So, as I mentioned this morning, we had a nice view of the annular eclipse today. I'd never seen one (nor have I ever seen a total eclipse, except on TV). Here are a few more pictures. That picture above illustrates in one way just how bright the sun is... I was using stacked filters [...]
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We had a nice view of the annular ('ring-shaped') eclipse from Kyoto this morning. We are on the edge of the shadow's path, so the view for us was of the moon skirting the edge of the sun. We had only 100 seconds of ring. (Folks in Tokyo got five minutes.) I took a bunch [...]
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I like heading off on my scooter into the mountains of Japan to explore and take pictures, but am often out of cell range, so the map on my iPhone can't update. I like the idea of having maps with me, and until someone can invent a way to make a map on paper or [...]
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Poking around my Mac laptop, I came across and found thousands and thousands of logs and crash-reports for various iPhone/iPad applications that have been accumulating over the years. You'd think that iTunes would clean this stuff up after a while. I deleted it all. Elsewhere in ~/Library/Logs/ I found random cruft, some dating back three [...]
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Before After "Chipping" my Nikon-Mount Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 As most folks guessed correctly in my golden bumpy "What am I?" quiz, the object is a lens CPU chip/contacts set. I'm surprised so many people knew what it was because I had no idea they existed until recently. It allows one to update an old lens [...]
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Well, this is surprising: iOS does not seem to be color managed. At all. This is a long and technical article. Here's the table of contents: Introduction Color Management Embedded Color-Profile Support Device-Specific Color Profiles The Curiously-Deficient "SpyderGallery" App What's Next One Last Caveat Introduction #post1964 p.h { margin-top: 60px; font-size: 130% } With all [...]
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So I was going through the photos from last weekend's Kyoto Marathon （京都マラソン２０１２) and came across an out-of-focus shot that I'd normally just delete, but it had some kind of odd sense of space about it that I found somehow appealing, and wondered whether I couldn't use some funky processing to turn the lack of [...]
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Three and a half months ago, after a lot of research and Lightroom plugin development, I published the long writeup "How To Best Export Lightroom Images to an iPad, iPhone, Etc.", about my Lightroom-to-iPad workflow at the time. It's now completely out of date. Most everything about my workflow has changed, all of it for [...]
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I'm looking for recommendations for a photo-viewing app for my iPad; Apple's "Photos" app has too many bugs and limitations for my needs. What I want seems simple -- an elegant way with which to impose my photos onto someone hapless to come within an eyeball's reach of me -- but I haven't found it [...]
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This post is of interest only to Lightroom plugin developers. Round about Lightroom 3.2, Adobe added support for intercepting "lightroom://" URLs, but have not documented it yet, so I'll do so here. It's particularly useful as part of an OAuth-authentication procedure. What You can have your plugin automatically respond to certain "lightroom://" URLs if they [...]
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In the comments of a recent post about GPS receivers, it was suggested that the GPS receiver in the iPhone was useful for keeping tracklogs. I had bad experiences with iPhone location services when I tested in 2009, but perhaps my test wasn't good, or perhaps the old iPhone 3 wasn't good, so I thought [...]
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Now that Nikon has announced its next flagship pro SLR, the Nikon D4, with much flowery prose but few hard details, discussion and debate and speculation and flames and praise have filled camera circles. This post is long, but here's the two-sentence summary for the "tl;dr" crowd: As with most any technology release (hardware or [...]
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Rarely does a photo take my breath away, but this rendition by Paul Barr does it every time I come across it. I don't know what it is about it, but if you'll excuse the pun, I'm really drawn to it. Paul recently got an iPhone 4s, and to compliment its camera he loaded a [...]
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function show1880(p, b, px, bx) { document.getElementById(p ).style.visibility = "visible"; document.getElementById(px).style.visibility = "hidden"; document.getElementById(b ).style.borderColor = "red"; document.getElementById(bx).style.borderColor = "gray"; } mouseover button to see that version show1880("t1880_00", "t1880_02", "t1880_01", "t1880_03"); Since writing "A Few Polarization-Filter Examples" several years ago, I've been meaning to do a post on a polarization filter's effects when shooting fall [...]
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Wow, what an ordeal. It started a month or so ago when I decided to put some of my photos on my iPad and iPhone, and found that it was harder to do well than I would have thought. A lot harder. A month later, finally, and I have a good workflow. It turns out [...]
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Like many eagerly awaiting an iPhone 5 announcement, I was disappointed the other day when Apple announced the iPhone 4s. In thinking about the logical response to my disappointment, asking "would I have been happier had they named the new phone iPhone 5?" the answer is "no" because bumping up the number from 4 to [...]
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FYI, I've just pushed calendar template PSD files for 2012, on my Photoshop calendar-template-building script page. If you can run the script, you don't need the templates, but if you can't, they'll perhaps be useful in making your own 2012 calendars.
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I've recently released a couple of new plugin for Adobe Lightroom.... Twitter added the ability to include a photo with a tweet a few days ago, so I've had my nose to the development grindstone and today release my "Export to Twitter" plugin. Most of my "export to..." plugins (e.g. to Flickr or Facebook....) already [...]
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Moderating blog comments -- the triage to weed out spam and such before making submitted comments visible to the public -- can get complicated. Obvious spam is easy (delete it), as are obviously on-topic relevant personal comments without links (approve it). But there's a lot in between. In particular, if there's a link you have [...]
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Scott Kelby's marketing skill continue to amaze me. I posted the other day in "The Amazing Marketing Power of Scott Kelby" that I was disappointed in Scott Kelby for hyping a product close to him in a blatantly dishonest fashion. It seems that he responded to the tsunami of criticism a few days later in [...]
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