Backstroke

Backstroke
Originally uploaded by bowtoo

It is the end of swimming season in here and both our boys did well this season, placing in the top three of almost all the meets that they went to.

Here a last lap in the 100m backstroke which he won.

Awesome Time lapse

This is a pretty cool time-lapse movie

FotoMagico Review and Tips

I follow the excellent TWIP Podcast (This Week in Photography) each week and really enjoy the casual presentation style. They offer interesting perspectives on photographic topics and recently led me to try out a product called FotoMagico.

I came to this product after several false starts in trying to find the ideal Mac product for photographic slide-show production that would retain the original photograph quality. In addition to lacing the images together with various pan and transition maneuvers a big requirement is to synchronize the presentation to a soundtrack.

I tried iMovie HD and Final Cut Express - both excellent programs that offer great control over the transitions (particularly with timing so that you can have the flow of images follow the beat of the music) but in each case, unless you show the slideshow on your own computer using the original program you get a marked deterioration in image quality in the final product.

This has to do with two things. The first that the image resolution has to be adjusted to fit whatever media output you select. In both programs you have the ability to select a base image size, but I found that even when I selected a size that matched the 1024x1050 resolution preferred with data projectors the image was cropped or resized for me in the final production in a way that made it look awful on the screen.

The second problem is that the programs render your still images into moving images which reduces display quality - especially when you apply an effect like the Ken Burns effect - there is a rippling that gets introduced.

I tried producing a DVD (720x480) and found that the software again resized my images with a dramatic loss in quality.

Now to be clear, I suppose I could save my images pre-set to these smaller display sizes and try again but I had already spent two weekends in a row on this without coming up with a recipe that gives consistently good quality resolution for data projection.

Scott Bourne, a TWIP presenter mentioned how useful he has found FotoMagico for slide presentations (for the Mac) so I downloaded a demo version of it to try myself. An aside to Windows users - the software of choice for Windows is ProShow Gold (no contest).

A quick note on marketing for the people at Boinx (and a warning to any reader). The $49 advertised cost for FotoMagico is not much more than a a bait and switch marketing ploy unless you like having an ugly red Boinx marketing watermark ("This presentation is produced by FotoMagico etc. etc.") at the bottom of the highest quality slideshow presentation. So resign yourself to spending the $129 for the Pro version upfront.

When I discovered that the $49 was for a shareware-like product I almost gave up, but I have a presentation that I want to put together and believe me, the production quality that I got with the demo made it worth it for me - particularly since I can see how I will be able to use this in a number of different ways (my wife is an art teacher and what better way to present portfolios?)

Another disappointment (while I am getting them out of the way) was that I had heard that you could produce an application that you can run on Windows machines from FotoMagico - this is not the case. With the Express version you can produce DVD quality - with images that far surpass the quality that I was getting from my novice attempts at iMovie and Final Cut Express with as little as 20min of experimentation. The pro version allows you to produce a Quicktime movie but we forewarned that the file size is large (5Gb for 130 images and a 4min50sec song).

So on to the positive......

I liked the software from the beginning - the first screen you see when you start a new project asks where you want to use this: Digital projection, Monitor or TV? The software sets up the aspect ratio and then behaves much like iMovie does for setting up the images and the sound,

Somewhat irritatingly, your soundtrack is clipped by the length of the images, but you should follow the technique below for figuring out how many images to use (thanks to tips from the very experienced fellow photo club member at the Greater Lynn Photographic Association (Barbara Rozavsky)).

• Start by playing the soundtrack a couple of times and counting the prominent beats in the music. Remember that you might use a couple of beats for some of the more dramatic images, but this gives you a ballpark of how many images will work with the song. (Use a marker to mark each beat - it will be hard to count otherwise).
  
• Once you know how many images you need, import them into FotoMagico (you can drag them from Bridge or put them in iPhoto and bring them in from there). FotoMagico apparently integrates to Aperture as well. Leave the timing set to whatever the default is for now.
• Now drag the music in from iTunes and add title slides and position the beginning of the music where you want it relative to the slides. I found that it snaps to the begining or end of slides which is also a bit irritating.
  
• As the images extend beyond the end of the soundtrack, you can click on the end and widen it (if it was clipped) until it plays the full song.
  

I really wanted to synchronize the images to the beat of a particular tune and needed to set marks in the soundtrack to use for transition timing. The method for setting this up in FotoMagico is not as slick as in the other two products, but once I had the music marked, telling the program to use those markers was incredibly easy.

In case you want to try this yourself let me save you a little time (this took me a fairly long time to figure out).

If you click on Options on the bottom right and open the audio bullet you will see an audio window that looks similar to the little LCD-like display at the top of iTunes. There is an "M" with a circle around it on the right. If you click on the play button you can click on the "M" each time you want to mark the soundtrack in time to the music.

Unfortunately these marks do not show up in the audio file at the bottom of the images, but you can select the block of images that you want to set to the markers and choose "Markers" from the set of three options for transition timing (Time, Mouse Click and Markers). The advantage of this is that you don't have to fine-tune the transitions like you do in iMovie and Final Cut Express. The photos simply latch onto those markers and transition at each marked beat.

One thing that I found tricky - and they really could have fixed this by allowing you to see and edit the markers in the soundtrack under the photos - was when I wanted to delete or reset one of the music markers. The position in the soundtrack under the Options->Audio panel is not kept in sync with the play head. You can watch as you preview the movie and it gives you the number of seconds into the movie. Then if you didn't start the song immediately (in my case I had 5 sec worth of Title lead-in before the song started) you have to subtract the lead-in time from the time into the movie to figure out where in the soundtrack you are.... a little painful.

15 min away

15 min away vertrorama 2
Originally uploaded by bowtoo

An assignment for flickr had me off to the beach with my wife on one of her regular walks with my dog.

I have already described the technique I use for creating these composite images. This one was made from 6 photographs taken in a vertical panorama.

The photograph is at Manchester-by-sea on the Boston North Shore at about 9:30am.

Sinowal and encrypted data interception

Well, following in the theme of Trojan and viruses that we discovered at work in December, a colleague forwarded a link to a blog article describing Sinowal.

For the non geeks out there this is an important lesson: Take care before downloading and running programs from the web or mailed to you as file attachments. I have watched in horror as a otherwise smart person clicks on "OK" repeatedly when faced with them on a web page - even when these are popups screens that might contain dangerous programs.

Briefly, a Trojan is a program that installs itself on your computer and then attempts to steal information from you or is used for sending out those thousands of spam email messages that plague us.  Lots of computers with Trojans are often referred to as a Botnet because they are like an army of robots that are usually controlled by a syndicate of criminals.

The following bits of information about this program should put your guard up.

1. It cleverly behaves in a way that fools some anti-virus programs.  Basically but not going hell for leather on installation and rather waiting before starting to take action.
   
2. It can be installed via a web site that contains an executable or file attachments.
   
3. It installs itself so that it starts up before Windows even launches and sets itself to execute as part of regular Windows programs
4. (And this is the scary bit) It can read all the information that you send to encrypted web sites before they get encrypted and after the reply is unencrypted it can see what that was too.  So when you connect to your bank, paypal, amazon or any other place that you might use a credit card or passwords, this program can intercept the information.
5. It periodically forwards this information to one of a number of sites set up to gather all the stolen passwords and credit card numbers.
6. It was created by an organized syndicate that register thousands of web sites and host domain names for it to use.
7. Regular updates are issued to this Trojan to keep those that are out there active.
8. 
   

If you are a computer geek you will appreciate some of the details in this article .

Fetch that ball

Fetch that ball
Originally uploaded by bowtoo

This is Molly, our crazy Labrador.

Photographing black on white is challenging. The camera tends to bring the exposure down because it tries to average the scene at 15% grey so the blacks will be very underexposed and the whites will tend to grey.

I adjusted the automatic exposure so that it would counter this effect and then in photoshop used some leves and selective lightening to lighten (burn) the dog and darken the snow to bring out the details.

I like the intensity in the dog's eyes.

Displacement maps in photoshop elements

This follows a tutorial on the www.photoshopsupport.com The idea was to take a wooden post that I had photographed and somehow super-impose it on a face. My first attempt ended up being ok, but the wood is not contouring with the face.   

This week I revisited that image and Garrey suggested that I look into using a displacement map to make the wood contour with the face. The tutorial site has the following steps. 

1. Prepare the image that you want to act as the contour: In this case it is a face. The basic steps for preparation are 
   • Expand the contrast (make a duplicate layer and set the top layer to overlay mode) and
   • convert to greyscale.
   • Apply a gaussian blur. Save this blurred image as a PSD file (photoshop) file with map in the name to remind you that it is for a displacement map - you will use it later (don't close the file). In the case of my image I only wanted to apply this to a face so I selectively erased all but the face and applied this procedure to the resultant file.
   • Now undo the blur that you applied to the image you saved. This leaves you with the greyscale if the face that will be used for contour.
2. Applying the map to the target image (in my case a white wooden fence post) requires the following steps.
   • Bring the target image (the one you want to displace) as a new layer on top of the greyscale image you kept.
   • Use the free transform option to resize the target image layer so that it is a little larger than the greyscale below it. The displacement will change the size and you need some breathing room.
   • Set the mode of the target image layer (your top layer) to multiply. The greyscale of the wooden post shows through the image now as tones where the contours will go (but there are no contours yet).
   • Now go Filter->Distort->Displace and set the amount of displacement. The tutorial recommended 50 each for horizontal and vertical which works fine for a flag blowing in the wind. I settled on 20 each for the face. When you have set those you are asked to choose the displacement map and you have to browse to the blurred map file you saved before. Photoshop will apply the map and you will have contours.
3. I found that some of the displacement didn't work as expected so I used the liquify filter and moved some of the lines a little manually to fill in where the displacement map failed. Here is the resultant image.

I also decided not to make the image black and white as before - I left the color in and applied a selective hue/saturation mask to the face - leaving the hair and eyes their natural color.

Coopers with European Starling

Coopers with European Starling
Originally uploaded by bowtoo

I went looking for eagles for the first time today. I had heard of a chain bridge up near Newburyport (about 40min north of our house) where eagles come during the winter.

They are attracted to the open water - it is warm enough that it doesn't freeze over. Apparently as the winter deepens and the lakes nearby freeze, the eagles make their way over.

They are large, majestic birds and we saw a pair from fairly far off but they didn't come close enough for any good shots. In the end we decided to call it a day, but not before stopping at a couple of roads on the way back to Rt1 South to see if we could see the eagles across the river from the opposite bank.

We stopped at a second road and had just decided to call it a day when I noticed some movement on the ground in the yard next to where we were standing.

There on the ground was a hawk devouring a recently caught bird. We all (Garrey and Tom - two flickr friends) thought at first that it was a pigeon, but when I came to look at the images at home it turned out to be a European Starling.