Here are some tips for making your gallery a nicer experience for your visitors.

Organizing your Gallery

You can have folders with sub-folders in SkyDrive, so one album page can lead to others. Recent changes now allow “root location” folders to be moved to any other folder or sub-folder. This makes organizing and re-organizing your gallery quite easy.

Right-click on a folder tile to get a drop-down menu with various options. One available choice is Move to. This allows you to move the folder to any other folder.

The order of sub-folders in a folder is not under user control, however the photos inside an album can be rearranged.

In the right pane, click Arrange photos to go to the “Arrange photos” page. If you have Silverlight installed, this is just a drag-and-drop procedure.

The alternate procedure is just a little more time-consuming. Each thumbnail is shown with a text box below showing a number that indicates the current order. Just replace that number with the new location order.

When a thumbnail in an album is clicked, it will be shown large. The information pane on the right can be turned off with a click on the “Collapse” chevron.

The right pane also offers a “Play slide show” option. All this can make your album and entire gallery a nice experience for visitors.

Uploading photos

There are two easy ways of uploading photos to your SkyDrive albums. You can open the “Add files” dialog from folder view. Again there is a drag-and-drop option. Just drag photos from your computer to the “Add files” panel. They will start uploading as soon as you release the mouse button.

Here too, there is a manual method that opens a standard “Open” dialog where you can navigate through your libraries and folders and select the photos to upload.

The second way of uploading is directly from Live Photo Gallery. There is a serious limitation in this method. You can upload photos only to albums in the root of your SkyDrive. You cannot upload to subfolders.

The procedure is simple. Select the photos and click the SkyDrive icon in the Share group on the Home ribbon. Photo Gallery opens a dialog that connects to your SkyDrive. You have to sign in if you are not signed in to Photo Gallery.

The upload dialog shows your albums so you can select the one to upload to. You may even see other albums that you are permitted to upload to.

You can also create a new album right in this dialog.

Another option is to specify the size of your photos. If they are larger than this specified size, the photos will be scaled down to this size. The default is 1600 pixels on the larger dimension. For most uses this is just fine. You can select “Original” in this dialog to upload photos in their full size. There are uses for that, but that is the scope of this article.

Providing a path to your gallery

Now, unfortunately, comes the part that is a “downer”. There is no short, easy to remember, web address for SkyDrive albums. One way to inform your friends of the album and provide them with a link is with an email. This can be done right from the SkyDrive album.  Click “Share folder” under the Share group in the information panel on the right.

As you can see in the illustration, there are a number of options. Besides sharing with an email you can post to Facebook and other social networks and to get links that you can distribute separately.

For the email option just enter the recipients’ email addresses. You can include a message in the email. Note that the “Recipient can edit” check box is already checked. Normally you want to uncheck that. You can also require that the recipients sign in to their Windows Live account to view your album. Not something you want to require when just casually sharing photos.

The recipients get a pretty email that looks like the illustration here (the recipients address has been removed). The email contains a “View photos” link that takes the visitor right to the album in folder view with the pretty tiles of the photos. In fact, clicking on any thumbnail in the email opens the browser right to that photo in large view.

You can copy the URL of the photos or the folder. These are very long and ugly, as you can see in the illustration. You definitely would not want to type out such a link. Better to stick to the pretty email. If the album is public, that is shared with Everyone, the email can even be forwarded to others.

My suggestion is this: Set up one folder as your “gallery”, organize you photos in subfolders. Share your gallery with “Everyone” if you want public access. Private albums should go into a separate folder or folders with more restrictive sharing. Note: You can share individual photos. However the visitor will have access to other publicly shared photos and albums.

If you want a public gateway to your gallery consider setting up a blog. Here in this blog post you can see how links to your gallery could be set up:

A Photo Album VIEW SLIDE SHOW DOWNLOAD ALL

Using Live Writer as your blogging tool offers a number of ways to show album links. Above is just one example.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 2,200 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 37 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

Still, stopping down remained a good rule. Lenses sported aperture scales with the f-numbers, distance scales that were pretty accurate, and depth-of-field marks, as seen here, that made the relationship between aperture and depth of field pretty clear. In the photo here, the lens is set to the hyper-focal distance for f/16, about 8 feet. You can tell that the scale shows that objects from 4 feet to infinity would be sharp.

That brings us to “sharp”. The “sharpness” of objects in a photograph are always dependent on a number of different things. The resolution capability of the recording medium being just one factor. How a photo is reproduced and viewed is another. What looks tack sharp in a small print might be unacceptably fuzzy in a wall-sized enlargement.

Film for a long time was a limiting item, especially as cameras moved to smaller formats. One big problem lurking in the background always was “diffraction”. Yes, camera lenses are diffraction limited optics at the smaller aperture sizes. The aperture is that “hole” through which the light reaches the recording medium, nowadays, the sensor.

The distance from that aperture to where the light bundle converges to a point for an infinitely far object on the other side, is called the “focal length”. The focal length divided by the diameter of the aperture is called the “f-number”. The light actually never “converges to a point”. This is where the laws of physics wag a big finger. Diffraction happens, it is the cantankerous, ornery, way of light bending slightly around corners instead of proceeding in a straight line. The smaller the light bundle, the more light won’t converge to a point. We will let the physicists worry about “Airy disks”, the point here is that light is smeared out and small detail becomes fuzzy, the larger the f-number, the worse it gets.

As digital cameras get ever smaller, this problem becomes more bothersome. The individual sensor elements, “pixels” to all of us, are already smaller that what the optics can resolve. As the aperture is set to a smaller hole, the “spread” of the light increases. So the minimum aperture for some camera lenses is limited. I have seen f/11 as the smallest aperture on some cameras. Smartphones, which have absolutely tiny sensors, go to the extreme: No stopping down of the lens. They work at full aperture all the time.

I ran an interesting experiment. I mounted my camera firmly on a tripod a good distance from my subject. This subject was a barren tree some two hundred feet from the camera. I was careful to exclude any foreground. I turned off auto-focus and vibration reduction. Then I took a series of photos at apertures from the widest, f/5.6, to the smallest, my camera goes to f/36. The first indication of how image quality is affected can be seen from the file sizes of the images. The seven images were taken at f/5.6, f/8, f11, f/16, f/22, f/32, and f/36. I let the camera choose the shutter speed.

Notice that file size gets larger, reaches a maximum for f/11, then declines. When the raw images were translated to JPG format (at 100% quality), the differences became even more noticeable. Photo file formats reduce the file size by eliminating repeating values. The simplest way to explain this is to say that when a pixel has the same value as the previous one, instead of recording that value, a “ditto” is recorded. So if three pixels have the same value, the file says effectively “three times xxx”. As a consequence photos with less detail produce smaller file sizes since there are fewer different values. This is a gross oversimplification, of course.

Can you tell the difference in the pictures? You sure can!

Here are small cutouts from the images. These cutouts are from the JPG images since this is how most photos get distributed and viewed.

Here, in a larger view the extremes, the f/5.6 image, the f/11, and the f/36:

I was far enough from the tree so that the small twigs were narrower in the image than the pixels of the camera sensor. The first couple of photos show improvement in the image as the lens aberrations decrease as the lens is stopped down. Then, after f/11 (third image in the top row, center image of the larger views) diffraction and some other effects take over.

The moral of this story is this: For best image quality, do not go to small apertures, large f-numbers.

For my camera the deterioration in this test starts at about f/11. This is a DX format Nikon D-60. For full-size sensor cameras, the sensors, and the pixel elements are larger thus the diffraction effects will be less. For smaller cameras, especially the point-and-shoot pocket cameras, image quality will decline starting at even larger apertures.

To give you an idea of the size of the areas shown above, here is the full image with the section indicated.

Camera manufacturers either help out, or cover up, depending on your point of view. You don’t see aperture scales on lenses any more. Distance scales are only on professional lenses. Cameras are programmed to do the best they can, and this means working at the largest aperture possible, not the smallest one.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

Here is a comparison of a photo album as presented by Flickr, Picasaweb, myPicturetown and Shutterfly. The album, consisting of 16 reduced-resolution images (1024 pixel horizontal dimension), was uploaded to each photo sharing service.

Here is the set of photos and below are links to view the album – and run the slide show – in the three services:

My impressions:

Flickr

There is a short download delay, but the images download rapidly. The slide show runs right from the link, no need to click a play button. The slide show does not automatically cycle after it has played through. The default setting is to scale images to the browser window or to the full screen(F11). The option menu calls this quaintly “Embiggen small things to fill screen”.

It is possible to get to the author’s “Photostream” with a keyboard shortcut (“m”).

Picasaweb

The slide show has to be manually started with the “play” button in the control strip at the bottom. Tools for managing the slide show timing are right there. The images are not enlarged beyond the actual size. For this album the photos do not fill a large screen but are surrounded by black.

Not scaling has the advantage that the photos do not become unsharp as is the case when they are enlarged beyond their actual pixel size.

myPicturetown

With this service there is a significant download delay before the album appears. The slide show does not start by itself but is started with the “play” button (lower left). The slide show goes immediately to full screen and the images are scaled up to fill the screen.

Accompanying the slide show is a music track. The viewer can turn the music off or make another selection (from 5). By default the show recycles and starts over again and again.

Shutterfly

The Shutterfly slide show starts right away. Images are not enlarged beyond their actual size. The show plays just once and must be manually repeated.

The controls at the top of the photo remain even when full screen mode (F11) is selected.

The viewer of these slide shows cannot get to other parts of the author’s shared photos, except for the Flickr show, as noted.

Obtaining the web address, URL, of a slide show is just a matter of starting a slide show when you are signed in to your account and copying the address from the browser address bar. This is not available for a show in myPicturetown. For that service, the address is obtained by a “share album” feature (it sends an email with the URL).

Which photo sharing service provides the best slide show?

That depends, of course, on your preferences. All of these photo sharing services, and there are many others, do things a little bit differently. We all have our on individual likes and dislikes. If you would like to share your opinion, please comment on this post.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

The site requires Adobe Flash Player and the user interface has some unexpected quirks, it is also unexpectedly slow in operation. In addition there is an up-loader app you install on your computer that used Adobe AIR.

Sharing photos is by email – somewhat like sharing a SkyDrive album. I prefer a clean web address like you get at Flickr or Picasaweb, but that is not available. The generated email message is quite pleasant and looks like the one shown here.

The “View photos” link is extra-ordinarily long, not something to be typed by hand. If you wish to share in a way other than the email link, an URL shortening service is advised.

One nice feature is that you share just one album. The recipient can view the photos an a pleasant slide show, but cannot view the rest of your site. In my opinion that is a definite plus.

You can define the background of the album with several color and design options. The layout and appearance are attractive and functional. When the visitor gets to the album it looks about like this:

Clicking a thumbnail on the right displays it in the space on the left. The little play button, ,

in the lower left starts a slide show, with music! The viewer has a set of tools to set the transition speed and effect and to pick the type of music track. Not much choice there, I don’t like any, but this is a nice touch.

The viewer can also download the set of photos in the album as a ZIP file.

Take a look at my album, either image above links to it, and see if this is something that would appal to you and your friends.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

There are circumstances, however, when the autofocus system can’t tell what you want to focus on. Subjects behind windows or fences are classic examples, although many cameras have even mastered those situations. Here is an example of a photo that had to be manually focused. The deer is among shrubbery with leaves in front of and behind the deer. Autofocus simply could not select the the intended subject.

The camera is likely to select the closest item in the focus area. This can result in missed focus even when the subject is not obscured.

My second example shows such a situation. There is no way for the camera to know if I want the pretty flower or the butterfly.The flower was closer to the camera and that is what the autofocus system selected (this photo is cropped, both subjects were much closer to the frame center in the original).

Most cameras have a “close up” mode which causes the focus system to use just a small area in the center. For this photo that would have worked. OK, I intentionally set the wrong mode to get this illustration.

Autofocus works so well that many users don’t even know how to focus manually. Some cameras do not even allow manual focus. Learn how your system works, know where the switch is located to select autofocus or manual focus.  So when that unusual situation presents itself, click to “M”, focus and get the shot. Don’t forget to reset the switch to autofocus so the camera is ready for the next photo.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/10/09/when-autofocus-fails/feed/ 0 ludwigkeck LJK_3352-P-800-blog LJK_3301-P-Blog LJK_3497-P-blog-300 http://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/a-useful-learning-resource/ http://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/a-useful-learning-resource/#comments Tue, 20 Sep 2011 00:49:56 +0000 Ludwig https://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/19/a-useful-learning-resource/ ]]> The Internet offers many useful resources for improving your knowledge and skills in digital photography. One such site is the blog All Digital Photography with a great deal of information, both basic and advanced, written in clear and easy to understand language. The author of the blog is Geoff Ronalds who has decades of experience in photography and now shares tips and techniques and some superb photography. Geoff mostly works with Nikon equipment and also shares reviews and details about cameras, lenses and accessories.

Here are some sample posts from All Digital Photography:

• Lens Aperture
• Digital Landscape Photography – Ten Tips
• White Balance and Color Temperature
• Seascapes Gallery
• Nikon Lens Reviews

You can find links to the most recent All Digital Photography blog posts in the sidebar on the right.

.:.

Cameras do a marvelous job of taking the work out of photography, but you can improve the photos more often than not after they come out of the camera.

Here is a photo of a hawk. The sun was high in the sky and what we see is the shaded side. Not a bad photo you might say – considering the luck in getting it.

You can see the red tail feathers and nice detail in the wings. The camera did a pretty good job.

The dark areas, almost black in this shot,  may contain more detail than is apparent when the photo is seen on a monitor or even printed as is.

Windows Live Photo Gallery makes it easy to improve your photos. Clicking Auto adjust lightened the dark areas a bit – it was a good improvement.

The manual adjustments can make it even better.

Photo Gallery, in the Adjust exposure panel, has four sliders and also two histogram controls.

Brightness affects the whole photo and makes it either lighter or darker. The Contrast control can make the dark areas lighter and the light areas darker or vice versa.

The Shadows control only affects the darker areas, it can lighten them or make them even darker.

The Highlights control works similarly but affects the lighter areas.

For this photo I set the Shadows slider almost fully to the right to lighten the dark, the shadow, areas.

The histogram shows the distribution of the pixels from full black on the left to full white on the right. The vertical scale shows the relative number of pixels of that shade. Note that in this photo of a hawk against a blue sky there are two humps or curves. The low, spread out curve on the left shows the pixels of the hawk, the big spike is the blue sky.

There are two sliders below the histogram. The left one lets you set the black level. Slide it to the right and every pixel that is to the left of the indicator will be set to black. The right slider lets you set the white level. Every pixel on the histogram that is to the right of the indicator will be set to full white. The nice thing is that once these settings are applied, the pixels between the slider settings will be spread out over the full range from black to white.

For this photo I moved the white level slider a ways to the left. There were no pixels there, so I did not turn any areas into chalk white. The effect was to spread the pixels out, lightening the photo and the sky.

There is no best setting for any of these controls, just play with them until you are happy with the results. I click Revert to original quite often to permit me to start all over.

Enhancing your photos is fun to do. It is even nice when your friends say that you take good photos.

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

]]> http://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/17/there-may-be-more-detail-in-your-photos-than-you-think/feed/ 1 ludwigkeck hawk-E1 hawk-E2 http://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/we-remember/ http://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/we-remember/#comments Sun, 11 Sep 2011 15:01:46 +0000 Ludwig https://cafeludwig.wordpress.com/2011/09/11/we-remember/ ]]>

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Let’s set the table.

The photos here are just for fun. As such no elaborate efforts were employed, not even a tripod. When flash was used, it was on-camera flash, with just a paper napkin as a diffuser in one of the shots.

Mind you, my dear reader, Café Ludwig is a blog, not a place to eat, so, no reservations, please.

How about spaghetti tonight? With a pleasant little chianti? Or maybe a chicken curry? Just a sandwich, perhaps? Or a “hurricane” dish – pantry food!

Oh, my, I used the same placement in two photos. Microsoft Word 2010 “Picture Tools” to the rescue:

The Background Remover needed just a little help around the plate – maybe a couple of minutes at most were spent on “lifting” the plate. A rectangle shape with a texture fill serves as the new placemat.

Using Picture Tools provides so many artistic effects that I couldn’t help playing with my food:

How about a couple of posters for Café Ludwig?

Ready for dessert?

Just one “fruit-on-the-bottom” pudding – all these artistic affects – you have also seen a version in the banner at the top. Microsoft Word 2010 shares these “Picture Tools” with Excel 2010, and PowerPoint 2010. Always handy when you want to play around with your photos – or your food. The banner was made only partially in Word, the capital letters were customized in Paint.

Bon appétit !

.:.

© 2011 Ludwig Keck

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