Cubic Mango & White Balance fail

My wife prepared mango in a rather fancy way so I wanted to make a photo of it. But surprise – the white balance was totally wrong. Or rather, no surprise – there’s only warm tones in the frame, so the camera logic, looking for an overall neutral tone, picked a color temperature that was way, way too cold. This was with my iPhone 6, but it doesn’t really matter – even the best DSLR would stumble here.

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Masochistic sharing

Instagram, Ello, Google+, August: it’s remarkable how photographers just love those services the most that make sharing photos most inconvenient. First you have to export from your DAM (where you enter all your titles, captions, keywords!) to a JPEG file, then manually upload, and type your title, caption, keywords/hashtag stuff again. As if embedded IPTC metadata doesn’t exist!

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Lightroom Rendering Bug(s)

Graduated Filter rendering bug in Lightroom 5/6?

I swear that Lightroom 5/6 have a render bug that affects older images. I can’t pin point it to any specific editing steps, but when it happens, there’s a huge difference in rendering between the Library and the Develop module.

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All Us Elitists

The large and medium format camera users look down on the full frame users…

The film users look down on the digital users…

The full frame users look down on the crop sensor users…

The tripod users look down on the handheld shooters…

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One plus One

Lets put some bits of information together:

  1. According to this article, 97% of the DMCA takedown notices that Google receives are legitimate (and they receive millions of them). Which translates to: there’s a lot of stuff hosted on Google’s various services that infringes copyright.
  2. A provider whom I had sent a DMCA takedown notice actually copied me in the conversation with the infringer. Here’s what the infringer replied:
    “we didn’t hack [the image] from his site – we found it through Google.” (I corrected the spelling).
    If that’s not just a lame excuse, and whether they actually think that what they find through Google is free to use I don’t know, but anyway, it leads me to…
  3. This. How Google, DuckDuckGo and Bing present image search result details (click to open larger and to see additional notes)…

    Notice something? All sites place a button labelled “View” or even “Download” together with the image, providing a deep-link directly to the image and outside of the context of the page where it is used/embedded. DuckDuckGo doesn’t even bother to add a note that images may be subject to copyright. Google does that, but at a very small font size, in dark grey on black (can you see “please just ignore this” more obviously?). Bing shows that note at a larger front size at least. If you ask me, it should be bold and red.

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AUPD: Trypod

From Alexander’s unofficial photography dictionary (AUPD), today: The Trypod is a person, usually a photographer, who is desperately trying to get a steady photo when the circumstances really dictate the usage of a more solid camera support system. Especially found in photographers who recently bought their first stabilized lens and/or camera with insanely high ISO …

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Could someone do the FULL math, please?

I’m getting a bit tired of all the frolicking about “fast” m4/3 (micro four-thirds) or other crop sensor lenses that are so much lighter and so much more compact than their full frame equivalents, and how people are wondering what Nikon or Canon will “do about that.”

Lately, Olympus’s 40-150mm/2.8 telezoom gets a lot of attention. Let’s have a look: it weighs 1.94 pounds (880 grams) and is 6.25 inches (15.8 cm) long. For a lens that offers the focal length equivalent of an 80-300mm on full frame, that sounds pretty cool at first, especially at f/2.8… but wait.

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AUPD: DOF

From Alexander’s unofficial photography dictionary (AUPD), today:

Doubt-of-Field (DOF), n. – the haunting fear that you didn’t stop down enough. Especially found in photographers who recently switched from crop to full frame sensor.