Great video from Trey Ratcliff from Stuck in Customs documenting his trip around the world in 80 days with 8000 photos in 6 minutes and 14 seconds.
Author Archives: trifler
Abusing HTTP Status Codes to Expose Private Information | Mike Cardwell, Online
This is pretty amazing. With a few lines of JavaScript it is possible to test if you are logged on at a number of popular web sites, such as Facebook, Gmail and Twitter. It works by requesting certain pages on these sites and analysing the http return codes. The requested pages are accessible or inaccessible depending whether a user is logged on or not. They thus give different status codes depending on their accessibility. Pretty cleverand pretty scary!
Abusing HTTP Status Codes to Expose Private Information | Mike Cardwell, Online: “”
Technorati Tags:
Internet, technology, privacy
Camera Bags
Like many photographers I have a certain addiction when it comes to camera bags. After a lot of experimentation I have settled on a small number of camera bags which I frequently use. They include:
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Each of these bags have their different use case and I use them in different situations.
In addition to these three main bags I have of course a number of other bags which I rarely use as bags, that is to actually take them out and use them for transporting gear, but mainly for storage. The include some bags from Crumpler and Lowepro, as well as from Tamrac.
In a future blog I’ll review each one of them, explain which bag I use for which occasion an what gear I put in, as well as the likes and the dislikes of the different bags.
Technorati Tags:
photography, camera bag
The Top Five Best Books on Photography Composition | Photography 24/7
Thomas from Photography 24/7 has published a list of “The Top Five Best Books on Photography Composition”. I have read two of them (‘The Photographer’s Eye’ by Michael Freeman and ‘Learning To See Creatively’ by Bryan Peterson) and I agree fully, they are fantastic. Makes me want to immediately go to Amazon to buy the other three.
Nifty Fifty: The Benefits of a Fixed 50 mm Lens
Bubble Chamber at CERN from below
It has been often said, that one way to improve your photography is to restrict yourself gear-wise and to overcome this limitation creatively. A very popular example of restricting yourself to improve is to stick to one particular lens, in particular to a fixed focus length. A good choice, in particular on a full frame camera is to use a 50 mm fixed focus length lens. A nifty fifty has several advantages:
- There are inexpensive fast F/1.8 versions of this lens available for both Nikon and Canon (and probably also for other brands).
- On a full frame camera the field of view is like that of the naked eye. This allows you see through the view finder with one eye and keep the other eye open to had have a similar view which is neither enlarged, as with a telephoto lens, nor decrease, as with a wide-angle lens.
- Of course the sharpness of these lenses are superb and unbeatable for the price.
- Being fast lenses, it is an excellent way to practice shallow depth of field.
A nice intro on more benefits can be found on the Phototuts+ blog: A first article (Nifty Fifty: The Benefits of a Fixed 50mm Lens | Phototuts+) explains the benefits of a 50 mm lens, whereas a second article (80 Awe-Inspiring Photographs Taken With a “Nifty Fifty”) has a beautiful gallery of examples of using the nifty fifty.
Black and White film effects | The Woodwork
Aperture 3 presets are becoming available now. One set of presets I came across is from The Woodwork blog. It tries to emulate the film effects found in Nik’s Software excellent Black and White film effects | The Woodwork.
LensRentals.com – “This lens is soft” and other myths
The blog — actually it more a newsletter — at LensRentals has a beautiful entry (“This lens is soft” and other myths), which debunks the myth often found on photography forums that people have to go through numerous copies before they find the perfect lens. So why is there so much complaining on soft/or front-focusing lenses? The key to the puzzle is the definition of ‘fine’. Most people assume that ‘fine’ means ‘perfectly calibrated’. In reality cameras are like any other manufactured item, calibration is within a given tolerance range. This leads to people choosing lenses and bodies which match in the same direction of production tolerance:The bad thing is many, many people who did this then hopped on their online camera forum and made blanket statements like “I had to try 3 copies before I found one that was calibrated right”. In reality what they should have said was “I had to try 3 copies before I found one that was calibrated right FOR MY CAMERA”. Those other two copies might well have been fine on someone else’s camera.
The solution to the problem is not to switch copies of lenses, but to use the “lens microcallibration” feature. Unfortunately, this feature of course only exists on more professional type bodies. I have it on my Canon 5D Mark II, but not on my Canon 400D.
Still it allows to understand — from someone with access to a lot of lenses — to explain the discrepancy between the number of complaints and the observation from a rental company finding only a few % of bad lenses.
What is (not) a GTD context?
As someone trying to apply the Getting Things Done methodology, it is often quite difficult to define good and useful contexts. In particular if the standard ones like @office do not work. Thankfully Evomend has some help availabale on how to define good contexts:
What is (not) a GTD context?. Even more important it also covers bad choices of contexts to avoid.
10 (more) Ways to Become a Better Photographer « Photofocus
These 10 tips from Scott Bourne are are probably all valid (maybe with the exception of tip #9, which I cannot judge because I have not read the book). In particular, tips #1 (Shoot with a project or goal in mind), #3 (Make at least one photograph every single day) and #7 (Edit your work) appear to be the most important to me.
Best Milk Choclate
I admit, I am a chocolate fan (who is not), and although I enjoy dark chocolate quite a bit I know discovered my love for dark milk chocolate. Dark milk chocolate can probably be defined to be milk chocolate with a high percentage of cocoa solids. Normal milk chocolate (at least in Europe) needs to have at least 30% of cocoa solids in order to be called milk chocolate. Dark milk chocolate has a much higher share of cocoa, normally 40%, but often 50% or more. Unfortunately, dark milk chocolate seems to be something of a rarity. The only mainstream chocolate maker that used to make a dark milk chocolate was Cailler a traditional Swiss chocolate maker now owned by Nestlé. Fortunately I found the The Best Milk Chocolate Bars – Gourmet Milk Chocolate web site which gives a list of alternatives. Hurray
