Photo on Fazal Majid's low-intensity blog

Batch-converting HEIC images to JPEGs on the Mac

Wed, 27 Oct 2021 10:49:05 +0000

I use Lightroom 6 to manage my photo collection, although it is falling victim to bit rot (e.g. the face recognition module no longer works, apparently due to a licensing logic time bomb in the code). Exploitative pay-forever software subscriptions are simply unacceptable so I will not yield to Adobe’s Creative Clout bondage, and since Lightroom will not work in newer versions of MacOS, that means I am working on migrating to Darktable, albeit very slowly.

Canon Powershot Zoom review

Sun, 22 Nov 2020 09:52:05 +0000

I just received my Canon Powershot Zoom yesterday. It’s a relatively compact digital camera shaped like a monocular. Size-wise, it is comparable with monoculars like my Leica Monovid or Nikon 7x15 HG.

It’s not actually a zoom, but rather it offers 100mm-e and 400mm-e discrete magnifications (with nothing in-between), and a 800mm-e digital zoom setting that is best ignored. It will take 4000x3000 images or 1080p25 (if set to PAL) at 30Mbps. There is no built-in memory, you have to use a microSDXC card, in my case a 64GB one, there is no specified upper limit.

DNP D820A review

Thu, 01 Oct 2020 16:54:48 +0000

A very solid and trouble-free printer that makes excellent prints, including spectacular panoramics, for a significant fixed price.

Despite striving for the paperless office, and believing photographic prints are mostly a relic, I have a substantial collection of printers (as my daughter points out, it’s 5 printers per person in my household):

HP OfficeJet Pro X551dw (extremely fast using PageWide fixed head technology, quite economical, huge paper tray capacity, very bulky)
Epson EcoTank ET-16600 (prints and scans A3, very economical, also very bulky but not considering the print size)
Brother QL-700, QL-820NWB, QL-1110NWB label printers (can make labels any length you want, the latter two are AirPrint compatible)
Rollo label printer (will take practically any label stock you can throw at it)
Fuji Instax SP100 instant photo printer (kids love them)
Canon Selphy QX10 portable dye-sub sticker printer for my daughter
two Dai-Nippon Printing DNP DS820A 8" dye-sub printers, one in storage
An Epson Stylus Photo R2400 in storage
a couple of Brother TZe label makers
a Dymo LabelWriter 450 Twin Turbo (unreliable garbage, at least on Mac, avoid)
A Selpic P1 on the way
A Prusa i3 MK3S 3D printer (not sure if that counts)

The DNP DS820A replaced my Epson R2400 for two reasons:

Virtual Reality for the people

Sun, 19 Jan 2020 22:59:33 +0000

I have been shooting stitched panoramas for almost 20 years. I have used manual panorama heads like the Kaidan Kiwi+ and more recently the pocketPANO Compact, robotic heads like the Gigapan EPIC 100 and the Benro Polaris, and four successive generations of the Ricoh Theta (Theta, Theta S, Theta V, Theta Z1).

Setting up and iterating a manual head is incredibly tedious. The Gigapan makes it less so, specially when using long lenses (my standard setup is a Leica M typ 240 or M10 with a 90mm f/2 Apo-Summicron-M ASPH). The Theta series was a major breakthrough in that it could produce nearly seamless 360° panoramas with no motion artifacts or ghosting. The Z1 with its large 1″ sensor finally yields image quality that I am happy with.

How big can a panorama get?

Fri, 02 Jun 2017 19:18:40 +0000

I use the Kolor AutoPano Giga panorama-stitching software, recently acquired by GoPro, but I have yet to produce a gigapixel panorama like those they pioneered. This brings up an interesting question: given a camera and lens, what would the pixel size of the largest 360° stitched panorama be?

Wikipedia to the rescue: using the formula for the solid angle of a pyramid, the full panorama size of a camera with m megapixels on a sensor of a x b using a focal length of f would be:

Scanner group test

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 03:28:13 +0000

After my abortive trial of the Colortrac SmartLF Scan, I did a comparative test of scanning one of my daughter’s A3-sized drawings on a number of scanners I had handy.

Scanner	Sensor	Scan
Colortrac SmartLF Scan	CIS	ScanLF.jpg
Epson Perfection Photo V500 Photo (manually stitched)	CCD	Epson_V500.jpeg
Epson Perfection V19 (manually stitched)	CIS	Epson_V19.jpg
Fujitsu ScanSnap S1500M (using a carrier sheet and the built-in stitching)	CCD	S1500M_carriersheet.jpg
Fujitsu ScanSnap SV600	CCD	SV600.jpg
Fuji X-Pro2 with XF 35mm f/1.4 lens, mounted on a Kaiser RS2 XA copy stand with IKEA KVART 3-spot floor lamp (CCT 2800K, a mediocre 82 CRI as measured with my UPRtek CV600)	CMOS	X-Pro2.jpg

I was shocked by the wide variance in the results, as was my wife. This is most obvious in the orange flower on the right.

Colortrac SmartLF Scan review

Fri, 07 Apr 2017 02:17:04 +0000

TL:DR summary

Pros:

Scans very large documents
Easy to use
Packs away in a convenient carrying case

Cons:

So-so color fidelity
Hard to feed artwork straight
Dust and debris can easily get on the platen, ruining scans
Relatively expensive for home use

Review

One thing you do not lack for when your child enters preschool is artwork. They generate prodigious amounts of it, with gusto, and they are often large format pieces on 16×24″ paper (roughly ISO A2). The question is, what do you do with the torrent?

ArtisanState review

Wed, 11 Mar 2015 21:29:31 +0000

I seldom print photos any more. When I do, I prefer to make photobooks, as the format is way more convenient than loose prints, takes little space, and looks more polished than a traditional photo album.

Unfortunately, most photobooks are printed on HP Indigo digital presses, which use a technology somewhat similar to a laser printer, but capable of better quality photo reproduction. Indigo presses were originally designed to produce personalized junk-mail, not high-quality photo reproduction, and the quality, while decent, is not at the same level as that of true RA-4 photo paper exposed with a laser or LED light source as done by most digital minilabs (e.g. Fuji Frontier or Noritsu QSS) or higher-end imaging systems like the Océ/Cymbolic Lightjet or Durst Lambda.

A Passel of Miniature Tripods

Sat, 19 Jul 2014 00:00:00 +0000

Miniature tripods are a handy thing to carry in a camera bag. While they cannot replace a full-size tripod, they can allow you to take a shot where otherwise impossible. Here are a few worth your consideration.

Mini-tripods group photo

Novoflex Microstativ

Pros: very lightweight

Novoflex Microstativ

Pros: very lightweight

The ultimate irrelevance of image quality

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 20:02:14 +0000

Months ago I showed my father how to take screen shots on his iPad and iMac, and he routinely takes them while using FaceTime video conferencing with my 1 year-old daughter. Due to poor bandwidth at home (we live in San Francisco and are subject to the tender mercies of AT&T’s not-even-third-world-grade DSL), the image quality can be described as blurry VGA at best. Yet he is happy with the results, and even made a photo book featuring many of these screenshots, showing the wide range of fleeting expressions she displays. When printed at passport photo size, the fuzziness is surprisingly passable. He has also gotten my technophobe mother in the game.