likimmun.

Ana Kim, Sarah Mun, and I are starting a joint daily photoblog! Each day all three of us upload a photo to the site. We're supposed to try to post recently taken photos, but tapping into our older shots is okay too as long as the shot being posted hasn't been published before. The site is running on a modified version of the Omjii engine.

So every day, three photos by the three of us.

I'm really excited. Why don't you take a look?

Bonus: This is the photo we used for the site teaser:



It's one of my dad's old lenses. :)

Exposure Fusion Experiments

Recently I've been experimenting with exposure fusion, a new technique that is sort of like HDR, but not HDR. After a week of experimenting, I've decided I prefer exposure fusion to HDR, mainly because there's no messy tone-mapping involved, which means... less of a chance for people to really screw up the photos. HDR done right looks really good, but when people do HDR for the sake of HDR, things get overdone really fast. ><

These were taken through the course of the week throughout the University City area, at various points on the R5 train to Lansdale, and at home. Everything that isn't flowers was shot on my iPhone, everything that is flowers was shot with my Nikon D60.

The Penn Bookstore:



Waiting for the R5 at 30th Street Station:







North Broad Station:



Pennlyn Station:



That bank on North Wales Road near Assi:



Some random bushes. Check the geotagged GPS coordinates in the EXIF data (all of these photos are- and all of my photos from now on will be- geotagged) if you care to know where this was taken.



An orchid of some sort. With these shots I added an exposure with flash to the mix of exposures that went into the fusion process.

Photos On The Go

I got the iPhone 4 over the weekend. One of the most widely anticipated new features in the iPhone 4 that I've been looking forward to the most is the new 5 megapixel, backlit camera with LED flash. Obviously 5 megapixels is quite a bit less than the 8 megapixels you can find on the HTC Droid Incredible or HTC Evo 4G or Motorola Droid X, but as any person remotely interested in photography should know, megapixel count is actually not very relevant to how good the photos the camera takes look. I've spent a few days playing with the iPhone 4's camera, and I'm confident in saying it's hands down the best cellphone camera ever made. Heck, it's better than the vast majority of dedicated point and shoots on the market. It's obviously still not as good as my trust Nikon D60 DSLR, but for everyday purposes, the iPhone 4's camera is more then enough.
Here are some photos I took throughout a day. Except where noted, all photos were imported into Lightroom 3 and resized but not retouched in any way otherwise. In other words, this is how photos come straight out of the iPhone 4's camera.
A basket on the island at home. I'm really impressed with how the iPhone 4 kept the temperature in the foreground nice and warm and kept the background cool.

I was really surprised to find that the iPhone 4's camera is actually good enough to serve as a decent art photography camera. The following photo is a photo of a large painting on the wall in a hallway in Addams Fine Arts Hall outside of our Drawing 1 class studio. The colors are more or less dead on:

A shot outside Addams Hall facing the Annenberg Public Policy Center's glass facade:

Bicycles outside of Addams Hall:

One really nifty feature in the iPhone 4's camera (this feature was also in the iPhone 3GS) is the ability to tap the screen to arbitrarily pick a point that the camera will calculate appropriate exposure bracketing, focus, and white balance from. The next three photos all show Addams Hall from the same position at the same time of day, but I picked three different points to focus on:

The iPhone 4's camera is really fast too. These shots were taken on the R5 crossing the Susquehanna river leaving 30th Street Station. The train was moving pretty fast, but the iPhone 4 still managed to get these shots without much motion blur:

Since you can pick focus points, capturing brilliant skies is really easy with the iPhone 4.

This one is just a neat shot I liked of the glass wall at the Temple R5 station:

When the train stopped at Wayne Junction, I realized something really neat about tap to focus- since tapping different points to focus also changed the exposure bracketing, the iPhone 4 is effectively a very easy to use HDR camera. Just tap to focus in several different places, and you have a string of shots at different exposures that can be merged to HDR later. Here's two shots of the station at different exposures:

...and then the two shots merged to HDR through Photomatix Pro and tone mapped:

...alternatively, Photomatix Pro has a new Exposure Fusion method of calculating a HDR photo. I actually prefer Exposure Fusion to tone mapping:

All in all, I'm really quite happy with the iPhone 4's camera. I've been looking for a good pocket camera for a while, and I think I've finally found one. The fact that the iPhone 4 can also use the phone's GPS chip to automatically geotag photos is just an even more amazing bonus.

I think I'm going to try following Sarah's example and start posting random camera photos every week. Stay tuned!

Pictures From Hong Kong Pt 3

I took around 500 pictures while I was in Hong Kong over the summer, but I never really got around to sorting/processing those photos until this weekend. Obviously 500 is too great a sum for any sane person to want to look through here, so instead here are around 35 (give or take a few) shots that Ana Kim helped me pick out.

Almost everything was shot with my Nikon D60; a few shots were taken with my dad's Sony DSC T-100.

Since there's so many pictures in this post, I've split it up into three parts. This is part 2, and here's part 1 and part 2.

Taxis in Hong Kong are red! They also drive on the wrong side of the road, just like in the UK.

The older parts of Hong Kong are AMAZING to visit, simply because there's so much to see.

So many people, so many advertisements!

The malls in Hong Kong make the ones back in the US look puny.

There was some celebrity holding a press conference in this one mall. This guy was videotaping it.

"Times Square" is an odd name for a mall.

Incredibly, this subway car can be considered relatively empty in Hong Kong. The subways get CRAZY packed during rush hour.

HAIR POTATO! MEEHEE. ^^

Two random people caught in the downpour from the typhoon.

Lantau Island has this mind-bending cable car system.

Ana says this shot doesn't even look real.

At the top of Victoria Peak, there's this big mall/tower called Peak Tower that offers amazing downward views of Hong Kong's Central Business District. A great place for panoramas!

That really tall blue tower that isn't the under construction one in the far background is International Finance Centre Two. Cool place.

At Dian's request, high res version available here.

Even the apartment buildings in Hong Kong are taller than most skyscrapers in Philadelphia.

The Hong Kong Convention Center has this crazy amazing rainbow light-up wall thing. I'm using this shot as my desktop wallpaper right now. If you want the full res gigantic file: click here.

The view down from my dad's friend's apartment. "Apartment" isn't really a good description... condo might be better? At any rate, it was a huge condo. I had this as my background for a while too. Full res here.

Go on to part 1 and part 2.

I'll post more pics from Shanghai and Beijing later, perhaps. If you guys want full res versions of any of these, give a holler down in the comments and I'll post 'em. :)

Pictures From Hong Kong Pt 2

I took around 500 pictures while I was in Hong Kong over the summer, but I never really got around to sorting/processing those photos until this weekend. Obviously 500 is too great a sum for any sane person to want to look through here, so instead here are around 35 (give or take a few) shots that Ana Kim helped me pick out.

Almost everything was shot with my Nikon D60; a few shots were taken with my dad's Sony DSC T-100.

Since there's so many pictures in this post, I've split it up into three parts. This is part 2, and here's part 1 and part 3.

Hong Kong has a LOT of really high end stores. I found this one street corner where there was a giant Louis Vuitton store...

...and not far from the Louis Vuitton store was a big Prada Store.

The previous shot of the Prada Shot has all colors desaturated except for yellow. This shot has all of the colors untouched.

I love experimenting with panoramas and stitching together separate shots into large shots. I thought I'd give stitching a shot in front of the HSBC and Bank of China towers.

I love the tubes and frame and stuff on the HSBC tower. Very very fun to look at. :)

One of the covered walkways had to have a suspension system because it's main span was so long. I think my exact reaction was something like "AWESOME!"

A lot of people use these walkways.

Even Ana couldn't decide between color and black/white for that shot, so both versions are here.

I found this in some random record store! ^^ I really regret not buying it. HAHA.

I wasn't expecting to find such grand boulevards in such a cramped city.

Another panorama that I stitched together. I think this was taken from in front of Hong Kong's main Convention Center (which juts out into Victoria Harbour). On the left is Hong Kong's Central Business District, on the left is Kowloon Island, which is starting to get more and more skyscrapers. The crazy clouds are what an incoming typhoon looks like.

Again, I couldn't pick between color and black/white, so here's both!

This is cropped from a larger panorama. Ana pointed out that the shot looks better cropped this way. :) The guy on the edge of the water with the umbrella is my dad.

Go on to part 1 and part 3.