What are your favorite lens apertures? After running the stats on 20K+ photos on one of my hard drives, I plotted the data in this chart.

Aperture stats

My most popular aperture is f/8. It looks like I am the “set the lens at f/8 and shoot away” type. The fact is that I shoot lots of landscapes and f/8 works well most of the time. I go to extremes of f/2.8 when I want to have very shallow depth of field (DOF). For most family activity and informal portrait shots, I use f/5.6 to ensure sufficient DOF and avoid busy background associated with smaller apertures. Read More…

Posted in Digital photography, Miscellaneous on November 8th, 2007. No Comments.

Nikon shooters with Vibration Reduction (VR) lens may be interested in knowing if the lens VR function was on or off for a particular photo. It is recorded by the camera in the photo but many if not most software do not report this information. The one that works is the new Nikon ViewNX. Nikon ViewNX is rumored to be the replacement of the old Nikon View but the exact status is unclear.

Another option is the more powerful software ExifTool, which was featured earlier. This is mostly a Perl library and a command-line application for power users. It can report a lot more information than a typical software. You can find an example after the jump. Read More…

Posted in Software, Tips and techniques on October 22nd, 2007. No Comments.

The EXIF data embedded in the photos you took may contain surprising amount of data. On some photo sharing sites I have seen people complaining about people removing the EXIF information because they are interested in learning photography from other peoples photos. However there are always reasons people want to remove this information. So here are some free tools for you if you really want to do so.

1. IrfanView. you can remove the EXIF information from individual photo or many photos using batch process.

2. Jhead. This is what I use. It can do a lot more on the EXIF data.

  • To remove the EXIF data from all files in current directory, type the following in windows command shell:
jhead -de *.jpg
  • To remove only the comment field by third party programs (e.g. Photoshop)
jhead -dc *.jpg
  • To get rid of all unnecessary data
jhead -purejpg *.jpg

3. jStrip. It has both command-line and graphical user interface. It also supports batch processing.

4. ExifTool. Another powerful command-line tool.

  • Remove all meta information
exiftool -all= *.jpg
  • Alternative method: rename exiftool to the following name, drag and drop your files on top of the icon (note: original file will be overwriten)
exiftool(-overwrite_original_in_place -all=).exe
Posted in Digital photography, Photo editing on September 21st, 2007. 2 Comments.
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