Wednesday, 2 June 2010

Cassini’s Space Camera

s06_pia11613.jpg

The image you see above is a processed press image captured by the Cassini Imaging Science Subsystem (ISS):

The Cassini Imaging Science System was specifically designed for exploring the Saturn system, and includes spectral filters and imaging capabilities for a multitude of scientific objectives, including capturing lightning, investigating the three dimensional cloud structure and meteorology of the Saturn and Titan atmospheres

The imaging system consists of a wide-angle (200mm) and a telephoto (2000mm) subsets, each giving us a .35 degrees, and 3.5 degrees respectively. Powered with a 1 megapixel (1024×1024, 12 micron) CCD sensor, coupled with the special filters, the cameras are designed to capture at the highest dynamic range & lowest noise possible — thus the large pixel pitch and the relatively low number of pixels.

The image will take you to The Big Picture’s brilliant selections of the press images, while NASA has a 3-D overview of the Equinox Mission Cassini space shuttle.

Monday, 31 May 2010

To Whom It May Concern

Software Development Group of: Canon, Nikon, Sony, Leica, Phase One, Olympus & [Insert camera make here].

Developers of: Photo Mechanic, Expression Media (Née iView Multimedia), Adobe Bridge & [Insert talented imaging expert/future programmer here]

Aperture Team.

To whom it may concern:

The time has come that the desktop/laptop space have been challenged by the 3rd kind, the you-know-what, by the you-know-who, the-so-called tablet of the future of computing.

We, imaging professionals/shutterbugs, are in dire need of a magic bullet that can simplify our imaging workflow, and that you-know-what by the you-know-who device has been proven to be the magic pistol by its growing numbers of acceptance, as well as its limited number of supplies, and yet, the magic bullet app — you know the one that does: photo review, approval/rejection, rating, annotation, generates contact sheet, send PDF to recipients (simple review website export don’t hurt), sync catalog/selection to the (we desperately hope) soon-to-be-announced app & its desktop client… most importantly one that is simple and doesn’t suck and doesn’t crash in front of jaw-dropped-by-our-magic-bullet-app clients — is nowhere to be found.

The time has come that you show the world that you are — in fact — are talented, smart & rake profits for reasons none other than innovating to the edge of our mankind and are capable of understanding the basic moral of business ethics that is to innovate & serve the customers well after charging us — the poor customers — a hefty price for things that we dream all the time, but rarely fulfilled by smart & busy business people like you.

Especially to Apple’s Aperture Team; the Pages, Keynote & Numbers have been ported on its 2nd sub-version to the you-know-what’s iStore, but we have yet to detect any radar movement, that you have even the slightest intention of porting/making Aperture Remote or whatever i-Thing you tend to name it, we don’t care so long as it does what it does in a way that the you-know-what was designed for.

If you think we make no sense here, something is wrong with you, if you think you can do better than what we suggested here, give yourselves a shot, and we shall praise you till you hear the thunder roared up in the sky.

Sincerely & signed.

Shutterbug.

21 May 2010
Pogue Speaks Specs ★ pogue.blogs.nytimes.com

David Pogue on publishing photo specs (EXIF):

So publishing all of those stats, as though the photographer manually calculated each one, is a little deceptive and unhelpful! I think they should SAY what the photographer did (“set aperture to f/7”) and what the camera did (auto shutter speed 1/20th sec).

He’s absolutely right. But I’d like to take it a little further.

‘Reading’ the photograph (the light, the lens, shadow/highlight, etc) tells you much more than mere metadatas. But it’s still nothing compared to the behind-the-scenes like NGM’s On Assignment or behind-the-scene videos on YouTube.

Sunday, 9 May 2010

One iPhone, One Thousand Apps

HipstamaticThere’s a touch of freedom that makes the iPhone a great lo-fi camera.

A slew of apps have come even before the App Store opened for business, some notable numbers popularize the term iPhonography (this is how I prefer to spell them). One of them is Hipstamatic, it came late last year and is recently being featured as iPhone App of the week.

If you don’t buy their pitch (they have a story about how it came to life), maybe you should consider mine instead:

It’s a perfect $5 christmas gift for yourself, or your iPhone-using-paparazzo friend, yes occasional crash still happens and opting in high-res output gives you the never-ending wait to snap another around, but you’re in for a different kind of iPhone-photography game, people… and this time you might want to stay a little longer cause digital never felt & looked so finely analog.

4 months, a few dozen notable apps later, this one indeed stays, I still use it regularly, along with Art&Mobile’s TiltShift Generator, QuadCamera & ToyCamera, as well as the lesser-known AutoStitch (currently on Sale) that does a marvelous job stitching those multiple shots into one usable panorama.

As I predicted, Best Camera never lived up to its hype, while CameraBag, the original app that inspired it is still standing strong and introduced a desktop & iPad version to complete your digital camera bag.

And recently, there is Andigraf. Inspired by the artist that started the whole pop-art movement, this digital Andy Warhol copies Hipstamatic’s proven success in mimicking a retro camera, improving upon QuadCamera’s multishot feature with an interval control and a better designed/positioned shutter release.

A few friends recommended SwankoLab; the original app & the pixel perfect graphics comes from the makers of Hipstamatic — I have yet to give it a try, but the thought of actually playing darkroom on such a small screen doesn’t appeal to me, maybe the iPad will change my mind.

Last but not least, Mill Colour is a low profile app that gets the job done, it hasn’t been updated for a while, but its excellent coloring control came handy to give your final image a nice final touch before blasting a tweet.

Friday, 7 May 2010

April’s Joy

When I first created this website, I wanted a simple place for me to showcase my work, one that is sustainable, expandable, accessible and pleasant to experience. That simple aim, however, did not come easy. Mainly, technical and personal limitation are two of the frontmost reason keeping me to make things happen.

Rather than expanding, the site has been slimmed down parallel to the readership growth, layout has been simplified, features added and redundancy removed resulting in a more streamlined publishing & reading experience on both front & backends.

The latest change has been the biggest challenge, it’s one that has been a botheration since day 1. Creating a photo gallery and a blog are mostly a two-engine job, either you run a gallery  with a blog, or you settle with a blog and add a gallery feature, both scenarios doesn’t fit my bill. But thanks to the massive community development and its extensive third party support, with WordPress 3 coming on the horizon and the excellent folks at GraphPaperPress this sort of marvel is now becoming a trend, showcase your work and blog about it — all from one place. Add to it the excellent blogging tool like MarsEdit 3 and WordPress for iPhone (where’s MarsEdit for iPhone/iPad, Daniel?), and we got ourself an always-on, accessible-everywhere studio/storefront/gallery/newsdesk.

For what it’s worth, WordPress is not a gallery engine, but a little hack will make one out of it; it’s blogging workflow is not perfect either, RSS output is downright limited, content rendering requires a lot of patience to figured out with. Inspired by kottke.org & daringfireball.net, solidify by this article, I have now implemented direct linking for the Linked List post on the RSS read.

The problem was simple, WordPress does not allow liquid content flow for longer articles (aka dumb), so if I want to run a snippet like how it used to run on the homepage (Title + Excerpt), I can’t have full content on the RSS front, when I enable full content on the RSS, my homepage’s grid based layout breaks. The solution was simple enough, but took longer to figure out; remove the blog snippet from the homepage and free the lion!

Feel free to refresh, or add this feed and you may feel something is right after all this time.

5 May 2010
Peter Gabriel’s Visual Journey ★ realworldgalleries.com

Ovo

I believe all art — regardless of its form — is like a journey; no matter how far you go, no matter where you are going, the journey is what matters, the destination is the product of a pleasant, unpleasant, road-bumps, even deroutes and other challenging feats.

All art, regardless of its medium, speaks the same language; it’s that formless, empty space between its creator and us that bounds us together — anything that gets in the way will only corrupt that potential.

Peter Gabriel:

When I put out records without titles it was because I tended to remember my own records by the artwork. I used to love gatefold sleeves …when you would sit at home with a new record and open it up it was just a precious moment. Now we’ve gone into this digital world a lot of that has been lost.

I have been a music fan even before I was born (we would never sleep until mother played some tunes from the tape player —  I’m an identical twin)… there’s always been something magical about PG’s music where all the sound coming from each song is a narrative to his soul, just like each song would fit together to create a unique experience to each album from the first to the last song in each particular record. Perhaps the most magical of all, is its often nameless, uber-minimalist, album-art that, he & his artists have crafted for us.

Real World Galleries displays all of his album arts to date, including some behind-the-scenes from both PG & the artist on the process of creating the artwork. The one showcased above, is one of my favorite — OVO.

(via graphic-exchange.com)

The Mothership

4 May 2010

China Pavilion – World Expo Shanghai 2010 © Will Wiriawan