Entries tagged with photography - Channel 10

Geotag Your Photos Without GPS

Sarah Perez — Fri, 11 Apr 2008 01:37:00 GMT

The Windows Live Photo and Video blog recently posted a great tutorial on how to geotag your photos without GPS. How is this possible? The trick to geotagging your pics is using a combination of Windows Live services - Windows Live Photo Gallery, Spaces, and Windows Live Maps. The blog post details all the steps, with screenshots, so it's easy for anyone to do. The end result is a Windows Live Maps collection collection of geotagged pictures! Awesome! Excellent post, guys - definitely worth a read for photographers and geotagging enthusiasts!

Panoramic Stitches from the Pacific Northwest

Sarah Perez — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:00:00 GMT

Brandon LeBlanc just posted some great panoramic stitches on the Windows Vista Experience blog. If you haven't yet seen what Windows Live Photo Gallery can do, you should check these out. From his recent trip around Washington state, including Seattle, Snoqualmie Pass, Grand Coulee Dam, and the Tri-Cities area, Brandon ported his Dell XPS M1530 (PRODUCT) RED laptop and his digital camera, a Canon Digital Rebel XTi. To check out the images for yourself, head over to the blog where you can see the complete set.

GPS Tagging Photos

Larry Larsen — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 18:30:00 GMT

At some point in the future probably all of our digital photos will be tagged with location data. Where a photo was taken is pretty important now, and will future-proof your photos, but how do you do it? There are a few different devices out there that carry with you when shooting that will records your location and then later apply that (via timestamp) to the pictures you load onto your computer. The ATP PhotoFinder is that type of device, except it's the first one I've seen with a card reader built into it that will actually take your camera's card and apply the geo-location data to the images directly. ($89, via Uncrate)

Stack your Photos with PicMe

Sarah Perez — Fri, 29 Feb 2008 14:18:00 GMT

A freeware application for Windows called PicMe, scans your PC for your digital photos and then displays them in 3D stacks, like a digital shoe box. You can use PicMe to browse through your photos but you can also use the application to share them with your friends by using the integrated sharing feature. PicMe lets you share photos with friends on Flickr, Picassa, Facebook, or with other PicMe users. The free version lets you share up to 200 photos, but to share more, you'll have to pay. However, it's only $9.95/year for the next step up, which allows for 5000 photos. You can try PicMe by downloading the app from here.

Digital Photography Resources

Sarah Perez — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 04:32:00 GMT

If you're into digital photography, I just discovered a great resource that you'll want to check out via Brian Johnson's BufferOverrun blog. Brian created a list of links using Microsoft Live Labs Listas, which breaks down the resources into the following categories: Digital Camera Resources, Photography Education and Techniques, Photo Software and Sharing, Photography Podcasts, and Photography User Groups and Events. The list features some Microsoft resources, like PhotoSynth and some non-Microsoft resources like Paint.NET's Wikibook. Even if you don't have time to peruse the whole list now, it's one of those gems that you find and just have to bookmark!

Depth of Field Guide for Geeks

Larry Larsen — Fri, 22 Feb 2008 18:26:00 GMT

One of the photography tricks that I'd really like to get better at is the use of depth of field. Getting depth of field right can make or break a picture. As you can see in the photo at left (courtesy of BernieCode), DOF allows the subject of your photo to be in sharp focus but the background area to be blurred. This is a little closer to how the eye naturally sees, but the real magic is that it immediately conveys to the viewer exactly what the subject of the photo is.

BernieCode has a great tutorial called "Bernie's Better Guide to Depth of Field for Geeks Who Want to be Digital Artists" and it's worth a read if you want to do more than click and shoot with the camera set to the green box. Also check out his guide for beginner computer geeks who want to be digital artists.

Metadata and the Windows Live Photo Gallery

Sarah Perez — Tue, 22 Jan 2008 13:30:00 GMT

Metadata means "data about data" and every time you tag a photo, give it a star rating, or edit the time it was taken, you've edited the metadata. In Windows XP, photo metadata included things like file name, size, and type, etc. In Windows Vista, however, there is all kinds of new metadata, including tags, date taken, rating, caption, image resolution, camera make/model, shutter speed, etc. Now, some of that metadata is created by your camera (like make/model, shutter speed, etc), but some of it is created by you.

With the Windows Live Photo Gallery, you can quickly and easily add tags and ratings. If this is the first time you've installed the program, you will probably want to go through the pictures already on your computer and add some tags to them. This can be easily done by clicking on the group of photos listed under the Tags section as "Not Tagged." You can then select a picture, or use Ctrl or Shift to select multiple photos and then "Add Tags" on the right side of the gallery. As you add tags to photos, your most recent tags will appear as you start typing in a tag, making it that much easier to tag a photo. The next time you import pictures, you can tag them on their way in - there are more details on the import process here.

In the Live Photo Gallery, you can also click on the star ratings, which are located above the tags in the right side column in the gallery to assign ratings to your photos. At the bottom right there is an option to add a caption to the selected photo.

But what you may not realize is that the tags you assign to your photos don't just help you locate and organize the pictures on your computer, the data is passed on to other services that support the metadata, too. A good example of this is flickr. By right-clicking on a photo or photos in the gallery, you'll see a "More Services" option. Click that and select "Publish on flickr." When you publish your photos on flickr, your tags and captions are supported and will be transferred automatically to Flickr, saving you from having to tag them again on the web service. But flickr isn't the only thing that supports the Photo Gallery Metadata. Since Windows Live Photo Gallery supports a type of metadata called XMP, programs like Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Bridge, iView MediaPro, Extensis Portfolio, and lots more support XMP, too.

Professional photographers may want to have even more interaction with the metadata, so for them, there is the Microsoft Photo Info tool. The tool is a software add-in for Windows that allows you to add, change, or delete metadata properties from inside Windows Explorer. It also provides enhanced "hover tips" and additional sort properties for digital photos in the Windows Explorer Details view.

Using the Microsoft Photo Info tool, you can edit images individually, or as a collection, quickly recall recent entries and location details, generate copyright notices automatically, correct EXIF capture date/time info, view EXIF properties, and preview images by double-clicking the photo's thumbnail.

(Source: Windows Live Photo & Video Blog)

Jon Udell talks HD Photo with Bill Crow

Larry Larsen — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 22:21:00 GMT

Did you know that many cameras can take better photos than the jpeg standard can display? This means that the camera is often trying to figure out which ball to drop in terms of how to save the photo and therefore limits you in the color correction you can make after taking the picture. Raw has been one way around this problem, another is Microsoft's new HD Photo format.

You may think that you need some expensive or proprietary software to use this new format - not so. You can get started using HD Photo using Windows Live Photo Gallery, a free download. Check out this screencast of Jon Udell talking to Bill Crow about how simple it is for "happy snappers" to easily adjust photo attributes using Windows Live Photo Gallery.

HD Photo plug-in for Photoshop available

Larry Larsen — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 20:12:00 GMT

Bill Crow writes that the free Photoshop plugin for HD photo is available now for both Windows and Mac OSX. This will work for XP, Vista, OSX 10.5 and 10.5 using Photoshop CS2 and CS3. If you missed Bill's presentation on HD Photo Guidelines, you can see the Powerpoint here.

HD Photo is an entirely new photo file format for continuous-tone imagines that allows multiple color formats for display or print, HDR encoding, and lossless or high-quality lossy compression. You're likely to see this file format start appearing on various camera hardware in the future. You can read more about HD Photo here and see the HD Photo Feature Specification 1.0 here. (via Bill Crow's HD Photo Blog)

Photojojo - A Site for Photo Enthusiasts

Sarah Perez — Thu, 29 Nov 2007 17:16:00 GMT

OK, I'm not a huge fan of the goofy name, but this website/newsletter has a lot of cool stuff that makes it worth checking it. Photojojo is primarily a newsletter (and they house their newsletter archives on their website) where you can find tutorials, do-it-yourself projects, camera/camera accessory reviews, contests, and much more. Some recent posts on Photojojo include a customizable version of the Monopoly board game, where you can add your own photos; a how-to post on making a doggie cam; tips on de-pixelizing your photos using VectorMagic; and a handy how-to on removing extra people from your photos. Whether you're just getting into photography or already an enthusiast, you can learn a lot the Photojob site. There's even a store where they have cool photo-related tools and gifts and a forum where you can chat with other shutterbugs like yourself.

SEAMonster Does Seam Carving

Sarah Perez — Wed, 28 Nov 2007 17:54:00 GMT

SEAMonster, a personal project of Mike Swanson's, has nothing to do with the cool SeaDragon technology, despite the similar name. Instead, SEAMonster is an app that lets you perform seam carving on your photos. What is seam carving? It's a photo-resizing algorithim developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir that reduces or enlarges pictures by intelligently removing pixels. If that's a little confusing, this video demos the technique quite well. According to the seamcarving.com website, seam carving removes the pixels that carry little importance - something that is determined by measuring a pixel's contrast when compared to its neighbor pixels, as well as by more advanced techniques. By performing seam carving, you can scale photos by a wide range, while retaining the details. (Normal scaling techniques normally can't go beyond a factor of 2 or less than 0.5.). The SEAMonster application uses Microsoft .NET Framework Version 2.0, so you'll need that first. When you're ready to get started, check out the 8-minute video intro Mike recorded in lieu of documentation. Amazing stuff! (Thanks to Blake Handler for posting about this).

Upload Photos from Your Camera to the Web

Sarah Perez — Wed, 14 Nov 2007 15:57:00 GMT

The Eye-Fi Card is a breakthrough new product that everyone with a digital camera needs to know about. It's a 2GB SD card and wireless memory card that automatically uploads pictures from your digital camera or PC directly to the photo sharing site, photo printing site, blog, or social network of your choice. The Eye-Fi Card stores pictures like a regular SD card, up to 2 GB, and then uploads your photos automatically as soon as you return to your home network (or any open Wi-Fi network that doesn't require a login via an initial splash screen webpage...like Starbucks). Amazingly, the card already works with a myriad of services, including Kodak, Walmart, Snapfish, Photobucket, Facebook, Webshots, Phanfare, Shutterfly, flickr, TypePad, Vox, Sharpcast, and many more.

Spooky Photography

Larry Larsen — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 22:29:00 GMT

It must be tough to be a pro-photographer. How many average people appreciate good photo composition, the mathematical beauty of the golden rectangle or even heard of the rule of thirds? Everyone in a creative field wants to create work that is personally identifiable, distinctive from the work of others. What does 'thinking outside the box' even look like in photography?

Let me show you two different examples to get your photographic creativity flowing, both a good match for Halloween. First up is William Hundley, whose photographic trademark is getting people to put a sheet over their head and jump up in the air. William then shoots a picture while they are off the ground and hidden by the sheet. It's one of those things you just have to see. The result is something your brain processes differently than your average photo. These draw the viewer in and make you think.

Another interesting - almost creepy - composition style is by Bobby Neel Adams, titled Age-Maps. Two photos of a single person from vastly different points in life are cast together, the separation being what looks like a tear in the joined photo.

Both of these techniques are at least approachable by novice photographers. Know of any other cool photo techniques? Leave us a link in the comments.

Windows Live Photo Gallery includes Flickr!

Larry Larsen — Thu, 18 Oct 2007 16:32:00 GMT

Every so often something hits at Microsoft that is so cool you find your inbox filling up about it late into the night as we all start playing with it. It happened this week with the integration of Flickr into Windows Live Photo Gallery. With the latest version, available now on Microsoft Update, uploading your photos to Flickr is as easy as clicking the publish button or just right clicking on your photos. The best part; all the tagging you've done in Vista carries through to Flickr so there is no need to have to re-tag your photos!

Stay tuned as later this week you'll see how easy it is to include these Flickr photos on your site using the drag and drop development tool PopFly.

To get this new version of Photo Gallery, click over to http://get.live.com and get Beta 2 of Windows Live Photo Gallery, and then to http://update.microsoft.com to get the latest version. Check out the press release here, the Windows Live Photo Gallery blog here, and the Flickr blog here. And don't forget to check out Jeff Sandquist's post about it.

Moo MiniCards

Larry Larsen — Fri, 14 Sep 2007 20:20:00 GMT

What if it were easy to have printed 100 business card-sized miniature calling cards, all with different pictures on one side and some text on the other side, for a relatively inexpensive price of say, $20. You'd probably think of more than a few uses for that, right?

That's what Moo allows you to do with their MiniCards service. You can browse their designs or use your own, even pulling your photos from Flickr or several other online services, crop, add up to 6 lines of text on the reverse, and the next thing you know you've got a box of custom cards in your mailbox.

Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing

Nic Fillingham — Thu, 23 Aug 2007 05:53:00 GMT

"Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing" is a technique for resizing images that preserves key elements by deleting "seams" of pixels instead of block columns or rows.

The technique can also be reversed to widen or lengthen images by adding "seams" of pixels or to delete objects - similar to the smart erase feature from Digital Image Suite - but much cleaner.

The technology was developed by Shai Avidan and Ariel Shamir and a paper explaining the concept was presented at SIGGRAPH 2007 earlier this month.

A very cool demo video has found it's way onto the net - check it out.

From the SIGGRAPH 2007 web site

Seam carving is a method for content-aware resizing that changes the size of an image according to its content. This paper shows applications to aspect-ratio change, image retargeting, and object removal.
Shai Avidan
Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)
Ariel Shamir
The Interdisciplinary Center (IDC) and Mitsubishi Electric Research Laboratories (MERL)

HD View Beta 2 Released - Now with Firefox support

Nic Fillingham — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 05:34:00 GMT

HD View Beta 2 was released last week in conjunction with Siggraph 2007 in San Diego.

The big news in this version is the addition of Firefox support.

Firefox users wanting to get their "gigapixel on" will now be prompted to install a plugin when viewing sites with HD view collections. (Plugin available here)

Another new feature is Auto Tone Adjust. This works like an auto gain; adjusting brightness and contrast ratios in darker (or hazier) areas of a photo to increase clarity.

Check out the HD View Windows Live Spaces blog or the official HD View web site for more on gigapixel imaging.

Project Shutter Winners Announced!

Nic Fillingham — Fri, 03 Aug 2007 05:19:00 GMT

The winners of Project Shutter: Live in my City (as voted by YOU) have been announced!

Congratulations to everyone that entered and especially to the Gold, Silver and Bronze recipients!

For their efforts the winners take home some fantastic prizes from HP and Microsoft including Windows Vista HP Pavilion laptops and HP Photosmart bluetooth printers.

Although the competition is now over the Project Shutter Windows Live Space is just getting started.

Head over to http://projectshutter.spaces.live.com/ for free photo sharing, tips & tricks on using your digital camera and a great community of photography enthusiasts from around the world.

So without further ado, here are the winners:

Architecture category
Gold: "石府戏楼" by Yang Huiquan (China)
Silver: "Buddha Image" by Patcharanun Boonterm (Thailand)
Bronze: "Ki Lo Si" by Ng Choo Kia (Malaysia)

"石府戏楼" by Yang Huiquan (China)

Culture category
Gold: "Friends" by Kajohnsak Tangmanpoowadol (Thailand)
Silver: "Midnight Tailor" by Sam Lim Kien Hock (Malaysia)
Bronze: "Mobile Guru" by Kishore Nagarigari (India)

"Friends" by Kajohnsak Tangmanpoowadol (Thailand)

Food category
Gold: "Frying Fritters" by Avishek Chakravarty (India)
Silver: "Kanomjeeb & Salapao" by Pundet Saleewong (Thailand)
Bronze: "Satay Seller" by Victor Santoso (Indonesia)

"Frying Fritters" by Avishek Chakravarty (India)

Head to www.projectshutter.com to check out all the winning entries.

Day 1 at the Toronto Grand Prix

Barnaby Jeans — Fri, 06 Jul 2007 21:41:00 GMT

Every year I spend a few days down by the lake to enjoy the Champ Car and support series races. Every year they seem to tweak the name in some way - so this year it is the "Steelback Grand Prix of Toronto". For the last couple of years I have had media credentials which means I have access to the media centre and a wifi connection so I can post this stuff real-time. Unfortunately shooting video in the pits isn't an option unless you are one of the broadcast outlets (fair enough) so I'll resort to telling the story with photos, and besides, it's a great first outing for the Nikon gear that I'm trying out - I'll post on that later.

Given that I can't shoot video, one of the things I have been on the lookout for is the interesting use of technology and specifically what the teams are running on their laptops in the pits. The good news is I have yet to see a machine that isn't running Windows. While every machine I saw in the pits was running Windows XP, almost every PC I saw in the photo lounge was running Windows Vista - very cool.

At the end of the first day - here is the provisional top 3

Position	Car #	Driver	Team	Lap Time	Speed (KM/h)
1	1	Sebastien Bourdais	McDonald's Racing Team - Newman Haas Lanigan Racking	58.783	172.972
2	7	Oriol Servia	INDECK - Forsythe Championship Racing	58.801	172.919
3	9	Justin Wilson	CDW - RSPORTS	59.099	172.047

If you are in Toronto and at the race send me an email if you want to connect, or if you have a questions you would like to see if I can get answered, let me know.

All of my photos are online at: http://www.flickr.com/photos/barnaby_jeans/sets/72157600689404182/

UPDATED: Windows Live Photo Gallery beta not public

JD Lewin — Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:22:00 GMT

The new beta of Windows Live Photo Gallery ~~is now available~~ and it’s an important update for any photo enthusiast using Vista. The new version includes connectivity with Windows Live Spaces most importantly, allowing the user to easily upload photos to their Spaces account. Kip reports on LiveSide a quick rundown of the beta’s features. Also online are a few screenshots of Windows Live Folders, which will provide a place online for Live users to store and share their large files. Keep an eye on the Windows Live betas site for more as the summer marches on.

UPDATE: The WL Photo Gallery beta has only been seeded internally, and a public beta won't be available until later this year. We'd like to see integration with more photo services than Spaces by the time this gets released, so hopefully it's been designed to allow an intrepid user to write a plug-in.

Windows Vista: What's in it for Photographers?

Barnaby Jeans — Mon, 25 Jun 2007 19:48:00 GMT

I just came across the following article on PopPhoto.com that talks about some of the features in Vista that are most relevant for Photographers.

Without reprinting the entire article they outline 4 key areas:

Windows Photo Gallery
RAW support
Media Center
Forward-Looking Approach

If you are a photographer and wondering about Vista, I encourage you to read the article and let me know if you have any questions. Additionally, you may want to take a look at the Microsoft PhotoBlog at http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/ and specifically their FAQ at http://blogs.msdn.com/pix/pages/FAQ.aspx which address some of the common questions.

Technorati tags: Microsoft, Windows Vista, Photography, Windows Photo Gallery

Maker Faire: Bre Pettis gives us...Photo Bot

Laura Foy — Tue, 19 Jun 2007 15:59:00 GMT

Channel 10 and Bre Pettis (from Make Magazine and imakethings.com) have been dear old buddies from the very beginning. I found the talented boy down at Maker Faire and he shared with us his latest brain child. A robotic pen that does line drawing portraits, of course!

Project Shutter: Take Great Photos; Win Cool Prizes!

Nic Fillingham — Thu, 14 Jun 2007 08:55:00 GMT

Calling all photographers in Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia, Thailand, Philippines, India and mainland China!

Project Shutter: Live in my City has just launched and with it the opportunity for you to win some great prizes by taking photos of the unique food, culture and architecture that represent the country (and city) YOU live in.

The winners in each category (food, culture & architecture) will walk away with an awesome HP Pavilion Notebook running Windows Vista Ultimate and an HP Photosmart printer!

So arm yourself with a digital camera or camera enabled phone and get snapping - you have until June 29 to submit your entries.

For more details or terms and conditions check out www.projectshutter.com

Windows Home Server add-ins grow your backup powers

JD Lewin — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 19:40:00 GMT

Terry Walsh has started We Got Served as a place to gather up all the how-to’s and add-in’s for Windows Home Server. Considering WHS is still working through its beta phase, imagine our surprise at the handful of excellent pieces that have already been built! If you’re a big photo nut, Photosync will keep your Flickr and WHS Photos folder in sync. For the constant travelers, Wake on LAN will power up (or down) any of the machines connected to your WHS. And for the extra secure solution, KeepVault will backup the contents of your WHS online, for yet another layer of redundancy. Keep an eye of the WHS team blog as they march closer towards release.

New Photosynth collection: Gyeongbok Palace in South Korea

JD Lewin — Fri, 18 May 2007 18:25:00 GMT

One of the things that makes Photosynth such an exciting Microsoft Live Labs project is its ability to bring the far corners of the world to your desk. This latest Photosynth exploration of Gyeongbok Palace in Seoul represents a 4,000 photos and a month’s worth of submissions. The result is an ancient Asian experience unlike any other on the web. As with previous coverage of Photosynth on Channel 10, the experience of moving through a 3D collection of images is very Blade Runner. Hopefully this also represents progress by the Live Labs team towards empowering all of you to help model your own world.