Olivian Photography

Spring is here!

2012-03-04T08:49:00.001-08:00

A good indicator of spring has always been the snowdrop where I live. Although the temperatures are still quite low, spring is showing up shyly. I can't wait to bathe in the warm sun and start wearing some lighter clothes.
Here are some of the first snowdrops that appeared:

Auto Art

2012-01-23T07:01:00.000-08:00

Yesterday I discovered quite a cool program. It's an application that takes an input image and transforms it into a painting, according to the parameters you set. The interesting fact is that it's not really the same thing like applying special filters in advanced editing software like GIMP or Photoshop. This program actually PAINTS. And it's really good at it. It's fascinating to press the play button and watch it work. Oh and the more powerful your CPU is, the faster it paints :).

The name of this program is Dynamic Auto-Painter and you can try it for free, although it will add a watermark to the output painting. You can choose between several painting modes(or style, however you prefer it). I tried it too on one of my photos. Once you click "Start", it will run forever, displaying the amount of brushes applied until then, waiting for you to press "Stop". The more it runs, the more fidelity your final painting will have.

Here's the image I've experimented with:

And here are the output paintings, using different painting styles:

I am simply amazed by what this program can achieve. Of course, nothing like this matches a painting done manually, with passion.

Even more Full HD wallpapers

2011-12-27T06:42:00.000-08:00

[Important EDIT!]

It seems that blogger resized all of the wallpapers to 1600x900( now even if you're lazy you can figure out the 16:9 aspect ratio :P). Because of that, I'm uploading them to an archive.

GameFront Mirror
MediaFire Mirror

Again, some huge 16:9 wallpapers I created from experimentation.

Light bulb filament:

Grunge Christmas globe:

Dirty glowing light bulb:

Blue Christmas globe:

Fire light bulb:

Enjoy!

A couple of more-than-FullHD wallpapers

2011-12-25T13:51:00.000-08:00

I decided to make a few photos and experiment with making some wallpapers out of them. Unfortunately the weather and the fact that it's winter with little snow offered me little options of what to make photos of, even macro.

These photos are higher resolution than 1920x1080 but don't expect them to be crystal smooth: my camera shows a lot of noise in low-light conditions( it was cloudy, and macro photos require quite a lot of light). For comparison, I'm uploading the original photos too.

2011-12-09T01:54:00.000-08:00

Infographic by: Wistia

A collection of stunning Black&White portraits

2011-12-08T03:53:00.000-08:00

These are the portraits of homeless people. I think the photos are very impressive.

Find them all here.

A few more virtual photos

2011-11-23T11:01:00.000-08:00

After I gave it a try, I found it's actually an entertaining activity and I discovered that taking these screenshots in Garry's Mod which I like to call them "photos" can help me plan a photo shooting in real life. Instead of figuring out how to make some photos on the spot, I can first experiment in the warmth of my home and then head out for a shoot.

Anyway, these are a few more photos I made in Garry's Mod, exploiting it's screenshot feature and simple DoF:

Too bad 'macro-photography' doesn't show anything new in a game :). I'd need a very high-poly prop for that.
The screenshots were taken on a favorite map of mine, gm_valley.

Virtual photography?

2011-11-20T02:05:00.000-08:00

Since I couldn't find anything interesting to photograph in the past couple of days( well I did take some photos of a small block of ice! :) ), an idea popped in my head. I remembered that in Garry's Mod ( a Half-Life 2 modification), I can arrange things as I do in the real world and I also benefit from a few post processing tools such as a simple Depth of Field simulator. And I also have a very versatile focal range camera that could make real world photographers envy.

So I assumed the role of Gordon Freeman and went with Alyx on a short photo shooting session. We found a cool cave in gm_skylife and took photos:

I would have tried to make different expressions on Alyx's face, but unfortunately the face poser seems to be broken and if I modify the intensity just a bit the face starts looking weird.

Unbelievable photographing technology

2011-11-02T11:16:00.000-07:00

A new fantastic piece of technology appeared, that is available for buying. It's a tiny box that does not resemble at all with what the industry has familiarized us. This tiny thing is called "Lytro" and it's actually a camera that takes pictures in a special way...

It's probably so tiny because it doesn't need all the optical equipment a traditional camera has. It doesn't feature focusing. How surprising! You actually get to take the photo and focus after that! That's what's unbelievable. It works because the camera doesn't record only the light hitting its lenses, it records the entire lightfield in the front of it.

You can read more about the science of this technology here.

The price is not so tiny by comparison, but it's acceptable, since it's such a unique method of capturing memories that can literally come alive when you play with the focus later. There are 2 models, with different colors. The first one can take up to 350 pictures(8 Gb) and costs 399$. The second has a 16gb storage capacity and can take up to 750 photos, costing 499$.

There's a gallery of photos that have adjustable focus. It's really fun and exciting to examine photos this way!

A couple of neat wide-wallpapers for you to admire

2011-10-30T02:16:00.000-07:00

You can find the collection at this blog: http://crispme.com

Cross Processing in GIMP

2011-08-14T16:08:00.000-07:00

A quick tutorial showing how to achieve cross processing with GIMP

This effect can be used to gracefully increase the contrast of a photograph, giving the shades a blue tone and making the bright parts yellowish. Let's start!
Here's a description of the effect on Wikipedia:

"Cross processing (sometimes abbreviated to Xpro) is the procedure of deliberately processing photographic film in a chemical solution intended for a different type of film. The effect was discovered independently by many different photographers often by mistake in the days of C-22 and E-4. The process is seen most often in fashion advertising and band photography, and in more recent years has become associated with the Lo-fi photography movement"

First of all, load your image in GIMP. I used a photo downloaded from http://www.sxc.hu, a free stock-images site. Credit goes to "aljabak" for the image.

Now go to Colors>Curves, and switch to the red channel. Make an adjustment curve like in the image( basically an 'S' curve with the top-most point moved a bit to the left.

Switch to the green channel and make an adjustment curve like in the image( we're increasing the brighter greens).

Switch to the blue channel and make an adjustment curve like in the image( this will make the shadows look blueish).

If the image requires it, you can increase the contrast, but only by a little, else it will look to harsh.

Now add a new layer and fill it with a pleasant yellow(not too bright, but not too dark either). I used R255 G204 B0.Switch the mode to overlay and reduce the opacity to somewhere in between 10% and 20%. I used 15%

The final image looks like this:

And here's 2 more examples:

I hope you enjoyed this quick tutorial! Have fun!

Create a glassy frame with Gimp

2011-08-13T16:29:00.000-07:00

We often store our digital photos as they are, not enhanced or modified or something. We do this with glossy-paper photos as-well, but we put most of them in albums, and in special cases, we put them in a frame. Well, nowadays it's the era of digital frames which can change the photo now and then. And they're quite cool for showcasing your work to visitors of family :)

But let's talk about making a frame on a photo, using Gimp. First of all, load your photo in Gimp. I used one that I downloaded from http://www.sxc.hu. Apply the desired enhancements.

Then duplicate the layer.

After that apply some Gaussian Blur to it with a value of 60(that's what worked on my image).

There are more ways of creating a frame from this point, you'll just have to use your creativity. The one I'm going to show you is just a simple method, you can find other means of doing this.

Select your duplicated layer and go to Filters>Distorts>Ripple and here you can play a bit with the values to get a desired effect. For Edges, select "Smear". For the values I choosed: Period 35, Amplitutde 15 and Phase shift can be just any number, like 0. Other options should remain unmodified. Hit Ok.

Next, go again to Filters and then Distorts>Lens Distortion. Input -50 to Main. Hit Ok.

Pick your rectangular selection tool, and make a selection that will be deleted so that the remaining part will enough for your frame( hit enter after you made it so the editing handles will disappear). Press Delete. At this point, if the deleted section becomes white, it means that your layer doesn't have an alpha channel. Undo the delete, go to Layer>Transparency>Add Alpha Channel. Then hit Delete.

Now pick the selection tool again and change the mode to "Substract" (the third button). Make a selection so that only a thin line of selection remains around the frame. Hit enter to get rid of the modifiers on the selection. Next, get your Gradient tool and select a desired gradiend from the list, leaving the shape to "Linear". Drag across the image to fill the outline of the frame. You can deselect now.

Your image is finished, and it can be saved to the desired format. Have fun experimenting with other types of filters to achieve a more interesting frame!

Make that subject shine!

2011-08-08T05:38:00.000-07:00

Do you wonder sometimes about emphasizing a bit the atmosphere of a picture, and make the subject look a bit more "angelic"?

I'll teach you how to do that in this tutorial, using GIMP.

Choose a picture with somebody you want to modify. Take notice that this technique doesn't work well on all pictures. For the picture, I've chosen one that I downloaded from http://www.sxc.hu,
a free stock images site.

Duplicate the layer, and then desaturate it(Colors>Desaturate).

We'll have to increase a bit the contrast, so adjust the color levels to do so(Colors>Levels).

Now apply some Gaussian Blur (Filters>Blur>Gaussian Blur). A value of 65 seemed to work fine on this particular photo.

Because the blurring decreases a bit the contrast, we'll have to amplify it a bit more again. It's not compulsory to use the Levels tool, you can adjust the contrast with Color Curves as well.

Next, set this layer mode to Overlay.

Select a white soft brush, turn the scale up to 10.....

...and then start carefully painting on the blurred layer to "reveal" our subject even more.

Make a new layer(Layer>New Layer), take your soft brush again, but this time change the color to something gold-like.

Draw an outline on your subject.

Now apply some Gaussian Blur to this layer. Pick a high value. In my case, I picked 150.

Set this layer mode to Dodge, and reduce the Opacity to 35%.

We can now make the final adjustments to the color of this image. There are 2 ways to do this. The faster is to just Colorize the desaturated overlay layer.

But in my opinion it's more convenient to select the first layer, and change the colors using Color Curves.

This is the final image:

Have a nice day!

Default Resolutions Chart

2011-07-31T01:42:00.000-07:00

This is a quick chart that's very useful when you have to know the destination of your images- create different versions of the same image so it will be compatible with most of the popular resolutions.

One example of this is when making a wallpaper, but you want it to be compatible with both the squarish and widescreen aspect ratios(5:4, 16:9). And it's useful if you want to scale the things up a bit.

Found it on my computer, and don't remember where I got it. Probably on Wikipedia.

Also, for a more complete list of default resolutions, check this table on wikipedia.

I'm am going to post the most popular 16:9 resolutions here though, I think they're useful enough to be interesting to everyone.

Name	Width x Height	Aspect Ratio	Number of pixels
720p	1280 x 720	16:9	921,600
WXGA, max. (standardized HDTV 720p/1080i displays)	1366 x 768	~16:9	1,049,088
900p	1600 x 900	16:9	1,440,000
HD 1080 (1080i, 1080p)	1920 x 1080	16:9	2,073,600
QWXGA, 2K	2048 x 1152	16:9	2,359,296
WQHD (Dell UltraSharp U2711, Apple iMac)	2560 x 1440	16:9	3,686,400
QFHD	3840 x 2160	16:9	8,294,400
4K	4096 x 2304	16:9	9,437,184
UHDTV(speculated time frame is 2016-2020)	7680 x 4320	16:9	33,177,600

A little bit of nature and fun

2011-07-28T10:57:00.000-07:00

I went for a stroll, and arrived near a spring with cold, crystal fresh water, at the base of a mountain. While I was quenching my thirst, I noticed a stork changing leg positions on an abandoned pole.
I took the camera and took a few shots. In on of them, the stork was looking at me:

Just like in a real fashion presentation, its feet are not too comfortable it seems!
After that, I turned my eyes to the ground and took a few pictures with wet leaves and grass. I always love how pure the water drops look when seen up close.

It's boring to sit in the same place and try to take photos of the same subjects. So I left the place and went at the river, taking there some pictures:

I had fun taking some splashing water photos. Would be awesome to make some macro with the water still in its vertical motion, but it's really hard.

When I came back, along the river bank, I took a photo of some nut tree leaves too. Yeah, it's heavily edited to make it look a bit better:

Going even further, I almost stepped on an earth warm crossing the path. I lowered myself at ground level and took a macro shot of it.
As it turns out, something quite gross was happening: 2 warms were sucking nutrients from the poor earth worm.

I thought it'd be nice to film its odd movements. All this time, until I arrived home, I thought those pulsating things were only a leaf moving under the pulsating skin.

Well, have a fun day guys!

Obscurity

2011-07-26T15:39:00.000-07:00

I looked through my stuff and found a very old(probably about 14-15 years) Sega Mega Drive 2, on which I used to play(mostly mario) as a kid. Near it I also found 2 cartridges...(the only 2 I ever had, but as an added bonus, the Sega drive came with its own games....). For some reason I decided to shoot a photo of the cartridge, striped from its oversized casing. In low lighting conditions, it look like something old and unuseful.

Also I made a photo of a solar lamp in the dark, trying to emphasize the effect of the light passing through the transparent piece of plastic. I might have done it wrong with the warm colors, probably a blueish-mauve tone could've worked better.

The green beetle

2011-07-23T10:10:00.000-07:00

A short clip filmed by me:

Photography Cheat Sheet

2011-07-18T00:24:00.000-07:00

Could print and stick this to my camera :).

Spice up that contrast!

2011-06-14T14:35:00.000-07:00

So you're trying to make some good looking photos, but really all of them look bland and boring? Sure, you took into consideration several factors to make your scene look better, but still... the colors seem washed. It's ok- it happens with most entry-level photography tools. They're not designed for professionals, but for enthusiasts. I'm going to make a short and comprehensible tutorial about rapidly enhancing the look of your photo using Gimp. The current stable version as I'm writing this is Gimp 2.6.
Wait, I have to drink a glass of water first. Making a tutorial ain't so easy! ...phew, now that I calmed my thirst, let's start this! Here's a close-up photograph of some rocks I took recently:

It surely looks quite bland. What can we do? Well, the first step is to load it into Gimp. Select the background layer and then click Layer>Duplicate Layer(Shift+Ctrl+D).
Let's make this duplicated layer black&white by going to Colors>Desaturate, choose Luminosity and click OK. Set this layer mode to Overlay and reduce its opacity to about 50% or around some satisfactory value(we want this effect to be subtle, not to scratch our eyes).
We should also increase a bit the sharpness of our image. To do this, select the background layer, then go to Filters>Enhance>Unsharp Mask. A Radius=5, Amount=0.5 and Threshold=0 seems to work fine on this particular image. You can fine-tune these parameters, but remember: you always want the effect to be subtle, else the you're effectively damaging the image.

The image is now looking like this:

Basically, we can already save it as it is, it's looking much better than the original. You may be tempted to say it's not, but switching back to the original you'll have a sensation of looking at it through fog...

Let's continue making this photo more interesting!
When I took the shot, I forgot the EV(exposure value) at -0.7, so it's a bit underexposed. Let's profit from this by emphasizing a bit the whites, particularly the bigger white rock. Duplicate the background layer again and move it up(so it's at the top). Go to Filters>Blur>GaussianBlur. Type in a value of 100 and click OK. Set this layer mode to Dodge, with an opacity of about 50-55. To eliminate the possible "too saturated" blurry edges(it's happening on the white rock in this image for example), go to Colors>Desaturate and choose Luminosity to make this layer b&w too. So now we have this:

Now it all depends on your imagination. Would you like to alter the colors or make them more intense? Select the background layer and then go to Colors>Curves and start messing around until you are satisfied. I came up with this:

(I usually enjoy warmer pictures. I rarely opt for 'cold' colors)

Perhaps you enjoy monochrome images? With the background layer selected, go to Colors>Colorize. Again, fine tune the parameters remembering to make the effect have a subtle impact on the final image. Particularly, reduce the saturation a lot.

(this looks green and... cold... *sneezes)

Let's try something different this time. Desaturate the background layer( I hope you know how to do it now). Select the Blend Tool(or gradient tool, by pressing L). Set its mode to Overlay and then choose a gradient from the available ones(or you can create one of your own, but the list is quite enough for our purposes). You have to experiment with the Opacity on this one, as different gradients will look better with different values.
For example, I chose the Golden gradient, with an opacity of 70, a Linear shape and dragged from bottom to top:

(now I don't want to hear somebody saying this has the color of puke, because I think it is elegant! Allright? :) )

Or you can go totally wild and do something like this:

(Notice how we completely ignored being subtle here :)... uhm, is that a double rainbow? :O)

Well, what can I say? Editing is a lot of fun! So have lots of it! ;)

NIkon D5100 Unboxing

2011-06-14T11:23:00.000-07:00

Color Theory

2011-06-04T02:10:00.000-07:00

By "pronouncedyou", on DeviantArt.

Beauties of mid-spring

2011-05-01T05:59:00.000-07:00

Cherry flowers

Dandelion radiance

Crystal drops on the delicate blade of grass

Tableau de la forêt au printemps

Yellow blossoms

Blue fragility

How to take photos in low light

2011-04-11T11:58:00.000-07:00

Whether you'd like to take acceptable photographs in the dark or just face some difficulties doing it, this infographic is for you:

Taken from SnapSort blog.

Nikon P100 trick

2011-04-10T05:48:00.000-07:00

Today I accidentally found a cool little trick after I kept my fingers on the "Preview" (or play, how do you want to call it).

For almost a year since I own this camera, I've always had to take the lens cap off and then start the camera for previewing images\videos or accessing the menu without getting the lens cap error message, because it would always start the lens mechanism.

I was surprised to discover today that I don't have to this. Just keep the "Preview" button pressed for about 2-3 seconds and the camera will start and display the last image that was shot. You can also access the menu. But if you press the "Preview" button one more time, the camera will try to activate the lens mechanism to put it in the active position.
To shut it down, press the on\off switch.

I don't think this is written in the camera's manual, but if it is, others might have missed it just like I did.
I think this works on the P500 as well, but I'm not sure.

A few words about Snapsort.com

2011-04-02T02:26:00.000-07:00

It's well known that when you are short of money(or when it's very hard to save some money at all) and really want that special product, you begin to make some research. After all, you want the best bang for buck right?

This whole research process can be basically divided into 3 main parts: FINDING, ANALYSING and COMPARING.

Personally I think the hardest parts are the first two, once you went through them comparing is easy. But this whole process takes up a lot of time. And when it comes to digital cameras, things start to get complicated.
The product line is very wide, and you can get confused rapidly. There are pocket cameras, bridge cameras(those that look like a DSLR but you can't change their lenses), DSLRs and for quite some time now, mirrorless cameras with changeable lenses(they're like a DSLR, but much more compact).

You only have to go to some sort of online shop that sells cameras to observe how fast you can get confused. If you had an idea what camera you'd like before, at this point you get really confused. What should you choose?
And you start asking friends, taking those suggestions and google about them, comparing, start having a ton of tabs opened, reading reviews, hours pass like birds... at the end of the day you still have no idea. Yeah, if you had lots of money you could just buy the most expensive camera from a certain category right? Oh but you're not a billionaire :(.

There's an online tool that does most of the job for you: http://snapsort.com . Really, when I decided buying P100 I spent a month researching(because I really had no idea about cameras at the time) on the internet. At the end of my research I found snapsort, and after a few more clicks and comparisons I was convinced. I was short on money and needed something that has most of the DSLR's features.

So here's what I like about this online tool:
-Snapsort is like a friend that knows everything about cameras and does what you expect him to do: making a good recommendation.
-You don't even need to have a starting point. You just need to know what you actually want to do with that camera, or what you desire. It's easy: click the "Explore" tab and start adjusting the parameters as you like. For example, let's say that I want an entry-level DSLR that's less than 620 euros and is "Best overall". 2 simple parameters that will immediately display some results. Currently, the best one for these parameters is Canon EOS550D.
-If you're lazy you could just resort on using the "Just tell me" tab. Input a maximum sum of money and you get the best bang for buck. I don't recommend this feature, as you'll surely not get exactly what you want
-There's a top of the best cameras in different cameras, you can start getting orientated fast

The feature that I appreciate the most is "Compare", though. This is what makes the site a good friend in choosing a camera in my opinion. Its objective style of comparison is unbeatable. It's really helpful when you have to decide between 2 cameras that are extremely similar.
Take, for example, Nikon P100 and P500. Should you get the new P500 or P100? There are minor differences, mostly the increased zoom, but is it worth it? Try the feature yourself!
The awesome part is that you can even compare cameras from different categories! Of course, the site itself says that you shouldn't take the comparison seriously, but it helps you decide faster.

Now, although the site is mostly perfect in my opinion, I have some suggestions too. This site only helps you make decisions based on the features, but not actually the quality. Yes, there are videos and photos for almost every camera, but not in a direct comparison.
The owners of the site should create some kind of a "standard scene", or different standard scenes that will remain unmodified(forever :) ) and could be used for every new camera that appears.
A static scene that can be used to analyze the color and sharpness performance for example. That way, when comparing 2 cameras, not only can you decide based on the features, but you can actually ''SEE" the difference between the two.

That being said, I wish you a happy researching and a fast decision on which camera should you buy!

Early spring

2011-03-20T03:27:00.000-07:00

Watching the weather forecast... oh it's getting warmer! 15*C already :O ? I must get out!
*grabbing my camera
*head towards the nearby forest

I was hoping to photograph some snowdrops. Unfortunately, they have sprung much earlier, probably early February, because they like colder temperatures(they often get out even through snow).
I instead found lots of crocus flowers, and some primroses (primula vulgaris) here and there. I was disappointed for a moment(snowdrops are spring symbols after all!), but then I was happy that I found something to photograph anyway. Crocus flowers offer lively colours :).

Crocus flowers on the forest bed

I am not really pleased with my photograph above. Only when I arrived home I noticed that the bottom crocus, on which I focused, is not enough included in the frame. It bothers my eyes. I left too much blurred out space on the upper part. I hope it still presents the beauty of these flowers in a natural way.

As the "focus" suggests, my sole purpose of this photo was to present the pollen structure. If you zoom in a bit, you can actually see the grains of pollen. I think I could actually made it closer, but I wanted to include the flower petals so the image looks more natural. Actually, the petal from the left was touching the lens :)

This looks like a pretty generic flower macro, but photographing from this angle those common primroses (primula vulgaris) adds a bit of depth to them. They look a bit more beautiful in my opinion than watching them from above.

2 crocus flowers blooming on the same strain. It looks beautiful!

There are a lot of daisy flowers already on the fields, and, like anybody else, I almos passed near them without noticing. Perhaps because of their size they are most of the time unobserved. So I decided to give it a shot. I was surprised to see how beautiful and gentle they look from up close. It inspires perfection and happiness :).

Currently it's again rainy and cold outside :(. But in april I hope to make more photos of other beautiful flowers, like tulips, lily of the valley and daffodils( and of course, different tree flowers !)

I wish all a lovely warm, lovely spring. Have a nice day!

[post in progress]

Nikon Coolpix P500, the P100 successor

2011-02-09T06:50:00.000-08:00

As expected, Nikon released the successor to the P100 that was released in 2010, the Nikon CoolPix P500.

Here's the official ad:

At first, I was a little enthusiastic about it, and also felt a bit bad that it would render my P100 obsolete, until I came to the conclusion that it's not better by much.
If they would be released by number versions, and P100 would be 1.0, Nikon P500 would be 1.5 to give you an idea.

There are some updates here and there, the most noticeable being the 36x zoom( P100 has 26). Essentially the new camera is able to take wider shots and better telephoto, but the difference is not massive. I also noticed that the new zoom lens only push out a single cylinder, as opposed to 2 in P100.

When I saw the the step up to 12 Mp, I initially thought they included a bigger sensor for better quality images and better light sensitivity in darker conditions. I was disappointed to find out that it still uses a 1/2.3-inches sensor.
I also see a new addition near the lens, a seconds zoom control for fine zooming. It can be modified to adjust the focus too, and seeing the official ad video I suspect that it will now be possible to adjust the focus during video capture, which is really great.

And the third greater update is the new LCD screen,with basically doubled resolution (921k pixels)

Still no hotshoe. Still no microphone input. Same maximum 240fps in HS. And I wonder how the picture quality will justify the 12mp considering the same sensor size...

Oh well, we'll see. I can't wait for a review. I will post it here as soon as I see one.

Macro photos of Pirite and Mica

2011-02-09T04:58:00.000-08:00

I got my hands on some minerals and I though I should make some macro photos of them. I think they turned out pretty nice:

Mica sheets:

Pirite:

Happy new year 2011!

2011-01-03T00:35:00.000-08:00

Well, kinda late I guess. I am not very active on this blog, because I have my main blog here where I post most of the time: http://sjackm.wordpress.com/.

I want to wish you a happy new year, with more creative photos and videos!

Here's some of my latest photos(you can actually see in the sidebard the latest uploaded photos) that I enjoyed:

The Nikon Coolpix P100

2010-11-15T08:02:00.000-08:00

Now that I should start with something, I think I'm going to make a little review for the digital camera I own: The Nikon Coolpix P100.

Let me start by saying that this is a great digital camera. It's actually a "bridge", which means that it's still a "compact camera", but it has DSLR features. I have chosen this camera after a long period of research- about a month of reading reviews, descriptions, viewing samples and comparing it to other bridges. In a very short period of time I concluded that its main competitor is Fujifilm HS10.

At a slightly higher cost I could get a "better"-packed-with-features camera, but the differences weren't as high as to convince me, especially that I wanted to stick with Nikon for a first camera. There are several major differences: HS10 has support for an external flash while P100 hasn't, it can shoot RAW while P100 doesn't and if I correctly remember it works on AA batteries while P100 has its own standard battery.
But everywhere I checked Nikon P100 obtained the highest score.

I must admit, my first photograph was taken using the "Auto Mode", which is basically a point&shoot mode: you won't be bothered by any settings. My second photo was already made using the "Program" Mode, but if beginners buy this camera it will be much easier to operate with it in auto mode.

The main attractive feature is of course the 26x optical zoom(26-678 mm), which is amazing! Similar lenses for DSLRs would cost at least as much as P100 itself. Some will say this is literally a spy camera, and I agree! It's particularly useful when you can't physically move from your spot to get closer to the subject you're photographing. An eloquent example is the following shot I took of the moon:

The camera also has excellent macro capability. The specification says it has 1cm macro but that is partially true, it can do more than that! The trick is to increase a bit the focal(to zoom in a bit), and operate the focus manually. In this way I've discovered you can actually focus beyond the lens! That means that at a point, you can actually focus on the dust on the exterior glass- but it can go beyond that(which is not really useful anyway). Theoretically this is amazing, but in practice you'll rarely shoot such macros.

Long exposure times are bit disappointing: only 8 seconds. 20-30 seconds during a night shot would be nicer. The fast exposure is satisfying: 1/2000s. Although you can capture very fast movement, you also need plenty of light. Sometimes, even in bright sun 1/2000s exposed photos can look a bit dark, so you will probably need to increase that ISO sensitivity. Talking about ISO, it gives nice results until ISO1600 which is already a bit noisy, and I suggest using 3200 only in extreme cases where the combination of other settings(exposure, aperture) won't produce the expected result.

In my opinion the final image has balanced colors, although in some cases you won't get the expected result- it's the light source fault. That's why you can set the white balance to something adequate. I tend to leave it to "Auto" most of the time, as it will produce great results. But in cloudy days I choose "cloudy", to add a bit more yellow tone to the image. Of course, indoor situations such as fluorescent lighting or incandescent have their own settings too( setting them properly is a must, otherwise you'll get an obviously too blue\yellowish image).

I sometimes ran into the problem of difficult lighting conditions, or I probably desired a different exposure for a certain subject. This is where I found pretty useful to ability to change how the camera calculates the exposure. The default is "Matrix", in which case it takes into account the whole scene. There is one called "center weighted" which calculates the exposure after the lighting conditions present in the middle of the canvas. But the one that is quite interesting and fun is "spot". This basically calculates the whole image exposure based on a point.

You can also set how the camera auto-focuses. Although it can auto-autofocus(odd term, I know), I tend to set it to "manual" so I can move the focus point anywhere I want in the canvas. Particularly useful when shooting static objects and you're unable for the moment to choose your position. Autofocusing can be "single"(half-pressed shutter button=>focusing) or FullTime, which means the camera will always look after a subject to focus to.

You can't do any serious optimizing on the shots, other than a "Quick Retouch", which is basically a contrast and color enhancer. You can set your camera to take an additional photo with improved colours(more vivid), b&w etc. from the "Optimize image" menu(or you can manually set some settings yourself).

P100 features a "Scene Mode"(sounds familiar heh? most cameras have this mode nowadays...). Apart from the well known scene mods I must highlight a couple of them. The first one that comes to mind if the "Panorama Assist". It's pretty obvious what it does: it helps you shoot panoramas. So you basically select your direction of shooting, and then the exposure settings will remain the same for the rest of the shots. After each shot, a quarter of it will appear half-visible so you can align the new shot properly. It's a shame they didn't include auto-stitching in the camera. Fujifilm HS10 does this. Instead they threw a software on the CD that comes with the camera. Oh well, better than nothing I guess! :)
The second one is "Backlit scene HDR". It's useful when you have background light affecting your subject exposure. I haven't really had the occasion to test this function yet though.

Other modes include "Smart Portrait"- I use this a lot when taking pictures of people- and "Sport Continuous", which is useful if you want to capture a critical moment you can't anticipate in some kind of sport or any other thing.
There are also 3 other quite useless modes:
- "Scene Auto Selector": this one was either designed for dummies, or was thrown there to complete the selector wheel. It fails a lot in choosing the right scene mode.
-"Subject Tracking": Pleaaaseee..... unless you're leaving in a world full of contrast, this ain't gonna work!
-"User saved Settings": Right, this is not really useless, but I use it rarely and I find myself most of the times modifying the settings in program mode...

Have I talked about the movie shooting modes? Oh yeah! This camera is properly equipped to make some good home-movies, if you also have a tripod. It can shoot at a resolution of 1920x1080(Full HD!), with stereo sound. Now that is cool: most cameras have only one microphone, but this one has 2 mikes placed on top of it, near the flash.
But I consider the funniest feature the "high-speed" movie. It's actually filming at a QVGA resolution(I think, either way it's a low res) with 240 fps. Taking slow motion clips of facepalms and things like that can be really fun! I already made a "slow-motion" test I uploaded to Youtube immediately after I bought the camera.
Here it is:

So, in conclusion I must say again that this is a great camera and I'm satisfied of it. It helped me initiate into photography, and gave me the will to buy a DSLR in the feature.

Please visit my Flickr Slideshow to see my pictures, or just if you want to see some photo samples.
You can also visit my Panoramio page, to see some panoramas I've taken.

Umm.. History of what?

2010-11-12T15:28:00.000-08:00

Of light. Oh well, I know it's not an original name, but I had to come up with something!
It started from the idea that everything I capture on camera, is history.

What exactly is light? A short search on Wikipedia will reveal what it is, from a scientific point of view:

Light is electromagnetic radiation of a wavelength that is visible to the human eye (in a range from about 380 or 400 nanometres to about 760 or 780 nm).
What we see is very little of what it is...

Isn't it fascinating to think about how much we can't see but we, intelligent humans, have created special equipment to deal with each of the electromagnetic radiation? And the fact that what we see is very little from what it is...
So my passion, photography, is actually just capturing the light and make it look like something new, creative, fun, beautiful.

Light is an energy that, if it won't hit an object that is not reflective, will travel forever. You see, there's a difference between "light" and what we actually see. If we were to see only pure light, we would probably only perceive colors. What we do see is a reflection of the environment(also in the form of light, but altered). Reflections give us plenty of information so we can survive, and in addition it also inspires us and it is a type of entertainment.

A reflection informs us about the current state of an object- if it's close enough- or the past state of an object - if it's really far away, like observing the Universe for example. So that means that taking a picture is truly only painting that reflection forever, and thus- store an information about the state of objects at a point in time. That is history.
Light is thus an ancient story teller that will continue to tell stories until the last reactions that produce light in the Universe will have ended. Then the history will be over, at least from light's point of view :).

Oh, by the way, I don't have special equipment. My tool is a Nikon P100, which is enough for me now(altough I feel the need for a DSLR).

Hello light!

2010-11-12T06:36:00.000-08:00

I know, I should be using the overused term "hello world"... so popular among thousands of programming tutorials. But since this will be a blog about photography(and possibly filming), I prefer saying hello to the light- the phenomenon that makes it possible to read these words, and thus, to exist in the perception of readers...

But I won't philosophize right now, as this is just a welcome post( and a test one too, so I can tweak the blog a bit). As for the name of the blog... I'll talk about it later.
All you need to know is that I'm not a photographer. It's just that photography is a passion of mine. And I'm a beginner- I probably won't ever go "pro", but it's fun to capture moments... that become history.

Oh boy, I almost forgot to include a photo in this post(would've been a ridiculous beginning for such a blog, heh?).
That's my kitty :).