/dev/random

• the appeal of the 50mm camera lens
  Everyone should have one of these lenses. Too bad there’s no AF-S version.
  (tags: photography)

I’m planning to take Digital Photography School’s photographic challenge: Shoot at just one focal length for the next couple of days.

Choose a focal length to shoot at this weekend (or for at least one day) and don’t allow yourself to shoot at any other focal length.

• If you have a prime lens it’ll be easy - fit it to your camera and don’t take if off.
• If you have a DSLR with a zoom lens just choose one end of the focal range and resist the temptation to zoom.
• If you have a point and shoot camera with a zoom - again, just choose one end of the range and stick to that.

When choosing which focal length you go with - try to pick something you don’t normally shoot a lot at. For example if you tend to shoot fully zoomed in - try shooting with a wider angle. If you normally shoot with wide angles challenge yourself at the other end of the spectrum.

I’ll attempt to use only my 50mm/f1.8 prime lens, which also means I won’t be able to use auto focus.

The dead display problem I had with my MacBook Pro last month seems to be widespread. However it looks like it isn’t limited to Macs. According to Engadget, “significant quantities” of NVIDIA’s laptop GPUs have been failing at “higher than normal rates”. Laptop makers have apparently already been given an updated GPU driver which kicks in fans sooner to reduce “thermal stress” on the GPU (I notice that the fan on my MBP seems to run more often since the motherboard was replaced).

I still have difficulty using manual focus, thanks to my glasses and less than perfect eyesight. For anyone who doesn’t have perfect vision, it can be difficult to see if the subject is perfectly in focus, especially when using a large aperture with a narrow depth of field.

However, there are some instances where you have to use manual focus. With my D40X, any non AF-S lens, which lacks the internal AF motor, can only do manual focus (although the focus indicator will light up when it thinks the subject is in focus). I have a love/hate relationship with my 50mm/f1.8 lens for that reason - it’s the sharpest lens I own with the largest aperture that can produce a wonderfully narrow depth of field, yet I still find the manual focus difficult to use.

For certain subjects, like this spider web I photographed this morning, auto focus won’t work, since it will try to focus on a higher contrast object behind the spider web rather than the web itself. I took about 10 shots to get 3 that were perfectly in focus.

For this one I cheated a bit by spraying the web with a fine mist of water to make it stand out more.

After trying SmugMug for a few days, I’ve decided to keep it, although I’ll still continue to use Flickr.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

SmugMug has several pros & cons in comparison with Flickr. SmugMug lets you create really beautiful galleries where you can customize both the color theme and the photo layout. The default layout shows thumbnails on the left side with a large view of a single photo on the right. You can even let your visitors choose which layout they want to use.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

SmugMug does have some significant weaknesses, though. On Flickr, all of your photos appear in your photo stream and it can also be included in multiple sets or group pools. SmugMug doesn’t have a photo stream; it has albums and every photo can appear in only one album. Flickr also feels more like a community.

For general use, I prefer Flickr, but for a professional, SmugMug seems like a nicer way to show off your best photos.

Check out my SmugMug gallery at mike3k.smugmug.com, and as always my Flickr photo stream is at http://www.flickr.com/photos/mike_c/

• Meet Scott Dietzen, the New Guy at Yahoo in Charge of Flickr
  The new guy in charge of Flickr uses SmugMug instead of Flickr for his own photos.
  (tags: yahoo flickr smugmug)

It turns out that my work on Watermark was a complete waste of time. After I released it, everyone told me that Aperture has a built-in watermark feature (which I was completely unaware of), hidden in the export format window. If I had known, I wouldn’t have released it. I most likely won’t release any future updates since it landed with such a thud.

I’ve released Watermark 1.0. Download it here or visit the project page.

I’m trying out the unofficial iPhone version of Qik, which requires a jailbroken iPhone and uses the standard installer. A new version was just released today, which works pretty nicely. I recorded this video and streamed it live from my iPhone.

The Watermark plugin is fully working. I’m now working on the documentation and I hope to release it in a day or so.

Here’s my first official copyright marked picture, which I took today. This baby bird is nesting outside my neighbor’s window.

• pagetable.com » Blog Archive » The real reason for driver signing in Vista x64
  In Windows Vista x64, drivers are required to be signed by someone holding a VeriSign code certificate or they won’t load. Microsoft’s claimed reason for this is that it prevents Trojans from installing kernel-mode rootkits. The real reason? DRM.
  (tags: microsoft windows)

I had a chance to do a lot more work on my watermark plugin this weekend and I made lots of progress. Most functions work, but I still need a few days of QA & testing before I can release it.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

Black Star Rising tells why you should add your name and copyright notice when posting a photo, which is the reason I wrote this. I noticed that almost all of the pictures by the professionals from last week’s photowalk have a copyright notice, so I wanted to make it easier to do with Aperture.

• Web Services – Last.fm
  The Last.fm API allows anyone to build their own programs using Last.fm data, whether they’re on the web, the desktop or mobile devices.
  (tags: development)
• Last.fm – the Blog · Developers, developers, developers
  The new API introduces a user authentication protocol which for the first time allows applications to create user sessions, bringing both read and write services to web apps, desktop apps and mobile devices.
  (tags: last.fm development api)
• 5 Regular Expressions Every Web Programmer Should Know - I’m Mike
  here are the five regular expressions that are the most useful for day-to-day web programming tasks.
  (tags: web programming)
• Extreme regex foo: what you need to know to become a regular expression pro
  This tutorial will go beyond the basics of regular expressions.
  (tags: regex tutorial)

I get a lot of these spams, but I found this one particularly amusing because of the name he used.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

After seeing how my blog posts have been republished without my permission, I realize that the same thing is likely to happen with my photos (and most likely already has happened). Most photographers add a visible watermark or copyright notice to identify their photos. Although Aperture can embed a copyright notice and author info in the EXIF data, it doesn’t have a way to add a visible identification.

One way to do it is to edit in Photoshop and add a text layer. As an alternative, I started to write an Aperture editing plugin that can add text to a photo. I hope to have it ready for public release next week.

Uploaded with plasq’s Skitch!

• Classic Clips: Bill Gates Chews Out Microsoft Over XP
  WTF? “So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated.”
  (tags: microsoft windows)

• When is Manual Focus Better than Auto Focus?
  Manual focusing puts the control completely in your hands and will get your images with the right parts in focus.
  (tags: photography)
• The Website Is Down
  A mashup of true and mostly-true stories from IT hell. Starring Apache, Windows XP, Linux and Halo (among many others)
  (tags: funny)

Via Imaging Insider: B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights group, gives video cameras to Palestinians to document the attacks and abuses they suffer.

(original article: Politics, Theory, & Photography)

Daniel Jaikut reports that WordPress 2.6 will disable the Atom & XMLRPC protocols by default. These APIs are used by applications such as MarsEdit to let you post from your desktop. If you want to use a desktop blogging app, you need to go into the settings and explicitly enable remote posting. Hopefully, upgrading an old WordPress site will keep it enabled.

The developers feel that those APIs “expose a potential to be a security risk“. As far as I know, none of the recent WordPress attacks have involved XMLRPC.

I almost never make a blog post through the web interface; I do all of my blogging with MarsEdit (which I’m now using to write this post). I’m sure the majority of serious bloggers use a desktop client such as MarsEdit or Ecto rather than the web interface, so this will be an inconvenience for all but the most casual users. Since many people will re-enable XMLRPC, any security improvement will be negated.

A better solution would be to require a client key, as Flickr does, which you need to explicitly allow before that client can post to your blog.

I’ve added the FriendFeed Comments plugin, which shows activity on FriendFeed related to each post.