Category Archives: Photography

I spent an hour yesterday between Microcenter and Circuit City comparing prices of laptops and cameras. I came to the sorry conclusion that there’s not much to differenciate them. Best Buy is about the same price range. They’re still cheaper than Irish prices though! Especially in the digital camera market. I saw so many laptops and cameras yesterday my brain got a bit frazzled. I’ve decided to forego buying a laptop at this stage (as I might be able to get a loan of one..) and one camera that caught my eye is the Sony DSC-F717. Reviews are for the most part favourable even if the camera isn’t perfect. There was an auto-focus issue with earlier models that was almost 10 months ago. There’s some good prices to be found, but I’d like to hear if you’ve had experience with this camera. I’d also love to hear of sites offering accessories at more reasonable prices!
Update! Here’s an excellent review from photo.net

This is a demo of the customfield used to create a “photoblog” of sorts. In my “Picture” field I have the names of my 3 images, seperated by “;;;”. A Smarty foreach loop then runs through the list of images. You can find more information in your “Custom Fields” administration page.

Wow! This photo is beautiful!
As I drove through town last night there was an amazing sunset. The sky glowed orange/red against the striking cloudscape and reflected off the River Lee. Unfortunately I was driving so I couldn’t stop. I might get another chance tonight.

imgSeek is a most useful application! I’m importing my photo collection in there. That’s taking a while, as there’s a few gigs of data to work through! Sketching is fun, and could be useful as you can refine your sketch and it’ll keep updating the matching photos. Selecting an existing photo, and looking through the similar photos it like the first time you went online.
You find a photo, it displays “similar” ones, right-click on another photo and find similar ones to that which displays more photos.. It’s a nice way to look through a huge collection of photographs!
What are you still doing reading this, go try it out now!

imgSeek is a photo collection manager and viewer with content-based search and many other features. The query is expressed either as a rough sketch painted by the user or as another image you supply (or an image in your collection). The searching algorithm makes use of multiresolution wavelet decomposition of the query and database images.

(via Ice Walkers)

Amazing photograph taken at sea! wow!

This article about travelling with your photographic equipment is timely considering the Summer is coming and we’ll be travelling. Thankfully I only have two compact cameras to bring to Chicago!
One to read over in a few months time..

From the makers of Photosig comes artSIG, a new website to artistic work. Looks good and the new version of the software will be ported to Photosig in time! They also have an information page too.

XnView is a cross-platform image viewer (and more, you can also apply effects to photos, convert them..)
The Windows version looks nice, but the Linux/FreeBSD versions look a bit dodgy and dated. Yeah, it uses Motif. *ugh* Oh, and if it matters to you, I can’t see any source available, it’s dubbed as “freeware”.

While waiting for Martina to finish work on Sunday last I wandered past the Cork Opera House and snapped a load of photos. Pity about the bad light though, shutter was way too slow to snap these guys!

Digital camera software for Linux: gPhoto – I’ve never had to use gPhoto with my digital cameras as Linux has support for USB digital cameras through the USB mass-storage driver. Just plug the camera in, and “mount /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera” (or some similar device, this should work if you don’t have SCSI disks)