PM Gives Police Okay to Prohibit Photography

January 13th, 2009 by hobbyphotographer 1 comment »

Number 10 responded earlier today to an online petition calling for a clarification of photographers’ rights.

The office of the Prime Minister posted the response on Number10.gov.uk – the official blog of the office.

This virtually gives the police carte blanche to hassle people pointing cameras in public places. As I read it, it’s saying “of course it’s legal to take pictures in public places, unless a policeman or policewoman decide otherwise.”

While a less-than-judiciously applied breach of the peace arrest may get thrown out by a magistrate, the hassle and humiliation of being arrested may be enough to instil a sense of unease in photographers every time they point a camera.

Hobbyist already feel uneasy having a camera out when there are kids around, or near government buildings, in spite of it being perfectly legal.

This strikes me as being another instance of slowly chipping away civil rights at worst, or maybe just Number 10 allowing the executive branch a bit more public muscle flexing. Neither is very good news for beleaguered hobby photographers.

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Fotopic Directors Issue Public Statement

January 5th, 2009 by hobbyphotographer No comments »

Snappy Designs Ltd released an official statement regarding the weekend-long outage.

STATEMENT FROM SNAPPY DESIGNS LTD, 5TH JANUARY 2009

Dear Fotopic User,

On Friday 2nd January 2008 photo sharing site Fotopic.net suffered a
core equipment failure while upgrading the server and network
capacity. As a result of this the Fotopic.net website was unavailable
from approximately 9am on Friday 2nd January.

Despite our best efforts to resolve the situation the gallery service
remained unavailable until approximately 10:30am on Monday 5th January
2008.

As a result of this outage we are examining our hosting capability and
contingency plans, but wish to assure customers that Fotopic.net has
not ceased trading and will be enhancing its services during 2009. No
data or images have been lost during this time and all systems are
back to normal.

Additionally we will be extending Plus and Premium subscriptions by an
extra 2 weeks as a goodwill gesture.

We apologise for the situation which was ultimately out of our
control, and would like to thank customers for bearing with us.

Best regards,

The Directors
Snappy Designs Ltd trading as Fotopic.net

Joel Rowbottom created Fotopic.net as a personal photo blogging site in 1999. It grew in popularity amongst his friends and eventually became a public gallery site in 2001, jointly owned by Joel and his wife.

The couple sold the site in May 2008 to Snappy Designs Ltd.

“Snappy Designs Ltd is a company which is owned and operated by a consortium spearheaded by ANY-Web Group. No directors or shareholders are shared between the two companies (given that the directors and shareholders were myself and Nicky I can authoritatively say that!). The company had been on the market since February and we’d had some expressions of interest; Snappy were the first ones to get to the finishing line,” said Rowbottom

Fotopic accepts a million photos a month for publication, has 10 million photos live in the system. 2,500 new users every week join Fotopic, making it one of the largest UK-based gallery sites.

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Fotopic Update

January 5th, 2009 by hobbyphotographer No comments »

Transport enthusiasts gallery site Fotopic.net returned to life about an hour ago.

Support staff posted a brief statement:

Technical Issues We apologise for the extended outage this weekend which was caused by a
technical fault. There will be a full statement coming soon. Thanks for
bearing with us. (jon @ 2009-01-05 10:41:20)


The Hobby Photographer will post a full explanation as soon as site owner Snappy Designs provides it.

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Review: Samsung i8510 Camera Phone

January 4th, 2009 by hobbyphotographer No comments »

Sorting through back issues of Amateur Photographer I spotted several headlines asking if some model phone could be considered a camera.

I suspect reviews will ask this question every time a new generation of smart phones boasts new camera technology. So, is the latest generation of 8 megapixel camera phones eliminate the need for photographers to carry a point-and-shoot camera when they want to travel light?

Sony, Nokia and Samsung continue to push more camera into their smart phones, with Samsung, like Sony also a well-known camera manufacturer, leading the charge with several 8 megapixel models.

Recently Samsung released the i8510 “Innov8″ as it’s flagship smart phone. The slide form factor phone runs Symbian S60 3.2, has the usual assortment of media players and includes support for Real, DivX, and various other flavours of mpeg4, mp3, aac, wmv, and a wealth of other features. It has GPS so the camera supports geotagging.

The 8GB of internal memory and another 16GB can be added via microSD.

I find it a very capable smart phone, but want to focus mainly on the camera aspects of the phone.

Handling
As phones go, the Samsung i8510 feels heavy, but this is an advantage in holding it steady, and the black-enameled metal body looks smart and feels solid.

The i8510 uses a sliding form factor, but can be operated open or closed. To operate the camera while the phone is closed requires two buttons, which is a bit disappointing as many others, such as the Nokia N95/N96 and Sony Cypershot C905, only require one button to activate the camera mode.

I started using the i8510 closed as I thought it would feel more like using a point and shoot camera, but decided eventually I preferred using it open. It’s easier to hold and allows access to the numeric keypad, which also function as shortcuts to access various camera features.

The i8510 offers a list of “real camera” features like anti-shake and dynamic range optimisation, which both work reasonably well. However they only work when using the default settings – changes of shooting or scene modes disable those features and they have to be turned back on by accessing the advanced settings.

The camera offers the user three live-view display modes – Regular, which only displays basic menus and focus area; Indicative, which shows all the available settings; and Gridline, which shows the display divided into 3 both horizontally and vertically, to aid photographers fond of following the Rule of Thirds

The 2.8 inch 24 bit display gives a crisp preview of the photos using a 320×240 pixel or QVGA resolution.

The volume keys also work as digital zoom, but as they are situated on the opposite side from the shutter release, trying to use is quite fiddly.

The keypad shortcuts are very useful, especially for quickly turning the flash on and off, setting the timer and changing the display modes.

Image Quality

Some photographers will find it hard to accept a tiny CMOS sensor from which the camera has to extract 8 megapixels of data too noisy and low-detailed to be of any use. I disagree though.

Using low-fidelity cameras requires a bit more skill than using a point & shoot. Because of dynamic range limitations you may have to occasionally use spot metering or Ev adjustments to get the exposure right. You may sometimes find it hard to get horizons level and miss detail.

Some photographer find these limitations unacceptable but I found the images produced to be reasonable.

Like all small, budget sensors the full-scale images reveal digital fringing and somewhat messily interpolated background detail:

But these days images are rarely viewed at full size and when put the resizing interpolation or printer screen they look quite sharp and very usable.

medium sized image of a frozen pond
Original

Frost covered leaf
Original

Flowers outside a flower shop
Original

Clapham Junction at Dawn
Original

The LED flash however, looks dreadful. The LED flash created a horrible bluish cast, throws very directionally and in a beam far too narrow for the wide 28mm (equivalent) lens. Sony wisely chose to use a Xenon flash in the C905. While being far less power consumptive, I think Samsung failed badly on providing a point and shoot camera alternative by choosing LED.
Dog lit with flash

More example images from the i8510 are available here.

Conclusion

I like the camera in the i8510 and will probably find myself relying on it often. I currently use a Canon G9 as my point and shoot digital camera and an old Nikon 35ti as current favourite pocket film camera. I know a tiny sensor in a phone can never compete with the quality of those cameras. It surpasses those cameras in one area though – I always have it on me. Most of my “pocket” cameras fit in a bag better than a pocket, yes they’re light but not something you’ll grab and carry while running out the door on a quick errand.

If like me you won’t carry kit around sometimes for various reasons — going to familiar locations or just off for a walk in the park or a jog or something similar — it’s nice to have a usable camera to hand. The best pictures are the ones you actually take and I know most people always have days they wished they’d brought a camera but didn’t.

The quality of the i8510 is good enough to use for web, and in a test print, printed nicely at 4×6 and A4 on Kodak Everyday Glossy Paper. A clean, daytime shot at 8 megapixels should print well on A3 as well, but I don’t have an A3 printer on which to test.

The camera supports Pictbridge printing, which made it a breeze to print straight into my Canon Pixma IP4300.

I think the quality of the images, in most circumstances, are good enough to print and post on gallery sites. If you list a decent camera as one of the things you want from a smartphone you won’t be disappointed by the Samsung i8510.

Camera Tech Specs

  • 8 megapixels (3264×2448 pixels)
  • 5.7mm (equivalent to 28mm) / F2.6
  • autofocus
  • image stabilisation
  • face, blink and smile detection
  • video(VGA@30fps, QVGA@120fps)
  • dual-led flash
  • Camera geo-tagging
  • Pictbridge compatible
  • Business card scanner
  • TV out
  • Li-Ion 1200 mAh Battery

Camera Features

Shooting Modes:

  • Single Shot
  • Multi-Shot
  • Frame Shot
  • Mosaic Shot
  • Panorama Shot
  • Smile Shot

Scene Modes:

  • Portrait
  • Landscape
  • Sports
  • Indoor
  • Beach
  • Sunset
  • Dawn
  • Autumn Colours
  • Waves and snow
  • Night Shot
  • Against Light

Effects

  • Black & White
  • Sepia
  • Sharpen
  • Negative

Other Advanced Settings

  • ISO 50-1600
  • Matrix, Spot and Center-weighted metering
  • Wide Dynamic Range

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Fotopic Not Dead

January 4th, 2009 by hobbyphotographer No comments »

It just smells a bit funny, according to disgruntled users.

UK-based public-transport photo gallery site Fotopic.net went down at the beginning of the weekend.

The owners Snappy Design issued no statements or pointed the domain name at an informational site but former owner Joel Rowbottom (under his net persona “CapnB”) posted an explanation on protest newsgroup Former Fotopic Users:

I’ve just got off the phone after managing to track down one of the

directors of Snappy Designs. I asked them to post here but they have

declined (I reckon because they can’t get in touch with their PR

people at this hour).

Therefore here is the news as I understand it:

1. The reason it’s unavailable *is* a hardware fault with the

interface to the outside world. The gentleman I discussed the

situation with isn’t an IP engineer so was unable to give me solid

details on how it’s failed but if I can be of assistance in getting it

back up I will be – sadly the old Cisco 4000 series in my garage won’t

cut the mustard with at least a partial routemap! The router is

intentionally powered down which could mean anything from a router

failure to a cabling fault.

2. Snappy Designs is solvent – and they’re injecting more cash into it

to sort out Printshop and the rest. At that point (apparently) the

Printshop system will change somewhat and be more “automatic”. I don’t

have any more on that so please don’t ask me for further details.

3. There is a plan to give Plus/Premium users at least a fortnight

extension across the board.

4. It’s *hoped* that it will be back in the early hours of Monday

morning. I make that a 72-hour outage. I will keep track of what’s

going on and see if I can get further information tomorrow.

5. The architecture for Fotopic.net is still largely the same as when

we left in May. This means that when it comes back it should be mostly

OK – the image servers will probably take about 20 minutes to populate

their caches during which it’ll be a bit slower than usual. I have

volunteered to be on standby to help the engineers if required.

6. There will be a full statement going out to all Premium/Plus users

when it’s back, which will explain things. I did ask if they had any

plans to email their users prior to the recommencement of service but

there are no facilities to email upwards of 60,000 people without the

servers to handle it (which I can well believe, we have some

“interesting” issues emailing Yahoo people en-masse for instance). SD

said a statement will come pretty sharpish tho.

7. I’ll be having discussions with Snappy Designs about the future of

Fotopic.net, but please remember that myself and Nicky have been away

from the front-line since May (with the exception of assisting with

the odd support mail nobody else could answer, or when I’ve tried to

assist with things they didn’t understand yet). So please, please,

please, the “Mr Angry” emails have to stop or I’m going to have to put

this down again. I’m just trying to help here.

The news about the Fotopic outage will be updated as more news become available.

The Hobby Photographer also uses Fotopic.net for image hosting and looks forward to a return to service.

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Review: Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX500

December 24th, 2008 by hobbyphotographer 1 comment »

PanasonicFX500
At the end of last month Panasonic released its new flagship point-and-shoot camera, the Lumix FX-500. The camera belongs to a friend of mine, and I agonised briefly over whether or not to recommend a Canon G9 or Sigma DP-1. The Panasonic aims itself at an entirely different market – it’s a small, pocketable P&S, with no optical or external viewfinder and only shoots in jpeg instead of raw or a lossless format, though the resolution is 10 megapixels.

So it looks like Panasonic aims it new high-tech point-and-shoot at an entirely different market, but not the traditional point-and-shoot market either.

Amateur photographers I know go through a multi-fold phase of digital camera buying. They buy a dSLR to replace their 35mm SLR. Then they often realise the reason they stopped carrying the 35mm SLR was not the inconvenience of film, but the inconvenience of a bulky camera. They decide they need a point-and-shoot camera for convenience. Then they choose between highly portable, or a vaguely portable alternative to a dSLR such as the Sigma DP-1 or Canon G9. I chose the latter, but many of my friends prefer the former. I don’t blame them — there’s nothing nicer than having a fairly decent camera with you at all times that fits easily in any pocket. I end up shooting with my phone instead — my Canon G9 is a bit too bulky to carry around all the time. I think the folks who chose the former may have gotten it right. Mind, I don’t have an dSLR, so the Canon is my “big” camera in the digital world.

The Panasonic will appeal to the first group, and fit the bill very nicely indeed. It mostly features high gadget-value. It has a touch screen for one example of high gadget-value. I thought Panasonic might be going a bit gadget-gimmicky with the touch screen, but I was wrong. For one, the touch screen actually has a photographic use, and a very good one — perhaps my favourite thing about this camera. The camera features “motion detection.” It’s a great feature.

Touch an area on the screen you want the camera to expose correctly and either move the camera to compose your shot, or keep the camera still and let the subject move. The camera tracks the point you focused/exposed and keeps evaluating the focus and exposure as either you or the picture moves. I can’t think, without aid of a touch screen, how else you would make that work. It is a fantastic “gimmick” and a very helpful one. It doesn’t track fast-moving objects but I suspect in the future cameras will have the processing power to do that much better.

The fast Leica lens performs as well as you would imagine. The detail and sharpness of the optics stand out as being excellent, possibly better than on my Canon G9. There is almost no flare to speak of, very little fringing, and in spite of being a P&S, the wide end of the goes all the way to 25mm (equivalent) at F2.8.

Example1
Full-sized version of the above.

Example2

Full-sized version of the above.

The biggest limitation of the camera is the auto-exposure and post processing. It seems to have a tendancy to over-expose a bit, and it occasionally gets the sky colour wrong and the results are skies that are bit too cyan rather than natural blue.

Example3
The sky is more cyan than blue.

Example4
A good job with a difficult to expose scene but the sky is a bit over exposed and has a cyan cast.

But a slight adjustment of levels quickly fixes the exposure issues:
Example5
Full-sized version of the above.

Example6
Full-sized version of the above.

Fortunately the exposure mistakes are only occasional, and it does also get it right and produces excellent results, even with tricky unevenly-lit subjects.

Example7
Full-sized version of the above.

Example8
Full-sized version of the above.

Conclusion

In some ways I prefer carrying this camera to my Canon G9. It’s tiny, light and unobtrusive. Generally taking pictures raises a few eyebrows but I found using this camera went largely unnoticed by passersby, presumably because it wasn’t much bigger than a phone and people seem to have less reservations around phone cameras in my estimation. I enjoyed using this camera a great deal, though an optical viewfinder would have been nice. I still think like a film photographer and like to sanity check my LCD composition in a real viewfinder.

At a pound shy of £300 the FX500 is a very expensive camera, especially for one that only produces JPEGS. But I think the combination of a very-wide angle, fast Leica lens, the intelligent electronics and especially the motion-tracking feature make this an excellent camera, especially given it’s exceptional portability. Therefore it makes a great small backup camera for serious amateurs as well an good choice for anyone who just wants decent digital they can easily throw in a bag or a jacket pocket. In my estimation the thing that most often prevents people from taking good pictures is the fact they don’t feel like carrying a camera around. With such small cameras able to perform well there’s no excuse now. :-)

More sample pictures are available here.

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The Hobby Photographer’s Famous Five Minute Photography Lesson

December 24th, 2008 by hobbyphotographer 1 comment »

If you’ve just bought your first camera and want to get started taking decent looking photos quickly, the first thing you need to do is improve your composition.

Almost all modern cameras use very sophisticated metering techniques, so in 99% of situations you can rely on the camera to do the exposure correctly, so the part of photography you need to concentrate on first is composition. So, my advice is:

Keep it R.E.A.L.

Use the mnemonic R.E.A.L. to remember four of the more important composition techniques.

    Rule of Thirds
    Entire Frame
    Angles
    Leading Lines

1. Rule of Thirds

To use the Rule of Thirds for composition you have to imagine, superimposed over your frame, a noughts and crosses board:
Rule of Thirds

Place the most important bits, the things you want people to see in your picture, where the lines of the grid meet or use the horizontal lines to place your horizons in landscape shots — never put your horizons in the center of the frame, always use the rule of thirds!:
Rule of Thirds Grid

For example:
Nervi with Grid

Nervi Promenade

2. Entire Frame

When taking pictures of people and animals, never put heads in the centre. This leaves a lot of empty, “negative” space and makes the picture look cluttered instead of showing an actual study of the subject:
Better:
Riz in the Garden

Roberto

Really Bad:
Ugly Riz

3. Angles

When you’re confident using the Rule-of-Thirds grid, try adding new angles. Strong diagonals lines, or bold geometrics create drama and tension.

Tulip

Swiss Re

4. Leading Lines

Strong lines that start at the foreground or from behind the photographer and keep going deep into the frame are known as Leading Lines. These lines quickly draw the viewer’s gaze straight to the heart of the photo or to interesting elements you want to emphasise.

Kew

Band Shell

Memorise and start to practice Keeping it R.E.A.L.– the basics of composition — and I guarantee you will quickly develop photography skills and take photos that will impress your viewers. It takes time, patience and practice, but that’s exactly why we love photography — to learn new skills and stretch our creativity.

© Text and All Photos Copyright Lisa Singh

Photos hosted by fotopic.net

View my fotopic gallery.

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Ev-er Useful – Manual Exposure Using Exposure Values

December 21st, 2008 by hobbyphotographer No comments »

A while back, for no particular reason, I decided I wanted to expose photographs using exposure value or Ev. Exposure value works like the Sunny 16 Rule – a table of different aperture and shutter speed combinations for different situations.

To help me learn I put together a spreadsheet of the shutter speed and aperture combinations and a clear explanation of the actual exposure values for common lighting situations.

Here’s an HTML version of the table.

How It Works

It looks and sounds a bit daunting at a first, but actually works better than a camera’s meter. Modern meters measure light very accurately, generally much better than our eyes. But meters still mostly guess what sort of subject you want to shoot. I say mostly guess, because many cameras now have face detection software, and will meter accordingly.

Since cameras only concern themselves with light, scenes with both distinct highlights and shadows can easily fool meters, even the sophisticated multi-segmented averaging calculations of modern cameras. Dark nights with bright lights, for example, still pose great difficulty.

When we use things like Ev or the Sunny 16 rule, we employ far greater processing power than any camera – human judgement.

Looking at the bottom Ev table, we see a list of scene lighting conditions, ranging from dimmest at the top and brightest at the bottom.

  1. Pick one (that best matches your shot obviously).
  2. Note the number in the same row at the far left of the table.
  3. Find the diagonal row in which the number, or Ev, repeats.
  4. Pick one and note the shutter speed and aperture on the column and row headings.
  5. If you need to stop action – that is, increase the shutter speed, move further down the diagonal row and note the aperture / shutter speed combination.
  6. If you need to increase the depth of field — that is, increase the aperture, move to an Ev futher up the diagonal row and note the new aperture / shutter speed combination.
  7. Set your camera’s metering mode to manual and use the aperture / shutter speed combination you selected.
  8. To bracket exposure, select higher and lower shutter speeds or increase and decrease apertures; do not change both.

A couple of days ago, while out for a wander with my Sony Alpha 200 and my dog Riz Inevitably, I ended up looking at the Christmas lights and wondered if I could work out a decent manual exposure.

A while back I printed out a copy of my Ev tables and put it in my camera bag, then never really used it. I knew camera meters don’t cope well with Christmas lights and thought I’d give Ev metering a go.

I looked at the bottom table and decided exposure value 4 would work for most houses with Christmas lights, give or take a stop, and manually set my camera’s aperture to f5.6 and the shutter speed to 1 second. I bracketed one stop on either side by changing the shutter speed to 0.5 seconds and 2 seconds. The 1 second at f5.6 exposure was spot on!

House covered in Christmas lights

Full-sized version of the above.

I thought that worked pretty well. I left the camera set on manual in hopes I can get into a habit of relying mainly on manual exposure. It might take me a while to memorise the majority of exposure values and corresponding lighting situations, but definitely worth the effort, if only for scenes that normally fool camera meters.

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