Thunderstorm in Oslo – July 2009 from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

We’ve had 30 degrees Celsius and fantastic weather for the last couple of weeks. But today we had the most serious thunderstorm I’ve seen so far in the five years we’ve been living in this flat. A couple of minutes later and I have learned that my 5D Mark II survives huge amounts of rain. And it is capable of capturing lightning in HD…

At the end of the video I helped the storm stopping using a simple dissolve…

(No, Mr. Arnesen. This image is not HDR. It’s 5D Mark II + 15mm f2.8 fisheye + DXO Opticts pro + Lightroom, Photo: Eirik Solheim / licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Norway License.)

I had 7 minutes giving an example from one of the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation’s experiments using YouTube and added some general thoughts on why we need to be the best provider of our content.

If you have attended any of my presentations during the last year or so this is known material. With only 7 minutes available I decided to put together some proven and tested stories. The story of Heinrich Stammler and a quick use of my now pretty well known image of a certain park in Oslo.

Martha Speiss recorded the presentation. You find it embedded below.

The Open Video Conference was an excellent event with lots of interesting sessions and huge amounts of brilliant people. They’re in the process of making everything available at the OVC web site.

As part of some experiments I’m running I snapped more or less the same image with all the cameras available to me today. The devices you see in the image above in addition to my 5D Mark II (that I used to snap that image…). Simply because I wanted to be able to compare some details.

And my conclusion? Once you go full frame you never go back. If I’m shooting anything even remotely serious I’ll bring my 5D2. Now if someone could give me a full frame digital compact with the size and weight of my old analog (and indeed full frame) Olympus XA…

By clicking on the image you get through to flickr where you can have a look at the original full size image.

Canon 5D Mark II

Canon SX200 IS

Nokia N95

Canon 400D

Canon Powershot S50

Apple iPhone 3G

On our way to Valencia, Spain. Realizing there’s a place here called “Torrent”. Guess it’s where the pirate bay have placed their servers?

Per Erik Sviland just published a video that combines the stuff. Timelapse and HDR. That high dynamic range effect usually just add an intense feeling of something kitschy. But because it really enhance the clouds it works well in a video like this.

Gruda/Ullandhaug HDR Timelapse in HD from Per Erik Sviland on Vimeo.

Per Erik has also been kind enough to include a nice how-to explaining how he made this video on his blog.

And look no further. The best fisheye correction you can get is here. DXO analyze the different lenses in detail. On the specified camera. So you need to check if they have a module for your lens / camera combination. But if they have, DXO does the best corrections possible.

My original image

Corrected with DXO Optics pro

Corrected with DXO Optics Pro with new aspect

All sorts of corrections

I’ve just scratched the surface of this program. It does all kinds of advanced corrections. Here is my old test image from the 50mm f1.4.

Original 100% crop at f1.4

Any chance that DXO can do something with this total mess of optic errors?

100% crop at f1.4 corrected with DXO

Pretty impressive! But before you run out buying crappy lenses thinking that you can save everything in DXO, have a look at the same image snapped at f5.6:

Proper optics out there in the field is the best way to go. But so far I’m impressed with DXO. It’s worth the fisheye correction on my 15mm alone!

In June I will be at the Open Video Conference (english). Talking about some of the work we have done at the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation. BitTorrent, Creative Commons etc.

I hope to see some of you there! But most of all:

For both presentations I am interested in thoughts and feedback. Any important trends or services I need to mention?

But recently I did some quick tests with my 50 mm f1.4 myself. It’s a decent lens and regarded excellent for the price range. And it’s pretty fast, featuring an aperture of 1.4. But lenses loose sharpness and contrast at low apertures, and I wanted to know exactly how much. In this lens the difference is huge. Here are two 100% crops:

50 mm @ f5.6

50 mm @ f1.4

Yes. That’s the same lens, the same camera and the same conditions. Only a different aperture value. But will you see the difference if you snap an image at full resolution and reduce the size down to what you’ll need on a web page? Let’s have a look. 21 megapixels from my Canon 5D MarkII reduced down to an image that is 500 pixels wide.

50 mm @ f5.6

50 mm @ f1.4

And I guess you’ll need a slightly trained eye to see the difference clearly. First of all you see the vignetting: darker corners. Then you see that the DOF is more shallow and that the cars at the bottom of the image in the f1.4-version is not completely focused. This is how it should be. A shallow depth of field is one of the beauties of a low aperture value.

But if you look closely you’ll see that the overall sharpness and sense of depth in general in the f5.6-image is better. Even when the image is reduced down to this size.

So, if you want the ultimate in technical quality you should plan your aperture. And buy very nice lenses…

Passing a subway station from Eirik Solheim on Vimeo.

Place the camera firmly against the window. Start video recording just before you approach the station. Add a stupid sound from the default Apple audio library.

Exact location: Nationalteateret station, Oslo, Norway.

…and you can click through to Vimeo to watch the video in HD.

A quick question on twitter ended with these recommendations:
DataRescue (Mac)
Camera Salvage (Mac)
Digital Photo Recovery (Windows, free)
Smart Recovery (Windows, free)
Photo Rescue (Mac and Windows)

Thanks to @moltke, @willytk, @rudolfsen, @magnusak, @mortend, @evensr. Now go follow them. They’re helpful people.

But before booting to Windows or buying one of the Mac apps I wanted to try a small free program called PhotoRec (Mac, Win, Linux). By the way also recommended by @willytk.

And it did the trick. People might be scared of the command line, but it was fairly simple to choose the card, select FAT as the file system, choose a location to store the rescued files and start the operation.

One of the images with some corruption.

PhotoRec is currently ticking away. And it seems to find all the files on the card. Both images and movies. Two of the images have some errors on them, but I can live with that. 8 gigs of movies and RAW images rescued…

So now you know. In case you experience something similar.