Diary of a Network Geek

Another one for the photography geeks.

Some of you may have guessed that I enjoy photography just a little bit.  You may have deduced that from all the photography related links I share on Fridays.  Or possibly because I tell you am obsessed by it virtually every chance I get.  Either way, it’s true.  I find myself staring into portraits of people in magazines trying to figure out the lighting setup based on the reflections in their eyes.  When I see a photo I like on Flickr, I usually check the EXIF data, if it’s available, to get some idea about how the photographer made it.  The EXIF data is far from the whole story, but, at least, it gives me some idea how the photographer was setting the camera to get the light and depth-of-field that they did.

Well, recently, I was reading an entry on Chase Jarvis’ blog challenging his readers to reverse engineer one of his photos.
I kind of love those sorts of things, to be honest.  But, what was cool about this one was that someone in the comments pointed to a website that automagically pulled the EXIF information from the photo!  How cool is that!?
The site is called Jeffrey’s EXIF Viewer.  And you can use it to pull EXIF information from either a photo on your hard drive or that you find on-line somewhere.  I haven’t actually tried it on Flickr for people who don’t upload the EXIF data, but I’m sure I will be in the near future.  In any case, it’s free, outside of some advertising, and it’s pretty cool.  (Also, for the hard-core tech geeks like me, I’ll note that it looks like it was programmed in Perl, which is my favorite programming language.)

So, go forth, find photos and check them against the EXIF data to see if you can guess the photographer’s settings!
And, enjoy your Friday!

You may have seen this already…

If you travel in the same tech circles on-line that I do, you probably have seen a lot of the same things I link to here on Fridays.  So, why do I still do it?  Well, for a couple reasons.
First, because maybe you missed it.  Or it didn’t seem like it was what it is so you didn’t actually look at it.
Secondly, because, well, I liked it, so I want to link to it so I don’t lose the link, even if you don’t like it.
And, thirdly, of course, because it adds search engine optimization “juice” to my tiny, little marketing tool, er, I mean, blog.

So, anyway, now that the business is out of the way, here’s the real stuff.
You all should know by now that I’m a little bit into photography.  (Yeah, yeah, I know, that’s like saying Shakespeare wrote a couple plays, but, still, you get what I’m saying here, right?)  And, of course, digital photography is “where it’s at”, as the hep cats say.  Well, as ubiquitous as it may seem today, it wasn’t always so.  Don’t believe me?  Okay, then hop over to ExtremeTech and check out their History of Digital Photography and see if that doesn’t change your mind.
Also?  It’s Friday and you’re obviously slacking if you’re reading this blog anyway, so you might as well go see something fun.

Yeah, you read that right.

It’s no secret that I love my digital camera.  Not quite enough to give it a name, like some photographers I know, but, still, I love the little fist-full of magic that lets me take amazingly detailed digital photographs.  I remember when my ex-wife got her digital camera, it was a big deal that it was something like 3-megapixels.  Now, my iPhone has a camera at least as good as that built into it!  The camera I use now is a 10 megapixel camera and that’s really just an entry-level DSLR, which is 3 years old.  The better cameras start at 20 megapixels and go up from there these days.  That, let me assure you, is capturing a lot of data.  We’ve come a long way in a short time.

But, researchers are working on cameras that make those look primitive.
According to Scientific American, DARPA researchers are experimenting with gigapixel cameras.  That’s over a billion pixels.  That’s like 333 times better resolution than an iPhone camera.  That, in short, is pretty amazing.  And, not only does the camera take amazing shots, but it looks amazing, too.  Check out the slideshow at Scientific American that shows the camera and a picture it’s taken.

There’s something to think about as you snap photos of your friends this weekend!

More photography add-on software.

Now, as regular readers know, I loves me some digital photography.  What not everyone may realize, however, is that, in spite of being a professional geek, I have disturbingly weak photo-editing software skills.  It is my greatest shame.  On the other hand, it’s also one of the ways I’ve sharpened my photography since getting my camera.  I generally haven’t edited any shots I toss up on the web, so any “correction” has been “in camera”, with settings and lighting, not post work.  But, I do sincerely want to change that.

Now, this software may not improve my photographs, but, I suspect, that Fotosketcher will make many of them more interesting.  This FREE software will take your digital photos and make them into drawings or other kinds of line art.  It will convert them to black and white or leave just part of them colorized.  Simpler than Photoshop, though certainly less versatile, but also a whole lot cheaper.  Worth taking a look at, even if you’re as bad a photographer as me!