Reconsidering the ExIf35 Panel

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Is this box intimidating? After being away from it for almost 2 years it was intimidating to me when I returned to it a few weeks ago.

Obviously this is not a useful form for anyone that is not both an expert at photography and in data entry. I think this form is absolutely horrendous for basic day-to-day data storage. At the present time I am considering replacing this particular panel with a more slim model and placing this form as a special option for experts and for use on a case-by-case basis where more information may be needed.

I believe the revised form shall only need a few pieces of information:

  • Exposure Program (A, S(T), P, M)
  • Aperture
  • Exposure Time
  • Focal Length
  • Time of Exposure (Date Time)
  • Exposure Bias

These options would reflect the basic pieces of data that are captured and stored by DSC ExIf at exposure time. While the other data, such as metering mode may be useful it is not something that the average photographer changes very often. Orientation is no longer needed because the user can now adjust that after the images have been mated with their data and visually confirm the transform.

The area that bothers me about making these changes is the loss of special fields such as lens selection, lighting and flash info just because of a need to make the form more user-friendly. I am considering the idea of a pop-out panel that will allow the user to select these pieces of data.

Another area that is particularly difficult for me at the moment is considering what my data-retention policy in the application will be. I can usually safely remember user and lens. What about the other form elements? Should they keep their values or reset to zero when they are hidden?

There is a lot to consider regarding the improvement of the user experience for ExIf35.

Invasion of My Personal E-mail

I am becoming increasingly frustrated by the amount of automated e-mail that has reached my personal inbox and my academic inbox. I maintain special e-mail accounts for automated e-mail, commercial e-mail and anything that is not directly personal correspondence or academic correspondence.

I have been placed in an awkward position by two large entities that are notorious for their automated email. Google and AOL, for their Google+ and AIM properties respectively, have begun sending periodic e-mails to my personal email address. I did not opt-in to these messages. It is easy enough to opt-out, but that isn’t really the point, those e-mails should not have arrived in that inbox to begin with. I use my personal e-mail address with Google because Google hosts my personal email (and for everyone on the kularski.org domain). Several months ago I also decided to use the same e-mail address for communications via the AIM system because it made sense to keep all of my online IDs the same (except Yahoo, which is of course still in its own [rapidly collapsing] world).

Surprisingly I have used the same address with my Microsoft Passport/Windows Live/.NET/MSN/XBOX account and have received 0 messages (after initial confirmation). I use that account for so many services, but get no periodic e-mails and have not had to opt-out of anything. Microsoft is less invasive than Google and AOL, isn’t that odd?

Self-Critique of the Latest Film Rolls

1. I need to learn to be less afraid of different apertures.

I shoot a lot with my aperture wide open (smallest f/ratio). This shot of a mushroom cluster could have been a lot better had I closed the aperture some and gotten a little more depth. Probably not f/8, but perhaps f/4 or 5.6 (this one was shot at a macro-level f/3). 

2. I need to think with the contrast of black and white film in mind.

This would have been a very interesting shot if I would have been more mindful of black and white photographic contrast and perhaps let the image be a little darker to let the vibrant colors shine more clearly with tonality other than just white.

3. Consider the impact of shadow.

Black and white photography relies on the use of shadow and light to compose an image. As such, shadows in the wrong place and ruin the composition of an image. In a color image this is less critical, but still important.

Frustration of a Film Photographer in the Digital Age

  • It takes 2 minutes to scan a single BW 35mm negative on a traditional scanner at 2400dpi
  • It takes 7 minutes to scan a single BW 35mm negative on a traditional scanner at 4800dpi
  • Traditional scanners use “trays” and “adapters” which are not part of the scanner itself to hold negatives, this results in things that move and aren’t always aligned
  • There is no instant verification at low-res before moving on to high-res scanning on traditional scanners
  • Most “film scanners” are cheap crap that have more in common with a digital camera than a scanner. Film is analog and therefore requires optical projection to reach a desired result
  • Most independent film scanners assume colour negatives. BW negatives have color (shades of blue/green and yellow), but those colors are not intended to be seen in the finished product.
  • “Real” film scanners cost $1000-$5000

 

I enjoy film photography as an artistic hobby. It allows for more expression and limited options to trick or cheat one’s way out of problems in photography. In some ways film photography feels more “human” to me than any digital method ever has. The problem with this view is that I am in a digital age, which I eagerly embrace. I like the analog methods of recording an image, but I do not embrace the mess, difficulty or annoyance of printing photos to paper using traditional photographic printing methods. As a result of this combining of processes I find that my best option for handling my film is to scan it.

I have attempted to scan my film using a low-end “film scanner” and a standard Canon flatbed scanner with a film adapter unit. I was not impressed with the 5 megapixel images produced by the film scanner, but am quite happy with the output of the Canon flatbed, which ranges between about 7.1 MP for 2400dpi or 31MP for 4800dpi. The difficulty is that at 31 MP it takes 7 minutes to perform the scans and it is very difficult to get the scanner to output perfectly. The biggest issue is a gradient at the very bottom of each frame, which I can’t seem to get to go away. Despite these problems, the Canon scanner is currently my best option for taking on this process. I do find irony in using a Canon scanner to scan negatives produced on a Nikon camera.

Modern interpretations of the inexpensive film scanner that I had used in the past now have features like a built-in display and they function without special software. The screens are a nice touch, but I find those models tend to have the lowest reviews on Amazon for their technical abilities. I suspect those models are intended for an instant-gratification group of people who may simply enjoy digging through boxes of old negatives and reliving memories with friends and family and not for a serious photographer who wishes to save their work in a digital form. This brings me to another point. It is hard to tell what people are having problems with on these devices. People complain about color loss when scanning. First of all, I am not scanning color film. Second, Kodachrome and similar technologies do not have a very long life span and once the film begins to degrade (especially if it was developed commercially) then it begins to loose its vibrance. The bad reviews can be caused by bad film, not a bad scanner, which makes this process even harder.

One of the biggest problems I am having with determining what to do about this situation is looking at scanner specs I am told a lot of different size ratings (megapixels), but no one seems very willing to give me information in density (dots per inch). On a flatbed scanner the DPI is an interesting measure because there is a correlation between the output size and the density due to the physical size of the film frame.

For the moment it seems my best option is to keep working with the Canon flatbed scanner and attempt to be patient with it.

Academic Career or Runaway Train?

The past few days have been rather interesting regarding my academic life.

The first year of the Master of Arts in Sociology is pretty well planned out for me in regards to core courses. Each semester there are 2 courses I have to take and then there are 3 – 6 hours which I may do with as I wish. In planning for the spring semester I decided that I do wish to take on 12 graduate hours. Given the load of my current courses, I can handle it.

One of the plans I had involved taking a class with Chris. Typically I would simply take an undergraduate class and not worry about graduate level credit, unless the course happened to be cross-listed between graduate and undergraduate. This time the class is one that is not cross-listed, but is in the department of philosophy and taught by a faculty member that I am familiar with. I decided it may be worth a shot to attempt to get the course upgraded to graduate level utilizing an independent study. It would seem that there is no recent precedent for this being done and the academic policies on the topic are somewhat sketchy. It went from being as straight forward as registering the independent study and submitting an IS contract to the department to use the course as the base level requirement to now determining whether or not I have to register and audit the undergraduate section to make the course work out.  Seems like a lot of work just to take an Existentialism class.

After the Existentialism stuff was starting to work itself out I got an e-mail from my HCI instructor from last spring, attempting to get interest in a special topics course in Tactile Computing, offered by one of her colleagues. I contacted the instructor of the course to get more details and found out that she will be deciding based on the profiles of each student which of us she would like to have in the class, assuming there is high enough demand for it to matter. Assuming I’m selected, that is another course that may appear on my schedule. I am hoping that if I take the class I may be able to use it toward my Cognitive Science graduate certificate.

While on the College of Computing and Informatics website to find out more about the professor responsible for the Tactile Computing class I ran across the degree requirements for the Master of Science in Information Technology. I discovered that if I take the Tactile Computing class I will have met all of the requirements for the Human-Computer Interaction concentration of the degree. I am therefore considering applying to the degree program. Even if I do not complete the degree it would be nice to have it active on my record so that if I do wish to complete the degree I may utilize those courses that I have already taken. However, if I complete the MSIT degree, I will likely drop the Cognitive Science certificate, unless I can find a way to complete all of the requirements for it inside the MSIT degree.

I have a lot to think about and a lot of options to consider. I do not know what would be best at this point.

Adding Rotation to ExIf35

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About 2 years ago when I thought I wanted to do film photography I started working on an application called ExIf35. The idea was to have the same level of data storage in JPEGs from a film scanner as those found in DSC (Digital Still Camera) image files. One of the biggest pains that I had was the confusing way in which ExIf rotation is handled. The old method required entering the rotation information when you first entered the data for the exposure. While entering aperture and shutter time is hard enough, the application expected the user to remember which way the camera was turned as well. This was of course a step up from the user needing to enter the actual ExIf integer for which way the frame was to rotate.

Now I am working toward developing the form pictured above, it includes the same drag/drop or select tool that is used in the original ExIf writing process, except not requiring an output directory (because this form just saves to the data file, not the actual image file). Once all files are recorded the user can click on an image file to get a thumbnail image. Once I get the code written the blue and green buttons can be used to change the direction of the thumbnail and record the proper alignment for the ExIf notation. The data will then be saved to the ExIf35 exposure record in the roll file and the information can be written as normal.

Marginal Difference

Over the past few days, since Tuesday evening, I have been reflecting on my selection of topics and trying to discover where my real interest in sociology (and related fields) exists. My interest is in marginalized identities and marginalized people. The experiences of the majority are well documented and majority decisions, majority culture rules the world. I am interested in the margins, I’m interested in everyone that doesn’t fit neatly in the curve of normal society. I suppose for me the greatest research question is “why is there a margin?”. I am curious as to the systems of power that have worked to divide society into those that conform and those that do not. I suppose I need to resolve, at least academically, a certain amount of cultural conflict.

For this moment things seem clear and my thoughts make sense, but who can say for how long this will remain the case. Perhaps I will wake up in the morning and have everything confirmed for me, or maybe I will wake up and decide this isn’t the answer at all. I am trying to open discourse with myself to discover the essence of what drives me academically and what will ultimately be the thing that for me will make my thesis worth writing.

Considering My Academic Work

Beginning with my entry into the Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies certificate program last year my research interests have been somewhat narrow, focusing on homosexuality and alternative sexualities. These are are areas that are very special to me, but yet an exclusive focus on these areas do not fully represent me as an academic. After a brief discussion on Tuesday in Pro-Seminar I find myself questioning the depth at which I have been investing myself in this one particular research area. For sociology my research interest is more about identity, especially identity and group process for marginalized groups.

I feel like after the various options I had going in to this year I have become lost in my previous research and have not spent enough time evaluating new directions or new ideas. I am still growing as a scholar and I need to spend more time in breadth and allow myself to narrow down as I get closer to the PhD. I started work last year in WGST and Cognitive Science with the intention of being in the counseling program this year. As such I was utilizing the year to work on things that were important to me before diving in to a more structured program. Once I was denied entry to counseling and was waitlisted for sociology I went to my backup plan of using the MALS program, which would basically extend the certificate in WGST to a full degree program. After admission to sociology it seems as though I have forgotten to re-evaluate my research interests in any serious way. I have listed my interests, but I have not taken efforts to refocus my efforts on selecting the best possible topic for my thesis. Diving in to the first assignment in Pro-Seminar I selected BDSM and Sadomasochism as terms to begin my search for abstracts of articles that will one day form my literature review which will lead directly into my thesis.

My current plan based on these new thoughts is to move my specific BDSM topics to a tutorial class (utilizing my last tutorial space) and making my thesis more about marginalized identity, but of course including relevant elements from the tutorial.

As with any plan that I formulate, there is a backup plan (at least one). Other thoughts I have had involve a project on family structures and an analysis of alternative family structures and their “outcomes”. I may perhaps be able to toss a bit of religion in there as well. It even crossed my mind to do a project involving the structures involved in policy formation in ICANN, IANA, etc that lead to changes in the experience of the Internet’s constituency. 

Great Academic Advice

I have been stressing myself over the lack of productive thought that I feel like I have generated for my directed readings in subcultural (punk) masculinities and as such contacted my project advisor to update her on my status and seek advice or insight into my situation. Her key response to me was “create questions”. That option had not occurred to me before. I am used to working toward a goal in academic writing of producing a final product that either fills a gap or produces some sort of productive discourse into a topic area. Asking questions is not a something I’m familiar with doing, but now that it has been suggested seems to make perfect sense. If we open numerous lines of inquiry and attempt to flesh them out, then something productive will come of some of them. For my meeting on Wednesday I’m going to work on asking all of the questions that I can form regarding my topic area up to where I have gotten so far in my thought process.

“It’s totally OK to keep coming up with more questions & not finding many ‘answers’.”

I guess sometimes I forget that I may be taking a WGST directed readings, but my advisor is a philosopher at heart and sometimes answers just aren’t possible.

I feel like at the end of this project I may not have many answers, but I will have explored a multitude of possibilities and learned a valuable too for academic writing. Having an advisor for a project like this is certainly a far leap from all of those “advisors” I had as an undergrad.