I have been using a Canon 7D to record some footage for my degree show piece, and came across this demonstration of noise levels at various ISOs.
Note that the cleanest image is not at ISO 100, as you might expect, but at ISO 160, which is probably the 7D sensor’s native ISO. The video gets progressively noisier for each third of a stop above a multiple of ISO 160. This leaves your options at 160, 320, 640, and 1250. I used ISO 320 for yesterday’s shoot.
Via WetPixel.
I have a Moleskine notebook that I use for uni and the odd other occasions that I need to take notes.
I love my Moleskine. The pages are the perfect size and shape for how I use a notebook, and the pages are light, yet thick enough to stop ink bleeding through to the other side, and sufficiently textured to feel pleasing to write on.
The major drawback to a Moleskine is that it’s a physical, analogue medium, in a world in which I’m used to the conveniences of digital tools. The photos I take on my iPhone (which, I am only slightly surprised to admit, has become my most frequently-used camera) automatically appear on my MacBook Pro and iPad. Anything I need to remember or retain a record of goes straight into Evernote, which is not only synced between all my devices, but which are also run through Evernote’s free OCR service, meaning that even text within photographs I’ve taken is searchable. I’ll leave the triumph that is my (well, Peter Krogh’s) photograph-cataloging system for another post.
Last week I stumbled across Paper, which is an ostensibly free iPad app for notes and journaling. On the face of it, this should make it an excellent replacement for my Moleskines. However, it has a couple of drawbacks.
Firstly, the only tool available by default is a generic pen. There are a total of 5 tools available which, apart from the pen, cost either £1.49 each, or £5.49 for the lot. The free pen isn’t a terrible choice – I’d much rather have it than, say, watercolours – but it is incredibly hard to use without a stylus, which is the second major drawback. My writing isn’t massive and, to be honest, isn’t that terrible, but I find it hard to enter text by hand into this app.
‘Arty’ as it looks, it isn’t particularly functional for writing, which is what initially drew me to Paper. What it turns out to be very good for indeed, however, is quick sketches. For instance, even for someone who can’t draw, the following drawing only took me about two minutes, and zero effort:
Each drawing is saved automatically as a page, meaning that finding drawing and notes that you’ve made is a case of flipping through pages rather than scrolling through filenames. I’ve also found that it’s useful for drawing lighting diagrams:
I’ve also been using Paper to scribble diagrams of ideas for layouts for an upcoming group exhibition. It’s quite satisfying to use for this kind of note-taking because the book-like organisation system means that you’ve always got a record of notes that you’ve taken without having to manually save.
So, in conclusion, it’s a great app for scribbles and drawings. Not something that could replace a physical notebook, but an excellent compliment.
Saw this great lecture on creativity by John Cleese on Saturday. It’s 35 minutes long and (though presented in spoken English) subtitled, but worth watching the whole way through. It’s interesting because on the face of it a lot of what is being said sounds obvious, but the framework through which it is explained stresses the importance of simple, fundamental factors; namely, that creativity is not a talent and isn’t related to IQ, that it can only happen when you’re in an ‘open’ mode, that it requires support and is stifled by negativity, and, most importantly, the degree to which ‘creativity’ is related to ‘play’.
I’ve always considered Cleese something of a legend, and so I consider learning about creativity from him akin to being taught how exposure works by Ansel Adams. This is one of those lectures that sticks with you. Watch the video before it disappears.
Via PetaPixel.
I went to see my friend Jyoti the other day. He is one the most interesting people I suspect I will ever have the privilege to meet, but unfortunately I don’t get to see him as much as I’d like due to me moving away for university. Aside from being a musician, which is probably what he’s best known for (he’s the guy from White Town), he’s also a prolific photographer and skilled portraitist. We […]
The App of the Week on the iOS App Store this week is Cinemagram, a tool for animating portions of otherwise static photographs.
The app works by capturing a couple of seconds of video and then allowing you to mask over the details that you’d like animated. It’s surprisingly satisfying.
Cinemagraphs aren’t new (there are some nice examples on Jamie Beck’s tumblr photoblog), but I wasn’t aware of such a simple way of making them before now.
It’s a pretty straightforward process, with a couple of catches. Firstly, everything needs to be pretty still, and the details that move should move in place rather than moving around the frame. The second thing to be aware of is that in order to create a seamless animation, the movement is played forwards and then backwards on a loop. This is quite evident on the example (of Kat in KFC earlier) above – notice how she sometimes blinks ‘backwards’.
At time of writing, it is free in the UK iOS App Store.
I recently came across the excellent Pianosequenza series by Mario Zanaria. In this series, Zanaria uses a whole 36-exposure rolls of black and white 35mm film to create contact sheets, which become the final output. There are a mixture of square-ish ones in rows of 6×6 frames (as above), and others that are laid out as 5×7 frame portraits (such as this excellent piece). Be aware, though, that some contain nudity and therefore may be NSFW.
They’re absolutely fantastic, as is the rest of his work. We’re all familiar with the maxim ‘there is nothing new in photography’, but having said that, I don’t recall any well-known examples of contact sheets being used in this way. The nearest thing that I can think of is the Facebook profile banner manipulations that were fashionable for a while, before Facebook Timeline came out. To compare Zanaria’s work to Facebook hacks would be insulting, though – to end up with results this perfect, with 36 perfect frames, on an analogue medium, is very impressive and visually arresting.
Zanaria also sells a set of photobooks on Blurb.
Via PetaPixel.
It was mine and Kat’s birthday last weekend, and we decided to go down to London on the Monday and Friday. Kat took her ‘blad, and I took my Bronica. Shot off a couple of rolls of Fuji Pro 400H, which I got back earlier today. This was taken somewhere near Whitechapel.
I recently encountered a problem whereby I became locked out of my own blog, where attempting to access the admin page for WordPress would redirect me to the page I came from. Apparently this is quite a common (and infuriating) problem with WordPress blogs. Considering this, I thought I would be able to find a solution a lot quicker than I did.
Most of the advice online falls into one of 2 categories:
It seems that a combination of these methods seems to resolve most peoples’ problems. However, neither worked for me.
It turned out that the problems that I was having were related to a faulty plugin. Without access to the dashboard I was unable to disable my plugins, so I had to disable them via FTP instead. If neither of the above methods work for you, try this:
A good friend linked me to this slightly unbelievable video, which demonstrates how to make a apparently very usable black and white film developer using just coffee, vitamin c power, water, and a little washing powder (via a post on Engadget).
It looks incredibly simple, and the results that the narrator seems to achieve are almost suspiciously good. You’ll still need conventional store-bought fixing chemical, of course.
I have personally been paying around £18 a litre for Ilfosol DD-X. I push practically all of the black and white that I shoot at least 2-3 stops, at which DD-X excels. This home-made processing chemical (which users have apparently named ‘Caffenol’) might make it worth shooting a roll or two at ISO 200 or 400 just to see what sort of negatives it produces.
I wanted to share something I discovered at the end of last term – a service for Macs that creates a PDF booklet layout from any document. TL;DR: That link is all you need to print booklets.
I don’t like making traditional ‘workbooks’ – you know, the ones where you document your progress, stick in your contact sheets and test prints, and talk about your influences. Don’t get me wrong – I enjoy reading them, and they’re a good as a concept… it’s the execution that I have a problem with. They’re supposed to show development and provide justification and influences for what you’ve done. Which is great.
But it never seems to work out that way, and the act of creating the workbook seems to dominate the project – it becomes more about creating a workbook that’s very markable and grade-able, rather than creating a good body of work. That has been my experience with them, anyway. I’m sure that there are people that create workbooks as they go along, and use it as a documentary on the project rather than something that you do to jump through marksheet-criteria hoops. Having said that, I know more people who simply fake their workbook at the end of the project, which IMHO misses the point.
Personally, I prefer to word-process an extended statement about the body of work that I’ve created, and then print it out as a booklet. In the past I’ve then had these spiral bound at the print shop at uni. For the sake of about £2, it’s a tidy way to provide some context for what you’ve been working on. For my last project, however, I ran out of time and knew that I wouldn’t be able to get to the print shop before my crit.
This probably isn’t something that you’d know if you haven’t tried to print of a booklet using more than one sheet of A4 before, but it’s basically impossible to print out a multi-page booklet from whatever program you happen to be using. AFAIK, it isn’t possible with Word, Pages, Publisher… whatever. With this download, all you need to do is print out the PDF document that is outputted on a printer capable of printing double-sided, and staple it in the middle. Simple.
It has taken me a loooong time to figure out how to do this, which is all the more embarrassing considering how simple ‘Create Booklet PDF Service’ makes it. Anyone who read that rant has more than earnt the right to benefit from my struggles.