brainwagon

There is a nice interview on dpreview.com with David Coffin, author of dcraw.c, a nice little Linux program that decodes most RAW formats from digital cameras. Very cool and useful stuff. From the interview:

3. Are you ever concerned about the legal implications of reverse-engineering proprietary file formats?

If anyone sued me, I’d be the biggest free software hero since Jon Johanson. It’s better for the camera makers to ignore me and hope I lose interest.

Heh. Rock on, Dave.

Awesome bug pictures!

Eric’s exploration of digital infrared photography over on flutterby has urged me to try to take some more infrared photographs. Toward that end, I’ve created Experiments in Infrared Digital Photography in my brainwagon photo gallery. So far, there are only three images, all derived from a single shot of some plants that I did yesterday. I was experimenting with changing the result using gimp. Let me know what you think.

Dan Lyke Eric over at flutterby scored an Olympus 2020 and is using it to do Infrared Photography. Cool stuff, I did a bit of it myself with my Nikon 4500. Check out this or this for some better, slightly image processed examples. Click on the thumbnail or this link to see another processed example, or this link to see the original before image processing.

I’ve been interested in alternative photographic techniques for quite some time, so it was cool to see blueprintphotography mentioned on the Make blog. Very cool images, with a complete howto.

Courtesy of the Make Blog, here is Mike Golembewski’s page on Scanner Cameras. You can get more details on building a similar camera from Jason Yang’s thesis, A Light Field Camera for Image Based Rendering or Wang and Heidrich’s Design of an Inexpensive Very High Resolution Scan Camera System. Good stuff.

I was reading this article from the San Francisco Chronicle, which says that last December’s tsunami create a wave 90 feet high. They said that the wave would have reached the clock of the San Francisco Ferry Building (not the top, which is 248 feet, but the lower edge of the clock face). Here is a picture of the building from 1898. I reckon that entire scaffolding would have been underwater.

Ouch.

I must admit to a certain fascination with ancient Egypt, so it was kind of cool to note that the Library of Congress has a number of nice photographs in their collection for download, including stereo pictures like this one. A dab of the Gimp, and you can repair some of the minor tears and clean up the background so it looks nice on your webpage. Fun stuff. The Gimp is worth learning.

While testing the low light performance of my new cellular phone, I noticed that even in medium indoor lighting, the camera had significant amounts of noise (and blur). Still, there is a cool program called Neat Image which I’ve mentioned before. It can remove a lot of the noise from images and yielded the following cleaned up image.

If you do a lot of photography in low light, try giving Neat Image a try. Highly recommended.

The autochrome images of World War I subjects reminded me of the excellent Prokudin-Gorskii collection that you can see at the Library of Congress website. They also have a rather large archive of the three-color separation images that you can search and use, most of which are fairly mundane landscapses, but some of which include excellent pictures like the one on the right. The picture of the Tajik man on the right was taken in 1911.

This glimpse into the past is just too cool.

World’s Armed Forces Forum points to some magnificent color autochrome images from WWI. These images were among the first color images produced, and show remarkable detail and color fidelity. Great stuff. Autochrome images were created by a rather interesting process which you can read more about from either this page or from the U.S. patent.

My brother snapped this picture of this cute little squirrel while he (my brother, not the squirrel) was stacking up wood for the upcoming winter. He thought it was cute, and so do I. Enjoy. Click on it for a bigger version.