Seagate Free Agent Go 320GB on Ubuntu

I finally bought an external HDD - Seagate Free Agent GO 320 GB. Its a classy little device - fits nicely in my bag. I got it for INR3400/- from Plug n Play, Lamington Road, Mumbai. It came with a 2 year warranty and a auto sync software.

It got detected on my office machine which is a Dell D630 which runs Microsoft Vista. Now since I have Ubuntu Linux at my home, I could not use this out of box. The default format is NFTS that did not let me mount the device on 8.04 LTS.

I initially tried formatting to FAT32, but Vista does not allow this from front end. I tried to format in FAT32 using command line, but it created lot of noise and finally did not format it. Also, I read somewhere about FAT32 creating issues with files larger than 4GB.

I then searched for mounting NTFS HDD on Ubuntu forum and found that if I added couple of additional packages then I could do this.

I had to add the following two packages from the repo:
1. ntfs-3g
2. ntfs-config

Once these were installed and setup for read-write access, I plugged in the HDD and it worked like a charm!!

I can now seamlessly copy data from windows machine to ubuntu and other way...!!

Some extra effort on Ubuntu is worth much more than pain caused by pirated windows!

Slow sync flash to capture mobile phone details

Have you seen those mobile phone pictures in magazines and newspapers? Like these two here:

http://www.techgadgets.in/images/sony-ericsson-mobile-phones.jpg

http://www.thelatestone.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/sony-ericsson-c903-cybershot.jpg

As you can see, both these picture display the phone's shape very clearly and also the illumination in the screen and keypad. There are two illuminated areas in a mobile phone – the screen and the keypad. I was trying to get result similar to these print ads some time back.

My objective: illumination inside the screen and on the keypad should be displayed along with giving enough details about the shape and brand of the phone. All this without the use of any image manipulation using post processing softwares.

I started off by changing my mobile phone setting to display the screen and key pad lights for 60 seconds after which they will shut.

First Try:
f/9 | 2.9s | ISO 100 | Flash Off | Ambient light via 20w bulb


I got the illumination in the screen and keypad, but could not highlight the shape / brand of mobile

Second Try:
f/14 | 1/100s | ISO 100 | Flash On (Full Power) | Ambient light via 20w bulb




Here, I got the shape but the flash over powered every other aspect of the shot – no screen or keypad illumination was captured. In fact, due to flash, all artifacts on my phone (dirt particles, finger prints etc) started displaying very prominently.

Third Try:
f/14 | 5s | ISO 100 | Flash On (First Curtain Sync) | Ambient light via 20w bulb


The first curtain sync worked like a charm. The shutter was open for 5 seconds in which I got the flash to fire as soon as the curtain is opened. This made sure the mobile phone shape is captured. I placed a white card paper behind the phone to throw some light back on phone to capture the brand name.

Once that was done, the camera kept capturing illumination of screen and keypad in the next 4 seconds with help of some very low ambient light.

Similar results can be obtained by 'rear or second curtain sync' also.

Smoke Photography: Alternative to using external flash

Smoke photography always fascinated me. It creates such surreal abstract patterns that you can't take your eyes off the final creation!

I read the technique of how this is done and found some very good tutorials on this subject here and here. I also found a Flickr group which has many images and good discussions around this art form.

In summary, there are three basic requirements that your setup need to meet:

the first requirement is to have a dark background,

the second is to fire the flash at an angle such that it illuminates the smoke but does not light the background. Typically, keep the flash at 10 o'clock position from where you stand, a little below to incense, and fire it towards the smoke,

and the third requirement is to use a fast shutter speed. Smoke by its nature will lose it's form very quickly. So a shutter speed of at least 1/200s will allow you to freeze the smoke and give you crisp patterns.

Now the best way to meet these requirements is to use a external flashgun which you can sync with your camera at say 1/200s. That way, when you fire the shutter, external flash goes off at the same time (almost). I have heard that people use flash triggers to fire the external flash.

Once you capture the smoke then it is all post processing that gives you the final result.

In this post, I will only talk about what limitations I faced which prevented me from using the above mentioned technique for capturing smoke.

The main problem – you can call it the show stopper, was that I do not own a external flash or a direct focus light!!! So there is no way I can get the light at an angle. So I thought that story ends here unless I can think of some way to fire flash or a light burst from an angle.

After lot’s of trial and error (….and a pair of watery burning eyes), I came up with this idea…….

I decided to use two cameras - my DSLR mounted on tripod as the main camera and got my old point and shoot camera and tried to use it as flash instead of an external flash.

The issue here was that I found it nearly impossible to time the flash from point and shoot to sync with shutter speed of 1/200s. Result was a lot of (mostly) black frames with no smoke captured!! So using a fast shutter speed was not an option available to me.

Then I thought that it is a dark room with hardly any light, and small aperture (f/11 – f14) even with long exposure time of 3-4 seconds, without flash, did not give me any chance of getting any thing exposed. But in the same dark room, if I fire the flash even once, in between these 3-4 seconds when the camera shutter is open, I will be able to capture some thing.

So I did the setup – used a black card paper as background, lit up an incense (agarbatti or dhoop sticks available in market) and instead of external flash, I placed my point and shoot camera and fired the flash (just took a picture with flash forced) while the main camera shutter was open for 4 seconds.

I used self timer to release the main camera shutter – so that gave me 10 seconds to adjust the point and shoot flash angle and create nice smoke patterns (I very lightly blew some air on the incense).

I was getting the smoke captured, but the flash from point and shoot was lighting up the whole area including the black background and I was loosing contrast.

I needed to focus the flash output to a narrow area around the smoke – what I needed was a ‘snoot’ – an object you fit on top of your flash to narrow the beam if you will. I do not have a snoot either (remember, I don’t have a external flash….so having a snoot was a no brainer!!)

Another cheap trick - I picked up a old newspaper, rolled it and made a cone out of it and used it as a snoot in front of the point and shoot camera. Call it crude, but it worked!!

That’s it – the steps after the smoke is captured remain same as documented by others. Increase contrast, use levels, increase sharpness a bit, invert and then use color tools - Hue/Saturation to color the smoke.

I used GIMP on Ubuntu Linux 8.04 for the post processing. Some pro’s and con’s I observed:

Pro’s:

You now have a workaround if you do not own a external flash!! No need to feel jealous looking at all amazing pictures others clicked just because you do not have external flash!!

Con’s:

Due to long exposure, and suspended smoke particles in air, your pictures tend to get noisy and may not be good in contrast / sharpness as they would with a fast shutter speed synced with a external flash.

It is luck dependent as you cannot shoot as soon as you see an interesting pattern forming. You hope that within the 3-4 seconds you kept your shutter open, some good patterns do come up.

But what the heck, think of it this way - now you can at least do some trial without spending additional money on external flash.

If you don’t have additional camera, then just borrow your friends camera and use it as flash!! Don’t forget to gift him a mounted print so that keeps him happy!!!

While closing I get one more thought – can I use my mobile phone camera as a flash?

If you try out this techniques, do share your pictures!

Once in a life time experience: download RAW files on Windows XP machine!!!

I shoot a lot of staged shots so the number of clicks is always like 5 or less.

On my home machine, I have Ubuntu Linux 8.04LTS which recognizes my camera and lets me copy paste RAW images without any fuss what so ever. No driver no proprietary software. Just the default F-spot image manager works like a charm.

So when number of shots were less and Ubuntu recognized the camera, I pretty much used to plug my camera in the USB slot and download the images......all was well and life was all nice and happy!!

It was last week when I realized how badly I can get stuck up if I rely on camera-PC communication rather then using a dedicated card reader.

I wanted to transfer a few gigs worth of photos to my dad's computer which has Windows XP and the machine would not recognize my RAW images when plugged in. JPG's were seen and were downloadable, but RAW files were just not displayed.

After doing some research and reading many blogs, I got to know that 1) there are many other people having the same problem, and 2) that XP that I had installed (I have a pretty old system) would not recognize RAW files unless I patch it up and install a RAW viewer from Microsoft site (this is only for folks who have paid for their OS...they do some checking of if you have a legal copy....else don't even try...you never know what unknown code comes with what you expect to be a simple RAW patch!!!!).

So I download the RAW viewer and installed it and still no luck. I tried to download the latest Canon RAW codec and driver from Canon site, got it, installed it and guess what...still no luck.

I finally gave up and started hunting for DPP or Zoom Browser software's on Canon site as I did not have them installed and did not have the CD which came along the camera.

Apparetly, Canon only allows you to download the updates. It expects something installed on your machine. I found that to be totally illilogical business strategy, but anyways, I could not get the software on my machine.

I had to wait for a few days for my friend to get me the CD....I installed the software and then I was able to download RAW files to the computer.

So much of time and energy lost (not to mention the bandwidth used up on downloading all patches and all).

I decided I had enough of this bullshit - I needed a card reader!!

I checked few shops for readers and finally settled for "Tech-Com 36 in 1" card reader which I got for INR. 225/-.

Tested it out and felt why I did not go for it earlier.....

1GB Transfer: Camera - PC: 8-12 Mins (connection broke once or twice in between transfer)
1GB Transfer: Card Reader - PC: 2.56 Mins

No dependency to operating systems anymore - no drain on camera battery - just shove the card in the reader, plug the damn thing in USB and you are all set to download the images.

Camera: Canon 350D
Card: CF II 1GB
Card Reader: Tech-Com 36 in 1 exteral card reader

Camera-PC Test
Operating Systems Tested on: XP, Vista, Ubuntu 8.04LTS

Card-PC Test
Operating Systems Tested on: XP, Ubuntu 8.04LTS

So, take a cue from my lesson and get yourself a card reader. It's cheap, it's small and you will save a lot of headache when using someone else's computer which does not have the needed softwares or while traveling and using a cyber cafe PC to download images which does not have a card reader.

My camera says snow is gray color – a beginners guide to camera's in-built metering

My cousin recently came back from Kashmir and Simla annual vacation. Needless to say, armed with the latest digital camera, she came back with tons of pictures and was excited to show them to us.

I had seen pictures of Kashmir in magazines and television with it's snow capped mountain peaks, beautiful landscapes covered with snow, children playing in white fluffy snow, and pristine crystal clear rivers cutting through the landscape!!!!

I was quite disappointed when I saw the pictures that were taken during the vacation. It presented quite a different story to what I was expecting. The pictures were dull, colors did not look right, and lacked that “punch” in them.

My cousin, determined to impress everyone with the pictures, immediately started her favorite photo editing program and started fidgeting with levels, brightness, contrast and other functions of a modern day post processing tools. She clearly was relying on visual changes that were happening on her monitor to decide that pictures to look as good as the scene she had seen.

After updating 150+ pictures and spending close to 20 hours in front of the computer salvaging the pictures, she asked me why this happened and if there was something wrong with the camera.

She asked me a few questions:

“Why did the snow look gray in pictures and not white as it was actually.” “Why did the black color wooden cottage look gray and not near to black”

I explained to her that this was due to how “your camera's meter” saw the snow and determined the amount of light needed to expose it correctly versus what you “thought” it saw and registered.

Camera's in-built meter are designed to work with “reflected light” off the scene (majority of them). The design takes some assumption that all subjects are average color and will reflect average light off the subject to meter and there will be more then one color in the frame. This assumption works in most cases as normally you will have shades of multiple colors in a scene. This gives you near to correct exposure.

Things get tricky when you have dominance of one color in a scene. Meter gets fooled in believing that there is too much or too little light and result is over or under exposure.

Most noticeable are the whites and blacks as our eyes are trained to see black as pure black and white as pure white. We can very easily make out if white or black color is not looking like what it did when you shot the scene.

I shared a simple trick with her that my father shared with me when I was very new to photography. "In order to get correct exposure, over expose by a stop or two when shooting white subjects and under expose by a stop or two when shooting black subjects."

She clearly looked confused, so I did a little experiment to explain her what I was trying to say. I tried to replicate the environment in which she took pictures by using “near to white” and “near to black” subjects and shooting them individually on same color background.

Here is the test setup and settings:

White Subjects:
1) 3 to 4 mint capsules
2) iPod docking station
3) white paper with a white cloth for base material on which subjects were placed

Black Subjects:
1) My phone
2) Ear phones
3) black cloth for base material on which subjects were placed

Camera settings:
1) Canon 350D with 18-55mm lens (Tripod Mounted)
2) Focal length: 35mm
3) Aperture (Av): f/8
4) ISO: 100
5) Camera to subject angle: 30 – 45 degrees
6) Metering Mode: Evaluative (as this is the default in most cameras)
7) White Balance: Auto

Post processing:
1) RAW to JPG Conversion using UFRaw
2) Resized images using GIMP batch processing


White Subject: Test results & Observations:

Image 1: Exposure as per camera's in-built meter Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/30s
Heavily under exposed

This picture turned out to be pretty dull and clearly under exposed. This shows that the camera meter did not understand that the subject itself is white and it need not reduce the light reaching the sensor. In this case, since the frame is filled with white subject, meter thinks that there is too much light in the frame and sends less of it to the sensor thinking that it is avoiding over exposure.

In order to get the desired results, I started moving away from the suggested exposure as per the meter. Since it is white subject and meter is under exposing (sending less light to sensor), I intentionally started over exposing (sending more light to sensor).

I increased the exposure by 1 stop and 1/3rd stops thereafter to get the following results.

Image 2: Meter +1 stop Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/15s
Better than metered, but still under exposed

Image 3: Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/13s
Correct exposure very near to what was seen by eye
Image 4: Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/10s
Over exposure seen in some areas

Image 5: Meter +2 stops Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/8s
Over exposure seen in most areas
Observation:
While shooting white / near to white subjects, over exposing between +1 and +1 ½ stops, I got accurate reproduction of lighting and colors. Image # 3 above is correct exposure for this test.

Moment I reached near the +2 mark, over exposure was seen and I lost details in the subject.

Black Subject: Test results & Observations:

Image 1: Exposure as per camera's in-built meter Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/4s
Over exposure seen in most areas - black is looking washed out and more towards gray



This picture turned out to be clearly over exposed. This shows that the camera meter did not understand that the subject itself is black and it need not increase the light reaching the sensor. In this case, since the frame is filled with black subject, meter thinks that there is way too less light in the frame and sends more light to the sensor thinking that it is avoiding under exposure.

In order to get the desired results, I started moving away from the suggested exposure as per the meter. Since it is black subject and meter is over exposing (sending more light to sensor), I intentionally started under exposing (sending less light to sensor).

I reduced the exposure by 1 stop and 1/3rd stops thereafter to get the following results.

Image 2: Meter -1 stop Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/8s
Black is seen as near to black




Image 3: Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/10s
Black is seen as near to black - little more improvement from earlier shot




Image 4: Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/13s
Perfect exposure - black is looking pure black as seen by eye



Image 5: Meter +2 stops Shutter Speed (Tv): 1/15s
Black is seen as black, but we start loosing details in subject



Observation:
While shooting black / near to black subjects, under exposing between -1 and -1 ½ stops, I got accurate reproduction of lighting and colors. Image #4 is the correct exposure for this test.

Moment I reached near the -2 mark, under exposure was seen and I lost details in the subject.

Conclusion:
Metering is a tricky subject and mastering it will take some study and lot of practice for all of us. I hope with this post, I have cleared some basic doubts of how in-built meters work and some simple ways in which we can avoid under and over exposure.

Do share if you have any tips or suggestions on this topic.

Other related readings:
http://www.kodak.com/cluster/global/en/consumer/products/techInfo/af9/index.shtml