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Archive for May, 2009

Saturday, May 30th 2009

Kronskogen, Eskilstuna

Felt a sudden creative urge yesterday and headed out to Kronskogen. Nice light and some nice dandelions.

And a slug.

And some Lilacs in the garden.

Tags: HDR, Photomatix
Posted in Eskilstuna, photography | 3 Comments »

Friday, May 29th 2009

Today Jenny and I finally got round to sending some panoramas off for printing from Crimson. We already bought a panorama frame from IKEA (88 x 30 cm, or roughly 35″ x 12″), but haven’t had anything to put in it so far.

Screenshot of Crimson.se poster service options.

Since the printing place doesn’t do 88 x 30 cm, we stuck two panoramas in one image and had it printed at 100 x 70 cm. Plus a small one along the edge as a bonus. Obviously we’ll have to cut them out ourselves.

We’re thinking of sticking one of the large ones above our chest the drawers in our bedroom. Which one remains to be agreed on, with me voting for Paris and Jenny voting for Visby. We’ll probably end up getting a second frame and putting it above the bed …

Tags: panorama
Posted in photography | Comments Off

Monday, May 25th 2009

Getting the Most out of Photos on Facebook

Image quality on Facebook is awful. That’s the simple truth. Just compare what you get at Flickr and Facebook.

Flickr:

Facebook:

Facebook just completely mutes the colours. Look at the red lights on the cars, or the red windows of the building. And sharpness is nowhere to be found. The tree is just a mushy green mess.

While Flickr’s default size is a bit on the small side (500 pixels), it still contains more than twice as much information (163 kB) as the Facebook version (67 kB).

So … what can be done about Facebook’s mangling of perfectly good photos? Well, if you do the downsizing and sharpening yourself you get more detail left at the end, in the resulting image after Facebook has done its ruthless compression.

This is very easy if you’re using Lightroom, but can definitely be done with any other imaging software as well. Simply resize your photos to 604 pixels on the longest side, which is the maximum for Facebook, and then apply some sharpening. Personally I do sharpening for screen, level High, in the export window of Lightroom.

This is what you get: (Hover to see the improvement.)

So, you get slightly more detail, but Facebook still murders your colours. Below is a comparison between Facebook version and the 604 pixel original that I uploaded (when hovered):

An alternative to the hassle of downsizing and sharpening is to simply boycott Facebook for photos and just post links to your sets on Flickr …

Tags: Facebook, Flickr
Posted in photography | 2 Comments »

Wednesday, May 20th 2009

Snake’s Head Fritillary by Vaksala Church

I spent the weekend in Uppsala, mainly to celebrate dad’s birthday. We had a very tight schedule, seeing Jenny’s mum and dad and my parents and some other friends, but I managed to fit in a little visit to the meadow by Vaksala kyrka.

This meadow is one of relatively few places around Uppsala where Snake’s Head Fritillary (Kungsängslilja or Fritillaria meleagris) grows, and has always been something of a favourite spot for me. This flower is the provincial flower of Uppland and is protected by law because of its rarity.

It’s quite a charming little flower which can be either a deep red or white, or a mixture of the two.

Optimally, I should have got up at the crack of dawn, around 5 am, to get the nice morning light. But having watched the Eurovision Song Contest until midnight that wasn’t really an option. Instead these shots are taken at about 9 am, so the light is a bit harsh.

I have some more shots in a set at Flickr.

Tags: Uppsala
Posted in photography | 1 Comment »

Friday, May 15th 2009

Eskilstuna shots

Some more shots from my last photo hunt.

Fairly new buildings on Hamngatan.

Pretty Tulips in Fors kyrkopark.

Eskilstunaån, or Eskilstuna river if you wish, with the local heat plant in the background.

The first shot was made from three bracketed exposures using my Gorillapod. The last two were done the same way but hand-held. Slight movements between the three shots don’t matter because Photomatix can align the features of the photos when making the HDR image.

Tags: HDR, Photomatix
Posted in Eskilstuna, photography | Comments Off

Friday, May 15th 2009

Amazing Macro

This has gotta be the most amazing macro I’ve seen for a long time.

Posted in Uncategorized | 1 Comment »

Thursday, May 14th 2009

The Need for Speed

At the end of March, we launched a new version of our website at Eskilstuna-Kuriren, ekuriren.se. We replaced our ancient content manger with a new, modern, flexible system known as Polopoly. Polopoly is developed in Sweden and used by many of the large Swedish news sites.

The launch went smoothly, but soon we started getting e-mail upon e-mail from users about speed problems. After a while it turned out that many Internet Explorer users were having huge problems both loading the page and scrolling the page.

Apparently, when loading the website in Internet Explorer it can sometimes make the whole computer slow down to a halt, forcing a hard reboot. If you manage to load the page, it can scroll painfully slowly.

Obviously, this mainly shows that the site hasn’t been properly tested. A huge majority of our visitors use Internet Explorer. Or at least they used to. Perhaps the percentage has gone down now, from people simply giving up on us. It truly amazes me how the developers still haven’t properly managed to sort out the performance issues. They have supposedly been working on this from day one, which is almost two months back now.

While I still haven’t actually heard a precise technical explanation of what the problem is, this experience shows in a very tangible way how big a difference there is between Internet Explorer and the more modern browsers when it comes to speed. Whether it is the scripting engine or the rendering engine or something else that is causing the problems for Internet Explorer users I don’t know.

What I do know is that we simply haven’t had a single complaint about performance from Firefox or Safari users.

Here’s to hoping that the site admins get the issues sorted as soon as possible and that all browsers will be able to display our news site without the user suffering serious illnesses from frustration.

Posted in Eskilstuna, Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, web design | 1 Comment »

Thursday, May 14th 2009

Stunt kids by the library

Had a good photo hunt yesterday. I was mainly looking for some nice old ruin of some kind, but didn’t really find what I wanted. Still I ended up having some fun with some acrobatic kids outside the library.

I never asked what the guy on the bike was called, but the other two are Cristian Bati and Philip Nordström. They call themselves Ultimate Upgrade and have a few videos on Youtube where they do this kind of stuff too.

Posted in Eskilstuna, photography | Comments Off

Wednesday, May 13th 2009

Tingeling

After having watched the first semi final of the Eurovision Song Contest, the Swedish interval act Tingeling is about ten times funnier than it was the first time I watched it: (Skip to 4.15 for the music part.)

This was done as a parody on Russian culture, and then the Russians themselves go and do exactly the same thing for their real, 100% serious interval act:

But the thing that kills me is that the Russian embassy in Sweden handed in an official complaint to SVT (Swedish television) saying that the parody was humourless and insensitive. (Or something along those lines.)

And while we’re on the subject of interval acts, the best one I can remember was the Stockholm 2000 one:

Tags: Eurovision Song Contest, video
Posted in Uncategorized | Comments Off

Monday, May 11th 2009

An Old Favourite (3)

Me and crazy Silvana got up really early one morning in Sundsvall and walked up the north mountain. That’s two years ago now. Time really does fly. This was one of the best shots I got.

The same morning a woman was found frozen to death in the city harbour. A few of my photos covered the area where she was found so I sent them in to the police, thinking they could see if she was in them (as a tiny speck) or not and use the time-stamps.

Posted in photography | Comments Off