Category Archives: Tools

Cinemagraph Pro – A Little bit Magic.

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GypsyBridge2

Gypsy at the Bridge

by Jack Foster Mancilla
The small LensLord™ gallery on Flickr
The Full LensLord™ Gallery

This is a little quickie animated gif, created with Cinemagraph Pro, available in the App store.

The truth is that it is very easy to use. This is just a small handheld iPhone gif, but it would be a hundred times better with a larger format camera, and a tripod. I just wanted to play with it a little. …

What it does is converts any movie by freezing a chosen frame, and allowing specifically masked portions of the frame to reveal movement in the following frames. It is very easy to just brush in, or out, any portion of the frame by adjusting the mask.

The final product can be exported as a movie, for inclusion in other projects or as stand alone movies. Or, the final product can be exported as an animated gif, with options, like looping, bounce back, numbers of repetitions. …

This particular animated gif is a small part of a larger movie, that I chose the in point, the end point, and the time taken for the movement, I then added a bounce back, so the loop runs forward to the end then runs backwards, to the start, and then keeps that loop up forever….

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My Flickr images are suprising me.

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As a photographer, I have several photo display accounts. In addition to my SmugMug Gallery, this blog, 500pix, I also have my Flickr account.

This posting is about my Flickr account. … In the grand scheme of things, I know my viewers numbers are not very high, but I find them interesting. I wonder how people found my Flickr postings in the first place. 🙂

It seems that recently, my Flickr account is getting a much larger number of viewers. The viewers may go away, but for now, it is kind of cool to watch.

This image to the right covers some traffic information over the past month that I find interesting. I have highlighted three different days, with differing numbers of visitors. The highlighted day in the middle of the other two says “Zero” views. … I think that is an aberration, some sort of missed recording whatever. The first highlighted day is the day with the lowest number of views. It says that there have been 148 views. One hundred forty-eight, that’s kind of cool. One hundred forty-eight used to be a high view day, but in this last month, it is the day with the lowest number of viewers.

The general trend for the past six months has been one of a very slow growth, but always averaging an upward trend. … That last highlighted thing is for today. It says 2,390 views for today. … And today isn’t even over.
As a matter of fact, I just checked as I finished writing this post, and it now says 2,407. Cool! 🙂

*** Adendum *** Todays total came in at 2,528 at the end of Flickrs 24 hour day.

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How to Cover a Cover – Facebook

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Hey. … I’ll bet some of you are connected on Facebook! And some of your connections are groups of like minded people for whatever like mindedness ideas you have. … 🙂

Only a Page/group administrator can publish a cover image for the page/group. But, we can all put images up there for the administrator to use for cover art. …

Click on the thumbnail to the rignt, and you will be able to read the directions. ->

This is a little tutorial I put together for a group I am a member of. Now, we are all starting to put up cover images, and we expect the administrator to change the image as our administrator sees fit. But, at least, we have given her/him a choice.

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Pocketwizards – Lions and tigers and bears. Oh, my!

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Photo Jun 01, 18 31 51 – Photo Jun 01, 18 32 33

For quite a while I have had several “Alien Bee” Strobes. I used to use them quite a bit, when I shot pets at Petco. … I was good at it, still am. “Link to Pet Images.”

Anyway, back to the topic at hand. … When I was using the Bees I had some very inexpensive, and very cheap, radio triggers. Since then, I have moved to using Canon Speedflashes for most of my work, because they are just more portable.

But, there has been a drawback for the 580 II, and earlier flash units. They were all ETTL via an infrared signal. I had quite a problem shooting in the desert, and into the sun, and around corners. The problem was that they just could not do that.

I did want some radio triggered PocketWizards for quite a while, but at the time, PocketWizard did not make ETTL wizards. And I wanted all the benefits of ETTL. … So I waited, and waited, getting by with lesser products. Finally, PocketWizard made the FlexTT5 for Canon cameras. Now, I could control my off camera flash units with ETTL via radio. Yahoo!

But, then I had another problem, all the Alien Bee strobes that I had only synced to a 200th of a second. And, they did not work with ETTL. So the Bees were mostly consigned to storage. … Bummer dude. …

Sometimes Magic happens.

Now, the wizards at PocketWizards have made these little adapters, the AC9 adapters. I hook one of these little guys to my FlexTT5, and then via a small connecting four wire, RJ14 cable, I can wirelessly control my Bees into Hypersync, and now far beyond the earlier limit, now it is up to an 8000th of a second. And I can modify the levels of the flashes from my camera, just by changing the shutter speed, or the aperture. And I can use my canon speedflashes simultaneously.

They are amazing.

I have a Prom to shoot next week, and I wanted to incorporate all my flash units for maximum flexibility!

Today was my test time. A charm! They work like a charm! 🙂

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