My first and main suggestion is don’t be afraid to go out with your camera everywhere. Try using a prime lens on a small camera as large cameras are intimidating and attract attention, and use it whenever you see something interesting.

Street Photography is about the place and the moment, be in the right place and shoot at the right moment. Carrying your camera all the time is the best thing you can do to be ready for the moment.

Technicalities

Prime lenses and zone focusing are your friends. Autofocus is not perfect and might get in the way more than help your cause. On cameras with slow AF systems (e.g. EP-1), having AF on is a no-go for street photography, so knowing how to handle the DOF is vital knowledge for the situation.

Longer lenses do benefit from AF a lot. Try to avoid telephotos, only if the subject is too far away to go or is too busy doing something , and might be disturbed by your presence, use the tele.

Sharpness

Sharpness is a bourgeoisie concept. — Henri Cartier-Bresson

Ironically, you will probably be using the sharpest of the apertures of your lens most of the time. If you want to avoid focusing, have as closed aperture as the light will allow, and still have a fast enough shutter. Recommended values range from 1/250 upwards and near f/5.6~8 depending on weather. If needed pump up the ISO: noisy pictures can be fixed, but motion blur is unfixable.

Style

decide if you want it to be candid or posed. Both have advantages and disadvantages.

Posed

Choosing posed feels safer, but the ‘barrier of entry’ is higher, as you need to approach the person and talk to them before taking the picture. Try to talk to the people instead of just shooting and leaving. There is a great project called 100 Strangers which is all about that. For posed, the best tip is saying “I know it’s gonna sound strange but I can I take your picture” (saw it on a thread at reddit, and it works as a charm).

Candid

As for Candid, try to be as less intimidating as you can be, smile a lot and look like you are having fun. I have a serious looking face, but when I go out shooting, I try to cheer myself up (listening songs or reading jokes to get in the mood), you can note a real smile on the eyes so try to be really happy, a fake smile looks creepy. Try a prime lens, you can learn to shoot without looking and get some nice shots by knowing the framing by heart. Shooting from the hip is quite discrete, but you might get better compositions when looking, find the balance on shooting from the hip and looking with the viewfinder.

Depending on the area, candid might be as safe as posed. Still it’s good to remember: it might be legal, but that does not mean to be a jackass about it. I delete pictures when someone asks me to (which is not too common, but not unheard of). Still, while most people will avoid you or go away instead of being confrontational, be as polite as you can be and don’t be a jerk.

Composition

Specially when shooting candid, try to compose pictures. The best way to do so, is by seeing before shooting, shooting like mad will only bulk up lots of crappy pictures. See, then shoot.

Avoid shooting a person’s back, most of the time they are boring and don’t say enough of who you want to capture. Being sidewise helps if you don’t want to shoot directly into the persons’ field of view.

Safety

Get a companion! Find some else to join you, if you’re a guy try to get a girl, that instantly reduces your “creepyness” a lot (don’t ask me why). If you’re going out with a guy it also reduces the chances of you getting mugged. The ideal is having both a girl and a guy friend. (at least, street photo is a hobby that lends itself well to groups)

Avoid getting mugged by always being vigilant, so even though I love shooting when listening to music, I’d advice otherwise for safety. If you think you might get mugged, try to look as ready or alert as possible (I do lots of eye contact, friendly with non-suspicious persons, and stern with suspicious).

Conclusions

• Shoot a lot, take your camera everywhere (whenever possible)
• Look before shooting, try seeing the scene before pressing the shutter
• Stay safe, be always on the lookout, bring company if needed
• Know your controls by heart, keep your focus and exposition ready, so you only have to worry about the composition
• Be friendly and don’t be a jackass
• Have fun

I expect to have at least a reference client implementation done for the pencil down date. But I expect to keep working afterwards.

Also I’ll be assisting openSUSE Conference 2011 in Nuremberg. And I expect to present the service working fully.

Please leave your comments or feedback below.

Feel free to contact me for your comments or questions.

The code is available on gitorious.org/gsoc-2011/gsoc-2011

The objectives are now:

• Creating a Gnome/GTK, and a KDE client to submit and retrieve profiles automatically
• Performance profiling
• Improving look and feel
• Improving the search algorithm
• 100% test coverage and more testing
• Clearing up requirements to apply for infrastructure support on the openSUSE project (including creating an snazzy project name )

That’s it for the midterms, feel free to comment or contacting me,
Regards,
Sebastian

For the web part of the project, I will use Flask . A free framework, compatible with FastCGI.

Feel free to leave your comments.

Regards.

This week, I worked mostly on getting my paper mockups digitalized. Uploaded a design for the front page on gitorious.org/gsoc-2011/gsoc-2011. I also uploaded a basic API doc blueprint to be implemented.

I still have some drafts to be mocked up on HTML but I’ll be working on them this week.

You can check up on my public Google Calendar for some events.

On a mildly unrelated issue, on my University’s local usergroup lugUSAC, presented a workshop on free CMSs. We gifted some custom CDs made with SUSE Studio and raffled

some openSUSE discs.

Greetings, and please leave your comments.

I have some drafts on the UX and design of the web interface for the repository, though I’ve been unable to upload them to the repository.
I have also a public calendar on Google Calendar

I will travel next week to El Salvador for EMALCA (Escuela Matematica de America Latina y el Caribe), so my updates might be unreliable. I have informed my mentor already.

Greetings, and please leave your comments.

2011-01-01, ready to start a new year, bought a new camera, and eager to try out all the theoretical stuff I kept reading about. So why not do a 365 photo project, It would surely be fun!.

Let’s skip a month, February, 2011. “OK, a month already went by, and I took lots of pictures”, but something feels different, I’ve taken more than 200 pics, the thing is most of them are just plain rubbish. Turns out my life is more boring than what I originally thought. Taking this into account, it was not a hard decision to make, going on would be forcing myself to do something I would no longer enjoy, depriving myself of the actual experience that is looking at something, examining it, and deciding it’s actually picture worthy. I understand the whole purpose of a 365 is to shoot like a madman, but going on would mean for me to lose the sense of shooting for the kick of it.
I’m not saying the spontaneity of a 365 is bad per-se, but dragging along the gear everyday, and then returning home disappointed of being unable to take a decent picture is too tolling on me, It’s a foolproof way to start hating things.

Nevertheless, I think there is a reasonable middle ground, a 52 week project seems, not only more accessible, but it allows me to choose what to shoot; while keeping the pressure of constantly finding things to look at.

So that’s it, how I weaseled my way out the 365, and now welcome my 52-week overlords.

Thanks for reading.

After your environment is all set up, you will need a to create a new Project, just follow the instructions for your IDE.

The second step is to add to your project the library core.jar, which contains the basic Processing functionality. This library is found on the lib/ folder of the main Processing folder. For Linux this is located wherever you installed Processing, on Windows it is on Program Files/Processing, and in Mac it is located inside Processing.app, just Select the app, select File Menu > Show Package Contents and then open Resources folder.

Once you’ve added the library to your project, it’s real easy to start using it. PApplet is the class which Processing Applets extend, and it holds 2 very important methods, which you must implement to make a working Processing Sketch, this ones are void setup() and void draw().
You might note that this ones are quite similar to the ones on an average interactive Processing sketch, and you are totally right, in fact this ones are the exact equivalent as Processing converts your code to pure Java.

A basic and important thing to keep in mind is that PApplet extends from java.awt.Component so to your AWT of Swing based app, it will be no different from any other component, and it will be as easy to add to your JFrame or JPanel.

Let’s begin with a simple example

Simple Processing

  public void setup() {
    size(400, 400);
    background(0);
  }
  public void draw() {
    background(0);
    fill(200);
    ellipseMode(CENTER);
    ellipse(mouseX,mouseY,40,40);
  }

Now to add it to our application, we must create a class that extends PApplet, a JFrame to contain it and a Main class to launch it, your app then should look similar to this:

Java Source Code

Main.java

package processJava;
public class Main {
    public static void main(String[] args) {
        new DisplayFrame().setVisible(true);
    }
}

DisplayFrame.java

package processJava;
public class DisplayFrame extends javax.swing.JFrame {
    public DisplayFrame(){
        this.setSize(600, 600); //The window Dimensions
        setDefaultCloseOperation(javax.swing.WindowConstants.EXIT_ON_CLOSE);
        javax.swing.JPanel panel = new javax.swing.JPanel();
        panel.setBounds(20, 20, 600, 600);
        processing.core.PApplet sketch = new CircleSketch();
        panel.add(sketch);
        this.add(panel);
        sketch.init(); //this is the function used to start the execution of the sketch
        this.setVisible(true);
    }
}

CircleSketch.java

package processJava;
import processing.core.*;
 
public class CircleSketch extends PApplet {
 
  public void setup() {
    size(400, 400);
    background(0);
  }
  public void draw() {
    background(0);
    fill(200);
    ellipseMode(CENTER);
    ellipse(mouseX,mouseY,40,40);
  }
}

It’s done, now just press run and enjoy.
You now have no excuse to keep your processing sketches apart from your desktop applications.

EDIT: Fixed a small typo on a class’ name