The popularity of photography has exploded because of digital cameras. It’s easier and cheaper to take and share thousands of pictures, and if you choose a known brand, it’s almost impossible to buy a bad camera. But one thing that has suffered is the actual knowledge of the amateur photographer (and from the forums I read, a lot of pros have an embarrassing lack, too).

When you bought an old time manual SLR, there were no automatic modes (those that existed were often worse than useless, easily fooled by simple lighting conditions). You had no choice but to learn about light. You needed to know that 1/500 sec at Æ’8 lets in the same amount of light as 1/250 sec at Æ’16. You had to manually focus before a shot. And if you wanted to remove red-eye, you bought a black sharpie.

Now, I’m all for auto-everything. My cameras scarcely come out of auto mode, although I tweak the recommended settings. But, fancy as they are, a camera is still a box with a hole in the front, and understanding the fundamentals will make you a better photographer. Which is where Photocalc comes in. The $3 iPhone app will help you with all the calculations that the old-hands do in their heads. What’s in there?

First, there is a tool to teach you about exposure reciprocation, the rule that if you open the aperture one stop, you need to quicken the shutter speed one stop to achieve the same exposure. This is baked into my head, but I remember it was tricky to learn.

Second, and way more useful, is the depth-of-field calculator. Depth of field is the amount of your picture that will be in acceptable focus. If you focus on a subject, the depth-of-field means that there will be a little area behind and in front of that subject that is also sharp. And the size of that zone depends on the aperture that you are using. A wide open hole in the lens means that the background will be blurred, while a small hole means almost front to back sharpness (this is why pinhole cameras work).

But how do you know how big this area is? Well, older lenses had a scale on the lens barrel to show you. Now you need a calculator, and Photocalc does that. Tell it what camera you have, how long your lens, how far away your subject is and what aperture you are using and it will tell you the depth of field limits, and will give you the hyperfocal distance. Clunkier than lens barrel markings, but still dead handy.

Next, there is a flash calculator. In the olden days, this was all done with math tables printed on the back of the strobe. Now the flash does it all for you. But if you want to kick it old-school, Photocalc will do all the heavy lifting for you. You lock any one of the five values as the one you wish to know and supply the other variables. It’s quick and simple, especially if your brain is frazzled and you just need to know the aperture now, dammit.

Next up, and an amazing resource for the n00b, is the reference section. There’s a full glossary of technical terms, a page that tells you the sunrise and sunset times today (using the iPhone’s location features), a table for using Ansel Adams’ Zone System (don’t ask), a full rundown of the properties of different films (if anyone still uses them), a list of filters and a guide to the “Sunny 16 Rule”.

In all, this little app is a great pocket guide. The interface could use some help — entering values into the calculators is a little clunky — but as a learning tool for newcomers and as a reference for old pros, it’s certainly worth the three bucks.

Product page [iTunes]

Product page [Adair]

VLC, the grand master of all media players, has made its way to the iPhone and iPod Touch. VLC (Video LAN Client) is an open source media player maintained as a project by French school kids, and is known to be a player that you can “throw anything at” and it will just play.

The currently beta port, by Zodttd, is a hefty binary by iPhone standards, at 24MB, but it’s worth it: you can drag and drop any media file onto a jailbroken iPhone and it should just work. No more tedious conversion using the (quite excellent) Visual Hub. Right now the application is in private beta. The developer will give you access in an exchange for a donation, or you can wait around until it is made public. In either case, you’ll need a Jailbroken iPhone. After that, you install just like any other third party application.

Formats? XviD, h264, MPEG4, FLAC, 3GP, MP3, MPEG2 and AVI. In short, pretty much anything you’d find on the Pirate Bay.

Product page [Zodttd via BBGadgets]

Cone Photo [iboy_daniel/Flickr]

There’s some confusion as to what the RAW photo format actually is, and, like any good photographic fact, it can incite forum flame wars as quickly as the mention of the words Leica and Bokeh in the same sentence. Although it comes in various flavors — seemingly one for every different camera model — RAW is essentially the raw data from the camera’s sensor, hence the name.

If your camera has a RAW setting, you should be using it, no excuses. Here’s why.

Dynamic Range

Dynamic range is the difference between the lightest and darkest parts of a scene. Unless the lighting is very flat (lacking in contrast), your camera’s sensor will only capture a subset of that range. A RAW file, which contains all the data from the sensor, will give a dynamic range of around eight stops. A JPEG will will give you a couple of stops less, which usually translates to blown out, or over-exposed highlights and loss of details in the shadows. So, while you still need to be careful with exposure, RAW will record the maximum information available to you.

Also, the histograms displayed on most cameras are based on a JPEG preview (even when you are shooting RAW). So a histogram that shows your picture as overexposed (the graph is pushed up against the right-hand side) might still have some detail left.

No In-Camera Processing

One drawback of RAW is that you can get flat-looking previews on both the camera’s LCD screen and when you load up your images into editing software. This is because, unlike JPEGs, the camera is doing no processing to the file; no sharpening, no fancy tricks to boost the colors, no nothing. All of the important decisions are left to you to apply later, on a big screen with a much more powerful computer than the one in the camera.

To get the maximum data from a scene, common advice says that you should expose for the highlights, just like with slide film back in the day. Once the highlights have blown, there’s no getting them back. With the shadows, however, you can often pull details out of the murk. The flat looking preview will show you just what you captured. It might not be pretty now, but you are shooting to record the maximum information.

Adjust later

Next to capturing the maximum info from the sensor, the best thing about RAW is the post processing that can be done. Because the camera doesn’t bake any of its settings into the image, you have a clean slate on which to work. Using non-destructive editing software like Apple’s Aperture or Adobe’s Lightroom, you can make endless adjustments to the exposure, white balance, contrast and just about anything else you could do in a real darkroom and change your mind later.

These programs never touch the original RAW file; they keep a small text file (just a few kilobytes in size) which contains the adjustments you have made. Each time you look at the photo, these settings are re-applied in real time (although usually there is a preview to keep things quick). Even cropping, dust spotting and sharpening can be undone, years later, with the original file unaffected.

The (Few) Disadvantages

As you’d expect, there are some disadvantages. RAW capture is slower. Hold down the shutter release of a DSLR and it will happily shoot jpegs until the memory card is full, barely slowing down. Try that with RAW and even pricey cameras will slow to a crawl. Also, RAW files are bigger. That, though, is a poor excuse. Hard drives are cheap, and getting bigger all the time. Of course, some cameras don’t let you shoot RAW files. The manufacturers want you to buy a more expensive camera. If you own a Canon, though, you might be in luck. The CHDK (Canon Hacker’s Development Kit) will let you install hacked firmware onto some models, adding RAW capture amongst other goodies.

So if your camera has a RAW setting, go switch it on now. The advantages far outweigh the small drawbacks, and it is the only way to be sure you are getting all you can from your camera. A RAW file isn’t called a digital negative for nothing.

The Riddle of the Sphinx asks “Which creature in the morning goes on four feet, at noon on two, and in the evening upon three?”

The answer is, of course, a hungover photographer.

A tripod has two main parts: The head, to which the camera fixes, and the legs, which keep everything up. Both are equally important, and both can have a lot of extras, some of which are very handy and some of which are useless.

The Legs

The most important thing is stability. After all, the whole point of a tripod is to support the camera and keep it steady, either for use at slow shutter speeds or because you want to keep the camera locked in one place for multiple exposures (High Dynamic Range photography, for instance). Test this out at your local photo store before you place your Amazon order. A wobbly ‘pod is useless, no matter how many extra bells and whistles it has. Try it fully extended and consider what camera you will be using. A little compact will be a lot easier to support than a pro DSLR loaded with a 1000mm lens.

After stability comes ease of use. A tricky to operate gadget is a gadget which stays at home gathering dust. Make sure the legs can be quickly and easily extended without the clamps taking chunks out of your fingers. And also make sure that once the rig is set up, the joints don’t creep, the legs slowly collapsing under their own weight. The easiest locks are flippable knobs. The most annoying are the circular collars which need to be twisted to close; remember back to the last time you removed the u-bend on the pipe under the sink? With collar-style locks, you’ll be doing that every time you use the tripod.

After this, look for extras. A geared centre column can be nice if you use a heavy camera as it allows small adjustments while still bearing weight. With a non-geared head, adjustment is faster but you’ll need to get a hold on your gear before you unscrew anything.

Legs, too, come in different types. The most basic extend and that’s it. Some models can be splayed, either for better stability on uneven terrain or to drop the tripod closer to the ground. Here, tripods lacking a centre column will go lower. Some higher end models have a removable column, or even a reversible one so the camera can hang underneath. And there are a few Manfrotto tripods which have a flip-out centre column: extend it fully and it hinges, allowing you to point the camera straight down and effectively make an ad-hoc copy stand.

Other niceties include “leg-warmers” (foam sleeves which protect your hands from the cold metal), spirit levels, and adjustable feet (the rubber foot screws back to reveal spikes. Just remember to reset them before you photograph on your mother’s parquet). Many manufacturers now offer carbon fiber models, which are light, stiff and expensive.

Heads

The head screws onto the legs, usually via a standard mount. You then fix your camera to the top either by a machine screw which matches the tripod bush on the base of the camera or via a quick release mechanism. These are, as the name suggests, a lot more convenient as you can leave the quick release plate on the camera permanently and just slot it into the tripod when needed. The only other function of the head is to move, and then to lock solid when in position. The differences come in the kind of controls the heads offer.

There are many specialist heads, but the ones you’ll most likely want are a ball head or a pan-and-tilt head (aka the three-way head). The ball head is the most convenient: the two sections are connected by a ball and socket joint making movement in all three directions easy. The ball is locked by a single control, making it very fast to reposition. The disadvantage is that small adjustments are harder; if you want to adjust in one plane, it’s easy to slip out of alignment in another. Some models have an extra panning control to spin the camera on a horizontal access while the ball is secured.

The pan-and-tilt head has three controls, some of which may be spring loaded and damped. These are, to borrow from airplane terminology, pitch, roll, and yaw. Each axis has its own controller. This is a little slower than a ball, but it does mean you can easily track a subject in one direction while keeping other movement isolated. Hence the “pan” in the name. It also means you are less likely to drop a big heavy camera, something easy to do with a ball head.

Whichever you chose, don’t be cheap. A good tripod might be pricey but it will last and last. The cheap ones will frustrate you, the heads will sag and they’ll drop your expensive camera into the dirt. If you’re really unlucky, they might even claim a finger or two.

I’m in the market for a new tripod. If you have any suggestions, or anything to add to these tips, leave them in the comments.

Eye-Fi just announced an update to its line of WiFi enabled SD cards and made them a whole lot more useful. The original $100 card has been rebadged “Eye-Fi Share” and has been joined by the “Eye-Fi Home”, an $80 card which functions as a cable replacement: no uploading to Flickr or anywhere else, just wireless transfer to your computer, and the quite exciting $130 “Eye-Fi Explore”, which will geotag and upload your photos out in the field. All models are till 2GB in size.

One of the problems our Danny Dumas noted with the original card is that it will only work with pre-configured WiFi access points. You needed to set the card up by connecting it to a computer. Now, the Explore will hook up to any of 10,000 Wayport hotspots in the US for upload. This is fine, and great for photographers who are set upon by over zealous security guards and told to delete their pictures (”Ha! They’re already in the cloud”). The Explore will send photos to either the web or your home machine.

The real magic, though, comes with the new geotagging support. It doesn’t use GPS, which would be too big a battery drain on the host camera. Instead it uses WiFi triangulation, just like the iPhone and iPod Touch. In fact, it uses the same Skyhook service that Apple uses. And if the card can’t connect to a WiFi access point to grab the info it needs to geotag the photos, it will store a snapshot of the access points it sees and work things out later when you get back to your PC or Mac.

This is great news, and something we predicted last month:

Somebody like Eye-Fi will work out how to put faux-GPS, or WiFi access point triangulation, onto a memory card and then GPS will explode.

Hopefully manufacturers will start bundling these cards with cameras. The price of the Explore includes a year of hotspot access.

Press release [Eye-Fi]

Product page [Eye-Fi]

Photo [PPDIGITAL/Flickr]

Every gadget you own needs some kind of mains power. Even if you don’t hook it straight up to the wall, there will be some kind of battery charger involved. Finding enough outlets in your own home can be a chore, but at least all the plugs fit all the outlets. I was reminded of this on a recent jaunt to the UK, home of possibly the most paranoid electrical designs in the world. The first lesson was that you need to take your adapter with you. Almost nobody you visit will have adapters to fit their own country’s sockets. Why would they? All their plugs fit.

Photo [Wikipedia/Public Domain]

The second realization was that there is a second tier for electrical connections. While the World’s wall holes vary, there are a few international standards, exemplified by the Kettle Lead, or IEC connector (seen above) and its close cousins, the two-pin C7 and C8 connectors.

You find these everywhere, from games consoles to tape recorder to laptops and, of course, kettles. Even Apple uses a modified form on its notebook power supplies (if you have an old yo-yo style iBook mains adapter then it’s likely you’ve replaced the notoriously breakable Apple AC cable with a whittled-down C7).

Because these are so common, almost every house has a few spares, meaning that you can hook up to the local supply, even if it temporarily makes you white power brick look less pretty than Cupertino intended.

Britain

Photo [Docklandsboy/Flickr]

Aside from the practicalities of international portability, the differences in design are themselves fascinating and often reflect the national character of the host country. The most extreme example is Britain. In this joyless nation the average citizen can’t be trusted to think for himself. For this reason, standard 240v mains sockets can never be found in a bathroom (and bathroom lights are activated with a ceiling mounted pull-cord). When you get into drier areas of the house, the madness continues. Every UK socket has an Earth (or Ground) pin, and the three prong design means that the plug can only go in one way. You can still squeeze a two-pin plug in there, but it wobbles in a way that would strike fear into the most carefree Englishman.

It doesn’t stop there. Each and every socket has its own power switch. Even some power strips come with individual breakers. If you don’t think that the UK government interferes in every tiny part of its citizens lives, then consider a public service film that was shown there back in the seventies. In it, homeowners are warned to not only switch all appliances off at the wall before going to bed, but to unplug them, too. Failure to do so would result in electrical fires and death, joyfully illustrated by the scaremongering TV spot.

Other countries are more lackadaisical in their approach. In Spain, you’ll find mains power inches from the kitchen and bathroom sinks, with no way of isolating them. Some appliances requiring a Ground line can’t be fitted into groundless sockets, but that’s as far as the safety goes. For frequent travelers, it becomes clear quickly that people are very similar all around the World. It is these little, unnoticed and mundane, every-day pieces of public design that are one of the constant surprises for the globetrotter.

China

Photo [kenner116/Flickr]

Australia

Photo [Alikai/Flickr]

South Africa

Photo [Joi/Flickr]

Chile

Photo [César Rincón/Flickr]

Mexico

Photo [ZeroOne/Flickr]

Denmark

Photo [plindberg/Flickr]

Please point us to any more Creative Commons pictures, or tell us about any weird power cord conventions in the comments.

Further reading

Domestic AC power plugs and sockets [Wikipedia]

We missed this when it “aired” at the TED conference a month or so back, but when you see the cool hacks Johnny Lee is doing with the WiiMote you’ll see why I’m posting it now. Just look at what cheap consumer electronics can do when they get into the hands of a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D grad student.

The hacks are all based on the tiny infrared camera in the front of the Wii controller, which detects the lights on the bar that sits on your TV. The first one shows a virtual whiteboard. Using a homemade infrared pointer (an LED, a switch and a battery. Total cost, $5), Lee is able to write on the screen and the WiiMote sees the “pen”. This then tells Photoshop to draw the lines. Think of it as a poor man’s Wacom Cintiq.

Next, the showman Lee whips out a second pointer and starts stretching and zooming the on-screen windows. It’s kind of like Microsoft’s Surface, only without the big-ass table.

Last, and best, is his fake 3D display. This time the WiiMote sits under the screen, pointing back at the user who wears a headset embedded with two infrared LEDS. The computer tracks the head movements of the viewer and updates a display. It’s totally faked 3D, and it works amazingly. Lee says that Electronic Arts is planing to incorporate the tech as an Easter Egg in a game later this year.

Mind bending stuff, and Lee got three ovations during this one short six minute talk. Each of which, we think, was deserved.

Product page [CMU via John Nack]

The developers behind Snapture, a new camera enhancement add-on for the iPhone, don’t pull any punches on the product site:

While the iPhone itself is a slick package, the fact of the matter is most of the Apple built apps are mediocre and overly simplistic – to point where features are sacrificed. It’s like buying a new sports car and driving it at the speed limit.

That’s a valid point, and the five authors of the software didn’t just complain: they did something about it. Snapture adds many new features that should have been built in. There’s burst mode which captures three frames in a row, a 3X digital zoom, a grayscale setting, proper 360º auto-rotation (for snapping pictures upside down), a level (which appears to use the iPhone’s accelerometers) and support for different image sizes.

Camera Pro, another iPhone app, has offered these features for a while, but it costs $20. Snapture is free, and also has a much slicker looking website. You’ll need to have a jailbroken iPhone to run it. If you do, you’ll find Snapture in the Utilities section of the Installer application.

Product page [Snapture]

Corsair, the memory manufacturer which sounds like a 1970s airline, claims that its new Mac-tuned RAM will make the MacBook and MacBook Pro run up to 28% faster. How does it perform this seemingly impossible trick? Low latency, the explanation for which is so dense we find it easier to just think of it as magical fairy dust:

Corsair’s Mac Memory features special Serial Presence Detect (SPD) profile characteristics, so that Macs can self-configure for optimal performance for critical applications.

The graphs look impressive. According to the one above, Corsair’s memory shaves almost 30 seconds from a fairly demanding Photoshop task (it’s also one of the only times you will read the words “shorter is better”). You can see the rest of the tests in the linked PDF below. Four gigs (2×2GB) will cost you around $160. Not crazy expensive, but more than the competition. Maybe Corsair is relying on the Mac owner’s reputation as a hardware spendthrift?

Press release [PR Newswire]
Low Latency Memory Performance on Apple MacBook Pro [PDF – Corsair]

Belkin’s latest power-strip adds a very smart feature for travelers: USB ports. The strip has a couple of charge-only sockets along with the three-way mains AC extenders and even comes with a mini-USB cable, obviating the need to carry chargers for most gadgets. The $25 box also squeezes in a surge-protector for those untrustworthy hotel power outlets.

Product page [Belkin]