Problem statement Sometimes, I am somewhat dissatisfied with the size of my digital photographs. The simplest way to improve (after the fact) is to run any Photoshop-like program, and apply a resampling (resize) preferably with the Lanczos method, in order to get 2x or 3x or 4x more pixels. It is fast and efficient, but…
Category: Technology
Choose the best monitor for photography
Even before your camera, the computer monitor is the tool that the photographer uses most often. With the advent of digital techniques in photography, we spend more and ore time in front of this large screen where we select the best shots, we correct minor errors, improve the overall appearance of our best photos (and…
Heavy-wheight lenses for 2013
While 2012 was relatively calm in terms of new tele-lenses (with the significant exceptions of the Pentax 500mm and the progressive availability of the new great whites from Canon), 2013 appears ready to become a year of big tele-lenses at nearly all the manufacturers: Nikon launches an 800mm f/5.6 which is becoming the biggest product…
Goodbye 2011, Hello 2012!
Happy new year to all YLovePhoto readers! I hope that 2012 will bring you joy and photography. It’s now time to look back at the year behind us and try and see what is coming in 2012. 2011 Two features were really striking in 2011: Natural disasters: The earthquake in Japan and the floods in…
Manufacturing film and cards
In only a few years, we went from analog silver-based film to the Flash memory card. Let’s have some little fun comparing both manufacturing processes, thanks to Kodak, then Lexar. The world is moving. YouTube link YouTube link YouTube link Film or cards; Kodak or Lexar; Years apart, but the same attention to production quality.
Will the Electronic Viewfinder (EVF) save the photo world?
With the first expert photo cameras from Sony equipped with electronic viewfinders, the question is more and more often asked whether this is a technological opportunity that the old photo pricks prefer to ignore or an approximate solution aimed only at low-demand customers. As a matter of fact, truth lies somewhere in between those two…
Manufacturing of a Voigtlander Nokton 25mm f/0.95 lens
We don’t often see the modern process of the long manufacturing a modern lens. This one is a manual lens (there is much more electronics in the lenses equipped with AF motor). YouTube link If you did not have enough yet, you can always go back to the manufacturing of a Canon 500mm tele-lens (in…
Photo filters must be high-quality
To complement the other previous posts about photographic filters, here are few additional elements. Is a UV filter harmful? First, I would like to demonstrate once again the critical importance of having a very good quality filter rather than the usual plastic junk. Too often, we forget that the filter is degrading the image quality…
You only need two filters
Digital photography changed a lot of things but there is an invariant left: It has to catch light on a sensitive surface. So, for a long time, the photographers learned to play with light to draw the maximum from it. And during years, we saw pros lugging around their load of equipment they were the…
Manufacturing of a Canon 500mm f/4 lens
Let’s go and see how is manufactured a big tele-lens from Canon. A lot of hot glass and quite a chunk of shiny metal. YouTube link
Google competing with TinEye
Do you remember TinEye? This is the company which has been offering since a few years an image search service where you show a photo (or a picture) and they find copies on the web (useful for the photographers). This can also help you find the original (useful for webmasters). TinEye was always a little…
Operation of aperture blades
Aperture Revealed – 120 fps – HD from Camera Technica on Vimeo. The same at a slower speed: Aperture Revealed – 240 fps – HD from Camera Technica on Vimeo. Thanks to Camera Technica for these videos.
Clouds: How to do them?
For those who asked how I did the word clouds I presented on YLovePhoto yesterday and today, the trick is simply to go to the www.wordle.net web site and provide the text of a press release, then choose the right parameters for the best show of words. Good luck. Nikon D5100 Canon EOS 600D &…
Canon Image Stabilization
As seen at the Photokina 2008, the visible operation of the image stabilisization inside a Canon lens. YouTube link YouTube link
NASA Hubble pictures: 2 minutes in Photoshop
As a matter of fact, NASA prepares in Photoshop its gorgeous pictures from images taken by the Hubble space telescope. And, within two minutes, you can watch exactly how they do it. I would recommend to run it in slow motion if you really want to catch all the details and each and every step,…
Nikon D5100 – Night vision
Let’s come back to the issue of Night Vision around the new Nikon D5100. You certainly noticed that there was some talk about it before the launch and that this has been toned down at the announcement by Nikon. It appears that its an issue of trying to avoid discomfiture for the new or prospective…
Slow motion duel at Canon
Let’s not leave Nikon alone demonstrating the performance of its shutters… Today, here is a face-to-face confrontation of the Canon EOS 5D and the Canon EOS 450D (or Kiss X2 for Japanese buyers). YouTube link
Nikon D3 slow motion – Continuous 11 fps
Did you look into a pro camera shooting continuously at its top speed? Here is a Nikon D3 at 11 frames per second. YouTube link
All Sony SLR with semi-transparent mirrors
QueSabesDe.com obtained an extraordinarily bold statement from Sony: All future Sony SLR cameras will be using the semi-transparent mirror technology (so, very probably with Electronic View Finders) and this applies to: All APS-C SLR cameras All Full Frame SLR cameras Gee! This is going to influence the future of the Sony Alpha line. In a…
Canon goes electro-optical on IS III
This may be something that many people missed, but when Egami (a Japanese blog) produced a patent from Canon for a 300mm f/4, the important part may not have been the possible upcoming tele-lens but the technology used in the lens to reach a better Image Stabilization (IS). Up to now, Canon and Nikon have…
How is ink made?
YouTube link Source: Roumazeilles.net
A new Muybridge
Eadweard Muybridge was an English photographer famous for his animated photographs which pioneered the observation of animal movement. This was really a photography marvel in a time when video was not an integrated feature of photo cameras. Cassandra C. Jones did a relatively similar job from horse images collected on the Internet (probably with Google…
Photoshop CS6: a preview of the alpha version
The future of Photoshop CS6 has been recently shown at MAX2010, the Adobe conference in Los Angeles. YouTube link I believe that the really impressive part of this technical demonstration is the set of automatisms which operate -essentially- by showing the machine an example of the result to reach rather than finding the right settings…
NASA and ESA best space pictures
The two great space American and European agencies (NASA and ESA) are the most active sources of top-quality space images. Even better, most of their published pictures are available nearly without constraint (at least for non-commercial uses). So, you no longer need to bring your telescope and your photo camera to see the deep end…
Sony Alpha 33/55: No video
If you want to see a company suffering the worst pain at the worst possible moment, just look at Sony. In 2009, they repeated us that they would not add video to the DSLR photo cameras until it would be perfectly right and the half-baked solutions from Canon and Nikon where indirect justifications to this…