Category: Photography

Discussions about photography and photo galleries.

Slide Shows for Vertical Aspect Images

I have a couple of mini-PC systems that I use to display images in a slide show. One of these systems displays these slides on a 4K monitor and I’ve recently gotten a more modern one for that purpose. Post for that is upcoming soon.

Using these systems to display images of 16:9 Aspect is no problem and most images captured by cameras and cellphones and screen shots from games are of this or approximately this aspect. I use Irfanview on Windows, and the built in image viewer on Linux.

Slide Show of Game Screenshots

However, showing slide shows of vertically aspect images is less than ideal. Too much of the screen is left black to be pleasing to the eye.

Vertical Aspect Image Slide Show

When a large number of images like these are presented, it would be better to be able to quickly make a slide show that shows more than one image at a time on the screen.

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Flir C2 Thermal Camera

I’ve been wanting a Thermal Camera for a while and finally got around to doing some research and the Flir C2 seemed to be a good one to start with. It has the option to take a normal light picture with the thermal image. Once charged up and with the settings changed for F rather than C, here are some pics to start with.

Should be an interesting tool.

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Smart Remote Control for Sony Cameras

Sony Nex-6
Sony Nex-6

I’ve had my Sony Nex-6 camera for a while now. I got mine in 2014, but the camera has been out since 2012 and it’s probably been superseded by other models. I noticed on one of the news sites I scan that the Smart Remote App for Sony cameras has been updated, so I thought I should try to get it running. To review, this app allows almost full control over the camera from a tablet or smart phone using an application over WiFi. The android app is here.

I should have kept my camera firmware up to date so I had some glitches getting the camera updated to V 1.03 so that I could run the Smart Remote Control. If you have an older Sony Alpha camera, you might want to follow along to avoid running into issues.

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HDR with the Sony Nex6

Fusion Sum Result
Fusion Sum Result

The primary requirement I had for the purchase of the Sony Nex6 was that it shoot raw to allow processing of the photos to bring out shadows and compress highlight areas in the same photo. HDR – High Dynamic Range – combines photos taken at different exposures to provide the ability to represent both very light and very dark areas in the same JPG image. Raw saves the wider dynamic range data from the sensor to accomplish the same thing. Which is better?

I shot a series of bracketed images in both JPG and Raw and processed them with HDR software and RawTherapee to find out which is better. Beware of clicking on these images. They are the full size images from the camera and can take a while to download.

The photo above was built from JPG bracketed images using Fusion 1 SUM. It shows a typical flatness and lack of saturation of some HDR photos. I was able to get much better results using PictureNaut.

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RawTherapee – Suggest Easy Way to Compare Images

A90_00301When you are working on a new set of images you need to figure out which ones to use and which ones to toss. This is based on a few things of course, and many of the reasons are easily seen by looking at the image by itself, or comparing the image with the FilmStrip above. It’s almost never enough to just look at the File Browser thumbnail array to cull images.

If you are like me, you often take a few shots from a single spot of a scene. You vary crop, zoom, and exposure, and maybe other settings or just take a couple because the camera may have moved slightly and blurred the shot. So when you get home and start to process these images there are a few to choose from.

At this point, RawTherapee has no easy way to compare images. The current modes are Single Editor and Multiple Editor. Neither of these accomplishes what I need.

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Sony Nex6 – OMG It’s Small

Sony Nex6 vs Nikon D300
Sony Nex6 vs Nikon D300

Just got my Sony Nex6. OMG it’s small. I am amazed. This is not a review, those are easy to find out there. This is just my first impressions. I’m coming from a long history of SLRs and DSLRs. Olympus OM-1 in 1977, Nikon 90S 1995, D70 2004, D300 2008 – to preserve my Nikon lens investment. And later a 18-200 VR lens. A couple of years ago I got bored with photography, mostly because the camera was just too heavy to lug around. I’ve been using Nikon Coolpix and more recently a Pentax WG-II which is great on sandy beaches and rain storms. But I missed shooting raw. Recently I went looking for an updated Raw camera. I’d heard that the Sony Alpha series was a break through camera series with no mirror or penta-prism. Smaller, lighter and cheaper.

Well my first impression is that I can get excited about photography again.

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RawTherapee – First Impressions

A90_00301
RawTherapee is a photo processing and organization program. I have used Adobe Lightroom a few years / versions ago. I used RT a couple of years ago, but not carefully.

I have upgraded my systems to SSD system disks, and if you have SSDs there are somethings that you’ll need to do before you start using RT.

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Digital Foci Photo Elite – Photo Backup Device Review

As you may know from reading other posts here or from checking out my photo site, I use a Nikon D300 and a Nikon S550 camera. I have about 16GB of CF cards for my D300 and an 8GB SD card for my S550, but these are not enough for a week long vacation where I’m going to be taking quite a few pictures. For past trips, like the trip I took to Boise, ID for a week, I have taken my older laptop with me. And while on that trip I bought a 160GB USB hard drive as a second backup device. As you can imagine, a laptop is not a convenient device to carry on a trip.

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Custom Photobooks For Sale

Purchase high quality 12″x16″ [30x42cm] photo books with 20-99 high resolution pictures from this site. Prices start at $100 for 20 pictures minimum and $5/picture after that, plus shipping. You can pay with PayPal.

These are high quality bound books with full page size pictures. You choose which pictures from my site are in your book.
[Click for larger view of these images]

Photo Book
Photo Book

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Panoramas of the South Slough

I’ve taken some panoramas of the South Slough National Estuarine Research Reserve ( SSNERR ). The SSNERR is a tidal wetlands park and research station in Charleston, OR. The park is about 5000 acres.

SSNERR panorama Panoramas

The skunk cabbage is in full leaf, although by now the flowers are all gone. Don’t forget to click on the pictures for a full size image. The images are about 6000 pixels wide in full size. If rendered at highest quality, some of these pictures would be over 20,000 pixels wide.

More information on the SSNERR and the entire NERR system can be found here: SSNERR home page

enjoy.