iPhone Photography

I recently got an iPhone 3GS, the camera that’s built into the phone is a pretty big disappointment for someone who shoots dSLR for the past year.  3MP, super-noisy at even ISO 400, no manual control… it’s a mess.  Now, big lenses and big cameras are super cool, and they take amazing pictures.  But this post is about living with the tiny camera on the iPhone, or any camera phone for that matter.

Lesson 1: Know the limit of your camera, and don’t even try to push pass it, or you’ll just be disappointed.

Vancouver sunset

Small cameras are known for their low dynamic range, so to get the most out of this sunset, I took two images at different exposure and merged them together with Pro HDR, right on the phone.  This increased the dynamic range to at least 8 stops, making it equal to that of a dSLR.  Then a bit of contrast and saturation boost completed the look.

Lesson 2: Post Processing
i am {not} on a boat

This picture came out very bland at first, but a few tweaks in TiltShiftGen made it marginally passable.  There are enough apps in the Apple Appstore to edit your photo into oblivion and back.  Some of my favorite apps are Pro HDR, TiltShiftGen and Best Camera.

Lesson 3: Color
Metrotown through iPhone

What the tiny camera lacks in light-gathering ability, it makes up by upping the vibrancy.  iPhone photos are usually a lot more vibrant and contrasty than what you get out of a high-end dSLR.  Use this to your advantage.

Lesson 4: Bokeh
Untitled

You CAN throw the background out of focus even on a tiny sensor like the iPhone camera, but only if you are shooting in macro.  Just be patient with the focus, it can take a while to get the razor sharp image that you wanted.

That’s all for now, I am still discovering the capability of the iPhone camera.  Let me know if you have any tips regarding digital photography.

2010
03/16
POSTED BY
mike pan
2 comments

The Making of

Wow, a project I actually finished!

Since I started working on this car project, I’ve been getting a lot of positive feedback which really helped me move the project forward. It’s only fair that I return the favor and share a bit of what I learned here. (The full scene file including model, lighting, material and texture is available at my site)

The entire scene is rendered with the built-in renderer.  It gives me more artistic control than a photon-tracer, and is also much faster.  Blender is a capable renderer; learn to use it!

Supposedly, like eyes, car headlights defines the character of a car.  There is really no shortcut to making a sparkly looking headlight, I just modeled everything as geometry and applied a lot of reflection/refraction to the material.  As long as the geometry is there, all the cool effects happen automatically once you hit render.  i also placed a lamp at where the light should be, to throw in a bit of extra lumen.

A lot of the magic happens in compositing.  Here you can see my postprocessing setup.

For the animation, I rendered out the entire video at 1280×720, as PNGs.  Because PNG is only 24bit, extra dynamic range is lost, which made all the post-processing and cross-fading look half-assed.  Next time I’ll definitely render to floating-point EXR formats, which should help when I start applying more aggressive processings.  I also realized that a single computer is NEVER fast enough;  The 40 second clip would have taken 83 days to render on a single core, but with the help of 24 cores spanning across 4 PCs, I managed to push out the video in less than 4 days.  Dropbox made file synchronization embarrassingly simple.

A lot of the technical issues with the video (bad driving dynamics; black pixels; flickering) only cropped up last minute in the final rendering, at which point I am just too annoyed to re-render it.  So hopefully I’ll fix these distractions later and release a better version soon.

That’s it for now.  Hope you like what I have so far.

2010
02/18
POSTED BY
mike pan
21 comments

The perfect laptop!

I was window-shopping for laptops today and discovered the amazing Asus UL30 series.  It’s truly an amazing piece of engineering: it’s thin, it’s light, it’s fast, has an insane battery life, and pretty cheap.  Let me break down the specs for you non-geeks:

Core 2 Duo SU7300 Processor:
It has a 1.3Ghz (up to 1.7Ghz with TurboBoost technology), ultra-low-voltage processor manufactured on 45nm technology.  Which really just means the processor can do a LOT of work while barely sipping on your precious battery.  Honestly, it’s unbelievable how fast this processor is while using less than 10W of power.  [Compare with a 13 MacBook Pro: slightly slower, but uses 1/3rd the power)

Nvidia G210M 512MB and Intel 4500 Graphics:
This .93 inch thin laptop has TWO graphics cards.  The Nvidia G210 is probably the fastest graphics card available on a 13 inch laptop.  It's build on 40nm technology, and uses a max of 14W of power, which is still impressive for a graphics card of this caliber.  The Intel is slower, but uses even less power.  You can toggle between the 2 to trade off performance for battery life. [Compare with a 13" MacBook Pro:  The Asus is twice as fast, while using the same amount of juice]

4GB DDR3 RAM:
Also, the laptop can support a max of 8GB of memory, you know… in case you need that much. [Same as Macbooks.]

13inch LED-lit Screen:
LED also means it’s uses less power than regular backlights. [same as Macbooks]

12 hour battery life:
…or so Asus claims, you can probably expect 10 hours of real world usage, and maybe 4-5 hours of gaming/heavy 3D work. [much longer than the MacBook Pros]

Design:
Not quite on par with Apple’s drool inducing one-piece aluminum finish, but it’s one of the nicer laptops I’ve seen (once you get rid of all the stickers).  The design is obviously Macbook inspired.  And it’s really light and thin.

Price:
$800 USD.  I know you can get an even faster 15″ laptop for $900, but the battery life and portability also suffers as you up the screen size.  13″ with this amount of computing power is perfect.  It also comes with all the standard bells and whistles: webcam, bluetooth, 802.11n, and a half terabyte harddrive.

The bottom line:
if you are looking for a portable powerhouse, take a closer look at this laptop.  If you want raw power and don’t care about battery life, skip this.

* I do not own this laptop, nor did I got paid to write this, I was just excited that I finally found a laptop that seems to be everything I am looking for.

2010
02/07
POSTED BY
mike pan
5 comments

The best Blender 2.5 learning resource

Michael Fox’s series of Blender 2.5 walk through is definitely one of the most valuable video tutorials I’ve seen in a long time.  He made a total of more than 10 hours of video, explaining each features of Blender 2.5 in awesome detail.  Seriously, go check it out, you’ll learn so much in so little time.

2010
02/06
POSTED BY
mike pan
6 comments