Devicescape Software, Inc.

Posted on January 17, 2005 by John

Today, Monday January 17, 2005 marks the day when Instant802 Networks, the company I joined around 18 months ago, becomes Devicescape Software.

A few people around the SF bay area might have already caught sight of the yellow sweatshirts sporting the new company marketing device (they were handed out at a private launch party last Thursday held at the Bubble Lounge in San Francisco). The photo on the right is a clue as to why the rotated letter ‘e’ is the ‘icon’ over the name. You’ll find similar shots on the new website, though perhaps none as good as this one 😉 That said, next time I will remember to clean my keyboard before taking photos – you can see the dust on the top of the power button if you look closely! [Hint: you’ll probably want to click on the photo to get the larger version before looking for this.]

David Allio

Posted on January 16, 2005 by John

While on the subject of photographers, David Allio left me a comment on my Hawaiian Photographers entry pointing me at his daily postcard from Kaua’i.

While looking around on his site though I found that he has daily postcards from a couple of other places and one showing flowers from Kaua’i too, all accessible from his main menu page – you also get thumbnails of each postcard for the day on that page.

PhotoSydney

Posted on January 16, 2005 by John

Came across a blog with photos from one of the cities I’ve enjoyed most in the world: Sydney, Australia. The blog, called PhotoSydney, seems to be quite new (archives only go back as far as December 2004).

While there, I found some other blogs that are worthy of mention too:

Deep Thought (where I read that they are thinking of banning
cameras from Bondi beach).
334pixels.org
Shutterbug (this one is a little annoying at times for having exceptionally wide pages)
Iced
altreality

There are many more great photoblogs out there for Australia, and checking somewhere like photoblogs.org is a good way to find them (and spend a few hours surfing too).

Ritz PV2 “Single Use” Cameras

Posted on January 15, 2005 by John

For a little while now people, myself included (though intermittently due to other committments), have been working on getting the newer Ritz PV2 cameras unlocked so that they can be used as cheap digital cameras. This is not so much because they have stunning image quality (most, if not all of us have much, much better quality digital cameras already). Part of it is for the challenge. For me though there was also an element of being able to give a cheap camera to a couple of young kids I know and have them play with photography.

The PV2 is ideal for this since it has an LCD (enabling them to see the photo they’ve just taken immediately), it is cheap (no real loss if it gets broken), it runs on standard AA batteries and it was designed to survive well enough to be recycled by the store (and they are in a pretty tough plastic case).

Recently, there has been a bit of a breakthrough and the camera can now be reprogrammed a little bit so that an easily available Windows (and Mac OS X for that matter) driver can read the photos from them and reset the counter to zero allowing the camera to be used again. You can get more information about this from a number of places:

My own PV2 page on the bluedonkey.org TWiki site
John Maushammer’s excellent site. John is the person behind much of the progress on getting this camera to work.
The I-Appliance Camera forums. Lots of discussion here on these cameras, both from the perspective of getting access to the images and other data inside it, and some work on decoding the RAW image format that the camera’s use internally.
Forkboy’s Windows PV2Tool page.
The PV2 page at cexx.org.
Binaryweaver’s pages, complete with new skins for the camera’s and some instructions for getting the photos off without access to the unlocking tool (useful for Windows-only people until there is a Windows version of the unlocking tool).

I’m sure I’ve missed some. Almost all of those pages have links to other sites though so keep following them. There’s a lot of information out there. The I-Applicance forums are perhaps the most up-to-date, but they can be a little difficult to follow these days since there is so much activity there.

Framed Panoramic Pair

Posted on January 14, 2005 by John

Had Ofoto print the two panoramic shots on a single 8×10 sheet for me so that I could place them into a nice 11×14 frame I happened to have. The frame already contained a two window panoramic matte (actually a double layer matte). I like the final result (the print arrived in the mail Thursday having been ordered Tuesday evening), which looks something like this:

Obviously, in real life the mattes have the nice 3D effect edges, and being a double layer, one window cut smaller than the other, you get a nice border effect which is not shown in this simple HTML rendering. You get the idea though. The calm beach vs the crashing waves. Both taken on the northern shores of Oa’hu.

Hawaiian Beach

Posted on January 11, 2005 by John

Ala Wai Reflections

Posted on January 10, 2005 by John

Behind Waikiki is the Ala Wai canal, which is in fact the only reason Waikiki exists. The canal was created to collect the rainwater draining off the mountains behind Honolulu. Before it was created in 1922, the area that is now one of the world’s most famous tourist spots, Waikiki, was a swamp.

This shot was taken in the soft light of sunset. It would have been even nicer a few moments earlier, but finding a parking space along Ala Wai is not easy. In the end we found a spot several blocks away from where I wanted to take the photo, and the light changes really fast during Hawaiian sunsets. If I ever end up living on Oa’hu for any length of time I’ll have to try to get the shot I really wanted.

Hawaii Rainbow

Posted on January 9, 2005 by John

Driving out to the east side of Honolulu, on the climb up to the Hanauma Bay entrance, there is a viewing area out over Hawaii Kai. The day we drove that way it was showering intermittently, and at the time we got to the viewing area there was a full arc rainbow over the town below – and lots of people in the viewing area taking pictures of it.

Apart from the rainbows printed on the Hawaiian license plates, I think that this was the only one I have seen out there in all three visits to the islands.

Oa’hu North Shore

Posted on January 8, 2005 by John

It is a cold, rainy day here in Alameda, so I thought I take some time to pull out a few good shots from my last trip to Hawaii. This is the first set from that, all taken up on the north shore on a day when the surf wasn’t big enough for the surfing competition to run, but plenty big enough for some nice photos. These are two of my favourites from the collection I took on our day at the north shore.

Finally, one shot that I’ve cropped down to a panoramic form. Impossible to do the image stitching trick on something as fast as waves, but with a nice high resolution image to start from, cropping works well enough:

Norio Matsumoto

Posted on January 3, 2005 by John

If you don’t mind the 100% flash-based photo gallery, the photos taken by Japanese photographer Norio Matsumoto up in Alaska are stunning.

Without question the “Whales of Southeast Alaska” gallery is my favourite; the shot to the right, taken from this gallery, being the one I like the most (though there is another similar shot that comes a very close second). The forest and mountain galleries, “The Alaskan Forest” and “The Alaskan Range” respectively, are also worth viewing. I was less taken by the northern lights photos (though they are spectacular shots – just not my thing).

Thanks to John Sinteur’s weblog for the initial pointer to this site.

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