Simon Rules!

Enlarge this picture and take a good look. Isn’t this miniature village fantastic?

It’s really detailed… and it should be, since it’s a real life full-size town. It’s actually a real photo of Ouray, Colorado, and here’s the original:

I Photoshopped the image to simulate a type of lens called a “tilt-shift”, where the image plane is not parallel with the lens plane. This causes certain parts of the image to appear out of focus. When taking a picture like this, focus is set at infinity, so everything at distance in the image is in perfect focus. If this was really a miniature, everything would be very close to the camera, so only part of the image would normally be in focus. Also, miniatures tend to look brighter and more colourful when compared to weathered, washed-out buildings and cars.

I followed a great tutorial on how to do the effect. Also, here’s the lens that lets you take these photos without any messing around.

I’ve finally upgraded to a “proper” SLR camera after outgrowing my tiny Rebel XT.

It’s the Canon 7D, and it goes perfectly with my 24-105 “L” lens. Once the workload at the office starts to ease up in December, I’d like to take a wider variety of photos for my portfolio. I’m especially interested in live bands, so if you need some photos taken for free, please let me know. I’ve been working silly hours since I got the camera and I’ve had almost zero opportunities to take any interesting pictures. However, I did manage to sneak this one in. If you can tell me where this was taken, I’ll be impressed!

Why is it necessary to bring down an entire site for hours every weekend to perform scheduled maintenance? I think all bank online account access sites do it, but I rarely ever see online shopping sites doing it. So, what’s the deal? I think it’s another case of unless you are parting with money, they don’t care. It’s pretty simple to switch over to a back-up server while you do an upgrade. Ever notice how you can get through to someone on a sales line quicker than you can get through to support?

Also: Circuit City officially suck. They are closing a local store and liquidating all merchandise. I went tonight and they have a sign saying “everything in store is on sale”. I asked a sales assistant, and they said it includes all display merchandise. I wanted to buy a Canon 40D, but they had none left, and wouldn’t sell me the display copy.

We finally rounded up all of our wedding photos, and they all came out beautifully. I’ve also started work on a new online photo gallery tool, tentatively called “Snaps”. You can see the pics here.

One thing I love about digital cameras is that almost all tag pictures with EXIF data, which contains the date and time each photo was taken, along with the focal length, ISO, shutter speed and other information. In the future when cameras are available with GPS, the precise location will be tagged too. That will have the added effect of tagging each photo with the correct date and time. What I noticed from the wedding photos given to us is that only one person out of five who sent me photos had the correct date and time programmed into their camera. Two of those were from different time zones, and one person had got confused between 12 hour and 24 hour formats. Another had probably forgotten to change the clock for daylight savings time. It wasn’t a big deal because I corrected all the times with a nifty utility called PhotoInfo, because I like looking at all my photos in chronological order.