Aaron Hollman's Blog

Note: All work for this article was done using GIMP 2.6.6. on an Intel iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.7.

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As many of you who read this blog know, photography is a hobby of mine. While looking at photography sites to get ideas for pictures, I came across what’s known as tilt-shift photography. I’m not going to go into the specific details of it on the blog, but you can read about what it is here: Tilt-shift photography – Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

I like the way tilt-shift lenses can make real life pictures look miniature. There are ways to fake this effect in photoshop and with The GIMP (Gnu Image Manipulation Program), the free Photoshop-like program that can be downloaded from: GIMP – The GNU Image Manipulation Program

All of the tutorials I’ve found to fake this effect were written for Photoshop. I have found a way to do the same effect with GIMP. Without further ado, here is the how-to:

Before doing any of this with a photo, make sure you have a backup or copy of the original photo.

1. Open the picture you want to do this effect with in GIMP. (not all pictures work well)
2. Select the Quick Mask mode by pressing Shift-Q on your keyboard. (or by going to Select –> Toggle Quick Mask in the menu bar.) The screen should have put a red layer over your image.
3. Select the Blend tool from the Toolbox.  It will be the icon that fades from black to white.
4. Select your shape from the options that appear. Sometimes Linear works best if you want to keep the whole foreground (or background) in focus. Sometimes Radial works best if you want to focus on just one section of the image.
5. Go back to your picture.
6. Draw a line from where you want the focus to start, outward to where you want the blur to start. This will be a gradual transition when the blur is applied.
7. Change out of Quick Mask mode by pressing Shift-Q again. You will notice that parts of the image were selected from where you drew the line.
8. Go to Filter –> Blur –> Focus Blur in the menu bar.
9. The window that pops up gives you some options. I wish I could tell you exactly what to select here, but it is all dependent on you personal preference and the picture you are trying this effect on. I have found that 10 or 15 for the Diffusion Model and Radius works best for me.
10. Depending on the speed of your computer, this could take a few seconds to several minutes. Be patient, the results are worth it.
11. If you like the image, save it AS A DIFFERENT NAME. You don’t want to overwrite your original image. If you don’t, Control-Z a few times will get you back to your original image.

You can check out other Tilt-Shift fakes I’ve done on my photoblog:

Fake Tilt-Shift Experiment: Las Vegas « Blog Archive « Aaron’s Photoblog
Fake Tilt-Shift Experiment – Monument Valley, AZ « Blog Archive « Aaron’s Photoblog
Fake Tilt-Shift Experiment – Grand Canyon « Blog Archive « Aaron’s Photoblog

Don’t be afraid to experiment with the settings and try different things. There are so many different options to try. For example, pump up the color settings and contrast some to make the picture pop a little more.

Good luck and have fun!

aaron

I used to really be into photography. I was a photographer for my journalism class in high school and during my senior year, I was one of two yearbook photographers. I did everything from loading the film into canisters to taking the pictures and then to developing the 35mm film. My camera of choice then, a Pentax SLR so I really got into the manual settings for pictures.

Since that time and the development of the digital camera, I have been on a point and shoot system, using simple, digital cameras. My first digital camera was a Kodak 3.2 megapixel point and shoot that set me back close to $300 — on clearance. I thought I was getting a deal. Recently, my wife and I retired the Kodak and purchased a new one, a Canon PowerShot SX110 IS.

Right away, I loved it. The best way to describe it is as a medium range camera, somewhere between the simple point and shoots and the professional SLR cameras such as the Canon EOS Rebel. Suddenly, I had control over my manual settings once again. I immediately went out and started snapping away, adjusting settings for each shot. I was addicted to photography once again.

At any rate, here is an overview of the camera. New users will first notice that it is light weight and compact, taking up very little space. There is no internal storage on the camera but it does come with a 32 MB storage card, yes thats right 32 MEGA bytes. This card is so small that you can only fit twelve full size pictures on it, but no matter, I was going to buy a larger card anyway. I opted for an 8 GB SDHC card. This card will hold over 3300 full size images, enough to last a while. It is a standard SD card in size, but the HC (High Capacity) allows the camera to write its image data to the card at a faster rate since it is a version 2.0 of the SD card.

Some of the stuff I like:

Battery life

Very good battery life. I went through over 400 full resolution images on the set of batteries the camera came with. These usually aren’t the best batteries in the world.

10x optical zoom

I love the 10x optical zoom. This allows me to get in close on unsuspecting objects, mostly birds, and snap away getting really good shots. This, combined with the image stabilization and the continuous shooting feature, is a win-win-win for me.

Image stablization

This is not just for those with really shaky hands or who move too quickly while taking a shot, it is almost necessary with the optical zoom. While zoomed in on an object, the lense becomes more sensitive to any little motion. The image stabilization takes care of most of this.

Continous shooting

All I can say is, “Thank goodness!” I have no reservations about firing off 20, 30, or even 50 shots a pop while I am trying to get one good shot. Be warned though, this only really works well with a high shutter speed, a low ISO speed and no flash. Once the ISO speed gets above 400, don’t even bother with the continuous shooting. The flash is a continous shooting killer. It takes a few seconds for the flash to recharge so continuously shooting with the flash on shouldn’t be bothered with.

Timer feature

Mostly built for lovebird couples who want to take pictures of themselves doing stuff I don’t want to think about, this feature also has a practical use. It comes with a built in two second timer. This is a great feature I never even considered before using it the other night. If you want to take time exposure pictures, especially night shots, the two second timer eliminates the camera shake from pushing the trigger button. As a result, time exposure images come out much better than the steadiest hand on the trigger.

Multiple presets

If you have no experience with camera settings, this camera is also for you. It contains eight presets ranging from night scenes to portraits with most things you’d need in between. There are also settings that give priority to the aperture setting and the shutter speed. Perhaps the most important preset is the ‘auto’ preset. This is the Jack of all Trades setting that will be good for probably 90% of shots.

Manual settings

Greatly missing the control of the manual settings from my high school days, I was pleased to be able to adjust them once again on the PowerShot SX110. I have taken what I consider to be some great pictures with manual settings. Setting the aperture setting to its lowest level (widest opening) sets a very tight depth of field allowing you to focus on one thing but blurring out the foreground and background; it is a great effect that I greatly enjoy.

Macro setting

This has to be the best macro setting I have seen on a camera. It will focus up to the end of the lense. It is great for those REALLY close up shots.

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Some stuff I don’t like:

Came with 32mb SD card

As I mentioned before, I wish it had come with a bigger card. I think digital cameras are so prevalent now, that people are used to clicking away and not worry about wasting film. Twelve pictures is not going to last someone very long.

No viewfinder

Maybe I’m old fashioned, but I really miss my view finder. I have a real hard time holding the camera out in front of me to take a picture instead of right up to my eye. I also have difficulty finding the subject of my pictures in the view screen when it is zoomed in. At least with a view finder, I could make an educated guess as to where the subject is.

Manual focus

Of all the manual settings I like, the manual focus has to be my least favorable. It is tedious and tiresome spinning the little select wheel and watching the pop-up focus screen trying to focus on the subject. It is also slow. Maybe a small lense focus would have been a better way for Canon to go on this model.

Camcorder feature

If I want a camcorder, I’ll buy a camcorder.

Digital zoom

Here is one of the most confusing and useless features that almost all cameras share. It is there for mainly one purpose, to sell the camera. If I want to digitally zoom in on a picture, I will use one of the many available photo organization applications out there, like iPhoto ‘09. Let me say this clearly: A digital zoom is no different than cropping an image on your computer.

Its not an SLR

‘Nuff said.

Summary and Features

I do recommend this camera to those who think they might want to get into photography as a hobby but are not sure yet or the casual user who wants to have a little more power than with a point and shoot. In fact, this is a good camera for almost every user. If you want to see some of the pictures I have taken, go to my photoblog which is at Aaron’s Photoblog. There are not very many photos there yet, but it will grow eventually.

I have not played with all the goodness or found all the great features yet, but here’s what I can sum up for basic features. If I run across something I think everyone should know about the camera, I will post it as a comment to this post.

Batteries: 2 x AA
Memory: SD or SDHC
Shutter Speed: 15 – 1/1600 seconds
Aperture: f/2.8 – f/8.0
ISO Speed: 80 – 1600
Optical Zoom: 10x
Digital Zoom: 40x (remember what I said about the digital zoom)
Cost: @$270.00 USD
And much, much more.

Aspire One

Disclaimer:

The following instructions involve steps that could potentially corrupt and destroy any existing operating systems you may have. Use the following at your own risk. If there are any mistakes or errors in the following instructions, please let me and others know by making a comment. Although, I have endeavored to make certain as much as possible that the following is correct, I am not responsible for any damage to any machine that this is tried on. You have been warned.

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I recently bought an Acer Aspire One netbook PC that came with one fatal flaw, Microsoft Windows Vista installed by default. I had already had enough of dealing the poisoned dessert that Vista has brought to the Operating System Table so I decided right off that I was not going to use it, but I also realized that there might be a time in the future that I am going to need to be able to use Vista so I decided to install Ubuntu Linux 9.04 in addition to Windows Vista.

The first thing I needed to do, before anything else, was to make a backup of the current operating system just incase things went horribly wrong. Thankfully, I have not needed to do a restore from that backup at this time since both OSes appear to be running as well as possible. I used the backup software that came with the computer in Windows Vista. It can be found by going to Start –> All Programs –> Acer –> Acer eRecovery Management.

After the backup was complete, I proceeded to install my copy of Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix from a thumb drive. I am not going to go into the details of this install since it did not take me very long to decide that I was not going to keep it. I will detail the installation of the full version of Ubuntu 9.04.

Installation:

The first thing you need is a copy of Ubuntu 9.04 on CD and a USB CD ROM drive. You can download Ubuntu 9.04 from here: Download Ubuntu | Ubuntu.

1. Plug the CD ROM drive into your netbook’s USB slot.
2. Boot off they CD by pressing F12 (note: You may need to enable this feature in the machine’s BIOS, I did.)
3. Select your language (English) and click Forward
4. Select your time zone from the map (choose area close to where you live in your time zone) and click Forward.
5. Choose your keyboard layout. Based on your time zone location it will recommend one for you and click Forward.
6. Click ‘Specify partitions manually (advanced)’ and click Forward. (The reason for this over the ‘Install side by side…’ option is due to the fact that after I tried that the first time, Ubuntu thought I only needed 2 GB of hard drive space for the installation, this was not the case.)
7. Select the main Windows partition, it will be the larger of the two partitions if this is a new machine. DO NOT CHANGE THE SETTINGS FOR THE SMALLER PARTITION. THIS IS PROBABLY THE RESCUE PARTITION.
8. Adjust the partition size to what you want the size of the new partition to be. This is set in megabytes so adjust accordingly (ex. 80786 is equal to about 80 gigabytes)
9. Leave the other settings the way they are and press OK. Press Continue on the next screen, this will write the changes to disk. This should resize your Windows partition without removing it completely.
10. Click on the free space row on the device table and press the New partition button below.
11. Select the size you want for the root partition. I usually use the following scheme: (49% root, 49% home, 2% swap up to 2GB.)
12. Set the ‘Use as’ as Ext3 (this is the most common file format though Ext4 is becoming more prevalent)
13. Set the mount point to root (/) and press OK.
14. Click on the free space row again and press New partition again.
15. Select the size you want for your home drive, about 49% again.
16. Set the use as as the same thing you set it to for the root partition in step 12.
17. Set the mount point for home (/home) and press OK.
18. Click on the free space row again and press New partition.
19. Leave the size as is and set the ‘Use as’ to swap area.
20. Press OK.
21. Press the Forward button at the bottom right corner of the screen.
22. Fill in the information on the next page (name, login name, password, computer name, etc.) and press Forward.
23. If you wish to migrate documents and settings from your other Windows installation, this is the place to do it. (I have not used this so I can not provide any further information on it.)
24. Press the Forward button.
25. The next page is a summary of what is going to happen. Read it and make sure everything is as you want it to be. When you are certain, click the Install button. This will install Ubuntu 9.04 on the partitions we selected earlier. This will take about 15 minutes to half an hour, maybe longer depending on the speed of your machine.
26. Once it is finished, the CD ROM drive will eject asking you to remove the disk before rebooting. Once this is done the computer will reboot.
27. You will notice after the reboot that there is a new screen before the OS starts up, this is the boot loader screen where you can select which operating system to boot into. Your old Windows installation will probably be the bottom one that says Windows, the first one will be the rescue partition and probably will not boot up at all, this is a good thing since it should not be used except for recovery.
28. Your machine should boot into Ubuntu after a delay provided you have not pressed any keys. If you have, select Ubuntu from the top and press Enter. It will begin to boot into the OS.

For the machine  I installed Ubuntu on (Acer Aspire One model A0751), I needed to make some changes to the graphics to get them to work at full resolution. The instructions (these are for the netbook remix, but work on the full version also) for getting this working can be found here: AspireOne – Community Ubuntu Documentation (IMPORTANT NOTE: UPDATE YOUR OS FIRST BEFORE APPLYING THIS FIX.)

29. I don’t have experience with other models of netbooks, but I would search the Ubuntu forums for any issues that may arise. It is very well maintained and you can usually find the answers you seek there.

Customization:

Customizations are endless with Ubuntu. You can make it look almost exactly like other operating systems such as Windows XP, Windows Vista or even Mac OS X. I myself chose a mix between Ubuntu and Mac OS X. Here is a good guide to get you started: Ubuntu Customization Guide v2 « Tux Enclave.

Final Thoughts:

I still have not found a good Twitter client to use on Ubuntu, but I have not looked very hard yet. I am using Mozilla FireFox for the web browser and Mozilla ThunderBird for a mail client. I am using it for what it was designed for, accessing the internet. As I play around with it more, I may write more about what I am using it for. For now, that is it.

Good luck!

aaron

FireFox 3.5 was released last week to the pleasure of the FireFox fan masses. Here is my experience using FireFox 3.5.

Disclaimer: I am a new, yet pretty loyal user of Safari 4 and have rarely ever used FireFox so my opinions may be biased but I will try to keep a level head.

When first starting FireFox 3.5, I was greeted with a dialog box that let me know that FireFox was running in safe mode. I am not sure if this is due to the version change or the fact that the last time I quit FireFox (3.0) on my computer, it may have crashed.

The first test FireFox 3.5 passed was that it was able to render this website (aaronhollman.com) correctly. Its always good to know that a web browser your testing can display your site appropriately.

Having the tab bar enabled by default was a plus. I seem to remember having to set that manually in both Camino and Safari when I started using them for the first time.

FireFox 3.5, like Safari before it, includes the option of Private Browsing (aka porn-mode) This is a feature I believe every browser out there should have. It is a feature that is so much more useful than just surfing for porn. On public machines, it should be a requirement if you are going to be doing any online banking, site maintenance, e-mail, social-networking or working with any accounts that require a login (though I don’t recommend doing any of these on public machines)

The security features of FireFox 3.5 seem to be pretty up-to-date. They take care to protect the user while at the same time, not making them feel like an idiot. More advanced users can turn these features off, but I don’t see why they would. Even the best of us can sometimes fall prey to a well engineered social attack.

FireFox 3.5, like previous versions of FireFox has been designed for add-ons. This is a nice feature if you are the kind of user that likes to customize the way you surf the web. The more popular add-ons, like Adblock Plus, Grease Monkey, and Google Toolbar still work in version 3.5 but there have also been reports of add-ons not working in the new version of FireFox such as Better G-Mail 2 and Google Gears. (For a more detailed list, click here: Firefox add-ons: Which work in 3.5? | The Download Blog – Download.com)

Here are the results I came up with for running a couple of basic benchmark tests with FireFox 3.5. The new version achieved a 93/100 rating on the Acid3 Test. This is a significant improvement over FireFox 3.0 which managed to muster a 71/100.

FireFox 3.5 made improvements on the Celtic Kane javascript benchmark test as well. It achieved a 339ms runtime speed. This is a slight improvement over its old runtime speed of 429ms.

These tests were done on a 2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo  iMac running Mac OS X 10.5.7. Only one browser window was open at the time. Your results may vary.

Conclusion: It is better, but I’m sticking with Safari 4.

The Acid3 Test
Web Browser Javascript Benchmark | Celtic Kane Online