Stuck indoors last week I thought I’d take some photos of the cut flowers we had bought for a party. These tiny little flowers were in the bouquet mostly as foliage I think (they were attached to what looked like a fir tree branch, complete with little green needles).
More photos from the cut flowers in my Flickr stream.
So, I bought one of these digital frames a while back and just got around to trying it out. The frame has a roughly16:9 aspect ratio screen, so I was expecting to have to crop some of my images to that ratio so that they’d display nicely (it does also support a 4:3 mode, but that leaves black bars left & right on the screen).
Problem was that when I converted the images to the 480 x 234 resolution that the manual states the screen is, I ended up with black bars above and below and the image squashed down. Took me a while to work out what it was really doing… even in 16:9 mode it is expecting to be given 4:3 photos (which is what most digital cameras take). All it does is stretch them out to fit the screen, which distorts them.
My solution, after a little trial and error, was this process:
So you can see what the effect of the processing is, here’s a before and after pair from one of the photos I took in Mexico:
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When the frame stretches this out again to the 16:9 ratio it will look normal. The reason for the additional resolution, despite the recommendation in the user guide not to exceed 480 x 234, is so that it has more pixels than it needs. When I tried the smaller images, they came out looking blurry. The 624×468 resolution seems to look OK unless you study it close up (and who does that with a framed snapshot?).
I have the steps above stored in an action in Photoshop so I can apply it to a batch of photos, store them on a CF card and then have them run as a slideshow. The quality of the screen is not stunning, but then I didn’t expect it to be for the price. What was disappointing was that I couldn’t just load native resolution images into it and have it just render them directly, but my simple image processing trick works around that problem nicely and I am happy with the results.
Another photo of my favourite bridge – well, favourite in terms of photographic subject; I don’t think I’d consider it a favourite to drive over. Luckily for me, I don’t do that too often these days, instead racing under the bridge in relative comfort each morning and evening on either the Encinal or the Peralta.
Taken last weekend in Beresford Park, San Mateo. These socks were hanging in the tree next to where we were sitting in the park. Thought it made for a pretty unusual photo 😉
Came out this morning and noticed that the two gerbera daisies we have in the front garden now still had water droplets on them from their early morning sprinkling. That was much too good of an opportunity to pass on, so I went out with the camera and shot a few pics.
The others are in the Flickr stream.
Second time this week that I have taken photos of the dinner that I have just prepared for myself. Tonight it was a penne pasta dish with vegetables in a tomato based sauce. Earlier in the week it was a stir fried noodle dish.
Guess I should get out more, but I did get some outdoor shots (the Encinal, the Bay Bridge and some rusty chains behind the ferry building).
The tree in front of our house, that had been totally bare since we moved in, has suddenly burst into a mass of blossom. I guess that answers both the questions we had about it: (a) is it even alive, and (b) what kind of tree is it?
There’s a few more shots of the blossom in my Flickr stream.
The folks over at Urban Bay Properties have a web page devoted to the neighbourhoods of the East Bay, and right there in the top right corner of the grid is Alameda – represented by this photo. It is worth clicking into the Alameda section too though for an amazing photo of the USS Hornet by takenpictures.
One of those chance shots. I have no idea what she was looking at in the sky above the beach! Just after this she ran off along the beach with two of her friends, so it can’t have been anything that interesting.
This crop is also formatted to be the correct aspect ratio for Moo cards. Haven’t actually tried getting any of these printed yet, but I thought I’d start to add some photos that were the correct aspect ratio in preparation for getting some cards made 🙂
This pelican, on the beach in Puerto Vallarta, was none too sure about the camera I was pointing at him, or perhaps it was just me 🙂