Aug, 22
Here it is, the new blog design! (Yes the one that has been sitting here for about 2 years…) I decided that it was good enough to be put to some use. It probably is still buggy so please let me know if something looks bad. A couple of features aren’t quite finished -hopefully I will get to them soon. Let me know what you think!
Oh, and here’s a picture of a Gray bat (endangered species) that I captured a couple of weeks ago for my real job. Enjoy!
Dec, 5
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.
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.
It may not be obvious but technocamographers are actually very important to photographers. Here is just a short list of reasons why.
Aug, 30
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!
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).
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