Nels Lindahl — Functional Journal

A weblog created by Dr. Nels Lindahl featuring writings and thoughts…

Category: Photography

  • Thinking about digital photography for a bit

    Shaking off this latest cold has been difficult. It lingered more than I thought it would. A lot of people seem to have had a wave of something spread throughout town. That mental dullness that comes from having a cold easily defeats the need to write. Even some of the output that has occurred has been left to the false start bin which in my case is just unpublished prose. It will sit in a word processing document from now until the time that cloud storage ceases to exist. Remarkably large amounts of data have been stored in terms of pictures, documents, and other nonsense on cloud servers. Sometimes I end up wondering what will happen to all those pictures. For the most part even well kept photo albums from the past only last for so long. We have surprisingly few photographs in our possession from before 1980. People certainly did take photographs with film based cameras and had them developed at these little stores that no longer exist for the most part. 

    You got an envelope with pictures and the now exposed film back at the end of the process. Today none of that waiting really exists. Some people do use instant film cameras and a few people have these little portable printers to be able to give somebody a physical copy of a picture. Presumably the vast majority of photography today is just digital. It’s probably in the neighborhood of around 99% based on the rise of the smartphone and its promise of AI assisted quick and easy digital photography. I’m not saying that nothing is getting printed these days. People certainly print photographs and share them or maybe display them on a wall, desk, or shelf. Presentation and sharing just account for a very small amount of the totality of photographs taken these days. It is something that changed. My personal photo albums of which I have 3 of them in my office go from 1996 to around 2004. One of them is just basically high school to the start of college. 

    All of those pictures in that first photo album exist from mostly disposable cameras that I carried around in my backpack. Over time all the photos the camera was capable of taking which I remember as being around 24 the internet suggests actually included 27 based on a couple quick searches. Either way it was a process of rarity not a bulk creation of content. Almost all the photos are staged in some way and you can tell the people in frame are looking back at the camera. I’m not even sure at this point if I had gone back and digitized all the photographs in the albums. At one point, I do recall purchasing a nice flatbed scanner which was probably used for that purpose. 

    You may well remember that my first digital camera was an HP PhotoSmart C200. I spent a few minutes on eBay this morning looking at them, but buying a 1 megapixel camera just does not seem very practical. It would be an outright act of nostalgia. Some of the listings came with the camera and the box. I used to carry that camera and a set of backup batteries. It makes me want to go back to using Flickr again and sharing random photographs of things. Please keep in mind that very few of my photographs turned out to be amazing works of art. Anything amazing contained within the collection of photographs was happenstance not an intentional act of photography greatness. Over time, people started really just sharing the best photographs on Instagram and that platform took off to the size of billions of users.

  • A new header image got loaded

    Tonight I loaded a new header image to the weblog. This one was of downtown Denver with some Google Photos powered effects to make it look extra awesome.

    A photo of downtown Denver from 2016
  • Moving along today toward something

    Things are moving along today toward something. It feels like today I might get some things done. At the start of the day it is good to have a feeling that includes some type of forward momentum toward something. It could be the espresso talking or it could just be time to get some serious writing done today. My Warren Zevon station on Pandora is actually playing songs by Zevon. Summer is here for sure and the weather is getting warmer. All of the news about the pandemic is daunting right now. Things have moved westward and not in a good way. Maybe it is a bit of nervousness that has stirred my need to write. All things considered these are strange times indeed. 

    At some point, I’m going to write a review about the new camera that arrived this week. It is a Sony ZV-1 camera and it should help making and creating videos. For some reason, I also purchased a Sony camera bag for it to keep all the accessories together. That is what I keep telling myself. The camera could fit in my front pocket. It probably did not need a new camera bag, but one was purchased and is here on the counter. Yesterday I walked around outside the house and took some pictures of nature. It was not about documenting my surroundings or making art. I was just really curious about how well the camera was going to work in practice. At the start of this weblog, a lot of the posts were digital pictures of things that I observed. My original Flickr account was mostly a photostream of things that happened along the way. It was a glimpse into my daily life and the things that I ran into from day to day. 

    Over the years I have missed the community and networking that happened on the original Flickr and weblog communities. Sometimes at the start of the things the people who like to be on the bleeding edge of technology get together and maybe it is shared enthusiasm and interests that makes the experience powerful and memorable. It could have just been the right people at the right time coming together to create some things. Recently, I started using Flickr again, but it is not the same experience. With my free version of Flickr it clearly says when I go to post things, “You can upload 997 more photos and videos.” I’m pretty sure that hitting that limit will be easy enough, but deciding to move away from the free tier of the service will be the hard part. Sometimes I have wondered why Flickr as a company did not become what Instagram did given that it had a super passionate user base and was worldwide. Maybe the mobile aspect of the whole thing was the key differentiator in the products and the focus of how they were used. My perspective is a little different on the whole thing given that I don’t really engage in professional photography. Sometimes I make really large composited panoramic images, but that is more to see what happens vs. artistic expression. 

    Interrupted. Work.         

  • Sharing a photo of a Denver sunrise

    Earlier this morning I managed to snap a picture of the sunrise. It was fantastic and majestic (dare I say fanjestic?). The camera on my Google Pixel 3 XL does a pretty good job of capturing a moment, but it does not produce the type of depth and detail that a really amazing full size camera captures. Those amazing machine learning algorithms over at Google Photos did some magic to the base photograph. One of the photos shared below is stylized and the other is an enhancement. Both of the modifications look pretty darn good in my opinion. It is amazing to see what the machine learning algorithms are able to accomplish with a photograph. The real question is if the algorithm could be extended to make a decision about quality vs. numerically better. The algorithm that did the enhancement was designed to move the image from the original to something that would be considered enhanced. It was able to complete a transform that is numerically accepted as an improvement or at some level at least an acceptable alteration. None of that effort relates to a judgment of quality. None of it helps determine or explain why that transform improved the image.

    Google stylized this photo of a sunrise in Denver
    Google auto-enhanced this photo of a sunrise in Denver
    The original photo of a sunrise in Denver
  • Photos from Colorado Springs

    Photos from my trip to Colorado Springs