Jacob's photographic page

This page contains information about my equimpent and methods for taking the picture that I publish at different locations in the web as well as a list of the links to my different vacations that I have pictures from.

Introduction

Trying to capture what I see at my vacations is mainly for my own memory. However, sharing digital photos with friends are easy and often more appreciated than a traditional post card.

In my early work I wrote a lot of misspelled words for each picture, the amount of text has started to shrink with the years, which most people aprreciate. I rather spend more time working with the pictures, which, IMO, have gotten better over the years (or maybe I just throw away the bad ones for a better looking total impression ;-).

Equipment

With the exception of the Keb99 expedition the pictures are filmed using my Sony TRV410E Digital8 handycam. It is a digital video camera with a resolution of approximately 650x500 pixels. This is hardly a professional set-up for people like Mattias Klum, but it has several advantages for me as an amateur:
  1. By filming I automatically get several hundred pictures of each motive as I modify exposure(bländare), zoom, orientation, and focus. I got approximatly 20 pictures from my last vacation using 20 minutes of film. That is one saved picture for every 25f/s*60s=150 frames filmed. Sure a lot of them are "the same", but anyway.
  2. The longest Digital8 tapes (same as Hi8/Video8) I have found has a capasity of 60 minutes. I rarely use more than a minute for each good picture. Battery life has never been a problem I have a 4 h battery, and a 2 h for back-up. (I have a back-up tape as well).
  3. There is no development cost! I use the firewire (IEEE1394) interface on my computer to directly copy a chunk from the tape (actually all of it with the size of harddisks these days).
Maybe more that I cant think of now. Some disadvantages that comes to my mind:
  1. The camera is clumsy and heavy.
  2. The camera is very expensive.
  3. The camera has a low resolution making it worthless for hardcopy enlargements (or hardcopy in any form).
  4. No hardcopies means no cosy photoalbum sessions, but the dust on my three albums indicate that these are rare anyway. ;-)

Software and procedure for creating pictures

The video tape containg the pictures is no fun, especially with my recent excess of "standing" photos (rotating the camera 90 degrees. I use a a video program (Premiere that I have also used for movie production) to capture all of the tape to my harddrive and also for selecting the frames that I like and exporting them to bitmap files. These .bmp-files are then imported to Photoshop for
  1. Cropping and rotating to get the correct view.
  2. Changing contrast and brightness (even though I have tried to get the best possible camera setting, I still feel there is room for improvment in the picture).
  3. Altering color levels, this is a tool I found playing with the pictures from my last hike. The rain forest pictures are more than black and white thanks to this feature.
  4. Resizeing with bi-cubic scaling algorithms to avoid Moire patterns and other scaling artefacts. Simply publishing the photos with resizing directives in the HTML-tag can give a lousy result as well as bloated transfer times.
  5. Exporting to jpeg format for web publishing.

Links to my pictures

Of course, I hold copyright to all my pictures, but I happilty grant you permission to use them for your own leasure if you ask for it (I like to get flattered). Unfortuneatly all text is in swedish but the pictures can still be view by everyone ;-)