By now I’m sure everyone has upgraded to the latest FireFox but what most people night not know about is that FireFox3 was a long awaited release for those of us in photography. Why? Because FireFox3 added colour management to it’s list of features. A few browsers like Safari, and I believe Opera as well already had this functionality but FireFox now joins this elite few.

However, this functionality isn’t enabled by default and infact, there isn’t even an option to turn it on without going into the about:config page.

So here’s how you do it.

In the address bar of Firefox, type in about:config.
Scroll down to gfx.color_management.enabled. By default this is set to false. Double click on it to change it to true.
Restart Firefox.

Now stare in awe as your colour managed images appear the way they should!

UPDATE: The Daily Gyan has a great guide on other tweaks you can enable for FireFox3! Check it out!

So I’ve taken on another project and this time I’ve already gotten started

I’m working on converting an old Sony VAIO PCG-FX220 into a picture frame I can hang on the wall to display my photos. The main idea being that it’ll run off WiFi and should be light enough to hang safely on the wall. I’ve started documenting my progress and you can find the link here, or on the top nav of the blog.

If you have any questions or ideas along the way, feel free to post a comment and I will do my best to answer them for you.

Right now, the plan is to install Windows XP on it, and use Slickr to show the images. I’ll probably set up a share on the network and have Slickr read off that so I can easily add and remove photos as I go. Another idea which I got from another site was to have a startup script to map a drive to the network and run another script that I can customize which would allow me easier control of the frame.

The question on my mind right now is how I want to mat the frame. Do I keep the full 15″ at 4:3 or should I bring it down a little to 5:4 (Do I have my aspect ratios right?) which is where all my photos will be sized at?

When I was faced with the potential loss of a bunch of photos from a concert I attended, I looked into how to recover photos from a formatted or corrupted memory card. Since it was commonly asked question on my favorite photography forum, I decided to do a little write up for future users encountering such a problem. Originally it was to be posted to the forum, but I figured it might be more useful to others if I made it available on my blog instead.

Read the rest of this entry »

I own a Canon 350D and shoot exclusively in RAW format. I love having the ability to save my photos if I screw up in the initial shoot like exposure or while balance. My only beef is that sometimes it’s a bit of a pain to have to open up Digital Photo Pro just to find an image when all I want to do is look at the thumbnails in Explorer to find a file. Microsoft must think so too since they have an answer in the form of Microsoft RAW Image Thumbnailer and Viewer for Windows XP.

The program not only allows you to view your RAW files in a quick and easy window similar to the Windows Picture and Fax viewer, it adds thumbnails to your RAW files in Windows Explorer (in thumbnail and filmstrip views). Personally I say this is a must-get for any photographer shooting in RAW be it Canon or Nikon.

The next program is directed to those who are very concious about colour profiles and want an easy way to adjust their colour spaces. The Microsoft Color Control Panel Applet for Windows XP adds an icon to your control panel giving easy access to colour management options such as adding/removing colour profiles, assigning profiles to specific devices, and even setting up reminders to recalibrate your profiles at regular intervals.

Windows Genuine Advantage is required to download these programs.

By the way… Does anyone know if there is a colour profile available for the ASUS W1N laptop display? It would be greatly appreciated!

Lens hoods can be expensive to replace some times and if you need one really quick, can be hard to track down. That’s where lenshoods.co.uk comes to the rescue. This site contains tons of layouts for practically every SLR lens out there which you just print, cut out of cardboard and then rolled into a shape!

Neat idea and great for a quick fix!

Well, I guess it was bound to happen sooner or later.

So far nothing has happened yet, but an announcement made by Canon on Thursday stated that they are considering the move to stop development of new film camera models. This pretty much follows an announcement made by Nikon earlier this year that they would be dropping out of the film camera business and Konica who was dropping out of photography all together.

It just goes to show how strong the movement to digital photography is and in the end, only the hardcore now will continue to use film. I wonder if film will ever be gone, but one thing is for sure, for your average consumer, digital will probably the only way to go.

With digital SLRs becoming more and more popular with professionals and amateurs alike, and large file sizes on the rise, people want to make sure they have the fastest media in their cameras to get their shots stored quickly so they can take more simultaneous shots at a time.

Obviously this is more important for sports photographers or anyone who takes fast action shots but we all have a need for speed anyways don’t we?

With all the different brands and models of media out there, it’s hard to know which is the best for your camera. Rob Galbraith set out to find the answer. He has compiled a pretty extensive list of digital SLRs and CompactFlash media and timed the write speeds.

This was pretty good timing for me since I’ll be going out to get another card for my camera and with this list, I know what I want to get now