I’ve come up with a simple rule-of-thumb for cropping group pictures: Center heads horizontally, so that the left and rightmost people are the same distance from the edges of the shot. Don’t worry about torsos and legs, focus on the heads. Vertically, aim for the rule of thirds.

Mark Richard’s Core Memory project, a coffee table book on vintage computers (Thanks John).

I was recovering some data today after a random kernel bug munged a folder of photos, and I discovered how my Minolta Z5 captures video: It saves each frame as a low-quality JPEG, compressing them into a QuickTime video (then deleting) after the capture is complete. Recovering them after the fact opens up some interesting possibilities …

Some advice from an older photographer to the young’uns. The advice is oddly applicable to software developers. Mostly, learn at every possible opportunity.

Here’s a contest where 28 photographers post-processed a mediocre image in different ways,¹ showing that nudging and interpretation are most of what makes up quality in art. I think that this same principle translates to software aesthetics, in that quality is a matter of tweaking the visual properties, to find a better balance of purpose.

1. Be sure to read through each interpreted photo link, each one talks a bit about what/why ↩

Taking pictures is fun. It’s an ego trip. Armed with a camera, anyone can slice the world into tiny planes of expression. Photography can be art, history, science, or just plain interesting. But how can you escape the mundane?

The inspiration for this HOWTO came from a friend who reminded me that the greats of photography worked with primitive equipment, and that even the simple cameraphone was enough to create art. So I grabbed my camera phone and took some very average shots. I then I applied a few simple tweaks using the Gimp, and the results were surprising. In the end, good photography is more than just equipment and light.

It turns out that the process is really quite simple:

1. Shoot. Get closer. Try different angles, and take several shots.
2. Crop. Rotate. Find the interestingness.
3. Blur the image and reduce the camera noise (unless it looks cool).
4. Adjust the levels.
5. Fit the contrast to the texture of the image. Higher contrast for crispy, lower for fluffy.
6. Nudge the colours. Try different tones and saturations.
7. If the colours are really horrid (or the image is still noisy), drop to black-and-white.

A simple site of photography lighting tips, presented in an interesting foolscap paper theme.

My favorite web comic of 2006: What the duck, a wacky commentary about digital photography and nerd life.

A great set of digital photography tutorials (via Pete’s linkfarm).

Photography Today and Tomorrow, a big-picture view of the world of photography.