Google Camera is my new favorite toy…
September 6, 2014, 12:38 PM
I recently went on a trip down to Stuarts Draft to see my parents and sister, as well as my sister’s friend Vickey, and I came armed with a new app for my Android device: Google Camera. If you’ve never used it before, Google Camera is a camera app that will function as a regular camera plus do a few other things. Besides shooting regular still photos and videos, it will also do a lens blur effect, it helps in shooting panoramic photos, and it also shoots “photo spheres”, also called “spherical panoramas”. That last one is what I took for a spin on this trip. Those are the ones that I can post on Panoramio, and I believe that they go in as Street View (but don’t quote me on that just yet, because they haven’t fully propagated to Google Maps/Earth as of this writing).
Shooting them is surprisingly easy. Here’s a screenshot of the app in action, taking a photo sphere at my place:
Continue reading…Categories: Blue Ridge Parkway, Photography, Roanoke, Staunton, Virginia
So I found an app that lets you take stereo photos…
July 16, 2014, 10:24 PM
Last night, I found an app called 3D Camera for my Android phone. The idea behind the app is that you take two photos a few inches apart from each other, you line them up, and then the app makes a stereo image for you to look at. Depending on how you shoot them, they can come out as either crossview or parallel. I tested it out late last night on a Wheelock 7002T, and came up with this:
(By the way, I strongly recommend clicking each of the images on this entry to view them at full size in the lightbox)
Categories: Photography, Reddit, Rockville, Shopping
Acceptance testing on a waterproof camera enclosure…
July 5, 2014, 9:33 PM
First of all, I had fun at the Outer Banks. I’m going to leave it at that for now, though, because the whole trip is going to become a photo set for Life and Times, and so it’s going to come out, but the “extended Journal entry” treatment in Life and Times is what will do it the most justice.
That said, in preparation for the trip, I bought a waterproof camera enclosure, with the intention of taking photos in the water. The idea behind the waterproof camera enclosure was to get Duckie, my Vivitar ViviCam 6200W, out of the picture. Duckie, to put it nicely, has a very limited operating envelope. It’s because the ISO is too low, as 200 is as high as it goes. That means that when you take that camera underwater, you have to hold the camera very still to get clear pictures, unless you want to use the flash (which I don’t always want to do). It became quite frustrating, and led to a lot of bad photos. Basically, submerged handheld photos were a no-go under the vast majority of conditions. It worked well enough outdoors and in daylight on land, but the pictures taken under those conditions have a slight red tinge to them, which is a pain to try to correct. Plus it has no optical zoom, and the buttons were a bit stiff, with the latter’s making the camera’s use somewhat cumbersome.
Thus I got this to replace Duckie:
I completely nerded out on Sunday, and it was awesome…
June 24, 2014, 10:21 PM
I went out on a miniature road trip on Sunday, and I had a blast, taking photos of anything that vaguely interested me. It was more or less spur of the moment, when you consider that for what ended up being a photography trip, I only had my cell phone, and then, I didn’t bring my spare battery along. Thus it was a bit of a continual battle to keep a sufficient charge on the phone with only the car charger, but somehow, I managed, and the results came out pretty well despite my leaving my real camera at home. The way this trip came about is that I wanted to go up to and explore Westminster, Maryland. I’ve been wanting to explore Westminster for a while, ever since my father took an overnight business trip to Westminster a few years ago and I didn’t find out about it until it was too late in the day to go up and visit, because Dad didn’t realize that Westminster was as close to me as it was. That sucked, because I would have totally gone up if I had known. I’ll gladly travel an hour or so on relatively short notice to hang out with family.
So early Sunday morning, I just decided to go up and see what there was. I like doing these sorts of trips, because it’s basically a scouting trip, seeing if there’s anything that I want to explore and photograph in more detail in the future. Getting to Westminster is pretty easy: turn onto Georgia Avenue (MD 97) and take it all the way to Westminster. Seriously, it’s that easy. I got to Westminster just as the sun was coming up. After a quick drive through the main commercial area along Route 140, I located the downtown area.
The downtown area in Westminster has what I consider an unusual feature: a single-track rail line for the Maryland Midland Railway running diagonally through the main intersection in downtown. Main Street goes one way, and Liberty Street and Railroad Avenue (both MD 27) go the other way, and the rail line runs diagonally across the intersection. I would have loved to have seen a train come through here while I was in the area, but unfortunately, I did not get to see that this time.
Categories: Arundel Mills, Baltimore, Baltimore County, Companies, Converted buildings, Driving, Howard County, Howard Johnson's, Photography, Reddit, Sheetz, Vintage business, Westminster
Car show!
April 20, 2014, 8:34 PM
On Saturday, April 12, I got together with my friend Matthew, and we went to a car show in the Sterling area. I’ve always enjoyed a good car show. I used to go with my father when he would bring his Mustang to car shows in the 1990s. I met Oliver North at a car show at Wright’s Dairy Rite in Staunton back when he was running for the Senate in 1994, in fact.
Thus I was quite pleased to go to this show with Matthew. I had been to this show once before, in 2012, and had a lot of fun, but for whatever reason (possibly related to the ongoing site conversion at that time) never really featured all of the neat cars that I saw, save for one. I’m not about to miss this time, because I saw some really neat cars. I also remembered what I like when photographing cars. I like seeing show cars as they might appear while being driven. Thus I like it when the hood is kept down. For whatever reason, I’m not that interested in looking at the engine. And then if it’s a convertible, I love seeing the top down.
That said, this is not the way I like to see a car when it’s on display:
Categories: Events, Matthew, Photography
Infrastructure pix with a borrowed camera…
April 10, 2014, 9:34 AM
I have had my current main camera, a Canon PowerShot SX10 IS, for approximately five years and two months as of this writing. The camera still works quite well, but is starting to get up there in age. For one thing, the fliparound screen on the back of it no longer works when the screen is flat against the camera while facing out. The electronic viewfinder comes on and the screen goes black when it’s in that position. Go figure. I’m also often finding myself “hitting the wall” with the camera as far as its limits go. Some of the ways I want to go with my photography, the camera can’t go there with me because it doesn’t go far enough. Also, if it gives you any concept of how much time has passed, I wrecked Big Mavica in a rainstorm after I had owned it for five years and four months.
All that said, I am looking to replace my main camera. In this case, however, there is no camera damage forcing my hand. My current camera works fine, though it is starting to show some signs of age. And even if the main camera was kaput, I have two other cameras plus a phone as backup. So this puts me in a good position, as there is no pressing need to replace equipment. I also do not feel that I am currently in a position to upgrade, so running on existing equipment works just fine for me.
However, this doesn’t mean that I’m not trying out other equipment when I can. I recently got an opportunity to borrow a friend’s Nikon Coolpix P510 and take it out for a photo shoot. The Nikon Coolpix P510 is a “prosumer” level camera similar to my Canon PowerShot SX10 IS, but is newer and takes photos in higher resolution (16 megapixel vs. 10). I did this mainly to see where the prosumer cameras had gone in the past few years, since I’ve been toying with the idea of getting another prosumer or finally going to a digital SLR.
Categories: Cameras, Photography
At last, my Washington Monument photo set is done…
February 20, 2014, 12:30 AM
At last, I have finished my Washington Monument photo set. I started work on this photo set in September, finished up the photography for it in November, and now it’s February and with the scaffolding mostly gone (only a quarter or so of the height is now covered) at the time of this writing, the set finally goes out. This was quite a project, too.
I spent most of the first day, September 5, out on the Mall, shooting photos of the monument under clear to partly cloudy skies. I was out there from mid-to-late morning until around 5:00. I got home around 7 PM, after having walked 6.35 miles around the Mall area. I got off the train at Metro Center, headed to the Washington Monument, and looped around it once at fairly close range. Then I did another loop around it from a distance, following the path around the Tidal Basin, going past the Jefferson Memorial, the FDR Memorial, the MLK Memorial, the DC War Memorial, the Lincoln Memorial, the Vietnam Memorial, Constitution Gardens, and the World War II Memorial. Then I headed back up to the Washington Monument, and did another loop up close before heading out. I went over to the Old Post Office on my way out in order to get a few photos of the Washington Monument from up above, before returning to Metro Center to head home. After I got home, I don’t think I made it to 7:30. I was out like a light. Walking all that distance while taking some 900 photos, I definitely earned my sleep that night, as I was both physically and mentally exhausted.
Categories: Photography, Schumin Web meta, Washington DC
No more Creative Commons license?
February 20, 2014, 12:00 AM
As of today, The Schumin Web is no longer offered under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license. The site will now be offered under the traditional “all rights reserved” model, i.e. explicit written permission is required for most downstream usages. I am doing this for one purpose: to make money. I went to the Creative Commons model back in November 2005 in order to give my work more exposure through downstream uses, and apparently it’s worked. I now have a portfolio of over 250 downstream usages, both online and in print. I now have plenty of exposure. People know who I am, and know about my work, based on multiple usages from a few high-profile entities. Therefore, I believe that I have reached the point where I can monetize my photography work and bring in a few extra bucks. The idea is that if you work for some vague notion of “exposure”, that is all you are ever going to get, and it’s very easy to be taken advantage of that way. As I field more and more licensing requests from companies, it is clear that there is monetary value in what I produce.
Because of this, there are a few changes in the way that things will operate as far as image licensing goes, as I attempt to reconcile the old Creative Commons license with the new all-rights-reserved model. First of all, please note: as of today, no new downstream usages of any Schumin Web content are allowed under any form of Creative Commons license. Please see the new Content Licensing page for information about new downstream usages of Schumin Web content. All existing downstream content usages that were made using the old Creative Commons license are grandfathered. Thus, for example, if you used a picture under the Creative Commons license last year, nothing affects that past usage. However, if you want to use another image today, you need to receive explicit written permission to use that image, even if the image was originally published during the period when the Creative Commons license was in effect.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Schumin Web meta
Trashing a tripod…
October 16, 2013, 1:38 PM
It’s funny how things work out sometimes. Some of you may know that I’m in the process of doing a photo set of the Washington Monument while it’s in scaffolding. I shot all of the daytime material on September 5, where I walked 6.35 miles around the Washington Monument, and took 900 photos in the process (no wonder I was exhausted after that). One of the photos became the photo feature on September 8.
The plan was to also do a nighttime component for this set, and I got together with my friends Suzie and Rocio to do half of the night photos (since the full round proved to be too much) on September 28. Since I had gotten jittery photos when I did a similar photo shoot in March (the nighttime photos of the DC War Memorial and Jefferson Memorial are from that shoot), I did some equipment testing out on my balcony prior to this shoot to determine the cause of the jittering and get some quality photos. Since the camera wasn’t going to change, the test was on the tripods. I tested Big Mavica’s original tripod, which is a Kodak tripod that I got in December 2002, and my regular tripod, which is a Sunpak tripod that I got in December 2003 (which I used in the March shoot). Turns out that the Sunpak tripod jittered and the Kodak one didn’t. So it seemed a no-brainer: take the Kodak tripod out on the shoot.
Getting out on the Mall, with Suzie and Rocio along for the adventure, things quickly went south. I can deal with most equipment issues fairly well. But this time, an important piece decided to go: the head of the tripod. Early on, things held together, but while I was working in front of the Jefferson Memorial, the head popped off, and it wouldn’t go back in and stay there. Thus the best I could do was perch it in there and make do, but the problems got worse and worse as the night went on.
Categories: Friends, Photography
If you can’t follow a license as easy as mine…
October 9, 2013, 3:21 PM
I am of the view that information deserves to be free, which is one of the reasons that I make my work available under a Creative Commons license. For those not familiar, I provide my content under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 United States license. In a nutshell, that means that you are welcome to use materials found here for any purpose, including commercially, as long as you provide proper attribution, and share it under the same or similar license as you found it (it’s only fair, after all). I even wrote a guide on reuse of content found here. When I converted the site to WordPress, one of the changes that I made was to make the images available for download at full resolution. That was done specifically to help downstream users get what they need and get creating without assistance from me. That same conversion, with the image restoraton and such that went along with it, also finally allowed me to provide clean images right out of the box. Recall that at one point, I put my logo and URL in the corner of the large-size images for photo sets. Then I stopped doing that in 2005 or so, right around when I introduced the Creative Commons license to the site. The conversion and image restoration work removed all of the remaining tagged images, making every photo “clean” without any extraneous markings.
I like to think that I’m one of the more permissive and lenient content owners out there. Unlike many other entities that do not allow downstream use without explicit permission, I do allow downstream use right out of the box, as long as two things are present: attribution (preferably as “Ben Schumin/The Schumin Web”), and a free license. That’s not that hard to do, and by and large, most people who reuse content found here follow the license. But it really frosts my cookies when people don’t follow that, and because my license is so easy to meet, I take a very dim view toward noncompliance.
It always amazes me how many people think that because something is on the public Internet, that it’s public domain and can be used with wild abandon. It’s quite common. I’ve even had to disabuse my own mother of this notion before. Rather, just like any other medium, just because it exists does not mean that you have carte blanche to do whatever you want with it. Most material on the Internet is not, in fact, public domain, and therefore potential downstream users have to play by the content owner’s rules (or you don’t play). Those rules are up to the content owner.
Categories: Copyright infringement, Netculture, Schumin Web meta
Can’t believe that I forgot this…
July 9, 2013, 10:46 PM
I can’t believe that I completely forgot to mention this in the last entry discussing the July 4 trip to Harpers Ferry and Winchester. Pete and I spotted this scene along Route 7 in Clarke County on the way back to DC, and had to stop for photos:
Categories: Friends, July 4, Photography, Places, Recreation/Exercise
And then we visited Winchester…
July 8, 2013, 11:50 PM
So in our last episode, I was discussing a trip that my friend Pete and I made to Harpers Ferry, West Virginia and to Winchester, Virginia on July 4. I got as far as the end of Harpers Ferry, when I realized that the Journal entry was running quite long, so I cut it off and promised to continue at a later time. And now for part two.
Leaving Harpers Ferry, we soon came to Charles Town (not to be confused with Charleston, the state capital). For those not familiar, Charles Town is the place where people in Harpers Ferry go to go grocery shopping. For out of town folks, it’s also the home of the Hollywood Casino at Charles Town Races. I’ve never been gambling before, but it might be fun to do one time. But in this case, Pete and only stopped for lunch, and then it was at a Martin’s grocery store, where we each got salad. Funny how you can get pretty decent food on the go from grocery stores these days. But we did just fine at Martin’s. They had a decent-sized salad bar, and there was also an eating area. All in all, not bad.
Then from there, we continued along to Winchester. That took us on Route 340 to its intersection with Route 7, and then we took Route 7 the rest of the way into Winchester. When I first made a close pass to Winchester some time in the 1990s, I was a little bit underwhelmed by the size of the town. Understand that Winchester is listed as a control city for I-81 for quite some ways – more than 100 miles when traveling northbound. In my experience up to that time, I had only seen bigger cities as control cities for highways, like Little Rock or Richmond. Thus I figured that Winchester was a really big city. Surprise: Winchester is, while by no means tiny, also not a big city by most measures. It’s comparable in population to Staunton.
Categories: Friends, July 4, Photography, Places, Recreation/Exercise
Here’s a tip for you: don’t go hiking in flip-flops.
July 7, 2013, 11:58 PM
First of all, I hope everyone had a lovely July 4. I know I did. I got together with my friend Pete (whom you may remember from the Confirmation Demonstration and White House to Quantico photo sets), and we went on something of a road trip. We both figured that with living in the Washington DC area, and considering how July 4 is in DC, that was a good day to get out of town.
So we decided to go on a trip to Harpers Ferry and Winchester. Prior to this trip, I had only been to Harpers Ferry by train, and then only passing through. As far as Winchester went, I had only been to Winchester once prior, and that consisted of driving around at night trying to find the downtown area, and a stop at the Apple Blossom Mall and the local Walmart. So this was going to be fun.
I met up with Pete at Glenmont Metro, and then we were off. To get from the Aspen Hill area where I live to Harpers Ferry, you drive up I-270 to Frederick, and then from there, you take I-70 for about a mile, and then take US 340 (yes, that 340) the rest of the way to Harpers Ferry. The drive is beautiful. The first bit of beauty is just outside Frederick, where there is a “Scenic View” wayside on 270. We wouldn’t ordinarily have stopped there, except that was a good place to stop and put the phone into GPS mode for the remainder of the distance to Harpers Ferry, since we were both kind of fuzzy on the exact way to get there. While we were stopped, I got a few photos of the area:
Categories: Friends, July 4, Photography, Recreation/Exercise, West Virginia
Food photos…
May 5, 2013, 6:57 PM
As evidenced in a few places on this site, most notably the Fruit Stands set in Photography, I like photographing food. I don’t quite know why, but I enjoy it. I like capturing the details on food items. I like seeing the food items up close. It’s kind of fun like that. Since, outside of the aforementioned Fruit Stands photo set, food photos are usually not planned shoots, I don’t have my real camera around. Thus these are phone photos. Still, I have fun with them. I took some this week, so I thought I would share. Enjoy…
Sandwich fixings at the cafe in the building where I work.
Categories: Food and drink, Photography
And then there was Baltimore…
April 20, 2013, 12:54 AM
The day after my trip out to Annapolis, I was back in the car again and headed out to Baltimore. It’s kind of funny how things work out. This vacation kind of reminded me of spring break in 2002 and 2003 back when I was in college. I planned out the vacation week with five or so different destinations in the eight days that I had available. In 2002, my destinations were (in this order) DC, Richmond, Norfolk, Charlottesville, and Roanoke, with a day in between all but Richmond and Norfolk (which involved a hotel stay). Then in 2003, I did (in this order) DC, Richmond, Norfolk, Covington/Clifton Forge/Lake Moomaw (one outing, all three destinations), Roanoke, and Charlottesville/Blue Ridge Parkway. I only took two “off” days in 2003, between DC and Richmond, and Norfolk and Covington. Now, ten years later, I had the luxury of spreading it out over two weeks, and did Stuarts Draft (intended to do Roanoke, but it got snowed out), DC, Richmond, Cumberland, Annapolis, and Baltimore. I also scouted out Glen Echo Park as a potential photography destination (spoiler: not high up on my list). And with two weeks and a few destinations planned, I kept a close watch on the weather, and that affected my plans. Richmond was moved up a day to take advantage of sunnier weather. Cumberland was similarly scheduled to take advantage of optimal weather (that’s how Glen Echo Park got included – to fill a gap in the schedule from Cumberland’s placement). And then Annapolis fit the schedule, though weather was less important there, since it was mostly to get a feel for the area and determine further location work (probably).
And then there was Baltimore. I was out exploring Fells Point on this particular day. I chose Fells Point based on an episode of Bar Rescue. One episode featured J.A. Murphy’s, which was located in Fells Point. That bar, renamed “Murphy’s Law” during the show’s makeover, had closed, but I knew that going in. No worries, though. I wanted to explore. I parked on the street (in front of Dogwatch Tavern, also featured on the episode), and went to work. In getting the lay of the land of this area, I ended up dividing it into three sections. First area was south of Thames Street. This was the harbor area. Then the next area was Broadway from Thames Street to Broadway Market. The street around Broadway Market was a bit of a choke point due to construction on either side of the building that took away the sidewalks. Then the third area was the block of Broadway between Fleet Street and Eastern Avenue. I could have gone further north, I suppose, but owing to time considerations, I cut it off there.
Categories: Baltimore, Photography, Travel