Technology Nerd » Photography

Watch Videos and Become a Picasa Expert – Picasa Community on YouTube!

Anees Jafri — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 16:44:19 +0000

Google has recently launched the Picasa Community Channel on YouTube which would showcase videos about Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. These are videos that are created by users like you and me.

From some basic overviews to specific features, Google has compiled its playlist also that we can easily browse.

If you have a video that you would like to share with the rest of the users out there and teach them a trick or two then here is your chance. Upload the video to YouTube, than send it to Google through the “Send Message” link on the channel.

You can always check out the short how-to-videos and the quick tours created by some of the users who are passionate about using Picasa.

So share your own tips, tricks and testimonials with the Picasa Community. Click here to visit the Community Channel!

Tags: Edit Photo, Google, Online Photo Album, Photo Share, Photography, Picasa, Youtube

GigaPan: Click 50 Megapixels Panoramic Pictures With a 5MP Point-n-Shoot Camera!

Abbas — Sun, 08 Feb 2009 20:45:34 +0000

GigaPan is a revolutionary off-the-camera technology which helps a photographer click amazing panoramic pictures loaded with great details using a regular point and shoot camera.

I’ll get to the details right away. GigaPan is not a just gadget or software alone, this systems works together with both, hardware and software and a little bit of human input to create HUGE/high-resolution panoramic images.

One of the most recently clicked/published images which enjoyed a lot of attention was the GigaPan of President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address. The image is made of 1756 pictures stitched together and the image resolution after the stitching comes to 1.47 gigapixels. . Click here to check it out.

The technology is a collaborative efforts of researchers from Nasa and Carnegie Mellon University. GigaPan system uses the same panoramic photo technology used by Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity.

So how does this thing really work?

All you got to do is mount a camera on the robotic imager and mark your points (right and left) to be photographed. Once that is done the system immediately calculates the number of pictures it would take to create a hi-res panorama. Once the wizard is completed the robotic imager starts clicking pictures automatically.

The imager can shoot upto 1000-1100 pictures in 30 minutes and can create an image anywhere from 50 megapixels to 5 gigapixels and beyond. Isn’t that amazing?

Once these pictures are shot all you got to do is stitch them using GigaPan Stitcher and upload to GigaPan.org and start sharing it with friends and family.

GigaPan is quite reasonable and rightly priced at $379 and does work with most of the point and shoot camera’s available in the market (click here to check the list of compatible cameras). GigaPan will soon release a new product called EPIC 100 which will support larger cameras available in the market.

I have embedded about 5 videos on this article, the first four are GigaPan Tutorials and the last one is a tech talk about GigaPan from Google (Google Inc. was one of the project participants).

GigaPan Tutorial 1 of 4.

GigaPan Tutorial 2 of 4.

GigaPan Tutorial 3 of 4.

GigaPan Tutorial 4 of 4.

GigaPan in depth..

Tags: GigaPan, Hi-Resolution Panorama, Photography

PixiSnap: Make a mosaic of your photo in easy steps

Vivek — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 16:15:42 +0000

I know a lot of people who love photography and some who love being part of photos. Also, with my exposure to Internet I can comfortably understand how the art of photography has evolved. Some interesting forms of photography include Polaroid, HDR and so on. One of the kind of photography that excites me probably after HDR is mosaic. True that you cannot shoot a mosaic image from your camera. But while processing I am sure you can do a lot of stuff to make mosaic and make it look even more beautiful than normal photos.

In the field of photographic imaging, a photographic mosaic (also known under the term Photomosaic, a portmanteau of photo and mosaic, trademarked by Runaway Technology, Inc.) is a picture (usually a photograph) that has been divided into (usually equal sized) rectangular sections, each of which is replaced with another photograph of appropriate average color. When viewed at low magnifications, the individual pixels appear as the primary image, while close examination reveals that the image is in fact made up of many hundreds or thousands of smaller images.

Today we’ll look at a service that will make for you mosaic photos in just few steps. Best part is that it’s an online service and hence can be accessed from anywhere. This service is called as pixisnap and looks very promising.

All you have to do is upload a primary photo (the photo which will be converted to mosaic) and then enter all the photos which will combine to form the mosaic photos. Following is the mosaic I have created.

The interface is very easy and the process of converting an image into mosaic doesn’t take too much of time.

Tags: mosaic photo, Photography, pixisnap

PhotoFunia: Make your photos special and important!

Vivek — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 11:24:16 +0000

We all suffer from some kind of identity crisis at some point of time in life. I am not sure if this crisis is carried on to the virtual life as well. But it seems there are services to show off your photo as significantly important than what they are. This service is called as photofunia and is actually pretty impressive in what it does. It takes your photos and blends it in a nice template which makes your photo looks both cool ans significant.

Let’s take an example. I am going to use my photo for the lack of other photos. Please bear with the really non photogenic me and it would be fantastic if you would want to try this with your photos and boast about your significance to your friends. These are just a few of the many templates available. The first photo is my original photo and others are all generated using the service photofunia.

Let us take a quick glimpse into the some of the templates available.

Have fun with photos of yourself, friends and family members!

Tags: photo editing, photo manipulating, photo template, photofunia, Photography, photos

Leaf AFi-II: Get serious about photography

Vivek — Fri, 12 Sep 2008 14:27:31 +0000

Although I cannot afford most of the gears for serious DSLR photography, I still like to keep track of the photography world. I came across something neat yesterday and thought it’s worth writing about. Leaf has launched a new series of medium format camera and camera backs. The series is Leaf AFi-II 6, 7 and 10 digital camera systems and the Leaf Aptus-II 6, 7 and 10 digital camera backs.

Just in case you don’t know what a medium format camera is, wikipedia is there to help:

In digital photography, medium format refers either to cameras adapted from medium format film photography uses, or to cameras making use of sensors larger than that of a 35
Tags: camera, digital camera systems, digital cameras, dslr, medium format cameras, medium frame cameras, Photography

Microsoft AutoCollage 2008-Easiest way to create a collage out of your pictures

Vivek — Thu, 04 Sep 2008 12:22:05 +0000

Microsoft today launched a software for photographers called as Microsoft AutoCollage 2008. AutoCollage 2008 is a new desktop software which seamlessly joins multiple individual photographs into one. The method it uses is object recognition and face detection. Following is the overview of the software in Microsoft’s words.

AutoCollage is an application for automatically creating collages from your images. Pick a folder, press a button, and in mere moments AutoCollage presents you with a unique memento to print or to e-mail to your family and friends.

The software is only available for Vista and Windows XP SP2. We downloaded and tried our hands on the software and it’s as easy as any software can get. Just select the folder of pictures and say create. Save the picture and you have your collage ready. Following is a collage we created using Microsoft AutoCollage 2008. What we however did not like is that even in the 30 Days Trial version your collage created with Microsoft AutoCollage 2008 will have a watermark as can be noticed in the picture below.

Following is a demonstration video of Microsoft AutoCollage 2008.

Is this an answer to Picasa’s Face Recognition? IMHO, both cater to a different type of needs and Microsoft has to integrate a lot of features to make it reach closer to Picasa.

We also pulled out for our readers the press release by Microsoft.

Microsoft Research Press Release

CAMBRIDGE, UK – 4 Sept 2008 – Microsoft Research today launched AutoCollage 2008, a desktop application that allows users to easily compile a set of individual photographs into one seamless collage.

In just a few clicks, people can transform an unwieldy group of photos, for example, of an event like a wedding or holiday, into a single collage image that can be printed, used in e-postcards, web pages, desktop backgrounds, or emailed to family and friends.

Available to trial from the Microsoft Research download site, AutoCollage is an advanced computer vision and image processing program that assembles pictures into a seamless collage using methods such as object recognition and face detection. Having automatically identified interesting parts of pictures, AutoCollage combines the separate pictures into a composite collage by deliberately following natural features as a boundary between images.

Tags: collage image, Collage maker, collages, face detection, microsoft AutoCollage 2008, Microsoft AutoCollage 2008 press release, object recognition, Photography

Photosynth by Microsoft: Enjoy the 3D view of your favorite location

Abbas — Fri, 22 Aug 2008 10:00:47 +0000

Microsoft’s Photosynth is out of beta now. The product is based on its most talked about and popular research projects in the field of photography.

This product creates a panoramic 3D view of an image by synchronizing multiple images. This technology is also known as Photo Tourism.

it could just be the start of what we call computational photography techniques making its way to the main stream media in a form of a product.

To see the best results of this technology, one should take a lot of pictures of the same or surrounding view from as many angles as possible. Also, Microsoft suggests that this product be used with IE 7 and above or FireFox 3 and above. Once these pictures are uploaded into Photosynth, it creates a picture which can we viewed at different angles and distance.

This is certainly one of the best products out there on the internet as a result of Microsoft research projects.

Visit Photosynth.net and try the product right away, Click here to see an example of what Photosynth can do.

Watch this mind blowing Photosynth demo video at TED by Blaise Aguera y Arcas, an architect at Microsoft Live Labs, architect of Seadragon, and the co-creator of Photosynth.

Tags: 3D Images, Microsoft, Photography, photos, Photosynth

Nikon S550 has a mind of its own. Detects Smiles and Blinks

Abbas — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 16:09:45 +0000

Clicking pictures is an art but a lot depends on the subject and the moment you click the picture. Nikon released a camera cookpix S550 which has a mind of its own and makes point-n-shoot photography even more easier.

This camera has (at least)two amazingly useful features,

1) Smile Detection:
This feature alerts the photographer when anyone or everyone in the frame is smiling so that the picture can be taken at the right time.

2) Blink Detection:
Once the picture is taken this features quickly scans for "blinks" and the indicator appears on the screen so that the picture can be shot again.

Other features include, In-Camera Red-Eye Fix, D-Lighting (compensates for poor light on certain parts of the image), Face-Priority AF (detects up to 12 faces), etc…

Click here to read more about Nikon S550

Tags: Digital Camera, Nikon, Nikon S550 Review, Photography

Bookmark pictures from anywhere on the web using Vi.Sualize.us

Abbas — Mon, 19 May 2008 22:01:13 +0000

vi.sualize.us is a social bookmarking site for pictures only! You can create or organize a list of your favorite pictures from anywhere on the web.

You can do this in two ways,

1) Install the Firefox extension offered by vi.sualize.us which lets you easily bookmark pictures from any website by just right clicking on the image and

2) Copy the image URL and paste it on the "Post" form and it will fetch the thumbnail for you.

vi.sualize.us also lets you share pictures using your personalized URL (e.g http://vi.sualize.us/syedabbas) , comment and tag these images with your online friends and with other users on vi.sualize.us. One thing to be careful about is that the "Safe" feature on the site does not work all the time, I saw a few pictures which fall under 18+ category with "Safe" feature on.

No copyright issues have hit vi.sualize.us so far however the site clearly states that the content (pictures) on the site belong to their original owners.

You can view my collection of pictures here: http://vi.sualize.us/syedabbas

Tags: Bookmark Photos, Bookmark Pictures, Photo Share, Photo Tagging, Photography

3D Photography is now a reality, take a look

Abbas — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 09:05:32 +0000

Most of us are fascinated with photography and since the digitalization of pictures and cameras happened more and more armature and budding photographers aspire to be professional some day. With all the advancements happening in the field of Photography we are beginning to see features we’ve never seen before.

From what I have seen and known I think Stanford is one of the universities which is majorly researching on imagery and photography. Keith Fife and his team at Stanford have developed a new technology which is called multi-aperture image sensor.

Instead of taking one big picture this technology breaks the entire picture into small 16×16 patches which are overlapping each other, this is called subarrays. The way it works is that the sensor is measures the distance of each patch from lens to object and arrange accordingly.

Attempts have been made in the past to achieve 3D imagery or stereoscopic imaging and the following image shows one of the cameras developed few years ago to take 3D Images. The technology is developed by a company called 3D World and is available in the market now. Click here to visit the product page.

Another attempt was made by Adobe which is working on a similar technology. Click on the following link to view the video. AudioBlog.fr

Few months ago I watched a video on Scoble Show based on research of Marc Levoy, a professor at Stanford University. I was amazed at the things he demonstrated during the interview and it shows the kind of technology and features we can expect to see on our cameras in the future.

Resources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stereoscopy
http://home.comcast.net/~jlballou/stereoaerial/sfmcc.html (examples of 3D Images)
http://isl.stanford.edu/groups/elgamal/people/kfife/

Excited about the future of Photography? Me too!

Tags: 3D Images, camera, digital, Photography, Stanford University, Stereoscopic Imaging