Photos

This is my photo site. I've been taking photos since about 1998 which is when I bought my first camera.JAlbum.

Cameras and tools

My first camera was a 35mm Kodak compact camera which I used between 1998 and 2002. Between 2002 and 2006, I owned a Canon Powershot A40 (2 Mega Pixel, 3x zoom). In 2006 I upgraded to a Canon Powershot S80 which has a nice wide angle lens and lots of nice features. Around 2008 I also started shooting photos with my Nokia N95 which has a OKish 5 Megapixel camera and the advantage that I always have it with me. I have considered at various points to invest in a few kilos of SLR goodness + lenses but I always balk at the notion of not being able to put your camera in your pocket. Fact is that I like to travel light and SLRs are just not small enough for me.

For editing I use a variaty of tools. I usually do a lot of post processing in Photoshop to compensate for mediocre camera guesstimates and poor lighting/composition choices from my side. Check out my del.icio.us bookmarks for various tutorials I have found useful for this. I have a (growing) back of tricks that I regularly apply, including highpass sharpening, contrast maps, using layer compositions (overlay, multiply, etc), switching to LAB mode to edit color and light separately, etc.

For panorama photos, I have used various tools. Over the past two years, Hugin has been my favourite. It's a set of open source tools (mostly command line) and a user interface that uses these tools. The workflow can be quite complicated but the results are very good.

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