Cheetara Striptease
Because, deep down inside, I'm still a 12-year-old boy.
Yeah, it's a huge-ass animated GIF. Just let it load.
Hacking Disney
Well, okay, this isn't really a hack. But it is a method for grabbing low-to-medium resolution photos from Disney's rip-off PhotoPass service
.
Basically, what you do is go to their site, display each photo, and take a screen-capture of it.
But wait, you say, those images are tiny, a mere 400 x 286 pixels! And it's true, they are. So, here's what you do:
- View the image on the PhotoPass site.
- Click on
Edit Photo.
- Zoom in all the way.
- Preview the image.
- Screen-cap the preview. (It really helps if you have a screen-cap utility that let's you grab just a portion of the screen.)
- Close the Preview window.
- Use the arrows to move the zoomed in box around and repeat the preview/screen-cap/close routine until you've grabbed every area of the image. It should take 9 caps in total.
Okay, you have the image as 9 close-up images. Now you just put them all together. But, keep in mind that the resulting pieces do not match pixel by pixel where they overlap. (I don't know why. Ask Disney. They just don't.) Here's my method.
- Fire up a decent photo editor. I use Pixelmator.
- Create a blank canvas about 1600 x 1144. (Or 1144 x 1600, if it's a portrait shot.)
- Drag each of the pieces in and drop it in the approximate location in the full image. Each should end up in its own layer.
- Using the center piece as a guide, select each layer and move that piece into position. If you bring the layer to the front and set the blending mode to
Difference,
you can then jiggle the layer around until the overlap is as black as it gets. Then set blending back toNormal.
- Repeat for each piece's layer.
- Flatten the layers.
- Crop.
And that's it. The end result is a photo at 1142 x 761 pixels. Yeah, that's not great at all. But it sure beats 400 x 286. (And it beats paying Disney fifteen bucks for a high-res copy of a poorly-taken photo.)
lolcats
I love lolcats! So I made one of my own:
That's all. Get back to work.
Full Moon
A couple nights back was the biggest, brightest full moon in 15 years. The Moon was both completely full and at its nearest approach to the Earth. So I went out with the 18x Lumix and a tripod and took a bunch of exposures. Here's what I ended up with:
True, nothing compared to a telescope or a real camera-zoom combination. But not bad for a consumer-level camera.
The actual image is twice that size. But, frankly, it looks much sharper reduced down a bit.
High Dynamic Range Madness!
I've been playing around with high dynamic range images. The idea is that you take multiple exposures of the same scene, combine them into an image with a dynamic range higher than screens can output, then remap the image to a range you can display. The result can simply be an image with more detail, as different areas each get the proper exposure. Or the results can be really hyper-detailed with super-saturated colors.
I've been taking the latter route.
Hawaii Photos
My wife and I went to Hawaii last January. We had a wonderful time and took over 6000 photos. I've finally put a decent number of them on Flickr.
Vintage Ads
I love old vintage ads from the middle of the last century. Everything is so bright and colorful and optimistic.
So I really loved stumbling across Plan59. It has loads of the best of that era, and if you see something you really like, you can usually order a large print of it. It organizes the graphics into different galleries. (The galleries aren't mutually exclusive.)
I have a personal fetish for visions of our future in space from that era. (The space gallery is kinda small. The automobile gallery is huge.)
For contrast, don't miss Do What Now? for examples of bad designs from the past.
Spooky!
Here's a photo Roger took of the pumpkin I carved last week:
(I had to re-post it. I always forget that I should use the full URL to the photo for it to show up correctly in an RSS feed reader.)
I'm pretty happy with it, although Roger's weird one looks much more impressive.
ScanCafe Away!
I heard about a great scanning service recently. It's called ScanCafe. They scan all sorts of stuff: slides, negatives, photos.
They have a neat process. Once they've scanned your stuff, they put them on a web site for you to view. And then you can reject up to half of them. And you don't pay for the ones you reject. (And you can reject for whatever reason you want, even if it's just because Aunt Mildred's eyes were shut.) Then they send you a DVD with all the scans you kept. (And your negatives, of course.)
I've read that their quality is really good, much better than consumer negative scanners can do. And the prices are way low, only 19 cents per photo from negative, which is where my interest lies. You see, we like to take photos. So we have tons and tons of old negatives around the house. In particular, we spent a really nice week touring parts of Europe one summer, before digital cameras were any good. And we took photos, about 400 or so. I've always wanted these in a digital format. So we're trying out these guys with the European trip as a test.
They can also scan APS/Advantix film. Remember that stuff? Anyway, we have a few rolls of it from Europe as well. They were shot in panorama mode. Scanning those costs more than twice as much per photo, because it's a pain with which to work. But some of the photos are really nice, so we bit the bullet. (Okay, actually, I sent them in before I realized they cost more.)
They actually do the scanning manually, rotating and color-correcting things by hand. So, how do they keep their costs down? By doing the actual scanning in India, land of really smart people. (Honestly, I've never know anyone of Indian ancestry who wasn't really smart, starting with Ruma, my old debate partner.)
So, therein lies the sole drawback. You ship your negatives to California. They repackage orders in a big bundle and send them to India. India scans them. Then the negatives get sent back to California and then back to you.
The whole process can take two months. Is that a problem? Not at all. Those negatives have been sitting in a closet for years. (This probably isn't the way to go if you need things back quickly, though.)
So, we sent ours out and they arrived in California this morning. In two months, we should have some great scans. I'll report back then.
(If it all works out, we have loads of negatives from a two week stint in Norway.)
Scans Arrived!
Two months ago, we sent off a load of negatives to ScanCafe. (I mentioned it earlier.) The scans arrived today!
Two months is about what we expected for the turnaround, so it was pretty much right on time. Our order took a little longer than normal because I included some APS film. And, as luck would have it, their balky APS film loaders broke down. (They warn about this on the site.) ScanCafe did ask whether we wanted to wait an additional two weeks while the loaders were fixed or just get our order without the APS shots. So we chose to skip the APS shots. Unfortunately, it seems my reply was lost somewhere. A little over a week later, I re-sent the reply and the scanning was finished the next day. So, without the APS film, it would have taken about 6 weeks total.
The scans look great. The exact size varies, but the final images are about 4200 x 2700 pixels. The ScanCafe folks also rotate portrait shots, which is really nice. (One problem in our household is that my wife and I turn the camera in opposite directions when we shoot portraits. So, rotating them later is a pain. Can't just select them all and turn them.)
ScanCafe also does some clean-up and color correction. These negatives should have been in good shape, so it's hard to judge the clean-up. But, the bottom line is that the scans look good. Really good!
The odd thing is how photography has changed due to digital cameras. These photos cover a week in Hungary, followed by another week spread over Austria, Switzerland, France, and England. Not including the APS photos, is was 276 photos total.
That's all? Hell, I take more photos than that in a single day with a digital camera. Lots more! But, in the old days, each photo was an additional cost.
Overall, I take better photos in the digital world. We have some amazing photos from Alaska and Hawaii, because we could literally take dozens of shots of the same thing and just pick the best one. You just can't do that with real film, unless money is no object.
On the other hand, it seems like there's something missing with digital images. Some sense of warmth? I dunno. Maybe it's the same thing that vinyl aficionados miss with analog albums. (I'm old enough to have bought my share of records. But I started on CDs early on and never looked back. And, yes, even those very early CDs still play fine. I've had only 2-3 CDs actually go bad in, oh, 20 years.)
Anyway, the final verdict is that ScanCafe rocks. If won't work if you need the scans next week. But if waiting two months for the scans is doable, then it's a great service.
