Live Photos is one of the most interesting new features of the iPhone. The iPhone is the most used camera I have, because it is always with me. And until now I have been quite all right at taking the photos I want. Live photos adds a time dimension to my photos, and this means I have to re-learn what it is to compose a photo, what it is to frame a photo, what it is to shoot a photo.

Right of the bat, the first thing I wanted was to bring a tripod with me. Because even though I could capture the movement in the situation, I actually caught a lot of movement in my hand. And this is on the iPhone 6S Plus that has image stabilization. Obviously I’m not going to carry a tripod around, but it means I have to re-learn how to hold the iPhone while shooting a photo.

Apple proposed that this feature gives context to the photos, but the fact it can be used for a lock screen and as a Watch face means that the entire live photo is your composition, not just a photo with context. I think I’ll read a bit up on how people shoot short video clips to get a couple of pointers for framing and composition.

So, time to learn more photography

My camera marks HDR images quite clearly: They are a sequence of images, where the first second one and third one are equally many stops removed from the first one, and they’re usually within a couple of seconds from one-another, with all other settings the same. That sounds like something that should be easy to stack in the import-process, right? Preferably followed up by a rendering to a 32-bit pr channel image straight afterward that is set as the stack top image.

Unfortunately, I don’t know Lua, so I won’t write it myself any time soon. But such a trivial plugin should exist after all these iterations. Heck, it should be a core functionality!

As for grouping, possibly even a quick pre-rendering, I’d argue there should be a similar Panorama function.

Can anyone recommend any plugins?

Wow, I remember back in 1998, me and another photo enthusiast were discussing DSLRs vs digital film. I was holding out on DSLRs until there was a camera that could fit my lenses and was as good as the Canon 500N I had at the time. Turned out I’d be waiting a while, the first one I got (matched the requirements!) was the Canon 20D. Anyway, my friend showed a links on Slashdot and a few papers on “Digital Film”, and I had to agree: that was probably a much better fit for the time.

Well, digital film didn’t materialize, until now (or rather, soon) hopefully: Tom’s guide has an article where they describe Park Hyun Jin’s concept:

While in my mind the right time was 1998 and the wrong time is 2011, I would still love a “roll” for my analogue camera, and I might even get a few more old systems for the pure joy of using them

In this first video blogpost I follow up on my two blogposts from 2005, I show you how easy it is to put a Pentax m42 mount lens, one of the most popular kind of lenses from the 1950s up until the late 1980s, on a Canon EOS DSLR body. Back in 2005 I used the EOS 20D, now I use the EOS 5DmkII, but it’s just as easy.

The lens I put on the camera is a Helios 85mm f/1.5, second generation, meaning that it has a 42mm screw-mount instead of the original 39mm. The adapter is a m42 EOS AF confirm adapter that you can find on eBay for around $15.

Frustrated about having Faces in iPhoto and not in Lightroom? Frustrated that it’s then in Aperture, but not Lightroom 3 beta 1 and 2? Frustrated about not hearing about it being a priority in Lightroom at all? And still addicted to Lightroom? Yupp, me too. But this night, for reasons not related to this post, I thought, hey, perhaps Picasa can help out? What I found is too good to be true, so it’s probably going to have all kinds of weird side-effects. But for now it seems to be great! You see, Picasa doesn’t move the files out of place, and it works with XMP (which Aperture does not, even though it claims to). And of course, I save all changes in an XMP sidecar. This great article simply states that all face detection will be written back as metadata in the file, and even updated into the XMP, so that I can just read it back into Lightroom! That sounds fantastic! So right now I’m scanning my entire library and look forward to a lot of tagging!