Single-Serving Photo

Today is Louis Daguerre’s birthday, and Google is helping to celebrate it by devoting their logo to him. Happy 224th, buddy!

Wait, are you really about to ask me who Louis Daguerre was? Hey, it’s OK, to be fair the guy has been dead for about 160 years… Even so, in this line of work I sort of expected more from you. Maybe you’ve heard the word Daguerreotype before? Even my browser spell-checker knows that word. That’s right, it’s a photographic process; that’s probably close enough for most tabletop trivia games.

Unfortunately, this blog is not interested in tidbits of trivia, so get ready for facts. Lots of facts. With historical context. (more…)

A while back I posted that cool video of how a Leica lens is hand-assembled. At the time I mentioned that I’ve never owned nor even used a Leica lens but that I respected the craftsmanship and care with which they are put together.

It occurred to me back then that I had, indeed, seen videos of Canon lenses being assembled (specifically their “L” series; I am not sure if the non-L lenses are hand-assembled or not) but I didn’t have the presence of mind to go find them.

Because I’m still mostly a Canon devotee I thought it wise to catch up with that thought and post these behind-the-scenes videos of a Canon “L” lens being assembled, yes, by hand. Truly it is a marvel of engineering and of manual dexterity at some points. Hopefully if you, too, are a Canon shooter, these videos will give you even more respect for the product you likely hold in such high regard.

This is a three-part series and takes you all the way from “how do we make sand into a lens” to “this is how we put the barrel together.”

Continuing down this path we’re on, looking into the inner workings of our photographic equipment, here is yet another fabulous video from the folks at Camera Technica showing you what the Canon 18-55mm aperture looks like when it opens and closes in slow motion. Well, somewhat slow motion. The aperture actually opens and closes so quickly that even in this high-speed video it’s still a very brief movement.

Check out Camera Technica for more about photographic technology.

Seldom do I employ such emphatic punctuation in a blog title, or such bombastic portmanteaus, but it seemed appropriate given the out-of-control creation of panoramas that I’ve been engaged in lately.

As I mentioned in my last post, I’m out here in the great American west—“big sky country,” if you want to call it that—and some of the sights I’ve seen were nothing less than demanding of a panoramic treatment. On top of that, I suffer from a devastating case of technolust and wanted to really put “AutoPano Giga” through the paces. Well, I sure did. I also probably melted the heat sink off my poor laptop’s CPU…

Arthur C. Clarke once wrote that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” In the case of AutoPano Giga, I think he was wrong; I think it actually is magic. I have tried a few panorama tools out there; the free and open-source Panotools, a couple of Mac-exclusive ones, and so on. AutoPano Giga is so easy and so fast and so accurate, it blows them all out of the water. Of course it also costs an arm and a leg, but at least you know why.

After the break, actual panoramas! (more…)

The Internet is all a-flutter about this announcement Greg Yaitanes made via Twitter that the House, M.D. season finale (airing next month on FOX) was shot entirely with a Canon EOS-5D Mark II. This makes the 5D Mark II the first video-capable digital SLR camera to ever have been used to film a “prime time” television episode.

Yaitanes, who is a co-executive producer and director of House, M.D., said that they chose the 5D Mark II because they wanted to be able to fit the camera into “tight spaces,” they used mostly Canon prime lenses as well as the 24-70 and 70-200 zooms, and that no brackets or stabilization tools were used. I can’t wait to see how the episode looks!

The video was recorded onto large CF cards (Yaitanes said “18gb,” but I think he meant 16 GB), which afforded only 22 minutes of shooting before tossing in a new card.

You can read PetaPixel’s summary of the Q&A that has taken place so far via Twitter for more luscious details, and read engadget’s coverage as well as Gizmodo’s coverage. If you ladies and gents who are technology-inclined don’t already check out those two blogs on a regular basis, you may want to add them to your news reader of choice.