Oooooh!

Whose media lab is now stuffed with seven shiny new Apple iMac compooters?

Norwich Arts Centre's! That's whose!



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone and image fiddled with using the Tilt Shift app, lovely!

Calibrating your screen

Here's something that came up the other day on the Go Manual SLR course.

Problem: Your images aren't printing out the way they look on your computer screen, they're too bright or dark, or the colours are wrong. Or your images look way brighter on your screen than they did on the LCD of your SLR.

Solution: Ah! If it were that easy… Calibrating your printer so that what comes out of it is the same as what you see on screen is the trickier part of this, and one day I'll do a post about that, especially if the Arts Centre buys the pro printer they've been umming and ahing about for a while.

Calibrating your computer screen is very much easier and is something you should do right now. If you use an Apple Mac, it's easy. Go to System Preferences>Displays, then select the Color tab, then click on the Calibrate… button and follow the instructions. It will take you through step-by-step, and at the end you will probably notice your screen appears darker. Colours should be more accurate. This is how I have calibrated my screen, and when I print (using the online service Photobox) the colours match pretty well.

If you use a PC with Windows XP, then things are a little more complicated. Here's a link which explains it better than I could, mainly because I don't use PCs, and they frighten me. If you're using a PC with Windows 7, here's a link for that, and it looks a lot easier. If you're using Vista (ouch!) you might want to try this free software, QuickGamma. I can't vouch for it, I've never used it, but it looks like it deals with XP, Vista and Windows 7.

Is monitor calibration a nightmare? Yes. But you just wait until you start worrying about printer calibration. I don't even go there. I use Photobox.

Big bad wolf

I'm always reading scary stories about wolves to my three-year-old. Here's one [click here] for all you aspiring wildlife photography competition winners…



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Megapixels,the New War!

The 2010 courses have started here at the Norwich Arts Centre with the Further Adventures in SLR course on Monday morning, and I've just finished teaching the Go Manual course this morning.

On Monday, the subject of megapixels came up. It's a digital photography old chestnut of a topic, if we can have such a thing, that has been raging for at least three years. See this article from the New York Times, by ace technology writer David Pogue, for evidence of that. It was written in February 2007!

And now we have the full-frame Canon 5D Mark II with 21 megapixels and the crop-frame Canon 7D with 18 MP, while Nikon has the full-frame D3X with 24.5 MP. Interestingly, Nikon's latest offering, the full-frame D3S, has a mere 12.1 MP. So while Canon have gone megapixel mad, Nikon, it seems, are reigning back.

Perhaps it might be more helpful to consider pixel density. Striking a balance between how many pixels (or photosites) a sensor has, against how much space each of them has to itself might give us a better indication of likely image quality. Higher density is likely to mean more noise, but more MPs means better resolution. But there is a limit to the resolving power of the eyeball and brain, beyond which greater resolution from MPs becomes a bit pointless.

And so, those MP density readings are (drum roll):

Canon 5D Mark II - 2.4 MP sq

Canon 7D - 5.4 MP sq

Nikon D3X - 2.8 MP sq

Nikon D3S - 1.4 MP sq

So the Nikon D3S is the winner of the New Megapixel War! Density Wars!

Just for comparison, the Canon 40D comes in at 3.1 MP sq, the 400D is also 3.1 MP sq. The Nikon D40 is 2.7 MP sq, the D90 is 3.3 MP sq. All data comes from the excellent spoddy technohead camera website www.dpreview.com where you can find out the MP density of your camera in seconds.

Does any of this matter? Well, an image can be as sharp as a razor, but if it's not interesting I won't look at it for long. I'd rather look at the fuzzy, out of focus shots taken on a camera given away for free and is held together with Sellotape and rubber bands two MPs.

Heigham Park

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Unsharpened snow

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Sharpened snow

Sharpened and levels adjustment done in Photogene. Also slight warming.



- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Snow is grey…

…even on an iPhone!

The first picture was taken straight off the phone, the second has been corrected afterwards, using a little app called Photogene. There's going to be more of this over the next few days.





- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Cold Polaroid II

- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Cold

And more on the way…


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

iPhone camera