Category: Photography

There is currently a large conversation going on in Flickr on why nudity shouldn’t be allowed. Click here to view it.

Thanks K!

Pictures taken by people of their various Lifehacks. My favorite is the guy who cut up his toilet paper in various sizes (S,M,L,XL) and then organized them! [Link]

Today I had a tough time choosing my picture of the day. I was going to go for this one but decided to go for the more traditional fishing boat picture. This B-Side picture was taking inside the Kout Mall. This Nissan Armada was parked in the middle of the fountain I guess as a display or something.

Todays B-Side is from my office building. They were fixing the elevator again today but this time it was like only 1 guy working. I took his picture and I later realized he was a B-Side before! Poor guy, seems like he will never make the A-list. Click here for todays A-Side picture.

I just downloaded and updated my Nikon D70 Firmware. The first thing you will notice after the upgrade is how much cooler the camera’s menu looks, they redesigned the menus to make them easier to read. It feels as if I just got a new camera. The second major thing they fixed was the number of exposures remaining when shooting in RAW format. Before with my 512MB card it would display 47 shots although I could take a lot more. Now with the upgrade it shows me 88 shots. Below is a more detailed list of the updates:

1. Performance of the 5-area AF system has been improved (Dynamic area and Closest subject AF-area modes).

1. Changes have been made to the design of menu displays.

2. Page-size settings can now be applied from the camera with direct printing from a PictBridge-compatible printer.

3. The number of exposures remaining, displayed in the control panel and viewfinder, when shooting at an image-quality setting of NEF (RAW) or NEF+JPEG Basic has been changed (the number is calculated based on the size of compressed RAW file).
– Maximum number of exposures displayed when a 256-MB CompactFlash memory card is used:
– Version 2.00: NEF (RAW):approx. 44 exposures; NEF+JPEG Basic:approx. 39 exposures
– Version 1.03 or earlier: NEF (RAW):approx. 23 exposures; NEF+JPEG Basic:approx. 21 exposures

4. The default setting for camera clock has been changed from 2004.01.01 to 2005.01.01. Now you cannot set the clock back to a date before 2004.12.31.

5. A problem that sometimes caused communication between the camera and computer to be unexpectedly terminated when using Nikon Capture Camera Control has been corrected. (Windows)

You can download the 2.0 firmware upgrade from here.

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This is todays B-Side. It was a bit difficult at first to choose between the 2 pictures but in the end I dropped this one because it didn’t contain as many interesting elements as the other one. I also prefered the purple hues of the chosen picture combined with the greeness of the metals. This B-Side had a lack luster color combination.

Click here to see todays picture on Miskan.com

Found a flyer to a photography exhibition, I won’t be going to it but maybe someone else is interested.

Breathtaking Images of Ancient Egypt and Kenya
Photographs by: Mrs Haifa Al-Muhanna & Sakoma
Location: Diva House – Beside Al-Amiri Hospital
Date: 21st to 23rd of May 2005
Time: 6:30PM

As I promised, here is an example of a picture of the day before post processing. Here is the post on miskan.com with the picture post processed. I still need to post a guide on good post processing but I have been really busy.

The Scientific Center is one of the coolest looking places in Kuwait, so I would like to know who is the smart guy who gave I don’t know who, permission to build a building right infront of it?

click here for a better view

I just got invited to a flickr group called Horses, Ponies & Foals… why??! Whats worse is I accepted the invite and joined the group!

I take a few shots during the day and at night I post them on Miskan.com. What you don’t see though is how the pictures looked before right out of the camera. I shoot everything in RAW format which basically means the pictures are stored on my memory card unaltered. The pictures aren’t compressed in any way, no white balance is applied, no sharpening, no nothing. Its pure. When I open up the pictures in Photoshop, I have to set up the Raw options before the picture opens up. Its basically a window where I can control various aspects of the picture from brightness and contrast, to exposure and the white balance. It time consuming since I have to open each image and post process it till it looks good. Each one of my raw files are also over 5MB (on older cameras they are twice the size). The advantage is I get to control the settings, not the camera. Most of my pictures are usually shot under exposed because you can always brighten a picture but you can’t darken an over exposed shot. Shooting in RAW also means I am now more picky with my shots, I don’t want to get home and have 50 pictures I need to open and adjust one by one. I just don’t have the time for it nor the computer processing speed to do it quickly. Below is a shot I just took now in the office to give you an example of the importance of post processing.

In this first picture you can clearly see the white’s are grayish, the floor is dull and the whole picture lacks decent contrast.

This picture is the first one but it’s been post processed. I increased the brightness, contrast, a bit of saturation, set the white balance to neon and then proceeded to manually set the white balance till it contained a decent amount of magenta.

So in conclusion, don’t expect to get good pictures if you don’t post process. Remember when in university you took photography? Remember how in the dark you spent time experimenting trying to get the right contrast and shadows etc.. this is the same thing. If you don’t do it right don’t expect excellent results.

update: I think from now on whenever there is a cool shot I upload onto Miskan.com I will post the original unprocessed one here just to show the importance of post processing.

This photo was taken with a hidden camera at Moyie Springs, Northern Idaho. The owner of property noticed foot tracks some weeks earlier and set camera up in tree along path of tracks. This picture was taken from that camera mounted in the tree. It seems that the Bigfoot took a bite of the red fir tree bark. In the original that I have you can clearly see a piece of bark in the air. I circled the bark in the photo.

This is the only close up photo of Bigfoot that I have ever seen. Very large body and face. The original shows the face and teeth in great detail. Very large mouth and teeth. Not sure of the date. I was told a few years ago. There have been many sighting of Bigfoot in the Northern Idaho area near the Canadian border. Very rugged landscape with many mountains. [via]

I uploaded todays picture onto flickr but I am having problems with blogger. I keep getting a 504 Gateway Timeout everytime I go to blogger.com. Sucks. Here is todays picture.

This was todays B-Side for Miskan. I liked this shot because it looked very psychedelic. No photoshop filter of any sort was applied. No mirrors were involved in this picture.