and things went downhill from there

So far my post-vaccination reaction has been fairly mild. I have been running a low-grade fever off and on this evening, and the pain in my arm has been flaring up and settling down all day. It also feels like I have a headache wanting to come on. I'll take some Tylenol before I go to bed.

I saw a question come up on Reddit the other day, and it's something I'd mulled on when I got my first digital camera.

When does a photograph stop being a photograph and just become visual art?

I don't think that anybody would argue that making minor tweaks to colour balance, contrast and the like are fine - the camera will do that automatically anyway, so those tweaks get a pass.

I think that can be an argument made as well for a certain amount of cropping, straightening and sharpening.

I did all of those things to this one, then I added a bit of HDR, boosted the saturation a bit and overlaid a brush-stroke pattern.


Even with all of the tweaking, it still faithfully displays the original source scene, just not in a way that you would see it if you stood in the same place.

In my mind, this one is borderline. Given how far it has strayed from the original RAW file, I think this has slid into the realm of digital art rather than photography.

But what if I left everything else unchanged and only edited out the stop sign over on the left? I often edit out power lines and other distractions in my photographs. Once I do that, it no longer represents the scene as it would look to somebody else standing in the same place. Is it the same as other edits, where the degree of the change decides which side of the photograph/digital art line it occupies?

A popular technique I often see from photographers is to replace the sky in their shot, either adding in a more dramatic sky, or taking pictures at the same location (long exposure at night, and another during the day) and then compositing them together.

I think I would draw the line at the point where the edits go beyond removing peripheral distractions and blemishes and begins to modify the actual focus of the picture.

Removing a hydro pole in the distance is fine, but not adding storm clouds. Editing out a pimple on the nose of your model is fine, but making her boobs larger is, uh, stretching things a bit.

Ultimately this makes no difference in the world, but it's the kind of questions that occupy my mind when I don't keep it busy with the more important stuff.

First of all, thanks Hotmail for tossing all of my Dreamwidth notifications into the spam folder. I'd have figured it out eventually when I noticed my "unread" notification on the site ticking up, but it's a bit irksome. The reason I caught it this time was because I had a notification show up briefly on my phone and then disappear again.

I guess the obvious solution is to point my notifications to a different email server, but Hotmail is my oldest account, and I like to give it something to do. If I had any confidence that its mail server would still exist from one moment to the next, I'd try directing them to my venerable Yahoo account. I'll flag Hotmail that these are not spam and see if that works. Worst case I just point them to Gmail.

[Update] I dragged them all out of the spam folder, and when another notification showed up a few minutes later, Hotmail did not flip it into the junk folder. Maybe dragging them out of that folder was enough to make it change its internal rules.

There is a photographer suing a pop singer for posting one of his photos on her Instagram. On its surface, this seems to be a pretty cut-and-dried case where even an amateur hack like me would instinctively side with the photographer. Below its surface, it is a bit more nuanced and ugly.

This pop star recently changed the contract terms for her concerts, giving her all rights to any picture taken during the show. I'm sure web developers are familiar with "You should be happy to do this for free. Think of the exposure you'll get from it!" I think it's kind of a vile process, but at the same time it's not like photographers are blindly signing the contracts without knowing they are signing away the rights to their own pictures.

On the other hand, the photographer in question was paparazzi, whom I consider to be the bottom feeders of photographers.

The photo in question was of the singer emerging from a building, and was snapped by one of the pack of camera-wielding jackals who will camp outside of buildings hoping for a scrap.

To the photographer's defence, there is no reasonable expectation of privacy when one ventures into a public place. The singer was aware of that, or reasonably should have been aware of that when she emerged from that building into a public place. She knew the paparazzi would be there, and that they would be taking pictures of her for profit. There is also the matter of ownership. I am very firmly in the camp where a photographer owns all rights to every picture they take until such time as they modify the terms of that ownership, either through a contract, or through releasing them under a creative commons licence like I do.

But...

I think there is a strong case here for the singer to claim some measure of ownership over her own likeness. This is not a case where she went to a studio and signed a contract with a photographer, giving the latter rights to any pictures. There is no contract between these two parties, signed or implied. While the photographer is entirely in the right to claim sole ownership of the photograph, the singer is also right to claim that it only has inherent value because she is in it. I do not see this as being entirely different from standing outside of a concert hall with a tape recorder and then selling copies of the tape.

We need some balance between personal and public rights. If I spit my gum in the street, I think it is perfectly within somebody's rights to pick it up and extract my DNA from it. On the other hand, I don't think that doing so should give them the rights to my DNA. I believe that there is a case to be made here where both parties should be able to claim some measure of ownership on the picture.

I don't think this should be a general case, because that would completely stifle photography. I think our laws need to be updated with some rules for paparazzi, since that is a specific discipline of photography. If somebody is taking photos of another person in the street specifically because that person's likeness has inherent value, the subject of the photo should have the opportunity to exact value from it as well.

What better way to while away a blizzard than by hanging out in the house and taking pictures of our white cat?

Jaws is a far and away the most elusive of our cats when the camera comes out. Getting her to look at the camera is half the battle, and even when she does, her eyes are invariably shut when you snap the picture.

Belladonna was being cute earlier this evening, and I decided to try my hand at nabbing a picture of her. In shot after shot, she was either squinting, or had her eyes shut tight. Hm. She is usually not one to do that. I checked my camera's settings and noticed that I had the focus assist set, and I felt a bit silly as I was changing it back because I had forgotten that I had turned it on when taking a picture of the Christmas tree the a couple of weeks back. I tried a few more times to get a picture of Belladonna, but her patience was wearing thin, and I began to fear what she might do to me in the night if I kept pushing the issue.

I decided to tackled the Jaws challenge. She had been hunkering in the back part of the house for most of the evening, and I figured it would not take a lot of effort to coax her out with the promise of some human contact. She was very pleased to see me, and I had a cunning plan. My thinking was that if I shot at a fast enough speed (say, 1/640 of a second) I could catch her before she had a chance to squeeze her eyes shut. I took three pictures, and in each of them she somehow psychically anticipated the shutter and had her eyes shut tight. How does she know?!

She climbed onto my lap, and I decided to try shooting blind by holding the camera out at arm's length. The moment I did so, I realized that our cat was not some kind of magical, shutter-anticipating creature. At some point I had apparently turned on the focus assist on the flash. I sifted through the menus until I figured out how to disable that, cranked the flash around to give a nice, indirect light and held the camera out at arm's length again. I called her to get her attention and managed to capture this. Obviously it is not perfect, but I think it turned out pretty good given how it was shot. I did not even bother to crop it.

ISO 100, F 1.8,1/640sec, 35mm

We put up the Christmas tree last night. I give it a week before the cats have traumatized it beyond recognition.



We bought this tree shortly after we were married, and I am starting to think that this might be its last Christmas with us. It has been a good tree, and it owes us nothing, but wear and tear and years of cats have taken their toll on it. Every year we find more shed parts in the bottom of the box when we unpack it.

I shot this one at 200ISO, and 1/60th of a second with the lens wide open. Even at that low of a setting, it has a lot of noise in it. I love my old Nikon, but it does not perform well at higher ISOs. Most settings up to 400 are OK with decent lighting, but longer exposures at anything over 200ISO really start to show its weakness.

Part of the problem is that this camera is showing its age. It was a good performer in its day, but it does not stand up as well in comparison to modern cameras. Also, I am probably a bit over-sensitive to image noise because I keep looking at shots taken on medium format cameras at ISOs of 16,000 and above, and they are crisp and clear in comparison.

What does not help is that the original was underexposed, and I boosted the image in software, boosting the background noise at the same time.

Tomorrow may be the day when I find out if I still have a job. I am not too worried, but I suspect there may be a bit of a bloodbath in the office around me. We are in for some interesting and ugly times over the next few months.

The company sent out an announcement about a change to our pensions today that may as well have been prefaced with, "Lawyer up and get ready for the class action suit" when they sent it. We will see how much backlash there is against this, but I know a few people who are very very unhappy about the change.

I am still mulling over the idea of getting a new lens for my older DSLR - though in fairness, "still mulling" refers to a subject that I only broached just over a week ago.

I decided to go with dakhun's suggestion, and I put together a histogram of how often I use various focal lengths. I parsed through ~10,000 pictures, figuring that would be a decent sample size to establish some trends.

The first thing I did was eliminate 18mm, 50mm, and 200mm. I took out the two extremes because in the heat of the moment, I tend to turn the lens to the extremes (zoom right in, or right out) with the intention of fixing/cropping the picture later if needed. I took out 50mm because I already have a fixed 50mm lens, so the sample had a very strong bias.

When I removed those numbers, noticed some interesting trends in the graph.

- I definitely favour the wider focal lengths over the narrower ranges, with >45% of my shots coming in <48mm, and the other 55% spaced out with increasing rarity up to 170mm, then nothing at all between there and 199mm. I guess if 170mm doesn't cut it then I tend to just zoom in all the way.

- There are definite data spikes in the around 24mm, 70mm and 100mm.

On first glance, it looked like I would probably be better served by a more expensive 24mm lens, but I've worked around data long enough not to fooled by the pretty spikes on the chart. I plotted out a trend curve to see where the majority of my shots were happening, and the peak rose fairly quickly to about the 30mm point and then slid away slowly as it worked toward the narrower ranges.

Based on the numbers, I would probably get decent use from either a 24mm or a 35mm lens, since they both fall in the curve.

My gut feel is that if I got a 24mm lens, it might not see a lot of use. Even though I factored out the extremes from my sample, the fact remains that in the majority of cases, once I zoom out as far as 24mm, I typically just zoom the rest of the way out to 18mm. A lot of the settings in the 20+ range were from me backing off a bit because at the widest setting, the filters encroach on the picture, causing vignetting around the corners.

On the other hand, I fear that if I get a 35mm lens, then my 50mm lens will start gathering dust. In retrospect the 35mm lens is probalby the one that I should have bought instead of the 50mm, but it was twice the price, and money was tight at the time because atara was going to school.

Also, is 35mm enough of a difference from 50mm to be worth the price? I wonder if the camera shop would let me borrow a 35mm lens for a few days to that I could try them both out and see if I think it's different enough to be worth considering...

Earlier this week, atara tossed out the suggestion that she might make a light box this weekend. Unfortunately she ended up snowed under with homework, but the idea continued to percolate in the back of my mind. We have a fairly large box that used to hold my wine fridge - nearly the perfect size for a light box in my opinion. Before I put knife to box, though, I decided that it would be prudent to grab a smaller box and try a proof of concept before I destroyed the larger one. After a lot of cutting, cursing, taping and swearing, I finally managed to cobble together something resembling a light box.

If I have learned one important thing from this exercise, it is that I am not talented with my hands. Every time I tackle a project like this, it ends up as a stark reminder as to why I never took up a career in wood working, or any of the other artistic professions that require hand-eye coordination.

On the plus side, it works.

This is a Christmas ornament that we bought back when these little guys were still in circulation. I don't know if the stores here simply stopped carrying these, or if the company discontinued the line (or went out of business).

( A couple more pictures - including the finished light box itself - behind a cut. )

atara and I had just been talking about the sorry state of the water in our birdbath - no sign of mosquitoes breeding in it yet, but the water is abit on the brown and slimy side - when a bird happened by who apparently did not share our concern.
( Caught in the act. )

One of the features that I was sure my camera had, but I couldn't find was the manual "grey card" colour correction. I could manually dial up various colour temperatures, and select from some decent pre-sets for "tungsten", "fluorescent" and the like, but I wanted to have the option to apply the sledge hammer of colour correction when I needed it.

Today I did some searching on the net and found the answer I needed. The feature is easy enough to use, but not entirely intuitive - which is why I had not stumbled onto it earlier.

Below are two pictures that I shot in the living room this afternoon. The lighting is ambient daylight through the front window. The first picture (leftmost, or topmost depending on the width of your browser) uses the camera's automatic colour correction. These second picture (rightmost or bottommost) is manually corrected with my poor-man's grey card. I am both surprised and impressed by the results. The second picture is definitely much closer to how the scissors look in person.



It is especially noticeable in the pinks and greens in the picture.