tasuki’s blog

My blog is dead. Long live my blog!

My plans have changed. I am going to Korea for three months to study go. Then I’m going back to Amsterdam, almost moneyless, to begin the new life.

You can have a look at amazing amounts of new photos.

The EGC was mostly eneventful. After a promising first week, second week was a small disaster.

I am in Amsterdam now. I love Amsterdam.

Tomorrow, I’m flying to Korea. I was urged (by several people!) to put some info from Korea here — I will try not to disappoint you.

Good night.

LSG has ended. It was too short but a lot of fun. I’ve made about two bazzilion photographs, which I’ve managed to reduce to just 212. You are invited to see pictures from LSG 2009. They are mostly portraits, as I’m still in love with my Samyang 85/1.4 and I mostly refuse to use the kit 18-55mm lens.

You might be also interested in my gallery from Warsaw go tournament, or more generally in my pictures from the year 2009.

Again, I have no time to write much more, but hopefully all the pictures will keep you interested for a while. European Go Congress is coming up shortly, so I’m not getting a break in go nor in photography… And then — well, there’s time to slack off, travel, play go, make pics, drink vodka, and have fun, and then there’s time to work. Time to work is getting close, and to my own surprise, I’m sort of looking forward to it.

I’ve wanted a DSLR for a while. At first, I wanted to buy an entry level camera like Canon 1000D, but after I found out that the price of a used Canon 20D (semiprofessional camera, about five years old model) was considerably lower than price of 1000D, I just had to buy it.

1000D has more megapixels, but that’s about where the advantages end. 20D is more sturdy, has better handling and controls, rubberized grip, bigger viewfinder, higher frameburst rate (5 shots per second) and better high iso performance.

I decided to buy two lenses (neither money nor space for more ). The first one was the kit 18-55mm with IS (maybe buying used lenses isn’t such a good idea… but hey — it was cheap). As the second one, I originally wanted to buy Canon 50mm f/1.8, but I wanted also a little longer lens (I already have 50mm covered by the kit lens) and after finding the new Samyang 85mm f/1.4 with manual focus, it was an easy decision. That said, I’m still fighting with getting the focus right (it is very very hard, as almost everything appears in focus in the viewfinder… I wish I had live view and could zoom in to get preview of focus).

I am really happy with the high iso performance. With Canon 20D at ISO 3200, the noise is somewhere between ISO 200 and 400 on my point & shoot Canon A590. Five shots per second is very useful whenever you are shooting something moving unpredictably (kittens!).

I hope I haven’t become an equipment-theoretician freak yet.

The first time I saw square thumbnails (ie. thumbnails which are downsized and cropped to square) I thought they were the best thing since sliced bread.

The advantages of square thumbnails are obvious:

• they are really easy to align and never mess up your layout
• the layout will look more uniform and better than with irregular thumbnails
• they do not show everything so they invite the visitor to view the full sized picture

But there is a downside. Square thumbnails alter the composition of the picture. In some cases, when the photographer hasn’t thought much about composition, it can often actually improve the picture. But in other cases, when the composition is deliberate and well thought out, the square thumbnail can destroy it completely.

I use square thumbnails in my photo gallery (have you seen the pictures from my recent cross-country skiing trip?). And I keep wondering whether I should change it to normal thumbnails (normal = scaled down so as to fit into a given rectangle while preserving the aspect ratio).

Do you personally prefer photo galleries with square thumbnails (cropped) or with normal ones?

“What took you so long?”

Yes, I’ve returned from LSG a week ago. But I spent all my time either at work or creating the photogallery (I made over 800 pictures but my memory card got full so I had to delete the bad ones, I returned with over 650 pictures and the gallery is 187, so — as you can see — it was a lot of work).

LSG was great (you can see mroe photogalleries), and I really regret having to wait almost 350 days for the next one again. Last year when I came home from LSG I just sat there for several days doing nothing and waiting for the next LSG. Luckily, this year work takes care of that, it’s really good to have something concrete to do.

Sorry for a boring post, hopefully it was at least short enough. (and hey — it included links to photos… by the way, my favourite pictures from my own gallery are 4, 32, 94, 100, 109, 149, 152, 176, 178 and 181)

“Tone mapping reduces global contrast in images while increasing local contrast and shadow/highlight detail.” or so Gimp Addict’s Tone Mapper tutorial says. Go and read his tutorial, I will add few comments to it:
4) “radius of 100-500 is good” — yes, it usually is, but since we don’t know the size of the image, I’d rather say that 10% of image size (that is (width+height)/2) is a good starting point.
5) 75% is again a good starting point, but you might want to play around with the value.
7) It depends… if you want to increase the tonemapping effect, duplicating the “soft light” layer is the way to go (I’ve tried changing the layer mode and nothing else really worked at all).

So I wanted to create a script that would do this. After searching the GIMP Plugin Registry, I found Tone mapping script, which basically follows Gimp Addict’s guide. However, it only has two options – the amount of blur and the amount of layer transparency. That certainly isn’t enough for me. Luckily, the plugin is GPL…

(((GIMP’s Script-Fu) uses Scheme) (which is (a dialect) (of the (Lisp (programming language)))) ((Lisp is a (programming language)) (for people) (who (really (really (like parentheses))))))

And because I like parentheses almost half as much as an average Lisp programmer, I rewrote the Tone mapping script and created Advanced Tone Mapping script. Feel free to put it in your GIMP’s script directory (~/.gimp-2.4/scripts/ in my case).

There are four parameters for Advanced Tone Mapping script:

• Gauss. Blur (% of img size) — is the amount saying how much the blurring should be used for the tone mapping. It is in percents of image size (where image size = (width+height)/2). Ten is a good default, but different values might be interesting too.
• Opacity of blurred layer — this is the 75 default, which can be changed if you want stronger or weaker effect.
• Opacity of merged layer — the default is 90. If 100 is not enough, consider increasing number of “copies of merged layer”.
• Copies of merged layer — when one, it’s barely noticeable, you can deny any accusations of postprocessing easily. Three has a lot of “halo effect” and anything above five will completely mess all colours up.

The first set of pictures is simply a preview. The image on the left is the original image, and the image on the right is processed by Advanced Tone Mapping with Gaussian-blur set to 10, opacity of blurred layer equal 75, opacity of merged layer full 100, and finally three copies of the merged layer (note the way I use to show those values — it is also used for naming the layers, which can be handy if you later forget which layer is which or what you have done). The image on the right might be a bit over the top, but it shows nicely what can be done with Advanced Tone Mapping script:

The next example shows some pretty conservative tone mapping. The one on the left was created with almost none blur, while the one on the right has 10% blur. Note the difference: the one on the left has no halo but appears a bit flat, while the one on the right has a slight halo but also has higher level of detail.

Oh my… the following example shows what can go wrong with tone mapping (I’m sorry for all the people who already gouged their eyes out). The reason why image on the left appears so flat and awful is that almost no blur was applied. The image on the right is a comparison with healthy blur applied. Five copies is still a bit too much, but hey, at least it has kind of action-like look.

The last image shows the difference between the default blur and maximum blur available. As you can see in the right side picture, the halo is so huge it’s almost impossible to see. The bad news is that with maximum blur we lose a lot of detail near the borders of light/dark areas.

Ok, that’s it — now go and experiment with my script on your own photos.

PS: Underexpose your images — the dark areas can still be lightened, while the burned out areas are usually completely white and can’t be darkened.

PPS: The more contrast there is, the more layers you apply, the more blur you will usually need.

PPPS: Any kind of noise in your picture will be greatly amplified.

PPPPS: No, this is not HDR, this is just tone mapping of a single image (just jpeg, in my case). Tone mapping is a part of HDR, but HDR is not a part of tone mapping.

For newbies, by a newbie.

• It doesn’t really matter what kind of a camera you have (ok, no cell phone camera, you need some kind of a lens).
• Most modern cameras can decide the exposure settings just fine in 90% of cases. Nevertheless, you should learn to operate in manual mode too (for example, the closest distance my camera is able to autofocus at is about 15cm, using manual focus makes it about 2cm (it used to be my dad’s camera and he thought for two years that 15cm was the closest it could do)).
• Flash is evil. (funny, exactly the same rule applies in webdesign)
• The only exception to the above rule is using flash to light nearby dark objects in an otherwise well lit scene.
• If you do not have enough light, feel free to increase the ISO speed. Or bring a tripod. Or emulate it somehow (don’t forget to use a short timer to avoid touching the camera when it fires).
• By far the most important thing is the composition. (there are also other good resources about composition)
• Actually, there are no rules for composition. But it is still the most important thing.
• Postprocessing is your friend. (the examples here use GIMP, but similar techniques will work in other image editing software too)
  • Three alternative ways to do a Very Important Thing ™:
    • the easiest and fastest: Colors > Levels > Auto (this works when you have both real “white point” and “black point” in your picture)
    • slightly more control: Colors > Levels, and play with it (you usually want to leave the output levels alone and shrink the input levels according to the histogram, you can set this individually for each color channel)
    • and finally: Colors > Curves (this is like Levels but with more control — you do not only set the starting and ending point of the curve, you can also change its shape (slight S curve often improves the image a lot)
  • Orton effect (aka dreamy look): duplicate layer > Filters > Blur > Gaussian Blur (set something reasonable depending on your picture size, experiment) > set layer mode (multiply, overlay, hard light, or whatever… experiment) > set layer transparency (uh, guess what… experiment?)
  • Tone mapping: duplicate layer > duplicate layer > Desaturate > Invert Colors > Gaussian blur > Layer opacity to cca 70 > merge layer down > set layer mode > set opacity
  • Vignette effect (aka lomography): new layer > E (elliptical regions) > select accross the whole picture > invert selection > Select > Feather (set to something reasonable, experiment) > fill selected area with black > set opacity (usually 20 or so)
  • And while all these effects are great, try not to use all of them at once.
• Finally, publish your photos on the internets (flickr, picasa, etc).
• Flickr is still the best photosharing site around (even though they have the bloody videos now — which even started polluting Explore), it has the most amazing community and most talented photographers
• By the way, all that I know about photography (ok, not much) I learned on flickr, just watching Explore, and sometimes reading the comments.

What a mess of a post.
On the other hand it does contain plenty of good info, it’s just a bit too much concentrated.

As we all know, Flickr is the best photo sharing site (if you haven’t heard it yet, Microsoft is buying Yahoo, who own Flickr… so there’s a very real possibility that Microsoft will kill Flickr, which would make me hate them even more). Almost unbelievably, the flickr source is only 60k lines of php and 60k lines of templates… I’ve seen 10k lines files that didn’t do anything useful. The fact that all of the Flickr’s functionality can fit in 60k lines is simply amazing.

Flickr has the best features and — even more importantly — best photographers and best photos. Flickr Explore shows some of the most interesting, provoking and artistic photos.

And the best way to view any Flickr galleries (including Explore) is Flickriver. It’s currently my most favourite site on all the internets.

Why Flickriver rocks:

• Infinite scrolling (aka river) enables you to get to see more photos simply by scrolling to the bottom. No more clicking “next” and “previous”! (I absolutely hate paging, having everything on one page is just perfect)
• Black background just makes it look good. Show me a photo that looks better on white background and I’ll show you a hundred that look better on black background.
• Larger image previews are much better than the small squares you usually see on flickr, you see the full uncropped picture, and you see it at a size which actually enables you to recognize what is displayed on the picture.

At least once a week, I visit Flickriver and go through at least top 50 explore photos from each day since my last visit. I’ve been doing this for several months yet I’m amazed over and over again how perfect photos there are.

Give Flickriver a try, I’m sure you won’t regret it!

Oh, and I can highly suggest viewing my favourite photos (mostly falling into at least one of these categories: hdr, landscapes, mist/fog, cities, conceptual).

You might have seen my crazy ticket folding gallery.

Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet.

Here are some of the latest, greatest and bestest tickets:

This ticket is currently my favourite, but you’d have to see it as a whole to really appreciate it, seeing from just one direction simply isn’t enough.

Another view of the previous one, a bit of a rear view.

The part that you can see in the upper left gave me a lot of headache, and the more I try to do something reasonable with it, the worse it gets (the one thing that you should avoid when folding is making folds which tend to erase each other (ie. as you fold one the other unfolds and vice versa, that is exactly the situation in upper left))

This one has a lot of straight lines, but I still love it, the upper left contains one fold that shouldn’t have been there, but it can’t be really seen from this side )

A very artificial one, cascading round folds (extremely difficult to do well, I succeeded here, although the pic might be a bit too small to see it properly.

Totally baroque ticket. It’s getting a bit old and I am afraid it will soon fall apart. Again, it has many features that need to be seen (and touched!) irl.

An artificial experiment that turned out very well. There is an annoying straight fold between the cascades which shouldn’t have been there.

The same, a bit less artistical lightning which allows a better view of the actual ticket.

Pure round fold. If you think that those tickets are easy to fold, try this. I made this one exclusively for the photo (I fold most of tickets just for the sake of folding, therefore they are rarely suitable for photos).

This is on the other end of the scale – 100% natural. I found it in the trash one day, crumpled and abandoned. Of course I saved it, removed some folds that needed removing and improved the good ones (and added a few of my own). I very much like it. It’s not very suitable for a photo though.

Round folds, one inside another. Quite photographable.

Wrapped up in itself – prolly needs to be seen irl to appreciate.

This is a rather big ticket (some 10×12cm) from Poland. Recently I added the leftmost fold (the one which can barely be seen), not a good idea, it disrupts the lower fold (as you can see).

Testing the boundaries.

Tight round fold, a bit tricky to keep it round, these tend to sharpen.

Just some cascades.

Am I crazy? Well yes, sure.

PS: Hello WordPress, could you fucking stop touching my html? Many thanks.

UPDATE: The photos are now clickable (use the middle mouse button in firefox to open in new tab).

I’ve just spent a wonderful week in Risoul (their web sucks big time, but I feel compelled to link it anyway).

It was a great trip, the weather was nice (mostly sunny but some clouds too, which was good because the snow usully kept bellow zero even in the afternoon).

Out of the six days of skiing, I fell three times:

The first one was classical – I was trying to do a left turn, but my left ski got stuck in a pile of snow. Subsequently, the binding let go and I fell in a magnificent way, providing entertainment for the few onlookers.

The second one was just plain stupid and boring. I was trying to brake by making a 180˚ turn at a very low speed (always a bad idea). Of course the heavy snow layer was a bit thicker than I expected, so I fell over.

The third one was nasty, I was just practicing carving skiing and was inspecting my last carved turn (carving turns usually throw you out at a fairly high speed). It was in the morning, the pistes were groomed and there weren’t many people. I thought it was all clear and easy, but apparently I missed the fact that the piste was going quite a bit uphill. As I approached this uphill at a fairly high speed and completely unaware, it cought me by surprise and threw me on my back. I managed to stand up without losing much speed, but after stopping, I noticed that my right thumb was really hurting.

After that, the thumb was growing for about an hour. It grew so much that removing my glove showed impossible (in the evening I somehow managed, but it took a lot of effort and it was rather painful). Now (after more than three days), I can move my thumb and use it for simple tasks that do not require much power.

I spent the first three days skiing the boring same style I’ve practiced for all my life. It’s quite elegant, but not quite as enjoyable. I just go down the hill, letting the ski slip vertically. I think I got quite good at it, but it requires quite a steep slope to reach a good speed, and I was always really bored on the less steep pistes, waiting for a place to gain some speed.

Carving style, on the other hand, is much more dynamical. You retain your speed, because by doing the turn using the edge of the ski, you effectively avoid skidding.

So I spent the other three days trying to learn carve turns and I think I succeeded. Because of the hurt thumb, I got rid of the poles and I found out that they were in fact quite useless.

Mhmm, this post is getting quite long, so I’d better stop it soon… anyways, if you have read this far — have a look at my photo gallery from Risoul!