While I thought this would be a great gift, I was a little concerned that it wouldn’t work on the university’s wireless network in our on-campus apartment.  Sure enough, when I tried to set it up yesterday I couldn’t get it to work.  Any time a new device tries to connect to the university’s wireless network the DHCP server assigns it a temporary local IP address and redirects it to a registration web page.  Unfortunately, the Eye-Fi isn’t really a network adapter so you can’t use it to browse the web.  Thus, you can’t visit the registration page in order to register it for use on the network.

After the automatic setup procedure didn’t work I jotted down the card’s MAC address (which is easy to determine using the included software) and emailed the IT people on campus to ask if they could manually add the card’s MAC address to the list of MAC addresses the DHCP server will supply with IP addresses.  They were very helpful and responded that they had added the card’s MAC address as I had asked.

So, now it appears that I’m all set. I spent some time this afternoon getting it set up and I’ve successfully uploaded 5 or 6 pictures and one video using the device. All in all, it’s pretty nice. Hopefully, using this card will simplify the process of getting pictures from the camera to the computer but only time will tell if the device lives up to its promise.

If the card I got my wife works out well, I’ll seriously consider buying the Eye-Fi Pro, which permits you to upload RAW files as well as JPGs and videos.  In addition, it enables you to set up an ad-hoc connection with your PC so you can bypass local wireless networks and upload pictures directly from your card to your computer.  This type of functionality typically costs much more than either the Eye-Fi Pro’s street price of $100 or its MSRP of $150.

The first was taken using a zone plate, which I got ages ago but never used.  I got it last year at my birthday in a kit like this, which includes a device for holding photographic pinholes, the pinhole itself, and an adapter to make it fit my camera.  I had taken a few photos using the pinhole but never the zone plate.  I like the effect.  There are a couple of downsides to using either the pinhole or the zone plate, however.

First, these have incredibly narrow apertures, which means that, in order to get a correctly exposed image, you need a very long exposure or very high ISO setting.  I kept the ISO reasonably low but I used my tripod to give me the stability I needed for a long exposure.  I used a 1.3 second exposure, which, for a shot taken in the middle of the day, is really long.  This zone plate has f/56 (not 5.6, 56!), which is pretty wide for this type of device.  The pinhole I have is something like f/130, so it would require a much longer exposure.

Second, whereas taking photographs with traditional lenses is pretty forgiving when it comes to junk on your sensor, pinhole and zone plate photography is extremely unforgiving.  I had to do a bunch of spot removal in Lightroom to get rid of a bunch of ugly splotches on the image.  The image below is a 1:1 crop from an image I took of the same scene with the pinhole.  There are at least 4 spots that are clearly visible, though they vary in severity.  I had never noticed these spots before in shots taken using my normal lenses.  I guess if I want to do any more photography using my pinhole or zone plate, it’s probably time to have my sensor cleaned again.

The most recent picture is my first foray into high dynamic range (HDR) photography.  I’ve been interested in this for a while but never really pursued it.  The point of HDR images is to make details visible in both the highlights and shadows of an image. Generally, both the camera sensor and any typical viewing medium (like a monitor or even printed photos) don’t have enough dynamic range to either properly capture or properly display details in both an image’s shadows and highlights.  There is just too much difference in brightness between the darkest parts and the lightest parts in a scene for the camera to capture everything or for it to all be faithfully reproduced on a monitor or print.  So some kind of workaround is necessary.

Due to the limitations of the camera’s sensor, capturing the details in both the highlights and shadows requires multiple images to be taken at different settings, a technique called exposure bracketing.  In the simplest case, exposure bracketing involves taking the following 3 photos: one that’s significantly underexposed (to capture details in the highlights), one that’s properly exposed, and one that’s significantly overexposed (to capture details in the shadows).  These images are then imported into a program on a computer that merges them to produce a composite image that has a much higher dynamic range than can be captured with a single exposure.  Unfortunately, this image also has a much higher dynamic range than can be displayed on a monitor or on a print, so another step is necessary.  This step is called tone mapping.

Tone mapping takes a HDR image that can’t be displayed and maps its brightness values back to a range of values that can be displayed.  When an image is captured, the darkest darks and the brightest brights are “clipped”, which means they’re simply cut off – detail in those areas is lost.  Taking multiple pictures of the same scene using different exposure settings gets back the data that was clipped.  Tone-mapping could simply clip the data again, however that would throw away the detail we want to preserve.  Instead, tone-mapping compresses the dynamic range, so that the details are preserved in both the highlights and shadows.  Modern tone mapping algorithms are actually quite a bit more complicated than simply compressing the dynamic range.  Rather, they operate on the data both globally and locally to try to maximize the extent to which details are visible in the image while simultaneously compressing the dynamic range to something that can be viewed on a monitor or print.  This often results in a very striking, though sometimes unnatural-looking image.

Yesterday I was looking through my to do list and I found a reminder to buy some software for making HDR before I graduate so I can take advantage of their (60%!!) educational discount.  Having just sold our exercise bike, I had some cash on-hand so I decided to go ahead and buy the software while I thought about it.  I bought Photomatix from HDRSoft for about $40 rather than the usual $100.  I remembered that I was out a month or two ago and for some reason decided to take some shots using exposure bracketing, so I looked through my Lightroom catalog and found a few sets of exposure bracketed images.  I picked the set that I liked best, exported it to Photomatix, created the HDR image, re-imported to Lightroom, fiddled a bit with saturation and noise reduction, and then exported from Lightroom to PixelPost.  Done.

Having a tripod makes HDR photography easier, so I’m looking forward to using my new tripod along with my new HDR software to produce some good looking images in the future.  Stay tuned.

Anyway, I have wanted a sturdy tripod for a while.  After a lot of looking, I decided that I wanted a ball head since I had grown tired of having to adjust two or three knobs in order to get my composition right.  I settled on the Manfrotto 322RC2. It seemed like it would allow incredibly fast composition changes and would be very comfortable to use.  So, that found its way onto my wish list.

By pooling together money I got for my birthday I was able to get the 322RC2 head with the Manfrotto 055XPROB tripod legs.  I haven’t had a lot of opportunities to use everything yet but so far I really like it.  The ball head is so nice.  It is super easy to change your composition, very quick, and it locks solidly into place.  The legs are big – if I extend the legs fully, the eyepiece of the camera is at eye level without raising the center column at all.  This is great because it maximizes stability and gives me some freedom to play around with shots that might require the camera to be above my eye level.

Shortly after I got my kit and put everything together I took a picture of my wife and me enjoying our nerdy lifestyle:

Of course, this picture isn’t going to win any photo contests – it’s just a fun way of documenting what our evenings sometimes look like.

Earlier this week, I needed to provide someone with a head shot of myself for a poster on my research work.  I couldn’t find anything suitable among the pictures in my collection since I’m normally the one behind the camera.  So, I needed to have one taken.  I decided to try taking one of myself using my tripod.  In addition to the tripod, I also used my Pentax Remote Control F to trigger the shutter.  I wanted the picture to have a background nicer than the curtains in our apartment or something such so I went down to the banks of the Charles River and set up the camera.  I had to experiment with the camera height in order to make sure that the banks of the river in the background didn’t line up with the middle of my head, which would have been distracting.  I also ended up using my circular polarizing filter control the appearance of the clouds.

Below is my favorite from the whole batch, which includes probably 2 good pictures and about 45 bad pictures.  I felt pretty silly standing there smiling at the camera and taking pictures of myself as people drove by on Memorial Dr. and as runners strode by on the running path but I’m pretty happy with the result and I’ll probably never see any of those people again, anyway.

I’m excited about the possibilities the tripod creates for me.  I’m looking forward to trying my hand at some high dynamic range photography.  While a tripod isn’t essential for these, it certainly makes things easier since HDR pictures require at least 2 source images that have to be properly aligned before combining them to create the final product.  Also, I’m looking forward to being able to photograph the city at night.  I have plenty of good pictures looking across the Charles at Boston but none of those I’ve taken at night have been acceptably sharp.  I’m hoping my new tripod will change that.

All in all, I’m very happy with the setup, which also includes a padded carrying bag and a separate strap for carrying the tripod without the bag.  Given how solidly these things are built, I expect to be using them for years to come and probably passing them on to my offspring.

I’d like to thank my parents and my parents-in-law for their generous gifts, which not only got me the tripod but also got me the remote control and circular polarizing filter at Christmas.  Thanks!

After the break, I have some info on the Arduino project and how I got involved.

A couple of months ago, I bought an Arduino Diecimila microcontroller board after getting interested in the Arduino project while working on my exercise bike project.  Basically, these boards have a set of input and output pins that can be used to interface with switches, sensors, and output devices like LEDs.  In addition to the board, the project produces an open-source integrated software development environment that enables you to write code for controlling the microcontroller and upload it to the board via a USB cable.  The programming language involved uses syntax similar to C++, so you don’t need to learn how to program in a controller-specific assembly language.  Plus, since uploading and running your code on the board is quick and easy, the system is straightforward and convenient to debug.

The thing that’s great about the project is how easy it is to get started.  I actually bought an Arduino starter pack, which includes pretty much everything you need to start making cool projects. After I got it, I began by writing a program to light up patterns in a row of LEDs that came in the starter pack.  This was followed by an application to the exercise bike project: I built a little optical tachometer (using an LED and a photocell from the starter pack) and wrote code to send RPM data back to my computer over the USB connection (actually serial over USB).

One night I was up by myself and I thought that my 4-year old daughter might get a kick out of a little device that could sweep through the colors of the rainbow.  I had red, green, and blue LEDs, so it was actually pretty simple to get it working using the Arduino and the protoshield from the starter pack.  With maybe about 2 weeks remaining before Halloween, it occurred to me that I should put this type of device inside my pumpkin.  However, the LEDs I had used in my little prototype seemed a bit anemic for a pumpkin to be displayed outdoors – I needed to find something better.

I ended up settling on a high-power RGB LED array that I bought from SparkFun Electronics (which also carries a full line of Arduino boards and lots of other cool stuff).  The Arduino is connected to a prototyping breadboard which contains the various resistors, potentiometers, and transistors needed to drive the high-power LEDs.  This intermediate set of circuits was necessary because the LEDs I used can take up to 350mA, while the Arduino can only supply about 20mA per pin.  Other than the Arduino board and the LED array, I got all the components used in this project from Radio Shack and You-Do-It Electronics Center.  Thanks to my parents-in-law for the gift card that covered my Radio Shack purchases and thanks to Ricky Hardy for the ride to You-Do-It Electronics.

In the end, the project was a lot of fun.  I learned a lot and I got a lot of positive feedback from friends and neighbors about the pumpkin.  If you have any questions or comments, please leave them for me below.

To exacerbate our A/V woes, this morning I awoke to the annoying news that our DVD player wasn’t working.  Heather thought she had just pressed some button or something and that maybe I could fix it easily.  I fiddled with it for awhile and I’m now pretty sure that it’s busted.  Bear in mind, this isn’t some cheap $50 no-name DVD player.  This is a $200+ Sony 5-disc changer.  We got it in 2003 as an anniversary present, so I suppose it’s had a good run.  It replaced a Sony 5-disc CD changer which had gone belly-up for the 2nd time (my parents had paid for repairs on it after it died the first time).  Looking back, I think my CD player had an initial life of about 5 years, which was stretched another 2-3 years with the repair.  So, maybe 5 years is a reasonable life expectancy for one of these things.  I don’t know.

Anyway, I looked into getting it repaired.  Rather than having me bring it in somewhere to get a quote, they told me I could just get a replacement.  I give them my busted one and they give me a new or refurbished one and it costs me about $105.  That seemed reasonable.  Then I decided to look at what that $105 would buy me if I bought new.  It turns out that Sony has a single disc HD (1080p) upconverting DVD player with component and HDMI outputs for $80 or a 1080p upconverting 5-disc changer (also with component and HDMI outs) for $130.  So, for $25 less than the replacement cost, I can get a single-disc upconverting player and for $25 over the replacement cost, I can get an upconverting 5-disc changer with HD outs.  I’m pretty sure I’m not going to pay for the replacement.  I just have to decide if it’s worth $50 to get the 5-disc changer.  In any case, I hate the idea of this thing just going into a landfill.  So, I may see if I can just give it back to Sony so they can refurbish it and give it to someone else.  If they won’t take it, I’ll try to give it away at MIT.  Perhaps someone here can fix it, or, failing that, use some of the components that still work for some awesome project that may get them arrested at gunpoint at the airport.

On Monday, I decided to step up my game.  I did some more digging online and I found the following two sites: WiiTracker.com and WiiAlerts.com.  These two sites have scripts that trawl all the main retailers and can report their inventory status nearly in real time.  WiiAlerts allows you to enter your cellphone number so that when a product is in stock, you can get a text message telling you so.  It paid off for me this morning.  I got a message shortly after I got up telling me that Circuit City had Wii Fit in stock.  I quickly ordered it and about half an hour ago, I got a shipping confirmation from them.  So, if you’re interested in getting Wii Fit without having to pay extra on sites like eBay or Craigslist, check out the two sites above.  They worked for me!  (Queue cheesy smile and thumbs-up gesture.)

1) I bought Adobe Lightroom with money I got for my birthday. I’m trying to learn how to use it. Has anyone used it and/or can anyone recommend useful books or web resources about how to use it effectively. It seems like most books on the subject are already outdated (i.e. pertain to version 1.0; I have 1.2) or are not good.

2) Pinhole photography. I’m interested in trying this out. I asked for a couple of extra body caps for Christmas so I might try my hand at making a pinhole “lens” or two. Are there practical considerations regarding the construction of a pinhole “lens”? Is it worth buying a set of different diameter pinholes, like this?  What about practical considerations when taking a picture using a pinhole camera?

Since last August, I have aquired 2 other film SLRs, both as gifts, in addition to my K1000. The first – a Konica Autoreflex T – was given to me by my wife’s uncle during our trip to Omaha this spring. I’ve probably taken 3 or 4 rolls of film with that camera. I like it, but I don’t know how to use it as well as my K1000. This mostly hinges on the metering system, which recommends the correct aperture to use rather than telling you whether your currently selected settings would produce a properly exposed picture.

In addition to the Konica, when my friend Scott moved out of Cambridge, he gave me a Canon EOS IX Lite, which uses APS film. This is a much more full-featured SLR than my other two, including auto-exposure, auto-focus, aperture- and shutter-priority modes, fully automatic shooting, and other goodies. He also threw in a Canon 22-55mm f/4-5.6 wide-angle zoom lens and a Sigma 70-300mm f/4-5.6 telephoto zoom lens. These are both auto-focus lenses with built-in motors, so it’s a very nice package. I used this camera primarily when my brother-in-law and I took our Photowalk in the Back Bay. I like it a lot, but the APS format is dying and both the film itself and the developing is getting expensive and hard to locate.

By the time I develop all the film I have, I’ll have taken 25 rolls of film with my various film SLR cameras. I feel like I’ve gotten much more proficient at taking pictures. I’ve developed an eye for what constitutes a good photo and I have a sense for how to compose pictures. I’ve learned about the effects of shutter speed and aperture. I’ve experimented with different film speeds and types, including black and white print, color print, and color slide. In short, I think I’ve accomplished what I had hoped to accomplish with my foray into film: I’ve learned how to use a manual SLR. Sure, there’s room for improvement, as there will always be, but I’ve definitely got the basics figured out.

In addition to having accomplished much of what I hoped to accomplish through the use of a film SLR, lately I have become more keenly aware of how expensive using film is. The cost of film plus the cost of developing has been preventing me from experimenting and I felt like my photography was beginning to stagnate. So, I began to think about a digital SLR again. Unlike many of my friends who, by virtue of the many lenses they already owned, were locked into buying a digital SLR of a particular brand, I haven’t invested much money in lenses, so I was free to consider cameras from many different manufacturers. After spending lots of time on dpreview.com and reading many reviews written by camera owners, I came to the conclusion that the Pentax K10D is a great value, providing many advanced features that are only available on significantly more expensive cameras from Canon and Nikon.

This summer, Pentax instituted a rebate program, which could give buyers a rebate of up to $150 if they bought the camera along with one of couple of possible accessories. The last day of the rebate was July 31st and, in the days leading up to it, I agonized over whether I should take the plunge. I like to keep my options open, so I find decisions like this stressful. Anyway, in the end, I bought a K10D with the kit lens and a telephoto zoom lens from Willoughby’s in New York. I’m suspicious of many of these New York-based camera stores because they have a reputation for ripping people off, however, so far, I’ve been happy with Willoughby’s. I had to have one of the lenses replaced because, at some point during shipping the lens cap had become loose and had been rubbing on the front glass of the lens, producing small scratches and scuff marks. They were helpful on the phone, paid for the shipping to return the lens to them, and got me a replacement very quickly. So, all in all, it’s been a positive experience.

So, long story short, I now have a digital SLR and I’m learning how to use it. There are a lot of things to master, even if you’re not shooting manually and I’ve gotten pretty good at using the delete button. However, I’ve also taken some pictures that I’m really happy with. Unfortunately, while we were in Pittsburgh, it was overcast much of the time and I have lots of pictures in which the sky is overexposed. If people have any recommendations on how to minimize this problem, I’d be interested in hearing them. Also, I may try to set up some kind of photo blog on my server, so if people want to give me recommendations on what software I should use, I’d be interested in that as well.

When I was in college, I had a pair of sandals that I wore all the time.  At some point, the sole began to separate from the upper and they were unofficially retired.  Since then, I hadn’t been able to find a pair of sandals that I liked and didn’t give me blisters.  However, during my last trip to Pittsburgh, my mom wanted to help me look for a pair of sandals as a Father’s Day present.  We looked all around Robinson Town Center and finally managed to track down a pair of sandals that I liked and seemed to fit me.  I’ve worn them all day 7 or 8 times since I got them and I’ve yet to develop any blisters, so it looks like they’re going to be a success!  Plus, they ended up costing $5 since they were on clearance for $20 and Sears had a $15 off deal if you opened a Sears charge.  Not bad.

While we were in Omaha, in addition to visiting Heather’s grandmother, we also visited a number of her other relatives. In particular, we spent some time with Heather’s Uncle Jeffrey, who has a reputation for having a large collection of stuff from all over. In fact, his house is like a museum. In any case, I mentioned to him that I was interested in photography and I showed him my K1000. It turns out that he had a K1000, but had given it, along with a number of lenses, to a friend of his. He was disappointed that he no longer had it because he seemed to want to give it to me due to my interest in it and experience with it.

The morning we were to leave, Jeff showed up at Heather’s grandmother’s apartment with a kind of suitcase and indicated that it was a present for me. Inside was a Konica Autoreflex T along with a flash and a couple of lenses. Among the lenses is a 57mm f1.4, which gives me 2 extra stops of low-light shooting over the 50mm f2 lens I have for my K1000. The camera has a mechanical timer, which will be useful for group shots where I also want to be in the shot. In addition, the camera is noteworthy because it was the first SLR to use TTL metering and what is now referred to as shutter priority for auto-exposure shooting.

I don’t think I’ll probably use this camera in shutter priority mode; rather, I expect I’ll shoot manually. However, the way I shoot manually with this camera could be different than the way I shoot with the K1000. This discrepancy has to do with the presentation of information inside the viewfinder.

In the K1000, there is simply a light meter that shows you if the exposure will be correct given your current film speed, shutter speed, and aperture. It doesn’t present any of those values inside the viewfinder, however. Thus, because it’s easier to change the aperture while composing a shot than it is to change the shutter speed, I generally shoot with my K1000 in a way that might be described as manual shutter priority mode. That is, I choose a shutter speed and then adjust the aperture on the fly while looking through the viewfinder in order to ensure that I’m getting the correct exposure. Occasionally, when I really care about the aperture, I’ll set the aperture and then dial in the necessary shutter speed to ensure proper exposure (which might be described as manual aperture priority shooting). However, this is more cumbersome than doing it the other way around, since I have to look at the shutter speed dial to ensure that I’m not picking too long an exposure, which might result in a blurry shot.

The Autoreflex T, on the other hand, has both a light meter inside the viewfinder and a display showing the shutter speed you set. However, the light meter in the Autoreflex T isn’t like the meter on the K1000. Instead of simply showing you that your current settings would provide a proper exposure, the needle points to an aperture value that would provide the correct exposure given your film speed and currently selected shutter speed. So, if I were to shoot like I do with my K1000, I would have to take my eye away from the viewfinder and look at the camera in order to determine whether the aperture I’m using agrees with the aperture value that the light meter is recommending. This seems cumbersome and would likely lead to missed shots. What I could do instead is set the aperture first and make a mental note of the value I chose. Then, I could adjust the shutter speed as I look through the viewfinder until the light meter points to the aperture value I set. This would be described as manual aperture priority shooting. In general, this approach is more difficult because you generally have fewer stops to work with when changing the shutter speed rather than the aperture. So, depending on the lens I’m using and the light conditions, I might have to change the aperture by a stop or two in order to find a shutter speed that will give me a properly exposed shot without risking a blurry image by using an excessively long exposure.

Anyway, I haven’t taken any pictures with it yet, but I’m looking forward to trying it out. I’ll post pictures once I’ve taken some and had them developed.  Oh, and if you’re reading this, thanks, Jeff.