Hopes, Questions, And Sourcecode

Today, Instagram finally released an Android app. I’m happy to see that happen. As a software developer, seeing well known apps cross over to new platforms gives me a warm fuzzy feeling about users having more freedom to choose whichever platform they prefer and that sort of thing.

As noted in the title though, this post is about my opinions as a photographer not a dev, so that warm fuzzy feeling is irrelevant right now.

Since they were nice enough to release it, I installed Instagram’s Android app today, messed around with it briefly, decided it wasn’t my thing, and posted a snarky comment on facebook. Pretty typical chain of events for me, really.  Not surprisingly, that snarky comment sparked a quick discussion, in which I said I shoot a dslr and a medium format film camera when I want to take interesting looking pictures, and a friend replied that she doesn’t have a dslr. I was about to reply with something about how Instagram’s effects are what I’ll select certain types of film when loading up my medium format camera, and then it hit me:

The effects that Instagram delivers are something that I have felt for a long time that digital photography is missing. Instagram’s implementation is a little over-simplified and backwards from what I want (which is why I didn’t quite realize the implications at first), but what Instagram’s filters do, and what I wish my DSLR would do, is give digital photos some of the warmth, charm, feel, and beautiful imperfections of photos shot on film.

That’s one of the biggest things that keeps me coming back to my medium format film camera: the fact that I can go to my stash of film, pick something that will provide the look I want for a shoot, and have my photos come out with the distinct style of the type of film I selected. No photoshop filters, no manual adding of vignette and film grain, just pictures that come out with a harsh grain, or popping colours, or a slightly surreal tint, with no extra effort on my part after shooting them because that effort was spent up front when I chose which roll of film I wanted to shoot.

Obviously what I want on my DSLR is a little different from what Instagram has on offer, but the end result is the same: digital photos that look as if they were shot on film.  In my perfect camera world, the camera companies (or at least Canon, since that’s whose gear I use) would set something up with the film companies where the camera companies license the look of various different sorts of film and then along with things like “neutral”, “faithful” and “monochrome” in my camera’s Picture Style menu, there would also be “Ilford Delta”, “Fuji Velvia”, “Kodachrome”, etc. Selecting one of those film type options in the menu would apply that type of film’s appearance to any photos shot while that film type was set. Of course, there would also need to be an option to not use any film style emulation, because not every picture needs that stuff applied to it. By the way any Canon engineers that happen to be reading this, I’d probably use the Picture Style menu a whole lot more if it had these options in it.

So after all that, I think I can live with what Instagram does even though the app isn’t really my cup of tea. Except the faux-film-frame stuff. That irks me.  By all means, please make cellphone pics look like they were shot on Kodak Portra 800 (or <insert desired film look here>), but spare me the tacky borders.

I ordered all this stuff FOREVER ago, but DealExtreme finally came through with my 500 magnets that I was waiting for so now it’s all here!

It’s a little late since the Graffiti Research Lab posted about their LED Throwie project years ago, but I don’t care, I’m stoked about it anyway  This week is looking pretty hectic already, but if I can make time for it, I’ll be rounding up some friends to make 500 LED Throwies and find interesting places to throw them!

Here is the only picture that worked out from a quick photo shoot with my brother tonight:

I don’t know what happened, but my flash (which has always been fairly reliable in the past) was really finicky about synching with my camera.

By “finicky” I mean “totally not working”.  Like…. pictures that were solid black, or where the shutter was clearly out of synch with the flash.  And of course, now that I’m at home and poking around to try to figure out what went wrong, the flash synch seems fine.  I’m really hoping we can make it back to this spot for a re-shoot, but not sure what to expect out of the flash when we get back there.  Which blows because I *really* think this spot is going to be better to shoot at night than in the day, so I’m at the mercy of my flakey flash trigger (or whatever the source of tonight’s difficulties was).

Ho-ly did I leave this offline for a while!  In round number 1 million of Power Surges vs My Hard Drives, Power Surges continue their commanding lead of 1 million to Zero.

Now that I finally wised up and dropped a UPS between my server and the wall outlet, I’d really like to think the server will make it through the next storm without anything blowing up.

Fixing the server was actually no big deal, but it was time-consuming and I’ve been super-ultra-mega busy since the server’s OS drive got fried.  I didn’t personally need things back up and running right away so I didn’t get around to putting the machine back together very promptly.  And really, I figured the world would continue spinning just fine for a few weeks with one less blog of random stuff on the ‘net.

If you find yourself typically caring about the things I ramble about on here, stay tuned.  I don’t have a lot of earth-shattering stuff that I’ve been itching to post, but I’ll have some content popping up here as I get things pieced back together.  I may even resurrect some old posts from before things blew up, provided the drive those old posts are on is as intact as I think it is.  I certainly hope it is, that’s where all my code is stored.