I bought a new iPhone this past week. I had a variety of reasons for buying a new phone: the old one is between several and many years old, it won’t run anything close to the most recent version of Android, the screen is cracked, the display isn’t bright enough to see outdoors, the display is completely black when I look at it through my current polarized sunglasses, the battery doesn’t last as long as it used to, and so forth. I got an iPhone for the camera, and one application in particular.
Over the years I seem to have become the family archivist, or at least keeper of a repository of old documents. At different times I’ve thought that I need to digitize the whole huge stack of stuff, organize it somewhat, and get copies into more people’s hands. Again for multiple reasons, my approach to digitizing is going to be to take pictures, knowing that there will perspective and other distortions, and then extract the document from the picture and “dewarp” it. I’ve been using an iPad to take my test pictures. All iPads have Apple’s 12MP camera, and that’s worked well. The iPhone 17 reviews have consistently said if you like the 12MP camera, you’ll love the 48MP upgrade.
The picture up at the top is from a “synthetic” 300-dpi scan generated from a picture of a document page with the phone set to 48MP standard mode, holding the device in my hands (rather than on a tripod with a separate trigger), in pretty bad lighting. The image is scaled so that each pixel corresponds to one pixel at 300 dpi. If you had told me when I started playing with my software this past summer that I could get images of this quality, I would have said you were crazy. With better lighting and perhaps a different camera mode, I can probably get better.
Other people must be doing interesting and/or useful things beyond politics. Open thread, since we haven’t had one in a while.
I’m consistently amazed and annoyed by the distorted photos of photos I see people posting on social media.
They take the photos at angles that make people’s heads huge or tiny. They don’t crop out whatever’s outside the original photo – usually a tablecloth or some such. They seem to be completely unconcerned about glare. The photos are often crooked.
I’m extremely anal about those things when taking photos of photos, so it drives me nuts. I’ll sometimes take several photos until I’m satisfied.
I’d like to think of myself as the Stanley Kubrick of taking photos of photos.
Other people must be doing interesting and/or useful things beyond politics.
I’ve been cleaning black mold out of the basement. Big fun!!
🙁
Also, went to a two-day reiki class over the weekend, which was actually kind of profound. And fun. Profound fun.
Looking forward to getting the basement wrapped up so I can get back to the vibes.
Did you go with the iphone 17? For me, the battery is the key driver of a new phone, and the current phone I have is a 13, and my wife and I will probably get a 17 now. I realize that it is not just the battery, chip and phone design makes a huge difference, but it’s surprising to me that the models cycle thru without much improvement, so I can’t imagine just going up one or 2 model numbers
Yes, the base iPhone 17.
i’m working on a program to automate the application of large collection of image effects i’ve written over the years (mostly back when i had a software business). i’ve called the program “Director”, as in “movie director” and it’s based around the metaphor of shooting a movie.
there’s a Script (JSON) which describes the Cast (a list of Actors (an effect) and the name of their roles (nickname, for easier typing)), and some production info (where to get source images, etc). then, there’s a list of Scenes. a Scene is a list of Actors and the Actions they take (turn on/off, change a parameter, etc.) at a given frame in the video.
run it and it reads source frames, applies effects, displays them and saves them.
the Script is just text, so it’s not very sexy. but, it does work. the application as a whole is very close to being elegant, internally, which pleases me greatly.
i plan to use it to create videos for songs.
now i just need to write some songs.
Just for something completely different, I’m in Dublin, Ireland this week (conference). So I wandered over to Trinity College to check out The Book of Kells Experience.
A nicely done exhibition. I was particularly pleased to be able to see the Book itself. In a darkened room, and only the page it happened to be turned to. But still beautiful. And lots of other stuff from the book and about it. Way cool!
I love the book of Kells! Did you see the Long Room? It’s the platonic ideal…I’m down with a very grim flu, so nothing interesting to report I’m afraid.
I miss the old cameras. I’m a painter and I used to use photos as a starting point. It just isn’t the same trying to use a computer.
Lately I’ve been doing abstracts based on aerial views of the desert–I use mapquest to find images. I’m trying to get that magical, mysterious feeling of all that raw geology. It’s annoying when the screen keeps going black.
Also what an amazing experience to see the Book of Kells!
ps You can see every page of the Book of Kells in high res in TCD’s Digital Collection – i can’t remember where I learnt this years ago, but it might well have been here!
wonkie, what do you miss about the old cameras? When I bought my micro 4/3 camera before the Iceland trip, I played around with lens adapters and older lenses from the ’70s. Throw the settings on manual and you barely notice that it’s a modern digital camera. Doubly so when I pull up the photos in DXO photo lab and use their film stock modeling to give the pics the same light contours as a classic Fujifilm stock.
Send ’em off to an online photo processor for printing and you would barely notice the difference. The feel and the look are there.
Meanwhile, I’ve been converting my older mountain bike into a gravel oriented bike for when it rains and the roads are closed. I put lighter tires and some new TPU tubes on the bike and took 1.5 pounds of rotating weight and sticky rubber drag out of the equation. It’s feeling fast and light. Just waiting on handlebar tape to put the new alt handlebars on to get a more drop bar like position on the ride.
Fun times.
wj, if you’re into this type of thing don’t miss out on the Chester Beatty museum and library. Among many other artefacts, they have a lot of ancient books, illustrations and manuscripts. Incidentally, they have an exhibition on “Manuscripts and the Mind” at the moment:
https://chesterbeatty.ie/exhibitions/manuscripts-and-the-mind/
there’s an amazing animated movie about the Book Of Kells.very cool.
Thank you all for the information and suggestions.
I suppose you could say I’m at least somewhat into this stuff. Since I’m undertaking to produce a scroll which is in that mode, albeit with very different content. I’ve done such in the past, but I’m seriously out of practice. Like three decades out of practice. So I need all the help I can get.
Speaking of high-definition scans of old art, has anyone else looked at the varnish crackle in the scan of Rembrandt’s Night Watch? Literally, you can look down into the cracks. The resolution is 200 dots per millimeter, or about 5100 dpi. They used a $48,000 Hasselblad 100MP camera and a $6,000 macro lens. The museum doesn’t talk about how much the positioning framework cost to build, or how long to write the software that checked the focus on every one of the ~8,500 individual photos that were pieced together to make the final image.
hey all, how do I register with this blog? I have a Friday music post but can’t login, I don’t think I ever registered. I found the login information LJ sent way back in September but it doesn’t seem to work
And so, I am sad. 🙁
Thank you!
Nous, can you recommend a specific camera for me? Something easy to use.
Wonkie – my best advice would be to find a good camera store in the area around you (Seattle has to have a few) that has been around for years and has a good selection of used cameras. You are probably looking for either a “compact” camera (with a built in lens) or a “mirrorless” camera (which would mean getting at least one lens to go with it). If it were me, I’d be looking for a camera from Fujifilm, Olympus, Panasonic, or Sony with at least 16 megapixels. If you talk to the people there about what sorts of things you paint, they can probably find you the appropriate combination of camera body and lens to take some good pics with minimal fuss.
I have an Olympus OMD e-M5 with a 12-40mm pro lens. It’s nice and compact for carry and the camera and lens are both waterproof. A 12-40 lens is great for landscape and street photos (equivalent of 24-75mm zoom on an old 35mm slr). If it’s set to auto and auto-focus with the focus set dead center, you can quickly pick the thing you want to have in-focus, set the focus, then get the framing you want and take the pic.
I spend a lot of time with my pics on the software side to get them to look how I want, but most of these modern cameras have a few presets you can play with to give you some pics that look more like an old school film camera. Find what pleases your eye and then set it as default and you should be good to go.
Anyone heard from JanieM? She’d probably have some good advice here, too.
Thank you. There’s probably a camera store in Olympia too.