades from the D40, the superior (more pro-like) body makes and the full range of modern features make the camera feel like a D40 in a superior shell (call it the D40Pro). The body (although from plastic) feels very solid and has mostly the same button layout as the D80. Furthermore, the images (besides being 4MP bigger) are quite similar as on the D40. The camera seems to have the same tendency to overexpose so I set my camera to -0.6EV and the white balance is often spot on. 

Nikon D40 vs D80 by Allen Qu

The only problems with the D80 from a D40 perspective are related to size. First of the camera is quite a bit bigger (522g vs 668g a.k.a. 0.74l vs 1.04l) but the image file sizes are also considerably bigger (6MP vs 10MP a.k.a. 5.5mb vs 12.4mb). Still, I take it you chose for this when considering an upgrade, and realize that most DSLR cameras are actually of the same or similar size.

Additional links

Nikon D40 vs Nikon D50 vs Nikon D80 specification on DPReview.com

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Big Nikon Comparison: D40 vs D50 vs D80

When, where, what, how?

So the idea is to have a photo themed, BarCamp-like, unconference, somewhere in Q1 2009. The photo theme will extend to everything related to photography, ranging from the actual photography, to third party services that provide creative outlets for your photography, to law and copyright. We want to get people from as many different photography and photography-related areas to come and attend.

While it being a BarCamp style event, I doubt we need to make it a true BarCamp with a sleepover (unless demand says otherwise), but I still have to figure out if we want to make it a one or two day event. I think one day should be enough but if we can get enough people attending and a big enough venue two days might just be possible.

Attending

The most important thing that anyone interested in PhotoCampLondon can currently do is put their name (or pseudonym) on the PhotoCampLondon wiki so that we can get a rough estimate of how many people are interested in this event. I also set up a blog on the PhotoCampLondon site so subscribe to that RSS for more news.

Organising, Sponsors, and Venues

The second most important thing you can do is help out organising this event. There is already a few great people helping out, creating a permanent look for the website and designing a real logo, but we need more. The most important thing for now is to probably be able to get our hands on a venue, but I think that highly relies on first getting some fix on the number of people that might want to attend.

Finally, we’re looking to get in contact with as many potential sponsors to see in how far they are interested. We’re not just looking for random sponsors to pay for food and t-shirts, but also for sponsors interested to bring valuable knowledge and hardware to the event. it would be great if it would be possible to get some major market players to come and give a large group some kind of workshop.

Further Information

If you want to know more about PhotoCampLondon, have a look at the site or contact me on cristiano[at]photocamplondon.org.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Announcing: PhotoCampLondon

Still, we want to share those photos somewhere without forcing people to subscribing to them, and as Flickr is really bad at doing this in one account we had to setup a joint second account. The second account will be used with less filtering than our normal accounts and include large bursts of photos that we might twitter about or blog about.

So go and have a look at it, but certainly do not add it as a contact if you don’t want to see dozens of photos from some conference floating by.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Joint Flickr Account

Click through to the photo on Flickr, and then the 2 photos from Kelly and Melinda to see the effect. I am thinking of maybe trying to do a similar concept with even more photographer, possibly covering a bigger area.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Photographing the Photographer

Ace 5 by Joe Baynham

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Young Talent

In the process of making this page I decided to revisit an older photo of me on the first day that I had my Nikon D40. I like it a lot better this way:

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Revisited

Photo by Carlo Nicora

I must admit, I am a horrible person to take photos of. As a photographer I am way to aware of when someone is making a photo, leading to less than spontaneous results. Carlo (and Fabiana) made some very nice photos though, and I will slowly pick them and upload them here in time.

Thank you Carlo and Fab, you are great photograhers!

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day: Trust

Photographing in Public

As the above video seems to explain, in public anyone is allowed to make photographs of anyone. And then there are grey areas like train stations where even though not being completely public spaces photography can not be completely prohibited. It seems that most of the fuss has been created by the anti terrorism propaganda politics that have made everyone to paranoid to feel comfortable to take photos.

Model Releases

But what about taking photos of people and selling them? In the US any photo that features a person needs to be signed of on by the model with a so called model release form. But as we know, the UK is not quite the US (yet) and as far as I can understand a model release is not required to use a photo in a commercial publications. As Glyn put it to me yesterday: if it where, how would paparazzi then still be in business? 

Obviously there are a few little caveats with this, the main one being the concern of defamation. Let’s say I take a photo of a guy, and a marketing agency uses his head in an advertisement for male incompetence? This kind of defamation does require a model release because of the nature of the commercial use. 

It’s unclear to me though who is responsible for this release form. Let’s say I put all my photo on Flickr under a free license and a company does an ad like described before. Who is liable for not getting a model release form, the photographer, or the marketing agency?

International Complications

And then comes the problem with different international laws. As we said before, the US is not the UK, and a model release is required across the pond. So if a US company assumes my free license includes a release form, who’s responsible? 

Obviously most companies tend to make sure their photographers did get the model release forms, but I have to admit that I can’t see most photographers take on the marketing agency’s lawyer firm to prove his innocence.

Precautions 

So, for now, as a precaution I’ve added a few lines to my Flickr profile stating the details of my license, and warning anyone that I did not get a signed model release form from anyone. I have no idea if this is in any way legally binding but it might at least be a sign of good intent.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photographer Rights in the UK?

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Zombies!

1400×900 - 1280×960

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My First Wallpaper

Today I stumbled upon CoolIris, which I then learned was the new name of PicLens. The application has really grown a lot since I last tried it. It now has a very intuitive semi-3D UI, it can load photos from various sites, videos from YouTube, allows you to browse Amazon, and even has an iPhone app. 

Here is a little video that shows what it can do within Flickr. 

The app is freely available, and totally worth installing.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Cool Flickr with CoolIris

I shot this photo last Sunday and didn’t intend to capture the bee in mid-air. This was the second time though that I caught something in mid air (first time here) and I thought it might be a theme worth sticking with. So I created a “caught in the air”-set on Flickr and will be trying to add more stuff in the future.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Caught in the Air

After a few tweets and an email to some people at the BBC, the BBC told me that they did attribute to my photo in the ALT tag of the photo. Soon realizing that this might have been a bit of a relaxed implementation of attribution they quickly added my name under the photos.

I though that this was where this story ended until this morning Paul Downey wrote an interesting article “On The Vanity of Demanding Attribution”. He has some interesting views on the CC licenses, photographers requiring attribution, and the reasons we ask for attribution. I found his article interesting and added an extensive comment on my view of the situation. The main gist of my comment was that if the BBC had asked to use my photos without attribution, I would probably have let them.

I came to the conclusion that for most people, attribution has two sides: an external ego building factor that brings you link traffic and better Google rankings, and an internal ego factor that says you want to know what happened to your photos.

In my case I put the attribution license with my photos because this is the “common denominator” license that fits with most people using my photos. This does not mean that I’m not open to give a different license when requested. In the end though I want know that someone used my photos, no matter what. Not so I can keep control, but simply because I want to know. Notification for the sake of internal ego pleasing, not external.

So maybe there is a place for a CC license that requires notification, not attribution. We could maybe link Flickr up with some trackback system to make this easier, who knows. I hope that in the future people will read my Flickr profile page before using my photos as it really clearly states how I think an attribution should be done.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - The Vanity of Demanding Notification

Photo by Alper

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Tilt Shift

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Work

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Moo Stickers

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Great Photographers

You can see more photos take by this lens by others in this Flickr group.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – 50mm 1.8

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Pirates!

Somehow Ian is on to me, not sure why

James and Ryan gave us some improv lessons

We had a “Bring Your Own Gadgets” sessions in which quite a few people played with others’ gadgets

Reinier brought his RC helicopter

Ahh, this is why Ian was on to me: I kept making humiliating photos of him!

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - BarcampLondon5 @ eBay

Below is Safari3, or how I would like to call it “how it ought to be” and above is Firefox3 or “the f’ed up version”. As we can see Firefox3 shows images with way less contrast, with a bit of a grey overlay. So I did a quick call on Jaiku and Twitter and came across this post that explains that color profiles are off by default in Firefox. 

For those who don’t know what color profiles are, read up on wikipedia about color management:

In digital imaging systems, color management is the controlled conversion between the color representations of various devices, such as image scanners, digital cameras, monitors, TV screens, film printers, computer printers, offset presses, and corresponding media.

Firefox3 does have an option to turn color profiles on, but it is turned off by default for “performance reasons”. I think this is bollocks and everyone should always see photos as the creator intended so I decided to turn them on.

The hard way of doing this involves editing some configuration in about:config but an easier way is to install this plugin instead.

So go and do this now and make sure you get to see my, and other people’s photos the way they should look.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Things Anyone Should Do: Enable Firefox Color Profiles

Crazy Kitten? // Nikkor 50mm 1.4 by Merlijn Hoek

Bonus Photo

Talking about kittens, this dude has an entire selection of air born cats.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day – Kittah!

Today a photo from Melinda, who has been playing around a lot with the Nikon D40 lately and managed to create some great shots. This one she took during our trip to Dorset.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo of the Day

The Cooldown

Made it to #284

Blackfriars Bridge Train

Made it to #274

The Constant Reader – Part 2

Made it to #485

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - More of My Photos in Flickr Explore

I won’t be blogging much more about BarcampBrighton3, but Melinda has a massive post up on almost every session that I attended.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - BarcampBrighton3 Slides – Photo Histograms

Bookmarklet

Here is the new Histogram bookmarklet. It is 99% the same but next to some bug fixes the only new feature is that it now has a workaround to allow you to get a Histogram on photos from people on Flickr who have licensed their photos as “All Rights Reserved”.

Webservice

One of the first things I heard from someone is to make this into a Ubiquity plugin. It made me realize that I really have 2 products here: a webservice and a bookmarklet that calls the webservice. So in contrary to my last post I decided it would be cool to see what other services we could build on this webservice.

To make this work I added some important changes to the webservice. Most importantly it now caches the output for 24 hours! This makes stuff way faster if you include a histogram in a blog post that gets a few hits a day.

Secondly I added a height parameter. There is no height parameter as images are always 2:1. Main reasons for this being that it just looks better, and Google Chart API apparently has a limit of maximum 300.000 pixels per chart. Setting a fixed ratio therefore makes stuff easier. The max width allowed is 385 (making the largest image 385×770 = 296.450 pixels).

Improvements

According to a few people, the histograms don’t always look like they are supposed to. I find this interesting as I don’t really see why that would be. I still invite people to look at the code and tell me.

Secondly I have heard about some people having problems in IE6 or 7. I tried IE7 this afternoon but couldn’t figure out how to bookmark a bookmarklet. If someone know, please tell me. I will look at IE6 tomorrow.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Histograms Update

Admittedly, Flickr still has a great community consisting mainly of photography enthusiasts, but us enthusiasts are more often than not noticing that our regular friends and family prefer other tools to share their photos. To most people, the photos of a birthday or christmas party are not photos they want to show off to the world, but photos they want to share with their friends and family, who are in the photos.

And this is where sites like Facebook come in and do so much more of a social service than Flickr does. On Facebook you can share your photos with friends just like on Flickr, but you can also tag people inside the photos, allowing people to browse profiles through photos. Who hasn’t ever “faved” a photo of themselves on Flickr simply because there is no other way to keep track of the photos that you are in? Flickr desperately needs features like Facebook’s to stay on par.

Example of tagging people in photos

But not all hope is lost for Flickr. At the core Facebook is not a photo sharing site, while Flickr clearly is with over 2 billion hosted photos. It will take some proper innovation though to convince the regular photographer to see the use of Flickr. Here are some of the new tricks Flickr could learn itself to enable their social revolution.

• Remixing – Currently I can post my photos in sets, collections and groups; I can even edit them using their integrated Picnik tool. So why can’t I do all of this with somebody else’s photos? The web has become more and more about remixing, and admittedly Flickr has a great API that will allow you to remix outside of their site, but why can’t we do any remixes within Flickr? I can already make up a few mixes to start of with: a set with all photos of me made by other people, a set of the top 500 best panoramas on Flickr (according to me), and that photo by John that was released under a Creative Commons license that I edited to a smaller crop and black and white.
• People Tagging – As I said, people tagging in photos is one of the main reasons people use Facebook to share photos. Flickr already has a good tagging system setup, and people tagging could probably be easily achieved by some machine tags (triples) representing the Flickr UserID and the position in the photo. If they could build a nice interface around it, it will be the most used feature in no-time.
• Contact Groups – Flickr allows you to tag your contacts as just a contact, a friend, family, or friend and family. This was pretty cool when it came out, but since then surpassed in functionality by many a social network. Where for example do I put my colleagues in this system? It is clear that if Flickr wants to go social, it needs to provide people a bit more granularity on who they want to share what photo with.
• Better integration with other social services – Flickr, like most other popular Web2.0 services, has a great API that will allow other services to integrate Flickr with them. But like most Web2.0 services with an API, they often fail to treat other services as they expect to be treated themselves. One of the good examples is their so-called integration with Upcoming.org. To link photos to an Upcoming event, I can go to Upcoming, find the event, get the machine tag, go back to Flickr, and add the tag. Why can’t Flickr know what my most recent Upcoming events were and give me a nice drop down list on Flickr? This should be fairly easy as both Upcoming.org and Flickr are owned by Yahoo and require a Yahoo login. Now imagine the possibilities with other non Yahoo services.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Did Flickr Miss the Social Revolution?

One of my common things I like to do when judging a photo is to have a look at the photo’s histogram. Unfortunately to do so, you need to download the photo, load it into your favorite photo application and then look at the graph. This gets a bit tedious if you want to do it quite often.

So I decided to make my own solution that will work in any browser. I have some experience with bookmarklets, and as they are highly cross-browser they looked like the way to go. Unfortunately most browser do not support the next generation CSS/Javascript that will allow for the histogram data to be read out in the browser only, so I had to extend the concept with some server side code. It all worked out though, and after less than a day coding I now have a working system.

Server Side Code

The server side part is a PHP script that parses the photo’s pixels and generates a nice graph using the Google Chart API. The service returns a javascript function when run in the bookmarklet but it can also be called as a service to generate a image or a html block. Here is an example of an image and it’s equivalent histogram created via the server side script.

The url of the photo is 

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3122/2806124294_08cc5efc74.jpg

And the url of the corresponding histogram is

http://histogram.cristianobetta.com/?type=image&rgb=true&image=

http://farm4.static.flickr.com/3122/2806124294_08cc5efc74.jpg

As you can see, the histogram script takes 4 parameters. The image parameter defines the image to be parsed. This can be either a jpg, png, or gif file. The rgb parameter let’s you choose between a grayscale or rgb histogram. A grayscale histogram for this image would look like this.

Finally the type parameter let’s you choose between an image (like the examples above), html object (image pre-wrapped in a img html object) or a piece of Javascript (js, callable as getSrc()). 

Since September 3rd 2008 the service also take a width parameter. For more info see the end of this post.

The Bookmarklet 

The web service gets more powerful when we add a nice bookmarklet. I wanted to be able to load the histogram for any image on the web with just a few clicks. So, I decided to make a bookmarklet that loads a simple GUI, prompts you to click the image you want to analyze, and then shows you the histogram. The result was a bit more code than I hoped for but more solid than I expected. I think the easiest way to show you how it works is with a video.

Download

So enough talking, I guess you want to try it yourself. Drag this bookmarklet into your bookmarks bar and try it out. 

If you really like the service, I would appreciate if you would install your own version of the server side script on your own server, simply because it will save me bandwidth feel free to use the webservice and bookmarklet as much as you want. You can also decide to download the webservice to your own host if you want to.  When installed on your own server, change the host variable in the bookmarklet to point to your own server and all should be fine.

The source of both the server side script and the bookmarklet are available to anyone who wants to play with them and released under GPL2.

Download as Zip

Improvements

There are still a few things that need to be worked out. I invite anyone to have a look at the code and help me out. Some of the main improvements currently are:

• Caching – Currently nothing is cached. A little bit of caching would make things way less bandwidth demanding. This has been implemented since September 3rd, 2008. Javascript, image, and HTML output is now by default cached for 24 hours.
• Custom size – Currently the server side script returns a fixed size image, but it would be arbitrary to allow the bookmarklet to send the parameters defining the size. I added a simple height parameter that is optional. Images will always have a aspect ratio of 2:1 as this makes histograms look better, plus it makes it easier to oblige to Google Chart API’s demand of staying under 300.000 pixels. Therefore the max height you can specify is 385 pixels (making the image 385×770, or 296.450 pixels).
• Correct Histogram Calculation – I don’t think that I’m far off at the moment, but I might have scaled some of the histograms just slightly off from what it is supposed to look like. I need to read up on how histograms are generated in pro-tools.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo Histograms Everywhere!

I am almost done uploading the photos that I took. Dorset is simply gorgeous and I had to limit myself to the amount of photos I could upload. Here are some of the best picks though.

We went to the Melplash show and had a look at the animals. Never been to a show like this but I really enjoyed it.

During the show they had some parachutists drop in, but unfortunately we were standing in the smoke created by the orientation-flare.

I also tried my hand at some HDR to capture the beauty of the country side, and I think they worked out pretty well. I love especially how the next one doesn’t look too much like a HDR.

The village of West Bay in HDR. Quite gorgeous.

These cliffs look like they are made of gold. Wish I could have taken them with me to make more photos of at home.

Durdle Door. Absolutely amazing. The walk to it is quite a joy too.

Besides HDR I also tried my hand at some panorama’s. They worked out quite nice too.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Geeks in the Country

There are some other solutions that do this but they require you to load the image in a different site, and I thought a bookmarklet could probably do the work faster as it doesn’t need to reload the photo. There was an issue that I bumped in though: quite a few elements on Flickr are white images, which can’t be changed to black. 

So I decided on a different take: hide the Flickr GUI elements, append a new element, load the image in it on black, and show it to the user. This seems to work at the moment with the below bookmarklet.

Flickr on Black

Go to any Flickr photo page, and press the bookmarklet. It should load a black screen with the photo. Either pressing the “Back to Flickr” or the bookmarklet again would bring you back to Flickr in white.

There are two major issues at the moment, The one is critical and that is that somehow mouse overlays, menus, and other items in the Flickr GUI, don’t seem to work after use of this bookmarklet. I don’t know why at the moment so please let me know if you do.

Secondly I would love for the script to autoload a larger sized image for you, as that makes viewing even more pleasant.

So, think you can help, let me know. The source can be found here:“Flickr On Black” source

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Flickr On Black Bookmarklet

After less than half an hour of editing I had version 1, which I threw away and quickly redid a version 2 in a few minutes which can be seen below together with the original.

I think it all worked out pretty well but wanted to challenge myself, so I decided to try and colorize the photo. This is what I ended up with.

Admittedly not my best work but we need to make mistakes to learn. I might recolorize it somewhere in the future, but as my mom as happy with the results I might not bother for a while.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Photo Restoration

I also had about 600 photos to get sorted, most from before my Apple trouble, and have been slowly uploading the best to Flickr. Here is some of my today’s submissions.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Back to work

Moo Cards

Made it to #441

Kisser’s Embrace

Made it to #139 and is still listed

The Tumbler on the Red Carpet

Made it to #247 and is still listed

Maggie Gyllenhaal on the Red Carpet

Made it to #371

A Squirrely Afternoon

Made it to #435 and is still listed

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - My Photos in Flickr Explore

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Moo Summer Party

I have been taking up photography a bit more seriously again recently, inspired by Carlo and his great photos. I started a little set with street photography from which this picture (Kisser’s Embrace) has been quite popular.

I am now trying to post at least 1 fairly decent photo a day, just to keep improving my skills.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Street Photography

Yesterday my first batch of (free) Moo Classic sized cards arrived. They are quite a bit bigger than the Moo Mini cards I normally cary around, and they are ideal for showing off your photography skills on the backside. Add to that the fact that you can add loads of text on the other side and this makes for the ideal “proper business card”.

I can’t see me using them though, except for maybe when I’m on a photography job, or in a meeting with a VC. The box that they come in is very nice and handy, but simply to big and bulky to log around. My mini cards are just so much more nimble.

If you want to try these out, go to the LinkedIn sponsored (limited time!) offer and order yours.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Moo Classic Cards

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - The Dark Knight Premiere

The code is: egg74J7Y

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Moo Greetings Cards Discount

I attended a few talks including giving one myself on “Voluntary Economies” (more in a moment). During the day I visited quite a few talks, including:

• Barcamp Ephemera (by Ryan Alexander) – A quick and funny introduction to Barcamp
  
• Arduino Introduction – I got to play with an Arduino board to get a led light to pulse on and off with increasing/decreasing speeds. And all of that within 45 minutes. I need to buy an Arduino board and do something cool now.
  
• Open Rights Group (by Glyn Wintle) – A nice talk by Glyn on how the ORG prevents the UK government from making even more mistakes than they already do. His talks are always good for some interesting anecdotes.
  
• How to : Uncricket (by Melinda, Emma, and Patricia) – What i thought would be a lame talk by the girls on how to play something without rules that they had come up with in Berlin last year, turned out to be a lot of fun. It did lead to some bruises and swollen tongs though.
  
• The Origins of Design Patterns – What town planning, poetry and design patterns have in common
• Summer 2008 movie trailers (by Melinda Seckington) – Mel did a nice talk by simply showing all the coolest trailers of the summer movies on the big screen, with nice surround sound.
• Wine and Cheese (no really, eating and drinking) by Emma Persky – I think the title says it all. Good wine though and I could use some cheese by then.
  
• High-performance scalable web apps with memcached (by Marco) – Interesting talk on what memcached is exactly and how it can make your site so much faster.
• Ask the BBC ANYTHING! (by Ian Forrester, Sheila Thomson, Dan Morris) – Interesting discussion on the BBC, the fun they and we are having with the iPlayer, and the future of the BBC in general
• Delicious Pecha Kucha (by Tom Morris) – Pecha Kucha style session where people got to explain a random 5 of their last 20 del.icio.us bookmarks as they showed up on screen. I didn’t present as I was afraid it would be way to boring.

As i said I also did a talk myself on “Voluntary Economies” and the talk went pretty well. For most part I stole the slides from Alper and Reinier who gave a similar talk before during BarcampLondon3 and BarcampAmsterdam3, and I probably should have prepared a bit better. Still, people seemed to love it and we filled the 45 minutes with ease. Here are the slides:

Finally I made a few photos. I had a play with Mark Ng’s Sigma 30mm F1.4 HSM which resulted in some very nice photos during the uncricket session. I really need to get this lens, so can someone donate me £200 ?

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Looking Back at BarcampBrighton2

We also tried to stream the talk, but the “The Cloud”-hotspot died after about 10 minutes making even normal internet communication impossible. Maybe next time. Improbulus recorded most of the talk though, which is actually interesting to listen at if you weren’t there. Click through to the full article to see the video.

Originally posted on Cristiano on Tech/Life - Looking Back on the Geek Dinner on DataPortability (with Photos and Video)