Gender Differences In Photography

 Photography, Politics  No Responses »
Dec 062009
 

I have just read this article on whether men and women take different photograph. Without going into too much detail, the overall impression is of confusion with some people saying yes and others no.

This is going to be very short. Whilst there may be gender-based differences in the way that we make photographs, these are likely to be overwhelmed by the simple differences between us that are down to us all being individuals. Most of us are far too keen to jump on the obvious differences (gender) and assume that these explain everything.

Or to put it another way, why did Robert Capa and Henri Cartier-Bresson make images that were so different when they are both men ? That’s right, because they were individuals and so was Gerda Taro. That she was a woman adds to her individuality, but being a woman didn’t make her any more of an individual or any less of an individual than Robert Capa was.

Creating A Date-Based Photo Repository & Examining Results

 Computing, Photography  No Responses »
Nov 282009
 

Because of a little “issue” with Bibble which causes that software to cease responding when navigating the browser whilst it is updating the icons, I had to come up with a different way of storing my raw images. Or at least a different “shadow view” that would allow Bibble to work more reliably. I had been thinking on what would be the best way (for me!) of doing this for a while now, and this morning spent about 45minutes knocking up some code to do what I wanted.

I chose to use the “date” contained within the Exif information within each file to produce a directory structure along the lines of “/some/place/YYYY-MM-DD/original-name-of-file” with the file at the bottom level being a symlink back to the original file. I chose not to move any files around as I could more easily fix things if the code I had written did Something Stupid. I chose not to copy any files, as I did not want to duplicate some 100Gbytes of RAW files if I did not need to — and I did not as symlinks can do the job perfectly well.

As for the choice of the date format, well I have long preferred the ISO date format in places where a conventionally human readable date was not necessary or would be inconvenient. The ISO date format is useful in that it is not subject to misinterpretation as date formats such as “DD-MM-YY” and “MM-DD-YY” are, and it happens to sort easily with the ls command – which is much more useful than you would think. If it looks a little odd, just start using it and get used to it.

The code itself is available here if you really want to get hold of it (I wouldn’t bother if I were you – it’s just something knocked up in a rush that works ok for me).

The interesting thing about the new “repository” was that it was easy to produce a table of dates and the number of photos taken on those dates :-

cd /media/photos/raw.dated
for i in $(echo *)                        
do
  echo -n "$i "; ls $i/* | wc -l
done

The output is long enough and boring enough (for anyone other than me) that I will not include it here. But it is relatively easy to turn this into a graph using ploticus :-

ploticus -prefab chron \
  -o photos.png \
  -png \
  data=dates.dat x=1 y=2 \
  datefmt=yyyy-mm-dd \
  color=blue \
  echodata=no \
  xinc='1 year' \
  stubfmt='MMM YY'

This produced a graph similar to :-

Photo Frequency

I seem to be taking more photos over time.

A Quick Look At The Olympus EP-1

 Photography  No Responses »
Jul 282009
 

There are many other places you can find technical information on the Olympus EP-1 – this is merely the first impressions from someone who has only just unboxed one, and taken it out for a quick spin.

It’s small. It is not a point and shoot, and so it is quite a bit bigger, but it sure beats my Canon 1DS for size, and even my Epson RD-1. Providing you are not wearing tight jeans, you can certainly slip it into a roomy pocket with the 17mm pancake lens. The 14-42mm zoom lens increases the size enough that you would need a jacket pocket to be comfortable.

The included camera strap is far too short. Admittedly I’m tall and I like my cameras to hang low, but this really is titchy. The camera itself feels good and solid – whilst it is no tank, it should survive a few knocks and bumps.

After charging the battery (why do the suppliers not charge these up themselves?), the first thing most of us will do is to dive into the menus to see what things can be fiddled with. Well the answer is a lot. In fact at first it is a little scary how many options there are to fiddle with even before you turn on the “customize” menu item. But after you get used to the idea that the menus are complex because there is a great deal to customise before you go out, then it becomes a little less scary. After all any camera that allows you to move the focus button from a half-press of the shutter (which I really hate) to an alternate is going to have lots of options. And I’ll put up with a lot of complexity if I am allowed to move the focus button!

54493

Out and about, the camera is reasonably comfortable in the hand. The lack of a “proper” viewfinder is a little distracting at first, but the key thing to remember is that this is a view camera which do not have small viewfinders. Sure holding the camera out to look at the LCD preview screen is somewhat problematic in terms of steadiness, but in practice it is perfectly possible to get used to it.

In fact I do happen to have the optical viewfinder for the EP-1 (for the 17mm pancake lens), but I have not used it in anger.

This is not a camera to replace a “proper” DSLR, but is a good choice for someone who finds the current crop of P&S cameras to be a little too small and limiting. I will probably find myself lugging a big DSLR just as much as I have done in the past, but I will also have a decent camera with me for those times when I would not normally carry a “proper” camera.

Most Ridiculous Product Ever: Camera Armour for a Canon 1Ds

 Humour, Photography  No Responses »
Jul 272009
 

Sometime you look at a product when trying to find something on Amazon (or elsewhere), and think what were they thinking of ? And a set of “camera armour” for a Canon 1DS (probably mkI and mkII) certainly fits the bill. It smacks of corporate stupidity – we make camera armour for Canon cameras, so we’ll make armour for all Canon cameras whether they need it or not.

If you have never encountered a 1Ds, you make well be wondering what I am on about, and that camera armour in certain situations is a good idea. Well, the Canon 1Ds is a tank. If you need to drive nails, and there is no hammer handy, the 1DS will do quite nicely. If you drop it, the pavement will break before it does (the lens attached might suffer though).

Seeing as so many people are reading this, I’d better point out that it is intended as humorous!

Digital Is Better Than Film??

 Photography  No Responses »
Jul 152009
 

Every so often I encounter a discussion on whether film is better than digital or digital is better than film, which usually degenerates into someone mentioning large format film and someone else mentioning the convenience of digital (or even the convenience of film). It’s all balderdash (and I wrote this post just to use that word … not!). More or less.

When making images (which is what photography is all about after all) it does not matter whether you use film or digital, because using either you can just occasionally produce jaw droppingly good images. Indeed for many such images, the quality of the source does not matter too much as you will be concentrating on the subject rather than the relatively minor “issues” with the image quality such as film grain, ISO noise, chromatic aberration, etc.

What does matter is using whatever makes you comfortable. I cannot shoot film because the thought of actually paying money per shot makes me freeze up. Exposure bracketing ? Forget it. Others cannot shoot digital because computers fill them with horror (and I can certainly understand that!!).

For me, digital is better. For those others film is better.

What counts is the final production – the image, and not the mechanics of how it came about.

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