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Archive for the ‘Photography’ Category

I do not like camera phones in the same way that I don’t particularly care for flash photography; you can produce good results (or at least passable results) with either, but the majority of stuff that comes out of it is just pure crap.

I recently moved to one of Sprint’s CDMA Android offerings, the HTC Hero. I just finished the flashing/rooting process, since I don’t particularly care for devices that try to lock me out of their own functionality. (The key to doing this with the “newer” Sprint CDMA Hero phones is apparently using an older version of the recovery image and making sure you have enough available memory to run the image flash, but that’s beside the point.) This particular device came with a 5 megapixel built-in camera, and though I know that resolution != quality, it does seem to produce *passable* images. Not great, but passable. I’m hoping to see an improvement when the CDMA Hero sees “official” Android 2.1 support. This OS version fragmentation is bunk, but at least I can upgrade as soon as the pieces are available for another model. Suck that, closed source technology.

Am I giving up the 40D? Hell emphatically *no*. But I can capture a few things I might miss fumbling for the camera bag. At least, I hope I can.

One of my pictures made it to the front page of the infamous “failblog“, consisting of a picture of a very disreputable looking van with “Little Angels Program” spraypainted on the side. I had caught that image earlier in 2008 in Willimantic, CT while I was walking through the hill section.

It’s not Life or the New York Times or anything, but I’ll take what I can get. Probably should have color corrected that one before I sent it in …

Our first few stopmotion animation tests were successful. As per everything else we do, everything was done with Linux and freely available opensource software. In this case, gphoto2, imagemagick and mplayer (with ffmpeg thrown in for the .flv conversion for Gootube.

We used my Canon 350D mounted on a tripod with Adam’s fixed focal length 135mm lens, with fixed lighting and a green background for eventual chromakeying. There was a quick hack involved getting gphoto2 to immediately spit out a photo, instead of trying to logically process it, which was solved with:

gphoto2 --set-config "Capture size class"="Full Image" --capture-preview --filename "${OUTPUTFILE}" --force-overwrite

(If you choose to try this, remember that whatever format you set your camera to will be the format that it comes out in, so don’t set it to RAW unless you really don’t value your time and want to have to convert it using dcraw.)

The first video can be viewed at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cp5t_IRIf58.

I took Stan up to Crystal Lake, where he had a great time swimming and doing whatever it is that dogs do. Some pictures:

Tasha and I went down to a horse farm in Hebron, CT, and took a bunch of pictures. I’m trying to get her to open her own flickr account… It was a good day, all in all, even though a few of the horse riders there got a little antsy with us taking their pictures.

Finally got my camera in the mail, and now all I seem to be doing is taking pictures of *everything*. As soon as I get back into the swing of taking pictures with a decent camera, I’ll post some more pictures to the photography section…