How To Spot A Psychopath

This is my picture of the Moon/Venus/Jupiter “smiley face” conjunction that just happened. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

(The 500-pixel-high version doesn’t look like much. The full-size one is better. There was a little cloud, though.)

I wasn’t planning to take this picture, but I went for a walk to Echo Point and found a person there hopelessly trying to photograph the conjunction with a full-auto compact camera. Which actually did have a “Starry Sky” mode (among many others, including one called “Food”…) - but said mode was, of course, useless.

So I promised to take a proper picture and e-mail it to her. And when I got back to Echo Point with my DSLR and tripod there was a family there trying to take the same picture, and failing for the same reason. So I harvested an e-mail address from them too.

A few times, I’ve gone to Echo Point and it’s been cloudy or foggy or otherwise not the ideal time to take a picture of the Three Sisters. On those occasions, I’ve offered to send disappointed photographers a picture I took on another date, because I’ve got some excellent ones.

My favourite is this one, which I took at 2:37 in the morning, by moonlight, with a thirty-second exposure.

Everyone I’ve made this offer to so far has declined, though. And fair enough, I suppose; the Three Sisters I photographed last year is not the same Three Sisters you would have photographed had you been able to see it through the bleeding fog. But the Smiley Conjunction I photographed is, within a fairly small time window, the same one that the people I sent it to saw.

Picture credit: Conlawprof

A reader asks:

Simple, maybe stupid question. We had an Olympus OM-10 which broke down, and some good lenses and stuff which didn’t. Please, do OM-10 lenses fit on modern Olympus digital cameras? I asked Olympus but they didn’t answer.

Patrick

In brief: Yes, they do. Just buy an OM-System-to-Four-Thirds adapter ring and away you go. Olympus make their own adapter, and there are cheap Chinese ones that’re probably just as good, since there’s no glass in there.

EBay’s full of adapters for popular camera and lens types, but there are far fewer Four Thirds cameras out there than Canons or Nikons, so there only seem to be a couple of OM-to-Four-Thirds adapters on eBay at the moment. I wouldn’t be worried at all about buying one on eBay for $40 delivered rather than from Olympus for $100, though; when there’s no glass in the adapter, it’s hard to get it wrong.

Olympus have a list of recommended lenses for use with the adapter. Other lenses should also work, but may lose a little quality.

The reason for this is that film responds in pretty much exactly the same way regardless of the angle from which light hits it - well, as far as SLR-camera applications go, anyway. Digital sensors, on the other hand, have their own array of tiny “microlenses” over the actual sensor pixels, not to mention protective glass and anti-aliasing filters on top of the microlenses. This stuff does not respond the same to light coming at an angle as it does to light coming straight at it - think of looking at an LCD monitor from an angle, versus looking at a CRT.

So for best results on digital cameras, you need lenses that’re as close as possible to being “telecentric“, which means the light coming out of the back of the lens is lined up, as much as possible, with the axis of the optical components.

All of the standard Four Thirds lenses are pretty telecentric. OM System lenses aren’t so much, because they didn’t need to be to work fine with film.

Olympus have a page about this issue, too.

(Telecentricity may be less of a problem as digital sensors evolve - see this page for some speculation.)

Worrying about telecentricity is a bit nit-picky, particularly because the part of the image circle where the rays from any lens are likely to be least perpendicular to the sensor are around the edge, which consumer digital cameras with their “APS“-sized sensors can’t even see.

The down side of this is that an APS-sensor camera can only see about two-thirds of the image a “full frame” sensor or 35mm film frame would capture with the same lens. This means all of your lenses appear more telephoto, and you need a serious bug-eyed-monster lens to get really wide-angle photos. The up side is that, even if you don’t care about telecentricity, most lenses store their problems around the outside of the image circle. Vignetting, chromatic aberration, softness; all are worst around the edges, which simply aren’t seen at all by an APS-sensor DSLR using 35mm-film lenses.

The Olympus/Kodak Four Thirds system was actually purpose-built around these APS-sized sensors, which is why its lenses and cameras are smaller and lighter than those for other big-brand DSLRs.

(The OM System cameras and lenses were small and light compared with the competition too, though that was because of ingenious engineering rather than just having smaller film.)

“Mainstream” Canon and Nikon (and Sigma, for that matter) DSLRs can have full-35mm-frame-sized sensors, but the affordable models only actually have the smaller APS size. So, for those cameras, the lenses and bodies are bigger than they need to be. You can get lenses that only work (well, only work properly, at least) with APS sensors (Canon’s EF-S line, for instance). But most mainstream DSLR lenses, and all of the really high-quality Canon and Nikon ones, still throw a 35mm-sized circle of light into the camera, even if only the APS-rectangle middle of it is being caught by the sensor.

The critical issue for putting a lens made for one type of camera on another one - no matter what company makes the camera and the lens - is how far from the back of the lens the film, or sensor, is expected to be. This is called the “lens register” or “registration distance”. The adapter you use to attach System X Lens to System Y Body will inescapably add a bit of distance of its own, so you need System Y’s registration distance to equal System X’s distance plus the thickness of the adapter.

If System Y’s register is not big enough - if it’s smaller than System X’s, or so close to it that even a skinny adapter will move the lens too far away from the sensor - then it’s still possible to adapt the foreign lens onto the camera, but only with some serious limitations.

If the lens is just too far away from the sensor then you won’t be able to focus to infinity - but you will be able to focus closer than you’d otherwise be able to. This is what people do on purpose when they add “extension tubes” or bellows to lenses for macro work.

(Note that this may slightly hurt image quality, since aberration-correction expects the sensor or film to be the normal distance behind the lens. A lens that perfectly focusses red, green and blue right on top of each other at the normal registration distance probably won’t do that any more if you move it further away from the sensor. The image-quality loss should be much smaller than what you’d get from a simple screw-on front-of-lens “magnifying glass” macro adapter, though.)

If you want to keep infinity focus with a lens that’s too far from the sensor, you’ll need not a simple ring adapter, but an adapter with optics in it to increase the lens’s registration distance. Unless that adapter is rather expensive, this will hurt image quality so much that you’d be better off getting a cheap and nasty lens with similar specifications that was made to fit your camera in the first place.

Karen Nakamura’s Photoethnography.com has an excellent page about inter-system lens compatibility, with register numbers for many camera types.

Let’s pretend you’ve bought a Canon EOS (EF) digital SLR, and want to put your Olympus lenses on it.

The registration for EOS cameras is 44 millimetres, and for the OM System is 46mm, so it’s possible to put the latter lens on the former camera - but only if your lens adapter is a mere 2mm in thickness, or contains the dreaded optics.

It turns out that it is indeed possible to make adapter rings that’re this thin; you can buy ‘em quite cheaply on eBay. You can even get “AF Confirm” versions, which allow the camera’s autofocus system to beep when it reckons you’ve got the scene in focus, just as it does if you’re using a Canon lens in manual-focus mode. The focus screens in mass-market DSLRs are usually not very helpful for manual focussing, and their viewfinders also commonly aren’t very big and bright, so AF confirm can

I have just, by idly clicking through from the Wigu/Overcompensating guy’s pictures of his righteously necrotic brown-recluse-spider bite, discovered that there is a Flickr group called “Does this look infected to you?“

That is all.

Remember that doofus who was selling USB endoscopes on eBay using a bunch of the pictures from my review of it?

This happens all the time, to me and to other review sites. Unless the people responsible are really stupid and hotlink the images, we usually never even know it’s happening. I only find out about it when a reader tells me.

And that’s how I know about the further unlicensed commercial popularity of my eTime endoscope pics. Two different sellers (”calalily899” and “ukelectronic-zone“), one just using some of my pics, the other using some of my pics plus a little of the text of the review, just to rub it in.

I know why this happens. It’s because the pictures I take of things, especially of things that aren’t often photographed by other people, look too good. If my pics looked like drunken happy-snaps, nobody’d rip ‘em off. But when my picture of a product is pretty much indistinguishable from a manufacturers’ hand-out press-release shot, there it’ll be at the top of a Google Images search - though the copy of it Google finds won’t necessarily even be the one I put on my own server.

(If you’d like to read about what I would, if I were something of a tosser, call my “photographic workflow”, I’ve got a tutorial about it here.)

I don’t really care about people using my pics on their MySpace page or school report or something. I’ll give pretty much anybody permission to use my pics for non-profit purposes for free, if they ask. And if they don’t, I still don’t really mind - but I’ll send the full-resolution originals to people who ask for permission, while people who just pinch ‘em without asking have to settle for the versions I put on the Web.

Commercial image-pinching is different, though. If you’re making money with stuff I made, I’d like to get paid my share.

A couple of days ago, a reader spotted yet another eBay image-pincher, this time selling tiny R/C cars with some images and text taken from my old review of one.

So I whipped up a complaint letter for eBay’s VeRO system, and within a day all of the listings had been zapped. The VeRO system takes a bit of effort to get into, but it works really well once you’re signed up.

And now, just a couple of days later, here are more pic-copying endoscope sellers.

I have, however, had a thought.

Sending a VeRO complaint takes at least a few minutes, and all I get in return is the cruel satisfaction of having stuck a rather small spanner in the works of someone’s business. The only entity that really gains anything from VeRO complaints is eBay, who I think keep the listing fees for just about every possible kind of cancelled auction.

So here’s what I said to these latest sellers (with slight variations for their particular offences), instead of just VeROing them right away:

WITHOUT PREJUDICE

I note that in your several auctions for the eTime Home Endoscope, you use a few images from my review of that product here:
www.dansdata.com/pencamera.htm

I did not give you permission to do this, and now require payment. Please forward $US250 to my PayPal account at dan@dansdata.com immediately. This sum purchases you the right to use any of the images from www.dansdata.com/pencamera.htm, for eBay sales purposes only, for the next 12 months.

If you do not make this payment within 24 hours, I will use the eBay VeRO system to cancel all of your auctions which infringe my copyright.

I’ve actually tried this before. Back in the day, all I could threaten commercial copyright infringers with (besides never-gonna-happen legal action, which is always the first stop for Internet kooks but is actually almost always pointless) was exposure before my Army of Goons. And I told ‘em to send me a cheque rather than PayPal me. But it did actually work a couple of times, out of the several times I tried it.

Let’s roll the dice again!

I just got a press release about an exciting new technology called “SmileCheck”. It’s supposed to give a digital camera the ability to look for “facial features associated with smiles” in the live viewfinder view. So, if you’ve got your camera in SmileCheck Mode, you press the button when everyone’s in frame, but the shutter will only actually click when it reckons everybody in the frame is smiling.

This doesn’t sound like the most useful camera gimmick ever, but it’s more useful than “sepia mode”. If it works.

The PR company helpfully included “before” and “after” pictures, to show what a sterling job SmileCheck could do.

Here’s the kind of picture that SmileCheck will, allegedly, prevent you from taking:

And here’s what it’ll let you take instead:

The more I think about this PR company’s choice of images, the more my facial expression comes to resemble that of the kid on the left.

UPDATE: They’ve now produced a second press release, showing off the same technology but this time coupled with the camera’s self-timer, and calling it “FaceTime”. So you activate that mode on your camera, and it waits the usual several seconds (so you can get yourself into the frame) and then starts looking for smiles, and takes the picture when it thinks it sees them. The demo pictures are less hilarious this time.

When I read Michael Ciuffo’s “Rip-off Photography” article, I did not immediately see everything wrong with the picture for which this unfortunate gentleman’s mother paid hundreds of dollars.

OK, he looks like a huge dork. But I look like a caveman in photos. Big deal.

At a glance, you can see that the lighting on his face is strangely even, and he looks significantly airbrushed too. But there’s more. Read the article for the rest. It’s as entertaining as those Celebrities Before And After Photoshop pieces, in its own way.

(Don’t miss Mike’s ultimate guide to building a minifridge into a 1998 Toyota Corolla, either!)

By the usual standards of terrible studio portraits, though, Mike got off pretty lightly. List of the Day’s Great Olan Mills Photos will scrub from your mind all memory of Mike’s embarrassment, replacing it with things indescribable.

(When I was a kid, I had hair exactly like that of one of those children. Not for a thousand dollars would I tell you which one.)

What’s a good portrait look like, you might ask?

Well, here’s a picture my friend Katy took of me in 1998.

(I’m happy to say that I still look pretty much exactly like that, if a bit fatter now.)

On film, ambient light, subject significantly toasted on nitrous oxide at the time. Perhaps that’s what warded off the Caveman Curse.

Katy’s photo doesn’t try to make me look like a matinee idol, or some insecure housewife posing for chaise-lounge-and-feather-boa “glamour” pictures. That, by itself, is half the battle.

I do feel obliged to mention, however, the pinnacle of my own experiments in self-portraiture to date.

If you click the mercifully small thumbnail, you’ll get a 1024-pixel-wide version. I’m not even going to provide a link to the 2048-pixel-wide version; edit the URL yourself if you simply must see it.

All you need is a fisheye lens, and you too can see yourself as an urRu!

I’m listening, for the first time, to Louis and Bebe Barron’s soundtrack for “Forbidden Planet”.

And then the MAKE blog lays this trip on me too.

…

I see now.

This world is not real.

The camera can see.

Let me help you see.

I will change you into the truth.

Today, I received a press release whose title was “FixMyMovie Launches with James Bond-Style Video Enhancement”.

This did not fill me with joyous anticipation. “Video enhancement” is one of those ridiculous action movie cliches - any old security camera footage can be “enhanced” to hundred-megapixel detail whenever it’s necessary to move the plot along.

FixMyMovie does not, however, actually make such stupid claims. It would, in fact, probably be perfectly useless to James Bond.

What it aims to do is apply MotionDSP processing muscle to low quality video, to make it better looking without losing detail. At the moment you can make a free account on fixmymovie.com and upload any video clip smaller than 352 by 288 pixels in resolution and 20 megabytes in file size, and see what transpires.

So I did.

When I reviewed the Aiptek Pocket DV2 toy digital video camera back in early 2003, I strapped it to the top of a model tank and took it for a drive around a park. The Pocket DV2 produces grainy, fuzzy, nine frame per second 320 by 240 video, which is pretty much on par for cheap phone cameras these days. FixMyMovie is specifically designed to enhance phone camera video, so I figured one of the Aiptek clips would be a good sample.

Here’s a Google Video version of the clip. Video of this quality is one of the few things that GooTube compression won’t make a whole lot worse, but it’s still lost some quality; you can download a DivX-compressed version of the original footage, which looks almost exactly the same as the original Motion JPEG video but is quite a bit smaller, here.

Here’s the FixMyMovie-d version. If you can’t see it, you probably need the latest beta Flash plugin. If you’ve got the right plugin already, you’ve probably noticed that the FixMyMovie player currently has a MySpace-style auto-play function, which you can’t turn off. Sorry about that.

The difference really is quite impressive. FixMyMovie has gotten rid of the prominent blocky compression artefacts in the original video, without noticeably blurring it. It’s not an amazing, incredible, action-movie-bulldust improvement, but it’s very worthwhile. Rapid camera movements - an acknowledged weakness of the enhancing technique - leave noticeable ghosts from previous frames. But they’re only noticeable if you’re trying hard to see something wrong with the video. The improvements far outweigh the problems.

The deal with FixMyMovie - once it leaves its current beta state - is that it’ll only enhance the first ten seconds of any clip for free. If you like the look of it you can “Order” a fully processed version, which will cost money - 99 US cents, to enhance this clip.

(It took quite a long time to process this clip, presumably because people are already hammering the FixMyMovie server. You get an e-mail when processing is finished, though, so you don’t have to sit there refreshing the My Videos page.)

At the moment, you get $US25 credit when you create a free account - and no, you don’t have to give them a credit card number; use a disposable e-mail address if you’re really paranoid. $25 should plenty to try the service out.

The player lets you play the whole clip even when only ten seconds have been enhanced, seamlessly connecting the enhanced beginning to the unprocessed rest of the video. Click the bar on the right-hand side of the video and you can compare processed and unprocessed still frames with a nifty mouse-drag interface.

As the FAQ explains, once you’ve fully processed a video, you can download it in various popular formats, including native h.263-encoded FLV flash video format, for upload to YouTube, which will then not recompress the video.

Here’s the video on YouTube - I only just uploaded it, so it ought to be viewable in a moment. If you can’t be bothered installing the new Flash player, or if it’s not available for the computer you’re using, this is pretty close to the fixmymovie.com version.

Google Video and YouTube still aren’t completely harmonised; you can upload FLV-format video like this to YouTube, but not to Google Video.

The enhanced WMV and MOV versions of this dinky little one-minute clip were fifteen megabytes in size. They’ve got a bit more detail than the online Flash version - they look a bit better than the 7.5Mb FLV-format version too - but they’re not nearly better enough to justify that huge file size.

The FixMyVideo enhancement hasn’t done anything to the frame rate (which is good), but it’s blown the file resolution up to 640 by 480, which along with 64 kilobit per second audio (which the crappy-camera original didn’t have) accounts for the file size inflation.

The smaller FLV-format version is 320 by 240, as it should be, because that’s the native resolution of GooTube.

The big file sizes aren’t really a problem, because this enhancement technique is based around interframe interpolation; it tries to find the same image components in different frames, and overlay them to leave the image data and eliminate various forms of distortion. So it’s kind of like speckle imaging and image stacking, but for motion video. Sticking with the original resolution would have thrown away some of the interpolated detail.

In brief, though: Yes, FixMyMovie works. I don’t know how much value it’ll have for video that looks OK to start with, but if you’ve got some crappy phone, web or toy camera video that you’d like to improve, check FixMyMovie out while it’s still free.

My little photo session for the Kittenwar book I just reviewed was somewhat delayed…

…because there were cats in the way.

Millie finds the photo tent quite cosy.

(The other one is Joey, who features in the sparky video here.)

My turn to hop on the polarised-photos bandwagon.

An LCD monitor is an excellent source of polarised light, and lots of see-through things also polarise light to different degrees as it passes through different parts of them. For this reason, you’ll see faint rainbows around the edges of various clear plastic things if you hold them up in front of a plain white LCD screen. Put a second polariser over your eyes or camera lens, though, and things get trippy.

(If you see someone looking at an LCD through polarised sunglasses and doing the Indian head wiggle, that person is not necessarily on drugs.)

When a local discount store was closing down, I seized the opportunity to buy a lifetime supply of little plastic shot glasses. It struck me that they might be good for mixing glue, holding small parts, reenacting the drinking contest scene from Raiders, et cetera. They are also good candidates for polariser photography, especially if you stick a few of them together.

One day, I’ll get around to making a cup sphere, in which you glue or staple disposable cups together to make a globe. Stapled paper cups are probably the fastest way to do it. I’ve got a lot of magnets here, though, so I decided to try sticking the little shot glasses together temporarily with those.

I got 24 cups together before the process started becoming really difficult, with the structure shifting around and magnets snapping onto each other and the wailing and the cursing, glayven.