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!

Omjii+Wordpress=New Blogging System

As you can see, my blog looks different from what it looked like a few days back! What's going on?

Omjii Blogs is getting a massive massive overhaul, that's what's going on.

8 months ago, Jason, Chris, and I announced the Omjii Blog System, a blogging engine derived from the Omjii Comic System powering our little webcomic. Initially the creation of the Omjii Blog System was meant to be just an exercise in designing and coding a basic dynamic content management system. This meant that the Omjii Blog System took shape as a relatively simple blogging engine that delivered the core functionality of a blog, but omitted a lot of the bells and whistles offered by systems built by people who actually know what they are doing, such as WordPress or Movable Type or Blogger. We invited our friends to try out the Omjii Blog System and give the system a general real-life usage test in order to evaluate how good of a job we did. After 8 months of continuous use, I think we can safely say that the Omjii Blog System successfully met our goal of a simple, lightweight content management system.

However, in those 8 months, the test blogs that started on the Omjii Blog System developed into full-fledged actual blogs, regularly updated by their authors. Omjii Blogs now faces a very different purpose from its original purpose- initially designed as an academic exercise, Omjii Blogs is now supporting live, actual blogs by our friends. Now that Omjii Blogs is a real life, albeit very small, blogging platform, we need to be able to address all of the blogging needs of our users- needs that the Omjii Blog System was not designed to handle. As a result, we have decided to move forward with deploying a modified version of WordPress MultiUser on Omjii Blogs. Most of the modifications made to WordPress MU were to integrate WordPress MU into our existing Omjii system and to ensure backward compatibility with the Omjii Blog System. All Omjii blogs will be migrated from the Omjii Blog System to the much more powerful WordPress MU system. So what does this change mean? Here are four of the many new changes:

1. Better, faster, more robust editing tools. While writing a post, you can now switch between visual and HTML modes to get your post to look exactly the way you want it to look. Inserting images and videos from Youtube, Vimeo, etc. is now much easier as well.

2. File uploads. You can now upload images, music files, video files, documents, PDFs, pretty much anything you please (minus a few security related restrictions, such as PHP files) to a folder in your blog.

3. Configurable layouts. Instead of being restricted to the standard Omjii layout of the Omjii Blog System, you can now stack text, navigation elements, widgets, etc. any way you please.

4. Themes. Instead of having to stick with the preset Omjii look and style, you can make your blog look any way you want by using WordPress themes. All standard WordPress themes work with our Omjii variant of WordPress MU, although some themes require minor tweaking to work. For that reason, before you can apply a new theme you have picked out, we need to screen the theme first to make sure necessary tweaks are made. Don't worry, we won't stand in the way of your creativity and refuse the use of any themes. Our tweaks also won't change the outward appearance of the theme, the tweaks are only made to the underlying mechanics that run the theme.

Here are some examples of themes, demonstrated with the Emma Blog. The Omjii Blog System look is on the left, WordPress themes are displayed to the right:

Applying a new theme doesn't require any coding or messy work at all. All you have to do is click a button. The new themes functionality brought to Omjii Blogs by the adoption of WordPress MU is really really cool. :)

The modifications we've made to WordPress MU are for getting WordPress MU to integrate into Omjii's existing user system and to ensure backward compatibility with the Omjii Blog System. So what does that mean?

1. Nothing has changed about how you log into Omjii. Just as before, logging in is done through the Switcheroo tool and the main Omjii site is still the same Omjii you know and (hopefully) love. However, when you sign in to your Omjii account, you will also be automatically signed into Omjii's WordPress MU system as well, so you can start posting without having to dig around for a new login page on Omjii. You can also sign in separately to WordPress MU.

2. Every last bit of content that was written and posted on the Omjii Blog System will show up in WordPress MU. We have added a layer to WordPress MU that allowed WordPress MU to be able to read, understand, and import posts from the Omjii Blog System. Your Omjii Blog will now sport a new look due to WordPress MU, but not a single word you wrote has been lost in the process. :D

3. Similar to how all of your content remains intact in WordPress MU, all of the metadata surrounding your posts also remain intact. Facebook Comments made to your posts on the Omjii Blog System show up completely intact in WordPress MU as if no change ever occurred. Even all of your permalinks are intact- going to a permalink for a post originally written in the Omjii Blog System will now lead to the same post in your WordPress MU powered blog. Even your RSS feed works just like it always has- you don't even need to point subscribers at a new RSS feed location.

We've worked hard to make sure that the transition from the Omjii Blog System to WordPress MU will be perfectly smooth and absolutely seamless. Happy blogging!