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Archive: Photography

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May 13, 2007

Take digital photos through a microscope

There's a way to take photos through a microscope, telescope, or binoculars with a regular digital camera and no special lense adapter. The trick is to use the macro mode on your camera. With a bit of positioning and focus tweaking, you should be able to get a clear photo. If you use a tripod with your camera, you can set it up once and continue taking additional shots - Link.

May 5, 2007

String Tripod

Taking photographs at a slow shutter speed can really benefit from the camera stabilization afforded by a tripod, but often times lugging around and setting up a tripod isn't so practical. The string tripod is an old photographer's trick that will give you a reasonable amount of stabilization, while still allowing you quite a bit of rotational freedom of movement.

Oh, and it costs under $5 to make, sets up quickly, and will easily fit in your camera bag.

String Tripod - Link.

April 13, 2007

Gimp Running Natively in OS X

A lot of progress has been made toward porting the GTK+ library to OS X, and recently intructions went up on how to build Gimp for native OS X operation. That's right, without X11 getting in your way. It's still not ready for prime time, but I'm really excited about where it's going. If you're a programmer and have some brain cycles to spare, this might be a fun project to contribute to.

How To Compile Gimp for Mac OS X -[via] Link.

April 11, 2007

AppleScripts for Adjusting iPhoto Dates

If you've ever forgotten to set your camera's clock or adjust the time for daylight savings time, you probably know what a nuisance it is to manually correct your photo's timestamps. Joe Maller addressed this problem by writing a few AppleScripts that allow you to shift and reset dates and times for album photos in iPhoto. This could save you a lot of time if you need to correct the dates on several photos at once. After you've installed the tools, you just select images within iPhoto and run the script from the menu bar.

Joe's iPhoto AppleScripts -Link.

March 26, 2007

Picasa Data API

Take a peek at Google's new GData API for Picasa. In addition to providing RSS feeds for albums, tagged photos and user comments, you can use the API to add and remove photos, albums, comments and tags from your own applications. This might be a nice way to manage image data (and offload image storage) within a web app.

Resources:

March 15, 2007

Roll Your Own Flickr

Custom Flickr

Paul Bausch has finished rolling his own Flickr substitute and just wrapped up his first round of extra features, including support for EXIF data, syndication, and tagging.

If you're just joining us, Paul's been rewriting his personal photoblogging and software from scratch and documenting the process. Here are all the posts in his OTFG (Off the Flickr Grid) series:

When the Flickr community is all abuzz at the news of six layout options for Pro users, it's inspiring to see someone designing his own infinitely flexible system from the ground up to suit his own needs. As a die-hard Flickr user, I'm already jealous of Paul's black background.

Related:

Flickr Hacks

March 14, 2007

Control a Nikon Camera from Your Computer

I thought putting my camera on a tripod and using the timed shot was a good trick for gadget close-ups, but this is tons more fun. Nikon's Camera Control Pro ($79, 30 day trial available) lets you remotely control a compatible camera from your computer. I can't figure out how to do a preview, but it's still really helpful; it lets you do a lot more than just trigger the shutter. You have access to most of the configurable features of the camera.

Are there similar tools out there for other cameras? Let us know in the comments.

Nikon Camera Control Pro Trial Posted - Link
Nikon Updates Camera Control Pro to v1.3.0 - Link

Related:

Digital Photography Hacks

February 23, 2007

Skitch It

Skitch

Plasq, the company that brought us the fun and useful Comic Life that now ships with all new Macs, recently released a new product in private beta. Skitch is:

a refreshingly simple application that lets you easily resize your photos, jot down a quick sketch, take a lightning fast screen capture and share images online...

This looks like a lot of fun. I tried registering for their mailing list but encountered some trouble with their captcha. Anyone have any personal experiences to report? I can't wait to get my hands on it.

(Via Merlin, who appears to be one of the early beta testers)

February 9, 2007

Turn Off iPhoto's Auto-Import

Make Magazine 0002
It freaks me out when any application does any thing automatically when media is inserted - a DVD, CD, camera, storage card - it doesn't matter, I don't like it. Perhaps it's because every auto-run type thing on my PCs were just attempts to install some weird software to do something awful. So, if you don't want iPhoto to automatically open when you insert a card or camera on your Mac just open up "Image Capture" and disable it in the preferences. I figured this would be in iPhoto, but it's not, so perhaps this is helpful for someone, or the Google.