I’ve been a photographer since high school, and an electrical engineer all of my professional life. The two things came together for a while. From 1989 until the middle of 1995, I worked as an IBM Fellow at the Almaden Research laboratory south of San Jose, CA. For those six years, my principal area of research was color management, color processing for digital photography, and color transformations such as gamut mapping. At other times in my career, I researched speech recognition and speech bandwidth compression and developed data acquisition and process control computer systems, telephone switching systems, and data communication systems.
I retired in 2000, and for the last 22 years when I’m not serving on NFP boards unrelated to photography, I’ve been spending most of my free time making photographs.
Geek Articles
In the last 10 or 12 years, I’ve owned and made many images with APS-C (with crop factors between 1.3 and 1.5), full frame (FF), and 33×44 (MF, or crop MF, depending on your level of precision – and maybe your agenda). During that time, I’ve also used larger MF cameras and a 72×96 mm […]
Geek Articles
This is Part 2 of an article published last week. For the best understanding, please read part one by clicking here. Last week, we talked a bit about how the camera exposes raw files and used an analogy of rainwater and buckets to explain that. Today, we’re going to dive into the topic more and […]
Geek Articles
Throughout the two-century history of photography, the subject of exposure has been repeatedly addressed and hotly debated. In the film era, people talked about exposure and B&W’s negative development in two ways. At first, when most of the photography was done with sheets and plates, it was “expose for the shadows, develop for the highlights”, […]
Geek Articles
Sometimes, people are talking about in-camera JPEGs, and it is possible to have a moderately fruitful discussion. How fruitful it might be depends on the definition of better. If better means more accurate, careful image analysis can yield objective insights. If better means, “what I like”, a meeting of the minds is far less likely.
Geek Articles
For many years, photographers have had focus-stacking programs like Helicon Focus and Zerene Stacker. You can now get the capability in some general-purpose image editors like Lightroom and Capture One Pro. Focus stacking software takes as input a series of images of the same subject with the focal plane in a different place in each […]
