Leon Kilat ::: The Cybercafe Experiments » Photography

Sony Ericsson unveils K770

Max Limpag — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 21:29:08 +0000

Sony Ericsson has released its latest model in the Cyber-shot line: the K770. The phone, which will be marketed as the K770i in the Philippines and the rest of the Asia-Pacific region, will be available by the fourth quarter of this year.

The K770 belongs to a phone line renowned for it’s photo quality: Cyber-shot models have photo qualities good enough to be able to carry Sony Ericsson’s brand for stand-alone digital cameras.

SONY ERICSSON K770. The latest model in the Cyber-shot line will be available by the end of this year. Click on photo to enlarge.

I still use my trusty K750i but my wife–having converted to Sony Ericsson purely on the fact that she lives with a company fan boy–already upgraded to the K800i.

To be honest, the K750i more than serves my needs. I use it to take photos, including images I use in this blog. I once dunked it into the sea in Camotes Islands while taking a water-level shot of my kids swimming. I shook it a bit to remove water that had gotten into openings, let it dry in the sun, and proceeded to take more photos after a few minutes.

I use the K750i as my main digital media player and, at times, file storage. I use it daily to send and receive e-mails. I even use it to capture data. But having played with my wife’s K800i stirred an urge in me to upgrade.

I initially thought of buying one of the later K800 models but changed my mind after reading about the K770 launched this week.

The K770 comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera with auto-focus. The company said the quality of photos taken by the phone are “good enough to print” on paper of up to A4 size. I haven’t tried printing photos taken by my K750i but my wife did with her K800i and the quality was good. It isn’t eye-popping exceptional but it was good enough for a camera phone, approximating the quality of the ones I got with my ancient Kodak digital camera.

The Sony Ericsson announcement did not mention whether the K770 comes with BestPic, a really great feature to use when shooting fast-moving subjects. With BestPic, the phone takes 9 successive shots on a single press of the camera button. You can then choose the best photo in the batch to save.

The K770 is also thin. It’s just 14.5 mm. That’s as thin as a single pack of crackers. It’s the Razr effect. Motorola’s iconic phone made other units look like clunky models with truck-sized batteries that manufacturers were forced to make their units go on a diet.

The K770 comes with features you’d expect from any new multi-media phone: play digital audio and video files, connect to the mobile Internet, RSS, e-mail, and the ability to extend its capabilities with installable third-party mobile applications. It is a phone blogger like me would love.

Upgrading WordPress Lightbox plugin

Max Limpag — Thu, 16 Aug 2007 06:22:12 +0000

I just upgraded the Lightbox 2.0 plugin I use for my WordPress installations. I use Lightbox 2.0 extensively for snazzy image loading effects in my blog and all the other sites I run. The script loads images in an overlay window and dims all the other parts of the page.

LIGHTBOX FOR WORDPRESS. The Lightbox plugin I use for my WordPress installations now works with the WordPress post editor. Click on photo to preview Lightbox effect in loading larger version of image.

You can try it out with the photo that comes with this post (it won’t work, though, if you read this on an RSS reader or in your e-mail, you have to go to my blog).

In the new version, WordPress Lightbox 2 0.6.3, the lightbox button now works with the WordPress post editor, albeit only in the code view. In previous versions, you had to save the post before the lightbox button appeared. The new version only supports WordPress 2.1 and higher and uses the Prototype and Scriptaculous library that come bundled with WordPress. The new version now allows you to easily enter group names for photo sets.

In upgrading from earlier versions, I suggest you disable the plugin and then delete the entire folder before uploading the new version. I tried just overwriting the plugin and encountered errors.

For more on how to use Lightbox to implement snazzy image loading in your blog, check my tutorial in this post.

Upgrading to Sony Ericsson K800i

Max Limpag — Tue, 26 Jun 2007 15:23:56 +0000

When my wife needed to upgrade her phone several weeks back, there was no question on which brand she’ll be getting. The question was which Sony Ericsson model best fits her needs and our budget.

I am a Sony Ericsson fan boy and my fanaticism must have rubbed off on my wife because she decided to dump Nokia. Not even a recent marketing fiasco by Sony Ericsson Philippines can dampen my Sony Ericsson fanaticism.

A PHONE ANY BLOGGER WOULD LOVE. The Sony Ericsson K800i comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera, which makes it great for taking photos for websites and blogs. The 3G phone can also display RSS feeds. Click on photo to enlarge.

My wife chose the Sony Ericsson K800 or, as it is being marketed here in the Asia-Pacific region, K800i. The phone is part of the company’s Cyber-shot line, phone products with image taking qualities good enough to carry the Sony brand for standalone digital cameras.

The K800i is no longer the latest in its line. Sony Ericsson has already upgraded the line by launching the K810i and announcing the coming availability of the K850i.

What stands out in the K800 line is the ability to upgrade the firmware over the air. In previous Sony Ericsson versions, you need to attach your phone to your PC via a USB cable to upgrade your unit’s firmware. With the K800, you can upgrade your firmware from the phone itself.

What’s good about Sony Ericsson firmware upgrades is that at times, the changes they bring are really major. In my K750i, for example, firmware upgrades have improved the photo quality and even sound levels. Firmware upgrades also fixed a nasty USB transfer bug that causes files to go missing when you transfer files to your phone.

I still haven’t tried upgrading the firmware of my wife’s phone so I can’t compare the experience with upgrading via a PC connection. My wife is still using her Globe SIM. We’re waiting for her plan to expire in July so that she can shift to Smart, which offers cheaper mobile Internet access and has a stronger signal in our part of the subdivision.

But I’ve updated my K750i at least thrice and I also upgraded a colleague’s phone and found the process easy. There are several comments, however, on this blog about botched upgrades and these usually involve drivers and versions of Java and Flash.

What I’d wish for Sony Ericsson to implement, though, is allowing users to choose which firmware to upgrade to. In the K750i’s case, the last firmware version lowers the volume by two levels. I was lucky I had upgraded to the penultimate version and could afford not upgrading to the latest firmware. But others who were still suffering from the USB transfer bug had no option but to upgrade to the last firmware version and suffer the lowered volume levels.

The Sony Ericsson Update Service, during the upgrade process, automatically upgrades your phone to the latest version for your country. This is perfectly fine if Sony Ericsson commits to continuing work on a model’s firmware but this isn’t the case. Look at the K750i.

The K800i comes with a 3.2 megapixel camera that’s perfect for blogging. The camera comes with auto-focus and an image stabilizer, which compensates for hand movement to reduce blurring of photos.

SAMPLE PHOTO. Here’s a sample photograph taken with the Sony Ericsson K800i. To view the really huge original photo (it’s 2,000 pixels wide so don’t say I didn’t warn you) click on the image. The close button of the window that will load the photograph is on the lower right portion of the screen (believe me, you’ll be looking for it).

The K800i also comes with BestPic, a feature that allows the camera to take nine successive photographs on a single button press. It takes four photos as you press the button, one image when you press it and another four photos after you press it. You can then choose the best shot to save.

BestPic is useful when taking photographs of fast-moving subjects such as in sports or even news events. I just wished you can have the option of saving all the photographs for choosing later. In certain scenarios, such as covering a news event for your website, you won’t have the time to go over the photos to choose the best one to save. And having to choose a photo may make you miss a shot.

The K800i also comes with picture blogging, a feature that allows you to publish photos in your blog as soon as you take them.

The K800i, being a 3G phone, also allows video calls with compatible handsets and is capable of video streaming. It also offers a faster mobile Internet experience. The phone can also display RSS feeds.

All in all, I think the K800i is a great phone. My wife thinks so. But the K810i seems a lot sleeker and the coming K850i is also something to drool over. I’m thinking of upgrading my K750i next year. In all likelihood, I’d be getting the K850i.

Zooomr Mark III now live: Get unlimited photo storage; sell images

Max Limpag — Mon, 04 Jun 2007 20:38:01 +0000

My favorite photo sharing website, Zooomr, is now live after weeks of being down. The two-man website had upgraded its services to Mark III, a new version that had been months in the planning and contains a lot of new features.

Among the features of Mark III is the ability of users to sell their photos and set prices for them. Users get to keep 80 percent of the sale.

WHAT’S THE PRICE? Zooomr allows photographers to set prices for their images. The photo-sharing website will soon be launching a marketplace where people can buy photographs.

Zooomr founder Kristopher Tate had attempted to upgrade the site previously but rolled back when the downtime took too long. In this last attempt, the downtime took two weeks but most of its users were still very supportive of the service and its two-man crew: Tate and chief evangelist Thomas Hawk.

For days, I was among the many loyal Zooomr users rooting for the upgrade to be successful, visiting the site daily to check for updates. I was among those who regularly watched the live video feed of Kristopher working on the upgrade and taking the site back up. I partly shared their disappointment when, a few minutes after the upgrade went live, it’s database server crashed. I say partly because no one can be as disappointed over the crash as Kristopher and Thomas, who gave so much for the upgrade to work.

The site is now back up, thanks to the help of Zoho, Sun, Dell and various groups and people who answered a call by Robert Scoble for the community to help Zooomr.

The passion Kristopher and Thomas have for Zooomr is contagious. Not only are they giving a lot of their time for the product, Thomas even took a second mortgage on his house to fund their service. Now that’s commitment.

Some of the new features aren’t implemented yet such as the ability to change your log-in from Open ID to an e-mail and password combination. The site is also a bit slow and bulk uploading is still disabled.

One thing that I’ve noticed with the new version, though, is that the photo pages no longer give a direct link to the image location. All it providers is an HTML code that you can use to insert your photo in your website and blog. The code links the image to its photo page.

I use Lightbox JS to load larger images of photos in this blog (go ahead check it out). For this to work, I need to have the URL of the images. Although you can get the image location from the HTML code Zooomr provides, the previous method of providing the URL of the image is easier.

Although I can understand why Zooomr would want people to link to the photo pages, Kristopher did say that linking photos to their larger versions is perfectly acceptable. He said people can just provide another link to the photos page by displaying links in the sidebar. Which reminds me, I need to display my Zooomr photos in the sidebar.

Get unlimited photo storage with Zooomr

Max Limpag — Tue, 20 Mar 2007 19:03:29 +0000

Photo sharing site Zooomr has removed the limits on the amount of photo you can upload and store in the site. Zooomr is currently undergoing transition to Mark III, a new version with over 250 new features and which offers users the ability to sell photographs and keep 90% of the sale.

NO LIMIT. Zooomr has removed storage limits for its users. The free photo storage site is currently undergoing transition to a new version. Click on photo to view larger image.

The transition to Mark III has been delayed but founder Kristopher Tate has decided to remove account limits, a move scheduled for Mark III.

If you post a lot of photos in your website or blog, it makes sense to host it with sites such as Flickr or Zooomr. If you host your blog or website in a shared web server, as I do, you run the risk of going over your web space quota in just a few months if you frequently post high-resolution photos.

You also run the risk of going over your monthly bandwidth quota, especially if your photos get hotlinked, meaning a web owner directly displays it in his or her website by linking to the file in your server instead of downloading the file and uploading it to his or her account.

By hosting your photos in Flickr or Zooomr, you don’t have to worry about file sizes or bandwidth. You also get the added bonus of the photos being processed into different sizes.

For bloggers and independent web publishers, Zooomr is a better option not only because 1. it now offers unlimited storage, or 2. it doesn’t limit free accounts to the last 200 photos in users’ photostreams, but more importantly 3.) it allows you to link photos to their larger versions.

Flickr requires users to link photos to their respective photo pages. But if you want to implement snazzy image loading as I do in this site, you need to be able to link the photos to their larger versions. Here’s how I do it. Zooomr allows this. Kristopher, himself, said this was okay, he just asks that you provide a link to Zooomr.

I can’t help but feel worried by Zooomr’s decision to remove storage and uploading limits. How can they possibly sustain such a free service?

But Thomas Hawk, Zooomr evangelist, said in an answer to one such comment that “Zooomr’s longer-term monetization strategy is built around allowing all photographers everywhere to be able to sell their photos on an opt-in basis. We believe that on a longer-term basis Zooomr can operate on a 10% cut from the sale of stock photography combined with advertising on our free accounts.”

Better photo presentation in your website in 2 easy steps

Max Limpag — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 20:59:02 +0000

Photos are best presented with captions or cutlines. The caption adds context to photographs and provides readers such information as the identity of the people in it, where it was taken and any other data not obvious in the photograph.

I used to publish photos with captions by creating an HTML table to contain the image and caption and then floating this within the text by giving the table a left or right alignment. Not only is the process cumbersome but many experts in web design advice against using tables for anything but tabular data.

There is a simpler way to do it.

A blog reader once emailed me to ask how I publish photos with captions, hence this blog post. I do it through CSS. I created several CSS classes for floating divs with different width dimensions and then I enclose the code for the image and the caption using these divs. This way, I could just include in the post a small thumbnail of the photo and a caption to explain what the photo is about. If readers want to view a larger image of the photo, they can just click on the thumbnail.

Don Pedro Cui St. in Cebu City as seen from the Sun.Star Cebu canteen. Click to enlarge.

1. Add the CSS classes for the photo box in your stylesheet
You first need to add CSS classes to your stylesheet. In WordPress, you need to edit the styles.css file of the theme you are using. In blogger, you just edit your template and add the styles before the closing tag of your template file.

Here are my CSS styles


.smallcaptionleft {
display: inline;
float: left;
width: 250px;
margin: 5px;
padding: 5px;
border: solid 1px #ddd;
background: #ffffcc; font-size:90%;
line-height: 100%;
font-style: italic;
}

.smallcaptionright {
float: right;
margin: 5px;
padding: 5px;
width: 250px;
border: solid 1px #ddd;
background: #ffffcc;
font-size:80%;
line-height: 100%;
font-style: italic;
}

I specified 250px as the width of my smallcaption class because the Small size rendered in Flickr and Zoomr has 240px as width and I usually choose this size for photos published in my blog.

2. Enclose photos and captions with div tags of your photobox classes
I place my code for the photos as well as the caption text within a

tag if I want the photo box floated left and if I want it floated right.

Since I use Lightbox 2.0 for the snazzy photo loading effect in this blog (go ahead, check it out by clicking on the photo above), I just enclose the entire Lightbox image code in the div tags. So the photo above is using this code:


Don Pedro Cui St. in Cebu City as seen from the Sun.Star Cebu canteen. Click to enlarge.

Extend
You can play around with the style by specifying border styles or changing the background colors. Here’s a link to a tool that you can use to get the HTML code for colors. Here’s a site that has a good rundown of the different border styles. For tips on how to write good cutlines, read this article in Poynter.

Adobe releases Lightroom beta for Windows

Max Limpag — Wed, 19 Jul 2006 15:35:40 +0000

Adobe Lightroom, the software “built from the ground up by photographers, for photographers,” now has a Windows version of its beta. I tried it and I was blown away with the way it allows you to edit your photographs.

The Windows version is labeled Beta 3 but Adobe’s announcement says the program is slightly behind the Mac version.

View in Zooomr">Lightroom, according to Adobe, “is an efficient, powerful way to import, select, develop and showcase large volumes of digital images. It allows you to spend less time sorting and organizing images, so you have more time to actually shoot and perfect them.” Here’s a comprehensive post on the capabilities of Lightroom.

To run Lightroom in Windows, you need to have Windows XP with Service Pack 2, a Pentium 4 processor with at least 768MB of RAM (albeit they recommend 1GB), 1 GB of hard disk space and 1024 x 768 resolution screen. I tested Lightroom with less than the required RAM and it was slow. Even then, I was still blown away.