Camera habbits

I wanted to have a brief forage into three dimensional data visualisation. The photos on this website provided me with a quick way to build a dataset: digital cameras store plenty of metadata in each photo, in addition to the image itself.

I put together a little PHP script that reads the “camera settings” data from every photo on this site and collates it into a flat database. An R script then takes two columns from the database and produces 2D density plots, (no longer) shown below. An initial attempt to produce full 3D animations using R was hampered by a resource leak in the RGL graphics package. This was resolved by having the R script render only one frame rather than the whole animation. A separate BASH script calls the R script repeatedly to render each frame of the animation, and then to coalesce the frames.

This visualisation allowed me to see what camera configurations I tend to use the most, information which has no real value to me besides curiosity at the moment. It has also persuaded me to move away from using R for analysis, it is such a painful environment for doing anything remotely graphical…

PHP script: Collate EXIF data => database: collate-stats.php
R script: Plot 2D heatmaps from database: plot-stats.r
R script: Plot 3D frame of animation: plot-3d.r
BASH script: Use plot-3d.r to create full animation: plot-3d.sh

3d-FocalLength-Aperture-ShutterSpeed-high

The faster shutter speeds are enabled by the reasonable sharpness offered by my 35mm prime at its open end, while the blob around f/4 to f/5 is due to the widest ends of my Sigma 150-500mm, Sigma 10-20mm and (now sold) Nikon 55-300mm. The blobs centered at 3″/f10 are probably from waterfall long-exposures, jupiter and the slower shutter speeds around the f/1.8 aperture region will be from fibre-optic art. The cluster from f5/150mm-f6.3/500mm is from using the big Sigma wide open, with the cluster around 500mm being mostly from low-budget astrophotography with the same lens. It’s interesting how easily trends can be visualised with just a little bit of crude scripting.

The end result of all this is that I abuse the open end of my f/1.8 prime far too much, when I could probably get sharper, less hazy photos by resorting to a slightly slower shutter instead…

Midi Analyser / Thru

I did a bit of work involving MIDI equipment a few years back. Here’s a little debugging program that I wrote back then, which is useful now for when I want to have a quick play on my keyboard. It allows me to quickly connect my MIDI controller to my Audigy2 synthesizer, behaving like an in-software “Thru” connection. It was never intended for other people to use so it looks ugly, but the readme file included should be sufficient to explain how to use the program.

Download here.

The Majestic Potato Cod

A cool screensaver where a load of potato fish swim around your screen and eat each other. While you’re at it, why not also post facebook updates via a potato?

Among my favourite animators are Cyriak and Terry Gilliam. Although I don’t follow an interest in animation at all, I occasionally get bored and end up producing oddities such as this screen saver. I created it in a hurry and due to extreme laziness it requires .NET Framework 4, probably won’t run on old computers, and will certainly have issues with Windows 8 (let’s face it, what doesn’t have issues with Windows 8?)

Download the majestic potato cod from here.

On Windows, extract the screen saver from the downloaded zip file, right-click on the screen saver file and select “Install”. It’s really that simple… unless you use Windows 8 in which case you’ll need to sacrifice a goat, pray to Mephistopheles, fight with the kneejerk security design then eventually give up and install XP/Linux…

Although this screen saver also runs fine under WINE/Mono on modern Linux distributions, I have no idea how to package it as a Linux screen saver – if you do this then feel free to post a link or git repo in the comments section.

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