Archive for the 'Camera Stuff' Category

About cameras, equipment, and postprocessing techniques

Adding a CPU Chip to a Nikon-Mount Voigtländer 125mm f/2.5 Lens

UPDATE: Sadly, the procedures reported on this post ended up not working. More info here.

I'll leave the whole post, including the inline updates, but be warned that it was all for nothing. )-:

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 with modern electronics that tells the camera body a few particulars about the lens.

By far my favorite [...]


View full post »
So Much For That Glorious iPad Screen: iOS and its Apps are Not Even Color Managed

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

With all the talk these days about glorious color performance of the third-generation iPad screen, such as this article and this, I realized that my Lightroom-to-iPad workflow (presented in "Getting Photos from Lightroom to iPad: a Much Smoother Workflow") neglected to consider color profiles. This is a huge oversight for someone like me [...]


View full post »
Funky Kyoto Marathoners: More Lightroom Processing Fun (and a mini challenge)

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 focus into an asset.

I don't know whether I succeeded, but the result is what you see above, something that vaguely reminded me of my memory of some Leroy Neiman Olympic paintings.

I don't use develop presets very often, but I saved the extreme develop [...]


View full post »
Some Random Japan Desktop Backgrounds From the Past Year

Some random desktop backgrounds in my photo library from the past year. I used these as practice with the new render engine in Lightroom 4, which I like but am not completely used to yet.

Often, a photo here is from some trip or event that I already blogged about; the "nearby photos" link under each image brings you to related posts.


View full post »
Kyoto Marathon: First Runners

So picking up from my previous post about the Kyoto Marathon (京都マラソン2012), once the runners started arriving, I practiced taking photos. The depth of field with this lens is so incredibly thin that it's only luck that I got anything, but like hitting the lottery to get something so close like the next shot:

It was odd for me to see the "OMRON" on each runner's number bib. They're a large international electronics company headquartered in Kyoto; I worked for them for eight years when I was fresh out of grad school back in the late 80s.

The challenge of [...]


View full post »