Panoramic photography - an intro

I’ve spent a few years experimenting with panoramic photography not really sure why, but I think it has something to do with my frustration of the normal photographic frame to capture the image I remember. I started with a hand-held compact camera, progressed through a gigapan, and have now purchased a pano-head. At Christmas I decided to start capturing my learning in a prezi to share with the world. Click through to find the prezi embedded, and learn why, and how to get-started with panoramic photography.

Click to read more ...

Wide or narrow gamut monitor?

Updated on 29 Jun 2010 by Andy Bryant

Updated on 29 Jul 2011 by Andy Bryant

I’m in the market for a pair of new monitors for my home office.  I am starting to get more into Photoshop, and after reading Scott Kelby’s Adobe Photoshop CS4 Book for Digital Photographers, am realizing that I need to think about wide vs narrow colour gamuts.  

“Gamut is a 3D measurement (3 ordinates x, y, z on a CIE diagram) that describes the portions of the visible spectrum that can be reproduced by a display device. The wider the gamut, the more vibrant certain colors appear. Most displays, in or before 2006, had a 72% gamut, although some professional or high-end LED-backlit LCDs and wide phosphor CRTs did exist. The following is an annotated CIE diagram of the sRGB, or 72% NTSC, color space.”
- LCD Resource.com

I’m not an expert in this space - but from what I gather, sRGB is a compressed colour space optimized for use on the web and ‘normal’ monitors, whereas Adobe RGB (1998) is a larger colour space which aligns with what’s possible to achieve on an inkjet printer.  Most typical monitors can only display the smaller sRGB space.

Scott recommends using Adobe RGB vs sRGB, to ensure colours are more accurately matched between screen and your printer.  However it seems that at the moment, this is only important if you’re using your own printer (or for publication via printing-press).  Most commercial labs will expect sRGB files at the moment (although it also seems that there’s mention of aRGB beginning to take over here).

“What i should have said is that sRGB was the standard before but as we move forward with the IPS and PVA panels the aRGB is the better colour space to work with since more labs are using it on printers form what i read and been told.” - Nasha Wilson on photo.net

“aRGB has a wider gamut than sRGB, ProPhoto has a wider gamut than aRGB. A decent monitor should be able to display beyond the sRGB gamut and a substantial percentage of aRGB” - The Crofter on photo-i.co.uk

Click to read more ...

Sharing your tracks and photos on-line

Updated on 30 Nov 2011 by Andy Bryant

Whilst the KMZ file you’ve created of your track-log and photos is great for looking at on your own system, it isn’t great for sending via email - due to the size of the embedded photos.  What you really want to do here is to make use of an online album somewhere to host the photos - and then just include links to the photos from within the kmz file.  This is what I did for the track log from my Tour de Mont Blanc trip.

Click to read more ...

Using absolute-altitude vs clamped-to-ground

The problem with my standard method for geotagging photos for a flight in Google Earth is that they’ll be shown at an altitude of 0m, stuck to the ground, rather than in mid-air on your flight-path.  This is pretty easy to fix - because a KML file is an editable text (XML) file, and a KMZ file is just a zip-file containing the KML along with the photos.  You can find out more about KML files from Google or Wikipedia.

Click to read more ...

Eye-Fi Pro adds raw support

When I spotted the original Eye-Fi card I was stunned by the concept - which allows you to take photos, and upload them from your camera directly as soon as you get within range of a WiFi network - however I still haven't got round to purchasing one.

The launch of the latest version - the Eye-Fi Pro, now has me considering it - because they've now added raw file support. 

The Pro version also uses Skyhook to automatically geolocate your photos by referencing the WiFi networks it could see at the time you took the shot.  I can see this working in cities, but when I'm out taking landscape shots up in the mountains, I'll still be relying on my GPS.

Available from - Amazon US (Eye-Fi Pro 4GB WiFi SDHC Card) and from Amazon UK

See the Wired product review of the Eye-Fi Pro for more info, or go direct to the Eye-Fi website.

SLR/Rucksack solution for hiking

You’ve got a SLR and are planning a long hike (like the TMB trip I’ll be on in a few weeks). You don’t want to just hang the camera around your neck, or to have to drop the backpack every time you want to take a photograph. You’ve spent some time researching dedicated camera backpacks such as the LowePro backpacks at Amazon.co.uk or Amazon.com, and have tried to find hybrids that are good for both carrying a camera and being practical on a long hike, but haven’t had much joy. That’s where I was about a month ago.

Click to read more ...

My first timelapse

A really short timelapse I created over the Christmas break using my Canon SD950.

My first timelapse from Andy Bryant on Vimeo.