Photography 101

[BigV]

What are you trying to say.. you're... unclear.

[infinite monkey]

I shutter to think of what he's been exposed to as of late.

But as time-lapses, things will get better.

[footfootfoot]

FOCUS???
You mean Bofus?

[infinite monkey]

I knew I could count on you!

[Clodfobble]

Originally Posted by BigV

Not meaning to quarrel. Hey... show us some pictures, why doncha?

To be sure, my "you" was generic, not directed at you personally. As for pictures I've taken, I've got over a thousand posted here. My favorite is the first one here. Although I admit, I don't actually use the viewfinder for my food pictures. Don't use the LCD screen either. I just hold it out in midair, turning in various angles and clicking away repeatedly, then I throw out the 85% that turn out horrible.

[skysidhe]

You have a great site. I have not made any recipes from it yet, but it gives me the feeling of ease and greatness of taste. I bookmarked you along with 'for the love of cooking' from blog spot. Two of my favorite recipe sites.

Oh and great photos too

[BigV]

Yes, please.

[xoxoxoBruce]

OK.

[BigV]

Thank you! I got them. Thank you.

[BigV]

9,765

takin a break now.

[BigV]

5,185 unnamed faces.

so tired now.

took 2100 pictures last week. many crowd shots with many faces. much editing ahead of me.

[BigV]

4,468

[BigV]

3,414

[classicman]

WTH are you doing anyway? How are you "identifying" all these peoples faces?

[BigV]

Originally Posted by BigV

An update on my journey with Picasa.

I continue to use this program as my principal image indexing tool. I also use it for lightweight editing, mostly straightening, exposure corrections, cropping, etc.

But it has a feature I really love and I'm using more and more. As I've said before, I am mostly just a snapshotter, and my favorite subject is people. I won't embarrass myself by calling pictures with faces in them "portraits", they're not. But they do have faces and Picasa knows this. It has a feature called face detection. This is pretty cool. It can scan a photo and pick out the section of the image that (according to its rules) is a face. It has made a couple (out of thousands) of mistakes, but mostly it's pretty "smart". It shows a crop of the face of a given image, resized so the face fills a thumbnail and then gives you a chance to add the photo to a special kind of album called a people album. In a shot that has more than one face, it will detect all the faces, show each of them in a thumbnail, and give you a chance to add that picture to each of the corresponding people albums.

A word about albums. An album is a collection of pictures. In Picasa, albums work like tags. A picture can belong to more than one album by having more than one tag associated with it. When viewing an album, all the pictures in it are selected from the database and shown as a collection. People albums, or People, work just the same. They're albums that have the title of a person's name, containing images that have been detected by Picasa to contain a face.

Back to People and faces. Not only does Picasa have face detection, it also has face *recognition*. This is scary cool. Once you've seeded Picasa's People albums with a few (or more) examples of a given face, it will continue to scan through the library looking for faces that match the ones already associated with a given person. When it finds some it *recognizes* it will suggest them to you. "Do these faces belong in this People album?". It's awesome.

Some of the the things you can do with this is to click on a Person, and see all the pictures that have that person in them. Also, there's a function called Face Movie, where the contents of a People album can be used in a special kind of slide show where the slides are put together in a face aligned movie. Here's a youtube video of Picasa's demo of this function. I think their model looks a bit like little Miss York at the beginning.



At this time, I have 214 People. And I have 18,875 faces detected but not yet categorized. It's a LOT. And it feels like pushing back the tide, but I take bites at it as I go, I think I'm making more forward progress than backward, so I carry on. Here's a typical screenshot of what I am making my way through.

I've circled a couple points of interest. SonofV appears in the blue circles. The red circles identify a couple interesting shots, one is a mask, not really a face, I'll throw that one away. The others show really dark faces in these thumbnails. I can double click on any of the thumbnails and get the whole picture, from which I might be able to recognize the person given the context. And the yellow circle in the upper right surrounds the slider showing how many screensful of this work I have ahead of me. Fun!!

Originally Posted by classicman

WTH are you doing anyway? How are you "identifying" all these peoples faces?

here's the long answer I don't wish to repeat.

Picasa has the ability to detect a face in a given shot, and I can identify that face. Once I've done that I can find that picture and that face easily. Have you any experience with face / tagging photos on facebook? Same kind of thing. I'm working my way through my whole collection of photos, and as I near the end here, the quality of the images Picasa has detected faces in are older, and crappier. It's exhausting work concentrating on screensful of faces and deciding who is who and who is I don't give a shit.

I *really* want to finish this project. And when I do, I want to extract the sets of pictures that contain the face of a given kid (mostly kids from family pics, scout trips, little league games, etc) and then compile them into a movie, or just the whole "album" of shots and give it to the family. I've got about ten years worth of pics here and seeing them grow up on screen has been immensely pleasurable. I think the parents of the other kids would enjoy them too.

ps--I see the screenshots I posted originally didn't make it into the quote. whatever. Go back and look at post # 60 in this thread for a visual of what I'm dealing with.