So, it’s been a bit quiet around here lately hasn’t it? What with getting married and setting up home and various other things, I haven’t really had much time to blog about photography, although I have got several draft posts about various things waiting to receive some attention. Is this neglect of srphotos.co.uk through laziness? Well, not really.

You see my new wife has a business – Lightbulb Head, and within the first month of marriage we were commissioned to build a website for a couple of guys who did a grand job with the catering at our wedding. I’ve therefore been spending a lot of my free time on the implementation of pigandporter.co.uk which went live last Friday.

Whilst we’ve been doing this site, Kiri and I have been looking at each other (we’re allowed to…we’re married!) and we’ve realised that what with Kiri’s design and film skills and my photography and geek skills, it would probably make sense to combine our businesses. So…at some point in the new year, srphotos.co.uk will be no more as it merges with Lightbulb Head.

You’re welcome to join us for the ride!

“Has he finally gone mad?”, I hear you ask? Well, that’s a distinct possibility I have to admit, but actually this blog post is about a website called “moo.com”. Ever since I started up srphotos.co.uk as a business, I’ve been using moo.com in some way or another for my printing.

Those of you who have ever received anything in the post from me will have had a little srphotos.co.uk sticker attached to the envelope – that’s printed by moo. If you’ve got one of my business cards – that’s printed by moo. If you’ve bought anything from the site and had a little note accompanying the purchase – that’s printed by moo. If you’ve had your wedding covered by me, and received cards to share with friends and families containing details of your private gallery on – they’re printed by moo. If you’ve ever received an engagement card from me – that’s printed by moo.

They have been absolutely fantastic as a one-stop shop over the last few years for my printing needs, and the quality has been great. Only once, when they began to offer black backgrounds and white text did I have need for complaint when the black was too grey for my liking, and they resolved that quickly and professionally.

So why am I telling you this? Well, they’ve given me a promotion code to share with people that gives 10% off your first purchase, whilst also giving me discount off my next purchase. If you’re interested in it, then check out my facebook page at facebook.com/srphotos.co.uk to get the promo code.

I never like to state the obvious when writing a blog post, but over the last few years I’ve taken a lot of photos! I have decided that I like a selection of them enough that I will put them in my main gallery of images. But aside from that, you’ll have noticed that in various blog posts, I’ve linked to other galleries that I’ve created as a result of, for instance, doing a photo walk or coming back from a holiday.

Up until now, the only link to these other collections of images have been from blog posts, so I decided to centralise them. Therefore, I introduce to you the new srphotos.co.uk collections page. Feel free to peruse the galleries you may have missed over the last few years!

A couple of years ago (although it doesn’t feel that long ago!) I wrote about registering the domain srphotos.tel. Well, I still own it, and it’s up for renewal, so I have a decision to make – do I keep it, or let it go back into the pool to let someone else snaffle?

This is what srphotos.tel looks like at the time of writing – you can tell that I’d forgotten I even owned it by the fact that it hasn’t been updated to say that I’m now living and working in London.

To be honest, it’s an easy decision to make. I haven’t used it at all in the last two years, and it hasn’t sent any traffic to my site. It’s just been a bit of a white elephant, which I haven’t had any value from. On the telnic site, there’s a whole section about benefits of owning a .tel domain…but I can’t find anything there that’s convincing enough for me to keep the domain, so I’m letting it lapse. It’s not worth spending money on.

The second upgrade to this website in 2011 is the addition of shopping basket functionality. You can now order 3d glasses from me, and order lenticular prints of some of my 3d images (which don’t require glasses in order to see the 3d effect). Unfortunately I can only offer prints of the later 3d images that I’ve taken, as this is when I started taking a new type of 3d images. However, this is the type of 3d that I’ll now be predominantly shooting in, so the number of images to choose from will start to increase.

Is there anything else that you might be interested in buying from the site? If people are interested, I’ll start selling prints of some of my other photos, and I have plans for a 2012 calendar.

At one of the first weddings that I tried taking some 3d photos, I was having a chat to some of the guests about 3d photography and why I was excited. It was only after I had been chatting for 10 minutes about how great 3d is, that one of the guests pointed out that he was blind in one eye, so 3d is lost on him. Since then, I’ve been thinking about photography (in particular 3d photography) for partially sighted/blind people. Last year I picked up on some news about a man who can ‘see’ with his tongue

At a recent visit to the V&A museum, I was interested to see some photos by blind and partially sighted visitors. The way they were presented was great – they were in binders (ok, nothing special there), but half of the binder was standard photos and text with the other half being braille and tactile images. When I got home, I searched online to find out more about blind photographers, and found an inspirational photographer called Pete Eckert. The phrase that stood out for me in his own words is:

I am a visual person. I just can’t see

This, combined with the tactile prints that I had felt in the V&A got me thinking. With 3d photography, because images are taken from two angles on the same scene, it is possible to calculate the distance of every object from the camera. Computer vision software could then build an internal map of the subject of the photograph. Still with me and my crazy ideas? Good. With the recent reduction in the cost of 3d printers (3d as in plastic model rather than 3d as in lenticular print), the photo could then be printed as a profile print. Obviously the depth of field would need to be reduced to avoid having a ‘print’ that’s several feet thick. Would it work? I can’t guarantee it, but it’s an idea that could make photography more accessible.

I have to firstly apologise for the drought in terms of posts in the last few weeks – it’s been because I’ve been working on my new-look site, which I can finally reveal!

It’s still a bit of a work in progress, so please contact me if you find any errors, or if something doesn’t work. I’ve been collaborating with Andy Gray with regards to the visual design of the site which has been a great experience. With my previous couple of site designs, I’ve done it all on my own, which isn’t ideal as there hasn’t been anyone to bounce ideas off. By working with Andy, we have both had ideas, then worked through them together.

The content of the site is much the same, but laid out in a slightly more usable fashion and linked together more logically. I intend to use this as a baseline over the coming days and weeks to build upon. Any constructive comments on the new look of the site will be much appreciated. Thanks!

I’m the proud owner of a Fujifilm W1 3d camera, that produces .mpo format 3d images. It comes with its own software bundle for Windows and Mac…I use Ubuntu. So, I’ve written a little bash script to help extract the .mpo format into something more useful for my standard image-processing workflow. It relies on ImageMagick and ExifTool, then I use AnaBuilder to further play with the anaglyph images it creates.

sudo apt-get install imagemagick
sudo apt-get install libimage-exiftool-perl

Thanks to the 3d photography blog for getting me started with the exiftool commands. I’ll put in my standard caveat: the code below is probably sub-optimal, but it works for me.

for img in *.mpo
do
  echo " splitting " $img;

  imgName=${img%.mpo}

  # create temporary left and right images
  exiftool -trailer:all= $img -o $imgName"_L.jpg"
  exiftool $img -mpimage2 -b > $imgName"_R.jpg"

  echo " combining left and right for " $imgName;
  # create stereo image  
  convert $imgName"_L.jpg" $imgName"_R.jpg" +append $imgName"-stereo.jpg"

  # create red-blue image and resize it for anaBuilder (x dimension of 2000 pixels)
  composite -stereo 0 $imgName"_L.jpg" $imgName"_R.jpg" $imgName"-redbluetmp.jpg"

  # extract the dimensions of the image
  pixelX=$(identify $imgName"-redbluetmp.jpg" | sed 's/^.*JPEG \(.*\)x.*$/\1/' | cut -d' ' -f2);
  pixelY=$(identify $imgName"-redbluetmp.jpg" | sed 's/^.*x\(.*\)+.*$/\1/' | cut -d'+' -f1); 
  
  if [ $pixelX -gt $pixelY ] ; then
    tempsize=`echo "scale=4; 2000/$pixelX" | bc`;   
  else
    tempsize=`echo "scale=4; 2000/$pixelY" | bc`;   
  fi
  
  size=`echo "scale=4; $tempsize*100" | bc`;
  
  convert $imgName"-redbluetmp.jpg" -resize $size% $imgName"-redblue.jpg"

  # remove the temporary images
  echo " removing temporary images"
  rm $imgName"_L.jpg"
  rm $imgName"_R.jpg"
  rm $imgName"-redbluetmp.jpg"
done

Finally, after months of talking about the Fujifilm W1, I am the proud owner of one! I finally have the means to take a 3d photo in landscape format and I can zoom too! I haven’t had time to properly test it out, but I’ve had a little bit of a play with it.

To be totally honest, I was a bit disappointed with it – for a start it’s quite clunky, and one of the least ergonomic cameras I’ve ever used. The menu is also not particularly intuitive, and yes, I know we like 3d and it’s a 3d camera, but does the menu really have to have a 3d effect? I like the ability to alter the parallax…but was disappointed to realise that it’s actually just software that’s altering how the two images are overlaid, not the lenses moving. All of that sounds a bit negative – I have to admit it has given me much more capability than my Loreo lenses, but it’s not quite the ground-breaking leap that I had been foolish enough to expect.

I’ve uploaded a gallery of the photos that I took (they’re not my best work!)

Out of interest during my day in Dungeness on Friday, I did some bracketing of some of my photos with a view to combining them into an HDR image. It’s probably worth explaining what I mean by that terminology!

• Bracketing is where you take multiple pictures of the same scene, but with slightly different exposure settings. You end up with a series of images ranging from dark to light; each one with different bits of the scene correctly exposed (so in the lightest image, the shadows will be nicely exposed, and in the darkest image, the highlights will be nicely exposed).
• HDR images are single images made up of a combination of the bracketed photos, using the parts of each image that are correctly exposed. HDR stands for “High Dynamic Range”, as the final image ends up having a higher range of light intensities than a stand image. The reason for creating HDR images is to provide a more accurate representation of the scene, as your eyes can cope with a wider range of light intensities than a camera.

As you may be aware, I do no post-processing of my photos normally, so to combine multiple images into one digitally is a bit of a blurring of my principles! However, I’m up for trying something new. So, below you can see the same image; one using HDR, and one just normal.

I’d be interested to know – which do you prefer? Please vote using the links below:

I like the first one (HDR image)

I like the second one (unadulterated image)

Thank you!