Tag Archives: Android

Photo of the Month – A Return to Film

Posted on by — Leave a reply

Hi Folks:  According to Wikipedia, it was 120 years ago (1892) that George Eastman first began supplying Thomas Edison and William Dickson with 35mm film for their movie projectors.  Film was around before that, of course, but in a variety of sizes and feeding systems; 35mm film became a standard in 1909, and in 1934 the 35mm film cassette for still photography was introduced.

So, in honour of 120 years a group of us met on a rainy afternoon in November at Ross Bay Cemetery to celebrate a (temporary?) return to film and to the days of B&W.  Some had never shot film before, for some it took a while to remember how to work a film-advance lever, and for others film is still in daily use.  For the most part there was no autofocus, no LCD screens (“you have to look through the little viewfinder there”), and no ‘instant’ results.  Those who had film cameras brought them, and those who didn’t were welcome to bring some film and borrow a camera from someone else.  I brought six cameras (five 35mm and one double lens reflex) and loaned out three.  For those who just can’t get into film, they were welcome to bring their digital cameras and there wasn’t a bucket of tar nor a bag of feathers anywhere about.  More on that in a bit.  Overall it was a lot of fun.  Continue Reading →

Photography Apps for Android

Posted on by — 3 Comments ↓

Hi Folks:

There are probably enough apps in the world today that if one were to compile a list it would rival the average encyclopaedia for size.  You do remember what an encyclopaedia looks like, don’t you?

I honestly have no idea how many Android apps are available for photographers, and I admit to using only a few of them myself, but I thought I’d start with a couple of suggestions and those who are interested can add their own recommendations in the comments.  I  prefer my digital images ‘uncooked’ so to speak so that I can use the processing power of my computer to tweak them rather than the processing power of my camera (or phone).  Even .jpg images can be processed better in Lightroom, so I tend to start with as few processing options in the camera as possible.  Making images with a cell phone camera poses its own challenges, in part because the files tend to be small, flat and low resolution.  Still, it’s the one ‘camera’ I have with me almost all the time, even when my camera is at home.  So, here are a few of the apps I appreciate (all available from the Google Play Store).  Some are free, and some are a few dollars.  Some offer both versions (with and without advertising). Continue Reading →

Lightroom, Geolocation and .GPX files

Posted on by — 6 Comments ↓

UPDATE: December 12, 2018:

As of November 30, if you have any version of Lr older than Lr 8 CC, the Maps module will no longer work. As I understand it, Google updated their API key and Adobe had already claimed it would no longer support older versions. So, if you’re renting Lr via subscription, run the updater and it should be all good. If you have a standalone version of Lr, all is not lost. Jeffrey Friedl has a plugin for Lr that enables geolocation support and is much more powerful than the Lr Map module was anyway. More here:

Jeffrey’s “Geoencoding Support” Plugin for Lightroom

_____

Hi Folks:

Welcome to our first blog post about Lightroom 4! (LR 4 Beta at this point).  A number of tutorials and videos are already available about the new features of LR 4; you can find several of them on our ‘Lightroom Links‘ page.  One of the new features in Lightroom 4 is the ‘Map’ module, and if your computer is connected to the internet the Map module will connect with Google Earth, read each image’s metadata and overlay a map of the earth (or portion thereof) with the location where your images were made.  It’s not a feature I’ll likely use much, but I can see its use in certain applications. Continue Reading →