How To Spot A Psychopath

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.

A while ago, because nobody sensible stopped me, I bought a Game Boy Camera to go with the clear-cased original Game Boy we’ve had for a while.

The Game Boy Camera may be the lowest fidelity digital photography device ever made. I’ll leave it to others to explain its magic.

If you’ve got the Camera, though, the logical next step is to get a Game Boy Printer.

If you don’t have a Printer, you can get images out of your Game Boy Camera by using a cable that connects to a PC and makes the Game Boy think it’s connected to the Printer.

Or, as I did, you can improvise.

But I needn’t scan the Game Boy any more, because yesterday I took delivery of my very own Printer!

With no paper.

Like lots of other old crummy printers, the Game Boy Printer uses thermal paper. The special little narrow rolls are now very hard to come by.

All thermal paper is, however, very much the same. So I rifled my wallet for an ATM receipt, cut it to fit the printer…

…and made my first print!

The “KATOOMBA” is from the original ATM printout, as is everything else except the black-framed picture of Joey and, at the top right, the greeting from Mario that you get when you turn the Printer on with its Feed button held down.

The image area inside the print’s black “NINTENDO” border is 21.5 by 18mm. About 410 such prints would fit on one of the “Super A3″ sheets that’re the biggest my Stylus Photo R1800 can accept.

I don’t know about you, but the obvious question that popped into my mind when I discovered that there’s “A 360 degree view in 71 photos of Will Self’s writing room” on Self’s site was “what’ll happen if you feed those photos into panorama stitching software?”

Ta-daaah.

(If clicking on the above image doesn’t work because Coral isnt’ answering hails, here’s the direct link.)

Lots of the images don’t actually match up, but Autostitch knows to discard the puzzle pieces that don’t fit. The result also has quite a few dreamy spots in it, like any close-range indoor hand-held panorama. But, y’know, that’s just a bit cubist, innit?

It’s still not half bad, if you ask me.

A reader took my lead on the polluting-Wikimedia-with-old-drive-circuit-boards idea, and came up with this most excellent image of a 44Mb MiniScribe’s underside:

(Now someone needs to slap an eight inch drive on an A3 scanner and make a really big file.)

Thanks to my Pocket PCRef, I know that the above drive is a 5.25 inch half height (which is to say, the same height as a modern optical drive) ST-506 3600RPM unit which reported 5 heads, 1024 cylinders and 17 sectors per track.

This information is, of course, almost perfectly useless these days, as is most of the rest of the content of even the current edition of Pocket PCRef (mine’s the 1999 ninth edition). Connector pinouts and ASCII codes and such are all very well, but it’s not as if all of those aren’t at your fingertips anyway if you’ve got an Internet connection. The same goes for keyboard scan codes, paper sizes, number base conversion tables and error beep codes for various old BIOSes - though if you work with PC hardware every day, a Pocket PCRef will still probably help you out a few times a year.

More impressive is the original Pocket Ref, old editions of which are far less obsolete.

Pocket Ref has close to nothing about computers in it. It’s more about every single piece of basic engineering information you’d need to reconstruct society after the inevitable happens, all in a very literally pocket-sized book.

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Apropos my previous post about file hosting services, the perfect repository for at least some big files occurred to me.

Wikimedia Commons!

And so…

Behold!

It’s a 1200dpi scan of a 5.25 inch hard drive controller board, from this scanner review from almost eight years ago. The board is of course rather older than that; it’s from the days before surface mount (OK, nitpickers, before everything was surface mount), when electronics took up more room and looked much cooler.

That cheap little scanner did a quite commendable job. Not quite 1200 whole dots per inch of detail, but still a whole lot of it in this 66 megapixel (!) image. Which ought to be quite enough for anybody’s desktop wallpaper.

If you’ve got some giant image, sound or video file that meets Wikimedia’s rather loose requirements, you can upload it to the Commons and be reasonably sure that it’ll be speedily available to the world for the foreseeable future.

The one caveat, of course, is that uploaded content must be covered by one or another free-use license. That rules Commons out for the 1337 w4r3z and pr0n that comprise most of the data uploaded to file-dump sites, unless you expend an unreasonable amount of effort in hiding your pirated content in something legit, and then hope they don’t notice that myadorablekitten.jpg is 702Mb in size.

There are various other stock photo repositories out there; Morguefile is a good one, and you can share big images on Flickr as well if you pay for an account (otherwise the biggest dimension of your pictures is limited to 1024 pixels).

I thought I’d stick with the big guns for this image, though, because it’s 12 freakin’ megabytes.

(Actually, the original was even bigger. This is my second attempt - I uploaded the original untweaked scan first just to see if Wikimedia would barf on the file size, then made this prettier, slightly smaller version that benefits from some Photoshop features introduced over the last eight years. Since my Wikimedia account is younger than four days - Wikipedia and Wikimedia accounts are separate - I can’t replace the old one with the new one, so I uploaded the new one as a separate file.)

Uploading your backups to FTP sites may be the really studly way to do it, but for this one niche - unreasonably large pictures of things that belong to you - Wikimedia looks pretty cool.

I hope to see many more scans of improbable objects there in the near future.

A reader asked me what I thought of Nokia’s N73 and Sony Ericsson’s K800i, two fancy mobile phones with autofocus 3.2-megapixel cameras in them, which make them quite different from the awful crunchy fixed-focus phone-cams of old.

(Note: Picture not to scale. I just stuck two press photos together.)

I can’t honestly say that I can recommend either of them.

I thought they both looked pretty decent when I started writing this, and I still agree that they’re better than run-of-the-mill cameraphones. But I think you’d have to place an unreasonably high premium on single-unit integration to make them really worth having - especially considering how much they cost (immediately when purchased outright, or eventually in service fees).

This isn’t to say that either of them are rubbish, though.

Most of the sample pics I can find from the N73 look OK. There are some problems, though. The N73 doesn’t seem to have a huge amount of exposure latitude, so you get blown-out highlights in a lot of pictures:

(Click through to the larger versions to see what you’re meant to be paying for in these more expensive cam-phones.)

When there’s less image brightness variation to worry about, though, it’s quite good:

Note that it’s doing the standard consumer-camera thing of punching up colour saturation in every image…

…which can sometimes combine with exposure problems in unfortunate ways:

…but, by and large, it seems to be up there with lots of OK cheap compact digicams.

Except for the lack of optical zoom, of course.

One other pitfall in many consumer cameras is that they have lousy light-gathering ability - a high minimum F-number. Since small-sensor digicams also can’t do high ISO settings without lots of noise, this can matter a lot for many ordinary medium-to-low-light situations, including most indoor photography.

Nokia don’t seem to even publish the F-number for the N73’s lens, which is extremely remiss of them; I had to look at the press photo of the lens to read the “2.8/5.6″ from around it.

I presume that means it can do f2.8 wide open and f5.6 with an aperture reduction doodad switched in, and that’s it. That means max aperture f2.8, focal length 5.6mm (real focal lengths for small-sensor cameras with reasonable field of view are very small; that’s why they’re usually specified in the marketing bumfodder with “35mm equivalent” focal length specifications, which leave purchasers mystified when they notice that the lens itself has some tiny number printed around it.)

F2.8 is OK, but it means that non-flash indoor shots, even during the day, will be grainy, blurry, or possibly both.

On to the K800i, which gives some great examples of this.

Its F-number is a freakin’ secret, too. Again, I had to turn to press pics to find it. F2.8, again (that’s what the “1:2.8″ around the K800i’s lens means).

I’m being careful not to make snap judgements from Flickr pics, because people may have processed them poorly or fiddled unwisely with camera settings. When cameras only have digital zoom, though, it’s possible to make truly awful pictures by using lots of said zoom.

Dear god.

Ignoring those sorts of pictures, there are plenty of decent K800i pics, too.

This is pretty good - not horribly crunchy or blurry:

Mildly blown highlights, but they’re no biggy.

Here we go again with the highlights, though:

And look at the crunchy stuff and noise reduction artifacts in this, when you view the larger versions:

Then again, this is quite good:

Again, it’s got unnaturally high colour saturation (though the reason why consumer cameras do that is that people like these “punchy” results out of the camera, even if they throw detail away), but there’s only a little blue fringing on the high-contrast edge at the top of the building, and no horrible distortion or sharpness loss at the edges.

But then again, look at this.

It was obviously not dark when this picture was taken, but look at the big version and you can see that all of the fine detail has been “watercoloured out” by noise reduction, because the camera decided it needed to keep its shutter speed up by cranking the ISO (the EXIF data says only ISO 80; if that’s the truth then something really awful is going on…), and then noise-reduced the result.

And bang, there goes most of your resolution.

You can get lost in all the technical bulldust about cameras and ignore the fact that the above picture really is a very good photo, which you unquestionably would not be able to take if your phone was just a phone and that was all you were carrying.

But when your camera deliberately destroys most of the detail in the pictures you take, leaving you with something that can’t be printed any bigger than an old 110 negative without looking strangely flat, you may still feel ripped off.

And when there’s no zoom, this is more important, because you’ll be cropping pictures more often. (The digital zoom crops the picture for you, of course.)

Regarding the deadly combination of low ISO sensitivity and high F numbers, check this out:

It’s a daylight shot (unless I, and the camera time stamp, am very much mistaken), but the camera still went to ISO 200 and 1/13th of a second for it, and as a result created a blurry mess.

This comparison figures that the K800i is more like a real camera than the N73 or N93, but their example pictures are pretty bloomin’ ordinary. They’re what I’d expect from a good compact camera in 2001, at best.

Overall, the most I’d pay for the camera portion of either of these cam-phones, in today’s market, is $US100. OK, there’s the one-device convenience factor that might make the camera worth much more to you - but you can buy really excellent compact cameras for $US300, these days, and the over-the-counter price for the K800i is, what, $US500? The Nokia’s not much cheaper.

Given that there’s an embarrassment of choices in the ultra-compact-under-$US200 market sector these days (go nuts with the DPReview comparator…), I really couldn’t justify paying any significant premium for a camera of the quality of the ones in these phones.

I mean, you can pay less than $US200 and get a Panasonic Lumix DMC-FX8 (combined review of it and its siblings here) these days. That’s got not only real zoom, but also a proper optical image stabiliser, not just one of those phoney baloney high-ISO modes, which Sony brazenly try to palm off on you with the K800i.

Yes, these cam-phones do beat the hell out of old-style fixed-focus cameraphones with no flash, plastic lenses and webcam sensors. But so does a Box Brownie.

Our youngest cat, Millie, in near-infrared.

This shot was taken at night (f1.8, ISO 800, four seconds), by the light of two 500 watt halogen floodlights that I couldn’t quite angle down enough to light Millie up really well. They still threw enough heat on her that she was squirming cheerfully around on the chair, though, which made it hard to get a shot of her that didn’t look like a many-legged blob.

Here she is in visible light. She serves as a useful metaphor for the wave-particle duality of light, actually, since she is simultaneously spotty and stripy.

She gets on well with Joey.

Herewith, the shatteringly gorgeous results of my first venture into infra-red photography.

That’s how it looked out of the camera, whose red photodetectors are most strongly tickled by near infrared, but whose green and blue ones see it too.

They don’t see a lot of it, mind you, because like all normal digital cameras these days, my EOS-20D has an IR-blocking filter inside it, over the sensor. It’s there because digital sensors are very sensitive to near-IR light, in the same way that normal film is very sensitive to ultraviolet. If something in the camera doesn’t block that invisible-to-humans light, it’ll haze up your photos.

(Lots of people put UV filters on digital cameras, too. That’s just because UV filters are really cheap, so you can use them to protect the lens. You can get non-filtering protectors now as well, that’re just a piece of glass in a filter frame. I don’t think they’re much cheaper, though.)

The anti-IR filter is not, however, perfect. A little light gets through. So if you put an IR-pass filter on your camera, you can still take IR pictures. You just have to use a pretty long exposure - eight seconds at f/3.5, ISO 800, for the above example.

It’s traditional to cancel out the meaningless colour cast from digital IR images, giving a result that looks like a black and white IR film picture, so I monkeyed with it a bit, and did.

The human eye can’t see a thing through the viewfinder when the IR-pass filter is on, because on an SLR like my camera, the viewfinder looks out through the main lens. Cameras with separate “rangefinder” viewfinders don’t have this problem.

I was still pleased to note, though, that the autofocus actually worked. The phase detection autofocus can see near-infrared light with no trouble - indeed, a lot of cameras use an IR beam as their AF-assist light.

The autofocus didn’t quite get it right, though, because it assumes you’re taking a visible-light picture, and infrared light doesn’t refract as much as visible (many older SLR lenses have a red dot on their focus scale as well as the standard white one; the red one is the one you use when you’re shooting IR).

You can compensate for that by cranking down the aperture to get more depth of field, but that increases your exposure time even further; the above eight second shot would have had to be 42 seconds if I’d taken it at the usually-suggested f/8. An alternative strategy is to just take a few pictures, manually bumping the focus in a bit for each one. Or, if you’ve got a choice of things to focus on, you can try focussing on something closer than the actual subject.

These problems almost all go away if you get yourself a camera adapted for proper IR photography (from here or here, for instance - or you can do it yourself if you’re brave), with the internal filter replaced with an IR-pass, everything-else-block one and the autofocus recalibrated for IR. Now you can use the viewfinder as normal, and autofocus works. Given the plummeting price of DSLRs, it’s not actually crazy for ordinary photographic hobbyists, amateur astronomers and so on to do this; it also only costs a bit of time to do a similar trick with a toy digicam or webcam. I don’t have that strong a need to see the world of white trees and black eyes, though.

(Have you ever wanted to get married in a black-skied nightmare world? Now you can!)

Incidentally, if you’ve got a camera with an electronic viewfinder that shows you what the sensor sees, then an IR conversion will give you a live near-IR view of the world. So will a camcorder converted in the same way - actually, the 52mm filter I bought was sold for use on camcorders, but works fine on the 52mm threads of my Canon 50mm lens.

I think fully converted cameras can grab a little bit of colour in IR scenes, too. My simple screw-on filter just makes everything a shade of the same pink, so there’s no data lost when you drop the image to monochrome.

The filter I bought, by the way, is an allegedly 850nm-pass model from here that cost me only $AU22.98 delivered. I’ve no idea what its actual spectral performance is like, but it seems to work fine, and is a lot cheaper than many brand name options.

If you want something even cheaper, you can try using layered theatrical light filters or fully exposed and developed (and thus black) colour film or something, but unless you can get offcuts of theatrical gel for free, you’ll be paying more for the big sheets of the stuff that you don’t need.

(I’ve made those goggles, by the way; they’re cool. Note the new photo gallery!)

All nerds worth their salt know about the Buran. It was the Russian Space Shuttle, that looked like a straight knock-off of the US original a la Concordski, but which actually had considerable improvements over the American horse-designed-by-a-committee.

(In this regard Buran was, arguably, also like Concordski, despite that aircraft’s distressing tendency to fall out of the sky.)

Buran wasn’t completely liberated from the stupidity of the Shuttle’s design. It still sat dangerously on the back of its giant fuel tank rather than in the obviously-more-sensible on-the-nose-of-the-tank position, despite the fact that it didn’t have the rear engines that force the Shuttle to be where it is, getting smacked by foam and blown to bits by booster failures.

But the Buran was still better. The Soviet Shuttle program didn’t get off the ground, but the hardware was just fine.

Anyway, six years ago I was working at the end of Darling Harbour (I didn’t stay there a lot longer…), and was reviewing the then-remarkable, now-pointless Sony Mavica MVC-CD1000 digital camera (it used 77mm CDs for image storage, which was a good idea when a megabyte of memory card cost five bucks, but is ridiculous now that the price is three cents).

And someone came along and parked the OK-GLI Buran aerodynamic test vehicle next to my office.

So I took a picture of it with the Sony…

…and here that picture is.

Click for the full sized version, complete with antique EXIF headers.

After this, that poor old bird got dragged all over the place, and has I think been stuck in Bahrain for some time now. OK-GLI is, however, apparently eventually going to take one last boring sea-and-land trip to a German museum, where it can rest in peace with a Concorde, a Concordski, an enormous Cock, and lots of other neat stuff.

I was going to just blog about the most excellent, if quirky, panorama-photo-stitching program Autostitch, which I have only just discovered because I am much lamer than these people, but the post ended up being so big that I ran it as a Dan’s Data review instead.

If you’ve got any +5 Insightful things to say about panorama-making with Autostitch or anything else, or would just like to link to your awesome browser-paralysing 10,000 by 10,000 pixel QTVR image, please comment below!