David Forster

Received this in my Download Squad RSS feed this morning. Norwegian developer Haakon Bertheussen has implemented an algorithm that colorises black and white photos in his own program called Recolored. The Windows beta is available to play with for free.

I downloaded and tested it with a desaturated photo and the results were amazing – on the first try! With practice I think this tool has real potential! My grandparents had a collection of old sepia toned photos that I have scanned and I can’t wait to try this out on them.

I have always been happy with the on-screen viewing of photos taken with my Nikon D70, but when printing them out on my ‘photo’ printer, my pictures have always been a little grainy, leading me to worry a bit about whether I ought to upgrade to something with more pixels.

However, I recently had a photo of my (ex) R1 printed out at a local Snappy Snaps outlet. The quality was amazing, and I certainly can’t see any graininess or dithering. I would highly recommend this as a printing option for digital photographers. My photo was printed 12″ x 8″ with no problems at all, and you can even (as I did) pre-process your photos in Photoshop (or your imaging program of choice), write them to a CDRW and take that along to the store instead of just printing straight from your camera’s memory card (as shot).

I was asked by the BMF to take some photos at the Ace Cafe on Sunday, as they had invited some MEPs from the UKIP to a meeting about some new UK biking laws. The mayor of brent and some senior police officers were also there.

I didn’t really like it. I think I lack the confidence to boss people around and arrange them for a photo (maybe this was because they were some quite important people) and as a result I ended up not taking many decent pictures

Luckily there are a few that will do the job and fulfill the brief I was given, but I will give these away for free, rather than charging for my time, as I’m not really happy with them.

In future I think I’ll stick to what I’m good at, sports and architecture photography and the occasional arranged portrait.

Something I’m definitely guilty of! Chimping. Own up Jay!!!

Late last night I noticed that there wasn’t much cloud cover and decided to stare up at the stars for a minute or two while waiting for my laptop to finish burning a DVD.

I easily recognised Ursa Major (or ‘the Great Bear’, or ‘the Big Dipper’, or ‘the Plough’) and Polaris (the North star), but there was a bright star to the west, quite high in inclination that I didn’t recognise. I loaded up an astronomy program in order to figure out what it was and it turned out to be a star called Vega. I then got some binoculars out to look at it and I found that I could see lots of other stars that I couldn’t view with the naked eye. While I knew this happened, I was still quite amazed how dramatic the effect was, and how beautiful. I thought I’d try and use my camera to take some pictures – using an exposure of 30 seconds at ISO 200 brought out some detail but I think I’ll need to increase the ISO or use my remote shutter control to manually increase the exposure time. I will try both and see what happens.

The astronomy programs that I used are both free (open source) and are Stellarium and Celestia.

One for all my photographer friends out there. Found a link to this site in my RSS aggregator this morning. Wish I could take photo’s like this!Courtesy of SimpleBits

Being a keen amateur photographer, I’ve been researching the rights and laws concerning taking photo’s in public for a little while. This came up in a discussion I had with a fellow biker and semi-professional photographer at the Frith Street bike meet on Friday night and also in a confrontation I had with a police sergeant on Sunday at the Ace Cafe.

At Frith Street we were discussing candid photography and the difficulty of obtaining a person’s permission to photograph them and subsequently getting them to behave normally. I found it interesting to find out that my friend carries model release forms with his kit just in case the need for one arises. I think I will print a few off and carry them with the camera from now on, even though they are more of a courtesy than a legal requirement and that I won’t be doing any commercial work. You never know.

At the Ace I was approached by the officer, who had seen me taking photos of him and his police car on the North Circular Road from a footbridge. Thanks to my basic understanding of the law, I knew that I was quite within my rights to do this and decided not back down to his “bully-boy” tactics (more on this in a later post perhaps). I stood my ground and answered his questions politely (it takes two to argue) and he was left with little else to do except get back to his job.

Here’s an excellent UK photographer’s rights page, which has a downloadable PDF file, which I have printed and will keep with me wherever I take my camera, and also a link to the Liberty guide to human rights, which has been useful for more than just photography issues.

Sunday saw the purchase of yet another overly expensive electronic gadget – A Nikon D70 digital SLR (from Kamla on tottenham court road), complete with an 18-70mm lens (the kit lens) and a 70-300mm G lens as well. I’ve always loved the results that I got with my Minolta Dynax 300si 35mm film camera but hated the poor quality of the prints I got. Similarly I always liked the way that I could download pictures from my Sony DSC-P72 digital camera straight onto the PC but hated the responsiveness of the shutter and I’d also started to become unhappy with the resolution. This should bring me the best of both worlds and will hopefully last for a long time before I need to upgrade, my first impressions are that I absolutely love it and I’m looking forward to getting back into SLR photography. I do however already have some extras on my wishlist – A proper flashgun to use instead of the built-in flash and a spare battery!