Photo Locus

So you may recall in my earlier post that I was planning a little experiment to see if I could more accurately predict what results to expect with the Holga photos.
Here are the EOS 50D (left) and Holga 120N (right) versions of the same scenes.

I realise this isn’t exactly the same but the thing with the Holga is that you never really know what you’re pointing at because the viewfinder is more of a token gesture than anything useful. All you can do is point it in the right direction and hope for the best.
I was pleasantly surprised that the Holga made something vaguely interesting out of such a boring subject.

Here’s another example:

Seems I was wrong about the focal length. I’d set my camera lens to 60mm to try and match the Holga but I think I should have accounted for cropping. I had the Holga set to “infinity” for this one.

Just for reference, here’s more Digital vs Analogue for you to examine.

It’s clear that the Holga, or at least the film, gives the images a warmth that my digital camera did not record and it’s fair to say the digital was much closer to real life in its recording of the colours. But the weird colours are part of the attraction and along with the soft edges and noticeable vignetting adds to the character of a Holga image.

Finally, here’s a nice example of how not to do it:

Holgas as deceptively simple, so simple in fact that you may forget to change the focus setting depending on your subject. I can’t recall exactly what setting I had here (the 3 people one maybe?) but it really needed to be on macro setting to have a hope of getting this in focus. I’ll know for again.

While searching for a new program to make HDR images with, I stumbled upon Fotoxx 8.7 just relased on Linux.

I got distracted from the HDR stuff and decided to try out the panorama feature.

I just happened to have a bunch of badly taken photos with which to put it to the test. The photos were taken from a rooftop on full auto mode; therefore the exposures are different and the focus wasn’t locked… and it was hand-held. Not really the ideal scenario for making a convincing panoramic image!

Below is a sample of the images used.

To make a panorama in Fotoxx you must work left to right. I found it a bit odd that you can’t simply open the program and go to Combine>Make Panorama straight away. You need to open the left-most image first and then add a photo one at a time through the previously mentioned Combine menu. As a side note, Fotoxx currently can’t open Camera Raw for this purpose but it can convert them to TIF, so prepare your files first.

Fotoxx’s strength is its ability to align images perfectly every time and it accounts well for lens distortion. Below is a screen shot of Fotoxx at work aligning the images. Simply drag your image until the overlap looks about right and let it go to work. You don’t even need to be accurate at this stage. If you only have a small overlap you probably won’t need to bother moving your images at all and it will still align them without issue.

Aligning the images. Drag the right image to align roughly with the left

Fotoxx highlights the areas that are currently being auto-aligned

After aligning. Correcting for distortion creates the curved black space.

I especially like how you can see it at work with red highlighting. Large images can take a while, so it’s good to know it’s still working. Once it’s done aligning the images it will even attempt to match the exposures at which it also does a mostly acceptable job.

You can add as many images as you like, as long as you’re working left to right. However, if like this image you have a lot of varying exposures expect a significant amount of digital noise if you choose the match exposures option.

Here is the finished panorama.

The finished panorama (ignore the dirty lens). There is a fairly visible join line in the sky but the foreground seems well aligned.

The noise is very apparent but this is a problem with the variety of exposure values in the images I chose rather than with Fotoxx. The alignment is very impressive and the distortion adjustments seem spot-on. The exposure matching is also pretty good but you can see in the sky area there are still join lines. This is very easily removed in GIMP or PhotoShop with the Clone or Heal tools.

For comparison, here is how the image looks manually aligned with no exposure correction, followed by a Canon PhotoStitch version.

Stitched together by hand. It doesn't take distortion into effect so the joins are more visible.

Canon PhotoStitch version

It seems the Canon program was better at matching the exposures but the end result was not as sharp as Fotoxx’s (perhaps this would be improved on images taken with a fixed length). Noise was a problem with both images, but again this would be imrpoved if you composed the shots properly for a panorama.

Overall I’m very impressed with Fotoxx’s photo stitching capabilities and considering the badly done hand-held snaps it had to work with, it did a great job making a passable panorama out of them.

Pros

• Cost
  Fotoxx is released under the GNU (GPL V3) license so it is completely free and has no annoying restrictions or bundled spyware.
• Alignment
  Aligns images at least as well as professional imaging software.
• Robust
  Can easily handle several very large files at once without slowing down or crashing
• Unbend
  If you feel your panorama still looks a bit warped, Fotoxx has a handy “unbend” feature that will let you adjust it.

Cons

• Interface
  Interface is a little bit unintuitive, for me anyway. It didn’t seem obvious to me to open the first image before being able to start the panorama. Also, when aligning the images the “Proceed” button is 2/3 the way down the dialogue with “Cancel” seemingly the main button. Not a big issue but a bit irksome none the less.
• Linux Only
  If you aren’t a Linux user you probably won’t want to install a new operating system just to try this out.

I don’t know about you, but I often find myself wondering what to photograph and I get bored with just going to a place and trying to find a shot there.

To give my photography a less random look I like to take a more fine art approach and make a collection based on a theme. Instead of trying to photograph a place I like to go to somewhere and look for anything that fits with my theme.

Coming up with a theme can be difficult though, but after a bit of digging around on the internet I found this list from JPG Magazine (why didn’t I look there first?). So many ideas to try, such little free time!

A couple of days ago my new plastic camera arrived from Hong Kong. I’m still waiting on the film I ordered arriving so in the meantime I’m trying to do a little prep.

As mentioned before, my experience with film is pretty limited so my plan is to set the 50D up with approximate settings for the Holga in the hope of getting the exposure right before shooting in film. I know; that is not in the spirit of analogue but it’s something I’m going to try until I get used to working things out the old way.

The Holga has 2 aperture settings – sunny and cloudy. I had read the settings made no difference so I did some digging and came across this article. They explain it great detail so I’m going to take their word for it that the only aperture available is ~f13. The shutter speed is around 1/125.

So I put my digital camera in manual mode and entered the following settings:

• Shutter speed 1/125
• Aperture f13
• ISO 400 (to match my film)
• White balance daylight (for daylight balanced film)

It might be a pointless exercise but what I have learnt so far is this:- do not try shooting indoors on a dark day with this setting! Hurray for the bulb function on the Holga 120N!

I see Lonely Planet is running a photo competition for a round the world trip. There have been a gazillion entries already so far – may as well add mine to the pile! You’re allowed to enter as many times as you like so I’m going to enter a few photos I took on holiday in Japan:

Bronze Dragon Waterspout

[Read on →]

Since Christmas I’ve been using my shiny new Canon EOS 50D (definitely not a crappy camera) for all my photography projects. It’s been a big step up from my old Canon 350D and I’m still playing with all the new features. It was a few weeks ago when I stumbled back upon the Holga Pool on Flickr and the Lomography website when thinking about a new project with a retro theme. I was looking into old style photo papers (the very textured type) when I remembered about the toy camera scene.

Like most people, I haven’t used film for a few years and even then I wasn’t all that into photography at the time so I’m pretty clueless about it. I’ve decided to go the cheapskate route and buy a Holga off Ebay for £15. A cheap way to have fun with 120 film. In contrast to my lovely 50d, Holgas have hardly any settings to play about with and come with a low quality plastic lens. I think this will be part of the fun of it; with light leaks and a flimsy construction it’s kind of pointless to  try and take a technically good shot – you just have to do your best and hope it comes out alright. The results are unpredictable. It takes away the pressure of taking a good shot and just leaves the fun part.

Looking forward to receiving it in a few weeks and shooting my first roll of film in about 10 years. I’ll keep you posted my first disasters masterpieces.