Posts from Chris

Some old Bullshit...

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 10:59:24 +0000

Chris has added a post:

... I stole that title from the Beastie Boys.

As I wrote in my guestbook, I had little to no time to take photos in the recent past. But I recently moved and since I still have too much empty space at my walls, I browsed my photo libraries for some candidates for photo printing. The last four uploaded documents are photos that looked crappy in colour but which I somehow like in black and white.

Survey: Browsing Documents

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 14:57:02 +0000

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How do you browse other people's documents?

Do you just open the first few pages (how many)? Or do you open the popular photos with most viewed / favs?

Do you skim through the photos or you open each photo in a separate window/tab or use that widget in the upper right corner?

Please Seed!

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Sun, 05 Oct 2008 18:23:53 +0000

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If you are downloading via BitTorrent, please do not close the torrent after leeching (=downloading), but keep seeding it!

That's the only way peer to peer networking can work!

Testing Panorama Tools

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Mon, 22 Sep 2008 18:56:19 +0000

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As most people, I like panorama photos. There are enough views that are simply to large to capture but it would be a crime to crop the view. So panorama photos are the solution

I did some panoramas with Hugin, but for larger projects (more than two parts) I'm usually too lazy to create dozens of control points over and over again.

Today, I tried three alternatives, all shareware. I loaded the photos and created the panoramas with default settings.

DoubleTake

DoubleTake is a typical application from a typical small Mac shareware company. The interface is clean and easy, the files are added via drag and drop. The complete workflow seems to be quite fast, I never got the feeling that the program hung. DoubleTake costs 16.95 Euro which seems to be fair price. As you can see in the result, there are some artifacts in the result. This may depend on the source images.

Calico

Calico also comes with a clean interface. Though it's not as Mac-like as DoubleTake, the image load dialog appears after clicking on the button on the bottom of the window or the edit menu (that's why I didn't find it at first) It costs 39 Dollar (approximately 27 Euro). The result looks good, but you have to crop the panorama yourself (or did I oversee anything else?)

PTGui

PTGui Pro is the most expensive tool. It really looks like a pro tool: the interface is a little bit awkward and not Mac-like at all, the advanced options are overwhelming. It seems to be a little bit more unresponsive as the other two. With a price of 79 Euro, it's almost twice as expensive as the other two together. The result also has to be cropped manually, but this time, I wouldn't be surprised to oversee any cropping option.

Conclusion

None of the three tools is unaffordable. Depending on the time you want to spend creating the panoramas (or rather you do NOT want to spend), the preferences should be the first two.

Please look at the results and tell me which photo looks best. Try to overlook the black borders and the shareware annotations.

BACK FROM CROATIA

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 10:25:02 +0000

Chris has added a post:

I'm finally back from Croatia where I spent the last two weeks.

It's a beautiful country and again, I took rather too many photos :-) I'll be busy picking the best ones to publish here at ipernity, so stay tuned!

Edit: As you might have seen, I started to upload photos, the second batch just finished. Though at the moment I have no idea how to prevent doublets - mismanagment in the first place... Perhaps I'm going to write another feature request to team ipernity with the wish to order a certain selection of photos (in my case: by date taken)

Wat fott es es fott

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 10:52:54 +0000

Chris has added a post:

Meine Festplatte hat sich verabschiedet, ohne jede Vorwarnung. Zwar ist mir die Wichtigkeit von Backups bewusst, so richtig hab ich es dann aber doch nie gemacht. Ich hab ja für andere Leute schon oft genug die Kohlen aus dem Feuer, bzw. die verloren geglaubten Daten von der defekten Festplatte geholt. Nachdem die Platte aber nicht mal mehr anlief, kam die Panik hoch. WAS ist überhaupt weg? Musik und Mails nicht, was ist mit den Fotos, welche Backups hab ich? Meine iPhoto-Bibliothek hab ich zum letzten Mal im Dezember gesichert, von meinen Lightroom-Bildern gibt es "ein paar" auf einem anderen Rechner. Was ist noch auf den diversen SD-Karten drauf? Von den wichtigsten Ereignissen, so scheint es, habe ich alle Fotos. Nach über einer Woche trauer ich den verlorenen Daten schon kaum noch hinterher. Ich halte mich da streng an das kölnische Grundgesetz: Wat fott es es fott.

(A quick translation: My harddisk died, without warning. Although I'm aware of the importance of backups, I never really backuped my data. Often enough, I pulled other people's chestnuts out of the fire respectively the counted for lost files out of the broken harddrive. But since the disk wouldn't even start again, I panicked. WHAT is lost? Not music and mails, what's about my photos, what kind of backups do I have? I haven't copied my iPhoto library since december, from my Lightroom library, I've only got a few photos on another computer. Is there still anything on my various SD cards? It seems that I still have photos from the most important events. After a week, I almost don't worry about my lost data anymore. I stick to the Cologne Constitution: What's gone is gone)

Expedition Colonia, Tag Zwei

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Mon, 14 Apr 2008 07:34:13 +0000

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Kurz gesagt: Alles war besser.

"Auf die Plätze, fertig ...?!" ist eine sehr empfehlenswerte Führung über die Plätze der Kölner Innenstadt. Dabei wird die Geschichte der einzelnen Plätze erläutert und mit alten Fotos und Zeichnungen veranschaulicht.

Bei frühlingshaftem Wetter habe ich diesmal sogar Fotos geschossen (kommen noch...).

Die Führung gibt es nicht nur im Rahmen der Expedition Colonia, sondern wird das ganze Jahr über angeboten, Veranstalter ist http://www.stattreisen-koeln.de/

Expedition Colonia, Tag Eins

nobody@ipernity.com (Chris) — Sat, 05 Apr 2008 18:02:36 +0000

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Ich komme gerade von der ersten Führung wieder, "Die Kölner Brunnen".

Vielleicht lag es vor allem am Wetter, ich bin jetzt nicht restlos begeistert.

Es ist jedenfalls keine Veranstaltung für Leute, die gerne (nutzloses) Wissen akkumulieren.

Wie schon angedeutet, das Wetter hätte kaum schlechter sein können, zudem hat mich

das hohe Durchschnittsalter des Publikums doch sehr erstaunt.

Von den Brunnen habe ich genau Null Fotos geschossen, vielleicht wird das ja bei schönerem Wetter nachgeholt...