Photographs of the Autumn Colours at Westonbirt National Arboretum
Monday, October 15, 2007 at 08:25PM Read and add comments (1)
My partner, our friends and I, spent the day at Westonbirt National Arboretum over the weekend and the colours of the leaves were quite amazing.
Of course the glory belonged to the Acers and Maples, proudly commanding the attention of an astonishingly large audience. As soon as we drove into the entrance we joined the back of one of two quarter mile long queues, slowly being funneled through temporary booths where
A foray into 3D animation with Silo and Blender
Monday, October 30, 2006 at 03:29AM Read and add comments (2)
Overview and background
3D modeling and animation has been on my list of to-dos since I began working with computers and now I've finally taken the first steps. I thought I'd share my progress to help others get started too.
I've been an intermittent user of Bryce ever since I acquired a free version with a cover CD some years ago. As time went on and Bryce was bought and sold by various developers it seems to have finally found a home with DAZ 3D. They made few changes and fixed and brought it into version 5.5 which I upgraded to. However, although fairly intuitive, if basic, its rendering engine is painfully slow and doesn't take advantage of our dual processor Mac. Needless to say I never really accomplished much with Bryce. Bryce has recently been updated to version 6 but as yet I've not been tempted.
First Steps - Hexagon
After getting interested in the idea once more fairly recently I started looking around for the best value modeling/animation programs out there. Obviously I started on the DAZ website and found Hexagon and Carrara. I downloaded the demos for both and tried Hexagon first. Obviously I was aware that Hexagon was a modeler/texturer and Carrara was the whole works. Although the power and features of Hexagon were impressive I couldn't help but feel hindered by the interface. It seemed to have a heavy influence on the mouse and very few main functions had keyboard shortcuts, or at least they weren't detailed in the interface. Life's to short to run around finding out if things have shortcuts so I put Hexagon on the back burner and started to look for another modeler.
Modeling - Discovering Silo
My budget for this whole venture is minimal at this stage so that helped refine my selection. It wasn't long before I came across Silo at $106. I was instantly impressed by it's intuitive interface and lightweight construction. I liked software to be concise and fast rather than bloated and feature ridden. I followed one of the tutorials and had a basic model formed in no time at all. An abundance of logical keyboard shortcuts meant a very fast workflow and I found myself hardly using the visual interface at all, in fact the on-screen interface can remain hidden from view until space bar is pressed. I like this. It wasn't long before they had my paying custom.
Rendering and Animation - Starting with Carrara
Of course, this still left me without any way (apart from Bryce) to render or animate my models. On to Carrara. In sharp contrast to Silo, Carrara is a massive program. However, I imagine most of it's features really are necessary in a powerful animation/rendering tool. After working through sections of the help file I seemed to be picking Carrara up quite quickly. I did have a look around for competing software at a similar price but only seemed to be able to find much more expensive programs. Apart from Blender, which is open source and powerful but anything but intuitive. Somewhat regretfully I couldn't justify the time to learn how to use it.
So Carrara seemed to be a logical choice. I'm actually still using the demo but unless anything else comes along it looks like its power and price will win me over.
Blender, Blender, Blender!
Throughout the process of writing this article I have since found the time to have a play with Blender and walkthrough some of the tutorials and documentation. Frankly I'm amazed at the capabilities of Blender, it might not be as easy to use as Carrara but after watching things like Elephants Dream you really appreciate how powerful Blender is. I've decided to focus on this and make that my software of choice for animation and rendering.
Slow Shutter Speed Sparkles
Wednesday, October 4, 2006 at 02:53PM Read and add comments (0)
Some time ago now I decided to do some experimenting with slow shutter speeds and neutral density filters.
You've probably seen many photographs of scenes where streams or rivers appear blurred, but everything else is clear. This effect is quite tricky to achieve with an ordinary camera. It involves a very slow shutter speed and this will result in the image being very over exposed, even with the smallest aperture setting.
So, to compensate for the brightness we need to prevent so much light entering the lens. The way to do this is with a Neutral Density Filter. When I'm working on film productions I often like to see outside windows when shooting interior scenes. A sheet of ND stuck to the exterior of the window will allow the outside to be exposed as well as the darker interior. Needless to say I have plenty of ND Filter gel lying around.
I started layering up the ND over the lens until the image became exposed. It took surprisingly many layers to do this. Once I had established how many layers were needed I stuck them together in a cardboard frame and fastened it to the camera with an elastic band. I then headed for the beach.
As I was heading down the cliff towards a favourite beach at Lansallos I thought I'd try a few shots looking down directly onto the sea's surface. I was really expecting nothing more than a blurry mixture of colour where reflections and sparkles would normally be. However, something quite interesting happened.
Each of the sparkles, that you normally only see for a fraction of a second on the surface of moving water, had added itself to the shot throughout the duration of the exposure. As a result of their fleeting existence they all appear perfectly sharp against the blurred surroundings. An interesting double effect is that as a result of the ND filters, the sparkles are actually perfectly exposed - they'd normally be "blown out" due to their brightness.
So the final image shows hundreds of sparkles, each one captured at the moment of its materialization, and perfectly exposed, revealing the true shape of a sea-water sparkle. They tend to take the form of tiny rings. Quite an interesting discovery and a pleasing image.
100% Crop of the above image
Review: Fujifilm S6500fd with sample images
Saturday, September 30, 2006 at 06:43PM Read and add comments (9)
Overview and background:
Having bought a Fuji F30 a few months ago, Paul, and I, were both very impressed by its new 6th Generation CCD. Its only 6.3 mega pixels but, as Fuji claim, it produces much clearer images than most. Of course, the F30 is a compact camera and is somewhat lacking in the Zoom department. At 3x optical I knew it would leave me wanting more. Luckily it wasn't long before Fuji announced a bigger camera that uses the same excellent chip, the S6500fd, which boasted a 10.7x optical zoom lens. After a few months wait until the camera hit the shelves I made the decision to order one, I hadn't seen any test images or read a review on the camera, as I couldn't find any on Google! It is for this reason that I am writing this review.
Key features.
Face Detection.
If you've already looked at the Fuji S6500fd specs, you will have gathered that Fuji are rather proud if its new Face Detection technology. As one of its main selling features it would be rather inappropriate for me not to cover it here.
I must admit, it wasn't the reason I bought the camera and I would have bought it had it not featured Face Detection. However, the feature did sound useful and now, having used the camera, I can confirm that it does what is expected of it and works well.
Pressing a button on the rear of the camera enables the feature and its status is then indicated on the screen. As you point the camera at a subject, any faces that appear in the shot are surrounded by a little green square. It can't help but provide a level of geeky satisfaction as you watch the green reticule follow faces around the screen in real-time.
It's not flawless and it quite often looses faces if they're not upright and facing the camera front on. None the less it's definitely better to have it than not.
The Face Detection feature is also accompanied by two Face Detection playback modes. These are found in the slideshow settings under the 'F' menu in playback mode. The two Face Detection specific modes in this menu are 'Normal' and 'Fade'. When enabled, either of these modes will first display the image as normal, then consecutively display each face in the shot individually, filling the screen. Obviously, if 'Fade' is selected this will happen with a smooth cross-fade between the images. The feature works very well and is great for showing the subjects the pictures of themselves after taking the picture.
10.7x Lens
This is clearly one of the biggest selling points for the camera. This becomes apparent as soon as you remove the camera from the box. It dominates the cameras design, making up roughly half its bulk. It has a big, chunky, manual zoom grip that feels smooth, if a bit 'light', as you turn it, dramatically extending the lens further towards your subject.
The lens is crisp at both ends of its range and I haven't noticed any softening around the edges. However, like the F30, chromatic aberrations are an issue, albeit not a big one. It seems to be most prominent on the edges of high contrast areas, as long as both the light area and the dark area are actually exposed. If, for example, the lighter area is overexposed and starts to blow out, no chromatic aberrations are visible. See the sample images at the end of the review for examples. There are various techniques available for removing this effect in post-production and I won't go into them here.
ISO 3200
The ISO options on the Fuji S6500fd range from 100 to an astonishing 3200. Most cameras top out at somewhere between 400 and 800 and suffer heavily from aggressive noise at the highest levels. The S6500fd (and the F30) seem to have almost eliminated the noise issues. Noise on the ISO 400 and 800 settings is barely noticeable, and even on 1600 noise is still relatively minimal. The quality does degrade quite heavily on 1600 and 3200 but in a subtle kind of way, resembling a blotchy watercolour painting. Certainly the higher sensitivity is a great feature to have as it means you can prolong turning on the flash until the very darkest of settings.
Incidentally, the flash on the S6500fd is rather neat. It's an SLR style flip-up type that automatically pops up when it's needed with a satisfying 'flick' (providing you haven't suppressed the flash).
Noteworthy Features
Macro mode
The macro mode can be enabled at any position of the zoom lens, gradually pushing the minimum focal length from 10cm at the widest angle to 90cm at full zoom. There's also a Super Macro mode which is only available when the lens is at its widest angle. Super Macro mode enables you to focus on objects as near as 1cm to the lens, which in practice is almost as close as you can physically get, pretty amazing.
Burst modes
An impressive set of burst modes includes, 'Top 3' (burst of 3), 'Auto Bracketing' (takes an additional 2 shots, one slightly under exposed and one slightly over exposed from your exposure setting), 'Final 3' (last 3 of a sequence of up to 40 in quick section), or 'Long Period' (continuous and slower but saves every shot). The most useful of these I found to be the 'Final 3' mode. This enables you to just fire away at something, for example a bird sitting on a tree, and as soon as it takes off you can release the trigger, confident that in those last 3 shots it would have caught the bird taking off. The continuous burst mode is very slow. Not much, if at all, faster than just taking consecutive shots in the normal manner.
Lens hood
A nice inclusion and one that I was used to with my previous camera, a Minolta A1. It's designed to reduce glare on the lens. It also really adds to the 'look' of the camera. It can be reversed and refitted for storage.
Big clear screen
The 2.5 inch screen is bright and clear. It's covering is a hard, shiny, clear plastic which is good for protection but not so good at reducing glare. In bright sunlight, reflection is so much of a problem that it becomes necessary to use the Electronic Viewfinder, which is adequate but noticeably lower resolution that the screen. The F30 has an anti-reflective matte coating, which, in a way, I was sad not to see on the S6500fd. However, the durability advantage of having a hard coating will possibly out-weigh the more sensitive anti-glare coating, depending on how the camera will be used.
Speed
On paper the start up time and focus time seem very quick. And this is quite true. However, I found that even though the camera started up very quickly there was a bit of delay for it to auto-expose. Obviously if you had the camera on manual mode and all perfectly set up you could turn on and take a picture very quickly. In reality though, this delay is noticeable. It's still a very fast camera and during normal shooting it's possible to focus and take pictures very quickly, with no noticeable shutter lag at all. There's also a 'High Speed' shooting mode which speeds up the auto focus at expense of battery life. The continuous focus mode is another way to ensure the camera is focused on what you want it to be before you take the picture.
Ergonomics
The layout and feel of the camera is generally good. It's shape lends itself well to being held. The textured rubber grip areas are comfy and inspire confidence when holding the camera. The controls are all easily accessible and the main navigation is done via a circular 4-way control button, with a central 'OK' button. Most of the controls can be reached with the right hand. The focus control, which toggles between Continuous, Single and Manual modes (as well as a button to auto-focus on demand when in manual mode), is mounted on the left of the lens which seems to be a logical place for it and can easily be operated with the left hand.
A few of the features are only available with a 2-button combination. This took me a bit by surprise. I'm not one for reading manuals, and was stumped until I did so, when trying to work out how to adjust the aperture in Manual exposure mode. The shutter speed can be adjusted with the up and down navigation buttons but to adjust the aperture you have to first hold down the 'AE preset' button with your index finger and then use the up and down controls. Not particularly logical or intuitive for a first time user but quite functional once you know how to do it.
In manual focus mode you adjust the focus with a pseudo focus ring around the lens. This is a simple way of doing it and it works well. A pleasing feature of the manual focus mode is that there are on-screen guides which indicate which way to turn the ring to get the centre of the image in focus. It's interesting to note here that you have to press the 'once off' auto focus button to get these to function; they only work once they have turned yellow.
Sample Images
The images below are 100% crops of the whole image, click on the thumbnails to see the complete image. The picture were taken at 'Standard' sharpness and 6M Standard compression. Selecting 6M Fine compression does result in slightly better image quality.
Chromatic Aberrations
As you can see in the two examples below the Chromatic Aberrations only seem to be a problem when the areas of contrast are exposed. In the second example the bright area is over-exposed which seems to not show the fringing.
Chromatic Aberrations at their worst.
Chromatic Aberrations at their best.
General Clarity test.
One thing that does seem to be apparent at close inspection are 'artifacts' in dark areas. You can see this in the dark areas of the swan images above. However, in practice these artifacts are only really visible on-screen at 100%. When they are printed and when viewed in iPhoto the artifacts are barely visible.
Buy from Amazon.co.uk:
Fuji FinePix S6500 Digital Camera (6.3MP, 10.7x optical zoom) 2.5" LCD
