Photos with tag 'photocamp'

Posts with tag 'photocamp'

PhotoCamp @ MooseCamp 2008

Alright. Sorry it took me so long to get this up. I've been alternating between being swamped with work and playing outside in this wonderfully sunny and mild weather we've been having.

For those not in attendance, I gave a short overview at PhotoCamp on what I did to create some of the black and white shots from my trip to Sicily last year. I did a very rapid overview of what it takes to mimic black and white film in software using the DxO Film Pack, some B+W Photoshop actions I'd found, or my own hand-done methods. After that, I showed the original Photoshop files of several of my photographs, and went step-by-step through the combinations of masks and Curves/Levels adjustment layers to tweak the intensity and detail in different portions of the photos.

In my opinion, cameras should capture what you experience, not light. While the end result of my photographs doesn't correspond to the actual photos that fell on the CCD very well at all, it does a much better job capturing what I felt at that moment.

Links:

Posted on February 25, 2008
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PhotoCamp @ BarCamp 2007 talk

This year at PhotoCamp, I gave a short overview of the concept of computational photography, how it stands to impact digital photography in the years to come. Along with my talk, Andrew Ferguson discussed the ins and outs of blogging about photography, and Duane Storey gave one of the best non-technical overviews of HDR imaging I've heard. Kris Krug moderated, and I think a good time was had by all.

Here are my talk slides. I tried to not ramble incoherently about something overly-technical this time, and tried to keep the message clear, and show off something people can go home and try today. Even if the full magic isn't there, they can get a peak and kick the tires.

The story goes something like this: Due to the complexity of darkroom techniques, and the limitations in what kind of image manipulations we can perform optically while exposing the print from the negative, we have come to view the light that falls on the piece of film in the camera (or the sensor) as the final image. In the old days, it was either impractical or impossible to perform much alterations to the image, so it wasn't attempted.

Digital photography requires computers. No matter how hard you rub the CF card on your monitor or printer, you'll never get an image from your camera to appear. For all intents and purposes, your computer is a giant brain capable of applying a vast number of image manipulations photographs.

There is all this computation available, and the most that people can think to do to their photographs after they are taken is to adjust the white balance.

Given this idea, I demonstrated DxO Optics Pro, the RAW processing software I current use. Optics Pro is one of the better steps in the direction of computational photography available to end users. They meticulously measure all the combinations of digital SLRs and major lenses and can correct the optical distortion and noise automatically. All of this can be done with existing tools, but the idea is that it's automatic and just happens when the image is downloaded off the camera.

Finally, I ended with wavefront coding, a more advanced application of the same basic idea. With wavefront coding, a special lens is used produce a blurry image that is recorded by the sensor. However, this blurry image has several interesting qualities to it. 1) The blur is invariant of the distance of the object and 2) the blur can be corrected in software. The result is an unblurred object with unlimited depth of field, without stopping down the lens to a small aperture, which can be very useful.

It's a very interesting area of work, and a large component of my PhD research. I can't wait to see and share more about it in the future.

Posted on August 18, 2007
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PhotoCamp, BarCamp 2007 style

I should have posted this a week ago, but as I state in every post, I'm too busy for my own good, and too lazy the rest of the time. This is pretty much straight stolen from Kris, with some additional commentary by yours truly.

This weekend is BarCamp Vancouver and I'll be heading up a PhotoWalk on Friday night and a PhotoCamp on Saturday. Here's some shots from last years late night photowalk at BarCamp.

PhotoCamp itself is a mix of presentations and open discussion on a number of topics, mostly chose on the fly. I believe this is the 5th in the series of them, and the 3rd that I will be taking part of. Previous editions have seen a healthy mix of areas from photographic technique, digital workflow, practicalities of preparing images for display, and more abstract technical concepts.

I'll be giving a 15 minute or so talk again this time around. I'll be giving a short presentation of some of the assumptions that people have made on how photographs are taken, and how these assumptions are no longer valid when moving into digital photography. Then, given these new possibilities, I'll discuss some possibilities of how this can influence new directions in photography and give some simple examples of how this is starting to work its way into software. This time around, I promise it'll be much more practical knowledge, and I'll even have a demo to prove it.

If you're interested in photography, cameras, or just want to take a cool walk through East Van... it would be great to see lots of you out there. Here's the details. Get in touch if you have any questions.

PhotoWalk

  • signup on FaceBook
  • meet at WorkSpace
  • 11pm, Friday August 17th

PhotoCamp

  • signup on the Wiki
  • @ Workspace during BarCamp Vancouver
  • TBD, Saturday August 18th

Sadly, I don't think I'll be making the photowalk, as I'm going to see Tipper, who is quite possibly my favorite musician, play instead. Last years was good fun. You should go, even if you won't get to see me.

Posted on August 17, 2007
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Photocamp presentation

Photocamp presentation

Well, this took me slightly longer to put up than I thought it would. I was pretty short on sleep last night and needed some time to take a nap, collect my thoughts, and finish some touch-up on the slides for my talk at PhotoCamp.

Talk slides

Speaking of my slides slides, there's a special deal at the moment: 2 talks for the price of one. We were short on time, so I didn't have the chance to get into any of my notes on high dynamic range (HDR) photography. In addition to the slides I had covering color photography for the web, I cleaned up the HDR slides and included them, figuring someone might find some use in them. In those slides, I mention a lot of different software, all of which you can find under my hdr tag on del.icio.us.

All in all, I think the session went quite well. Kris got stuff off on the right foot, and all those that presented had very informative talks. Roland gave a quick overview of the features in the newly-released Adobe Lightroom, Warwick had a very informative overview of the workflow of a professional photographer that has to work through a lot of photos, while Dave Olson gave some good tips for taking good macro and product shots on a budget. Tim Bray gave a very useful overview of high-end pocket cams, something I am currently in the market for. Finally, in my opinion, I think the field trip afterwards to see the HDR display was well-received.

The only disappointment was that even though we booked up 2 slots for it, we made it through about 50% of the content we planned on. I ditched on of my topics (though I admittedly had more than I should have), and we didn't get to any of the audience-suggested topics. People also kind of trickled out after seeing the HDR display and dispersed before any motion was made to have a photowalk. Some of that could have been fixed with better organization, but a lot of it simply required a bigger block of time. The comment that we really need to dedicate a whole day to PhotoCamp really rings true. I know Thomas Hawk already mentioned something like this, but Vancouver seems to have a pretty strong lineup to hold one itself.

Posted on February 23, 2007
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MooseCamp, PhotoCamp

MooseCamp, PhotoCamp

While my last post on Northern Voice covered the conference as a whole, the portion I'm excited is PhotoCamp at MooseCamp. PhotoCamp, as the name implies, is focused on photography and collaboratively presented by the many talented photographers attending Northern Voice. Kris Krug is the man responsible for pulling it all together while Warwick Patterson, Bre Pettis, Evan Lesson, and myself will be giving presentations on a variety of topics.

In case you need to be told, everyone is welcome and encouraged to attend. More are welcome to present, but contact Kris (kk@kriskrug.com) or myself (site+photocamp@matttrent.com) to discuss topics.

When + where

The date is Friday, February 23. Currently, we are shooting for the 2 sessions scheduled from 1:15-2:45, starting immediately after lunch and concluding with the break planned for 2:45. Check the scheduling board the day of MooseCamp to find out the location and any potential change in times.

Field trip

During the break, we'll collect those interested to take a field trip to my research lab across the street. This has two purposes:

  • To have another room to continue any PhotoCamp discussion we didn't have time to finish during the allotted block
  • To see the project I have been working on for the last several years: the DR37-P high dynamic range display that my company, BrightSide Technologies, has built.
DR37-P monitor

I'll leave most of the specs for the product page, but the DR37-P uses an array of individually modulated LED backlights to provide 10 times the brightness and 100 times the contrast of existing televisions and computer monitors. The 37" display has a 1080p resolution, with 16-bits of color per channel, 0.15 cd/m^2 black levels, and whites over 3000 cd/m^2 equaling a contrast ratio of 200,000:1.

Basically, it's the first step towards a TV you'd mistake for a window. Any description I do can't do it justice. You'll just have to come see. Anyone with an interest in high dynamic range photography or imaging, expensive toys, or generally shiny things should not miss this.

My topics

I'll get more of the specifics and supporting material posted in the next day or two, but here is a 30-second run down of the topics I'll be covering. I'm not certain if I can fit all of them into my allotted slot during the main PhotoCamp session, so I might have to switch one to the after event, depending on group interest.

High dynamic range (HDR) imaging

  • Since I'll be showing the HDR display, I'll cover the process of creating HDR images
  • Background
  • What HDR imaging is, and (equally importantly) what it isn't
  • Currently available methods
  • Software packages
  • Short tutorial on how to create HDR images using one of them

Color for digital photography and the web

  • Quick coverage of color science for photographers
  • Discuss why getting colors right is such a problem
  • Hardware challenges
  • Software challenges
  • What you can do about it
Posted on February 19, 2007
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PhotoCamp notes

Here are my notes from my PhotoCamp presentation I gave at BarCamp Vancouver over the weekend.

Idea

While we have used digital cameras much the same way that we have film cameras, digital photography has fundamental differences from conventional film-based devices. The ability to interact with sensors has opened up a number of opportunities for the capture of novel image types. The combination of different methods of capture with new processing techniques allows for new image forms. The umbrella term for this family of techniques is known in the research community as computational photography.

There is ongoing research in changing all the major clusters of the photographic process. People have investigated changes in lighting, camera optics, digital sensors, and image procesing. The point of the talk was to provide an overview of what interesting features might be available on your camera in the future.

Fourier slice photography

This paper presents a camera that samples the 4D light field on its sensor in a single photographic exposure. This is achieved by inserting a microlens array between the sensor and main lens, creating a plenoptic camera. Each microlens measures not just the total amount of light deposited at that location, but how much light arrives along each ray. By re-sorting the measured rays of light to where they would have terminated in slightly different, synthetic cameras, we can compute sharp photographs focused at different depths. This property allows us to extend the depth of field of the camera without reducing the aperture, enabling shorter exposures and lower image noise. Especially in the macrophotography regime, we demonstrate that we can also compute synthetic photographs from a range of different viewpoints.

Flash-no flash photography

This technique enhances the appearance of photographs shot in dark environments by combining a picture taken with the available light and one taken with the flash. It preserves the ambiance of the original lighting and insert the sharpness and more reliable color information from the flash image. It uses the bilateral filter to decompose the two images into detail and large-scale layers. It reconstructs the image using the large scale of the available lighting and the detail of the flash. We detect and correct artifacts due to the flash shadow. The output images provide the combined advantages of available illumination and flash photography.

Graph processing

This framework uses graph-cut optimization to choose good seams within the constituent images so that they can be combined as seamlessly as possible; and gradient-domain fusion to further reduce any remaining visible artifacts in the composite. The power of this framework lies in its generality; we show how it can be used for a wide variety of applications, including "selective composites" (for instance, group photos in which everyone looks their best), relighting, extended depth of field, panoramic stitching, clean-plate production, stroboscopic visualization of movement, and time-lapse mosaics.

Structured photography

Photo tourism is a system for browsing large collections of photographs in 3D. Our approach takes as input large collections of images from either personal photo collections or Internet photo sharing sites, and automatically computes each photo's viewpoint and a sparse 3D model of the scene. Our photo explorer interface enables the viewer to interactively move about the 3D space by seamlessly transitioning between photographs, based on user control.

High dynamic range imaging

One of the most interesting advances in photography and imaging is what is known as high dynamic range imaging (HDR or HDRI). In the context of photography, the purpose is to extend the dynamic range (or ratio of brightest to darkest areas) beyond it's current limitations. The goal is to capture all of the luminance data for later, and not have images that have areas that are overexposed or underexposed. For more information on HDRI and how it applies to photography, check out this article.

The process of HDR imaging follows the same basic flow as conventional photography. You capture the scene via some method, store and process it, then display it by some means, but all of the methods for HDR images differ from their conventional counterparts. On the acquisition end, there are several means of creating HDR images. For static scenes, an exposure sequence can be combined into a single HDR image, while new HDR cameras are also under development. On the display end, there are two categories, tonemapping and native display. Tonemapping is method of compressing the image contrast to the dynamic range of a conventional display. There is much more to tonemapping than the Flickr group and some operators work better than others, and you need to know what you want to do in order to pick the right one. The other option is to use a high dynamic range display, such as the ones by BrightSide Technologies (warning: shameless plug).

Posted on August 27, 2006
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