If you’ve decided to participate in Project 365 this year, you might start to find it difficult to keep track of which number day it is in the year once you get out of January – I know I did when I did my Project 365 last year.

Last year I made a special Project 365 Calendar with all the days of the year on it and after a few requests, I’ve updated it for 2010.

Details

The PDF contains three A4 pages (all vector graphics, so it’s no problem to larger or at a different size). Page one is the full colour calendar. Page two is a black and white version. Page three is a simplified version – just black text on a white background.

Download

Also

I’ve also updated Tagr for 2010 to help you tag your Project 365 photos with the correct date, number, etc.

The project is complete! I took one photo every day in 2009 and the above mosaic is the result. Definitely a worthwhile experience and it’s very satisfying to complete such a long running project.

What is Freelensing?

Photos taken with the lens detached from the camera but held in place and moved around to focus. This also lets extra light in sometimes causing light leaks and giving a vintage look and feel.

Freelensing can also:

• Give extra bokeh by shrinking the area in focus (aperture is 0)
• Allow for super macro shots
• Produce ethereal lighting by allowing stray light to get in to the sensor
• Make delicious light leaks
• Create tilt-shift effects

How do I do it?

If you just want the tilt-shift effect, you can detach the lens, but hold it in place against the camera. Slightly move the lens left, right, up or down.

It’s easier if your camera has a “live view” so you can see what it looks like, but it’s not too much harder with the view finder.

You only need to move the lens a few millimetres (fractions of an inch), and doing it this way, there’s not much risk of dust getting in to the sensor.

If you want lightleaks or the super-macro kind of effect, you will need to hold the lens a little bit further away (probably no more than a finger width, though). This is a bit more risky if you’re worried about dust, so try not to hold the lens away from the camera for too long and only do it in a dust-free environment.

For light leaks, I’ve found it’s best to be in a fairly dark room, with a big window in front of you. This lets the outside light get in to the camera (i.e. not through the lens, but just going straight in to the gap between the lens and the camera) but limits the ambient light getting in (which makes the photos less defined).

Will it work with my (SLR) camera?

Canon – Yes

Nikon – Yes – You have to put the camera into manual mode (thanks Eddie Barksdale)

Sony – Yes – In your camera’s menus, look for the “Release w/o Lens” option, and make sure it is enabled. You might also need to make something that will hold the aperture lever on the back of the lens in the open position (thanks ted @ndes)

If you’ve had success with your camera and it’s not on the list, let us know in the comments here or on the freelensing forum on Flickr.

Examples

See more on the Flickr Freelensing pool.

Obviously, the sky wasn’t quite as dramatic as in the photos, but it was a dark sky. The sky usually looks better when it’s darker in photos. That’s why graduated filters were made.

If you don’t have one of those, the easiest way to do that is to use a black-to-transparent linear gradient, set to Soft Light blend mode. In these photos, I’ve also added a bit of a HDR effect using the Shadows/Highlights tool and finished it off with some super-sharpening using Highpass with a Radius of 50px (then set that to Hard Light blend mode and removing the colour). Tutorial for that coming tomorrow.

As you can see in the image above, I can now get RAW photos from my Canon IXUS 70! Actually that’s not clear at all from the image above, but that’s what it is – RAW DNG photos produced by my little IXUS.

How? By using the latest version open source firmware, Canon Hacker’s Development Kit, or CHDK. As the name implies, it’s only for Canon cameras and only for those with DIGIC II or DIGIC III firmware.

I remember hearing about this last year when I had my IXUS 55. Back then the IXUS line of cameras wasn’t supported, so I didn’t pay much attention and soon forgot about it. But the other day it was posted on Lifehacker so I had another look.

Turns out they’ve developed the firmware a lot and it’s (pretty much) completely safe to use and doesn’t modify the camera at all. You just load it on to an SD card then when it starts up, tell the camera to use the firmware on the card and it re-boots with a bunch of new features.

From the Wired How-To Wiki:

Digital cameras have powers beyond what is immediately available to the user. On a standard Canon, for example, the fastest shutter speed option offered is 1/1,600 second, but the hardware can handle much more than that — up to 1/60,000 of a second… It unleashes new features including RAW file format, live histogram display, a battery readout, and the ability to run scripted actions on a camera.

When I was looking for a replacement for my IXUS 55, having the ability to shoot RAW was one of the functions I would have liked. All the point a shoot cameras with that ability were quite expensive though, so I just went with the IXUS 70 (mostly for it’s looks and time-lapse movie function, and the IXUS 55 had been good to me).

Shooting RAW is the main feature that I like. Having a decent battery read out is good too, as well as an always-on clock, a built in calendar, text reader and this CHDK firmware also adds a couple of games (Sokoban and Reversi).

I don’t particularly care about the faster/slower shutter speeds and higher ISO (anything above 200 ISO is already too noisy!) and some of the other features, but it’s nice to know they’re there.

If your model is on the list of supported cameras, I’d highly recommend giving this custom firmware a try.

Well I’m back from New York City – had a really great time. Having only spent a couple of days there previously I was left wanting more. After spending 5 days this time, I still want more.

I was almost afraid I wouldn’t like it as much and that it had just been built up in my memory to be this awesome place that never really existed. That is no longer that case. It really is as awesome as I remember. There’s just something about America and New York in particular that I can connect with. Living here in London for 6 months, I’ve never really felt that. Even though my family history is here in England and hardly any of my family have ever been to America, I just feel more at home there.

Anyway, I have processed all my photos and come out with 265 good ones. They’re on Flickr, but 265 is a bit overwhelming for most people, I would think. So I’ve picked 18 of my favourites and put them in a set by themselves.

As a bonus, below is some video from the first couple of days.

Update: Second video is ready.

5. Helvetica

This one kind of surprises me. I wouldn’t have counted it as one of my top five photos – even from the other photos in that area I didn’t think this was the best. I do love the capital R in Helvetica, though. The swirls in the graffiti seem to match the rounded shoulder of the R and the drips form the stems, echoing the type. The intricate textures formed in the half-heartedly cleaned graffiti are what attracted me to the place initially. While I am surprised it is in the top five, I do like it.

4. Rumored Distress

This comes from my first diptychs series, “Outer Poetry”. All the photos have a scene on the left, with a person or body part on the right. The titles were generated by a random sentence generator. They were, and are, a lot of fun to make. Gives me a chance to go back through my older photos and make something interesting with the unused photos that would otherwise just sit on my hard drive.

This one did come together well, but again, wasn’t my favourite of the series. The photo on the left was taken out the front of my grandparents house, while on the right is a friend/neighbour playing with a sparkler at Easter.

3. The Beetles

This one is similar in style to the Outer Poetry series, but applied to a single photo. Taken in a neighbours yard as they were restoring one of them (the black one). Again, I had fun making it. Applying the textures and tweaking the colours and getting it all just right is very enjoyable for me. I think I restrained myself a bit on this one – no light leaks and reasonably natural colours.

On a related note, why do people blur out license plates? Is there really that much info you can get from it? Can you even get any information from a license plate?

2. Untitled

I don’t really like Untitled photos or artworks, as it’s generally lazy, but I can’t think of a title for this one. And perhaps the simplicity of it suits the untitled-ness. This was taken in the back yard of our house, and is about the third peg-related work of mine. It was named Retro::3 on deviantART after Retro::2, my first peg photo from 2004. The blueness of it is in homage to that photo too. In fact, looking at it now, I really love that shade of blue. I should make this blog that colour.

I had a great comment on it the other day. MyGreatestGift interpreted the photo in a completely different way:

nice, it looks like a diving board over some water with the reflection of itself, in an abstracted way

1. Metaphotography

This is mainly the most popular because it was put on Digg by someone, giving it over 3000 views (rare on Flickr – not so rare in deviantART, interestingly).

I actually took the photo back in about 2003 before I had a good digital camera and was experimenting with film. I remember wondering what would happen if I took a photo of a negative – if it would make the new negative into colour. I remembered this photo I had taken, found the negative and took a photo of it. When I had the film developed, sure enough the negative was now in colour… albeit fairly washed out and lacking contrast.

A few years later, in 2007, I was looking through some old film shots I shot back in 2003 and found this colour negative. It was kind of washed out, so I took a photo, pushed the contrast up and it came out quite well. It now resides as my number one most popular on Flickr.

Interestingly, the girl in the photos is the same as in #4.