December 5, 2008
For most of us the holiday season evokes a lot of good, warm emotions and memories that seem to come floating down with the snow. But recently there seems to be a few other emotions that have been venting themselves. What’s all this I hear about the new Nikon D3X? It’s expensive? …Sorry my surprise at all the fuss, it has been a very long time since I have classified any new digital SLR D3, D300, D700 or otherwise as “inexpensive.” There is no need to rewrite what others have said already (e.g. here and here) but I did want to write this post for one very particular reason. All-ya-all writing mean comments on photography blogs have inspired me and I think I have determined the problem. People aren’t getting bent out of shape over issues of photography, but rather something else altogether. Never-fear, I think I can fix the confusion -I’ve decided to give it a name.
Intro to Technocamography
I am quite certain that many, if not most serious photographers are not getting bent out of shape at the price of the latest Nikon, but there is a growing number of people who own and use expensive cameras, photographic gear, and software etc. more or less just because they enjoy the experience. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that and if given the chance I would probably join right in. However, a subset of those in this group take their photographic experience very seriously. These individuals are generally much less concerned with photography and much more concerned with taking pictures. In this category performance, speed, megapixels, newness, and yes price are everything -not because they are needed to take the picture but because they define the art of technocamography. In short, for lack of a better term or definition, I have defined technocamography as: the serious discussion, evaluation, and use of the latest in photographic equipment; generally concerned with technical aspects and infrequently with artistic value or substance.
This is indeed where the conflict starts. Photographers and technocamographers come at a similar subject from very different angles and for such a long time have been forced to believe they must agree to both be valuable to society. Now I hope we can finally come to the realization that there are two groups using photographic equipment; both are valuable although they are considerably different.
Why photographers need technocamographers
It may not be obvious but technocamographers are actually very important to photographers. Here is just a short list of reasons why.
Read more…
Tags: camera-choice, equipment, lens-choice
Posted at 12:01 EST in Photography, Technology.
August 30, 2008
For a long time (well ok, maybe since WordPress 2.5 came out) I have wanted to use image EXIF data on my blog. Finally Sarah posted the code needed to get the extracted data displayed. Much tanks to Sarah for her post, but as one quickly finds out, the shutter speed is stored (and displayed) as a decimal not the nice fraction that we’re used to seeing on our camera.
I thought there must be a fairly easy way to display the shutter speed as a fraction so I set out to see if I could find a solution. I quickly found out that while php does a fairly good job at math, very few people must need to convert decimals to fractions. A google search shows a few attempts with varied success but nothing that would work conveniently for the job at hand. I dropped some of the shutter speeds into Excel to see if I could figure a convenient function to do the conversion and as it turns out, it didn’t take me all that long to figure it out… Unfortunately for me, I’m a biologist -not a php coding expert so please forgive any glaring errors and I won’t tell you how may times I had to hit the reload button on my browser trying to figure out the correct php syntax… (I’ve got to buy a book on php… any suggestions?). Here is what I figured that seems to do the trick for me.
Starting with the code from Sarah.
<?php echo "<li>Shutter Speed: " . number_format($imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'],2) . " seconds</li>\n"; ?>
It occurred to me that the decimal could be converted to the denominator like so.
<?php echo (1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) ?>
That’s nice, but because shutter speeds can be several seconds long I had to combine it with an “if” statement to separate the ones that needed to be displayed as a fraction and the others that needed to be left in the decimal format.
<?php if ((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) > 1)
{
echo "1/";
echo (1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) . " second";
}
else{
echo $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'] . " seconds";
}
?>
As it turns out, a few of the shutter speeds (from my camera at least) don’t turn out to be perfect whole numbers (e.g. 1/45 = 1/45.000045 etc.). The decimals can be easily trimmed off with the number_format function but then what about those shutter speeds of 1/1.5 or 1/2.5 that the camera likes to dish out on occasion? Ever since I started working with if statements in Excel I’ve always used the stone soup principle -and it always serves me well (you do remember stone soup… don’t you)(“it’s good… but it would be better with some carrots…”).
Long story short; here’s the code that worked for me (and my camera).
<?php if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']))
{
if ((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) > 1)
{
echo "1/";
if ((number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1)) == 1.3
or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.5
or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.6
or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 2.5)
{
echo number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1, '.', '') . " second";
}
else{
echo number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 0, '.', '') . " second";
}
}
else{
echo $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'] . " seconds";
}
}
?>
[Update: NOTE: the if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed'])) function is required to prevent a PHP “dividing by 0″ warning message if the shutter speed field is empty. ]
Finally, combining it together with the if statements that check to see whether a field is empty or not and all the rest that creates the table currently displaying the EXIF data on my site I get something like:
<?php if (is_attachment()) : $imgmeta = wp_get_attachment_metadata( $id );
echo "<table class=\"exif\">\n";
if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['camera'])) echo "<tr><th>Camera:</th><td>" . $imgmeta['image_meta']['camera']."</td></tr>\n";
if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['focal_length']))echo "<tr><th>Focal length:</th><td>" . $imgmeta['image_meta']['focal_length']." mm</td></tr>\n";
if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['aperture']))echo "<tr><th>Aperture:</th><td>" . $imgmeta['image_meta']['aperture']."</td></tr>\n";
if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']))
{
echo "<tr><th>Shutter Speed: </th><td>";
if ((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']) > 1)
{
echo "1/";
if ((number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1)) == 1.3
or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.5
or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 1.6
or number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1) == 2.5)
{
echo number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 1, '.', '') . " second</td></tr>\n";
}
else{
echo number_format((1 / $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']), 0, '.', '') . " second</td></tr>\n";
}
}
else{
echo $imgmeta['image_meta']['shutter_speed']." seconds</td></tr>\n";
}
}
if (!empty($imgmeta['image_meta']['iso']))echo "<tr><th>ISO:</th><td>" . $imgmeta['image_meta']['iso']."</td></tr>\n";
echo "</table>\n";
endif;
?>
I hope this is helpful. So far it seems to be correctly displaying all the shutter speeds that I’ve tried -though I haven’t tried every last one. You can see the code in action by clicking the picture below. Let me know what you think -Enjoy!
Tags: EXIF, PHP, shutter-speed, wordpress
Posted at 08:56 EDT in Computers, Photography, Site notes, Technology.
August 30, 2008
Hot off the press and now online! A Moment of EnLitement is now accepting public comments on selected posts. I just got it all finished …and I hope it all works as desired. Let me know if it works for you by just droping me a comment (link appears in metadata below or just click the title to view the post and scroll to the bottom).
Posted at 00:06 EDT in Site notes, Technology.
July 12, 2008
Over the last week I’ve been digging through maps, reports, and emails and running up the minutes on my cell phone trying to find areas where it may be possible to capture the endangered Indiana Bat. I received the basics along with the project protocol -a report noting the capture points of two Indiana bats last year, a small map with the bats’ capture location and small access road noted, and an address with two phone numbers.
I don’t know how people went about things in the past… but there are a few things that have helped me tremendously in securing the permission of several landowners to work in what looks like some really great areas. I thought I would post them here.
- www.maps.live.com - Ok, so on the surface it just looks like Microsoft is trying to keep up with Google… but try the “birds eye view” around a major US city… it’s a little scary… but very helpful if your looking good bat hangouts.
- www.whitepages.com - How do you look in a phone book you’ll never have in a place you’ll never live for people you’ve never heard of before…? Thank goodness for this web service… The reverse phone # look-up works too… it’s occasionally even correct.
- water.usgs.gov - Did you know you can get real-time data on stream/lake/river levels… maybe it doesn’t make much difference to you… but it’s pretty helpful if you plan on standing in the middle of one.
- maps.yahoo.com - I know everyone knows about online directions already -but they can be incredibly helpful if your constantly heading to places you’ve never heard of before. The reason yahoo is my personal choice at the moment is their maps seem to load much faster than others and I like the way you can just click and drag to adjust the desired path of travel. But a word of caution here -trying to follow online generated directions through a major downtown area can leave you a little turned around… use with adequate backup (sometimes called a paper map).
Tags: bats, habitat, Indiana bats, links
Posted at 22:59 EDT in Research, Technology.
