Hasta La Gadget!

Want to get your Instagram photos into Google+? Good news! You can — with a little work

Since its launch back in October 2010, Instagram has quickly become the spiritual successor to the Polaroid. Anyone can take instant photos, anywhere, and share them straight away. The resulting images are weird-looking, just like Polaroids, and you even have to buy a special camera to use it — in this case, the iPhone.

With Instagram, I often take better photos on my iPad 2 than I do with my “proper” camera. But it’s limited. There are third-party services that let you view Instagram images on Android or the web, but good luck getting Mom to use those. There are also a whole lot of other ways to take and process pictures that offer more features than Instagram. Here are a few Instagram hacks.

Using a Better Camera

The iPhone’s 5-megapixel camera is great, with more than enough resolution for Instagram’s tiny 612-by-612-pixel images. Even the iPad 2’s awful camera can handle this (although Apple’s weird anti-noise algorithms uglify the source picture something awful). But what if you want to shoot pictures with your grown-up camera and share those?

There are two ways, in the field. First is to use the Eye-Fi wireless SD card to beam photos direct from camera to iPhone or iPad. This is so clunky, so unreliable and so damn annoying to use that I’d recommend the second, (much cheaper) method.

Instead of buying the $50 Eye-Fi, buy the $30 camera connection kit. You can then slip the SD card into your iPad, copy the photos you want to share and open them from within Instagram (you know you can use camera-roll photos in Instagram, right?)

The third way is to just wait until you’re at your computer, sync the photos to your iPhone in the usual way and go from there. This rather misses the point, though. The app is called Instagram, after all.

Nikon’s new prime lens is pretty cheap, for a lens

A new Nikon lens is always worth a look. Recently the camera company has been upgrading its most stalwart lenses with internal AF motors to work on the latest, motor-less SLR bodies. Now, it has popped out a new, cheapish specialist model — a macro lens for full-frame bodies.

The lens is the AF-S DX Micro Nikkor 40mm ƒ2.8G. As you can see from the name, it has a 40mm focal length and a reasonable ƒ2.8 maximum aperture. On a crop-sensor body, that becomes 60mm, good for portraits.

The lens focusses down to 16.3 cm (6.4 inches), giving a 1:1 sized image on the sensor. It also has Nikon’s M/A autofocus mode, which will focus when you touch the shutter button but also let you grab the wheel and do it yourself without pressing any extra buttons. You can also opt for full manual.

If you don’t need the closeup features, you might be better off with the faster ƒ1.8 50mm Nikkor. If you do, then the $280 asking price isn’t too high. Available August.

AF-S DX Micro Nikkor 40mm ƒ2.8G [Nikon]

See Also:

• Nikon Lets Slip New 50mm ƒ1.8G Silent Wave Lens
• Nikon's New ƒ1.8 'Nifty Fifty' Official at Last
• Nikon Announces Four New SLR Lenses

The simple exterior of Google Plus' photo section is deceptive

It has been said that the biggest feature of Google Plus is that it’s not Facebook. However, there’s another feature that may be of interest to all you Gadget Lab photo nerds out there: the photo integration. It turns out that G+ is a pretty sweet way to manage and view your shared photos.

If you have ever tried to share your pictures on Facebook, then you’ll know the pain. And if you have tried to track down other people’s photos, it’s even worse. I use a third party app for this to see photos of my nephews because Facebook drives me crazy. Google Plus makes both sharing and viewing a whole lot easier.

Getting the Photos in

Browser

You can add photos to your posts, just like you can with Twitter, but this article is about using and sharing galleries of your own snaps. To begin, click on the Photos tab in the group of icons at the top of every page. You’re brought to your main photo page, and shown the latest snaps from anyone in your circles. Click on any of these and you’ll be taken to the album view for that person.

The upload screen, with caption and rotate options

To upload your photos you currently have a few choices. The quickest way to start is to use the browser. Click the big red “upload new photos” button, currently top right, and you gat a big rectangle into which you can drag the photos, one or more at a time.

These upload with a progress meter on each image. Once done, mouse over the thumbnails to add captions, rotate or delete the pictures. Pick a new gallery name, or add to an existing album, and you’re done. Next up, you can add an album description, and pick which of your circles you want to share with.

Here's where you add a description and decide who to share the album with

This step is key to what makes photo-sharing great in Google Plus. By choosing particular circles of friends, you can target snaps to the right people. Thus, all my bike polo photos go only to my Polo circle, to avoid boring everybody else with them. Family photos can go to family only, and a picture of my nephew playing bike polo can go to both. It’s quick, and once you have your circles set up, extremely powerful.

And if people in these circles aren’t yet signed up with Google Plus, no problem. You can choose to have G+ send them an e-mail instead, and they can come look at the pictures without signing up. This means your Google Plus network contains anyone in the world with an e-mail address. Take that, Facebook.

Worried that you shared a photo of you drunkenly dancing a striptease on a table in your local bar with the wrong group? No problem. Click the little white “View profile as…” button and choose who you’d like to be. You can view your stream as it is seen by “anyone on the web”, or enter an e-mail address (of your boss, say) and check what they can see. It’s neat, and makes you a lot more confident in sharing things.

Cellphone app

Currently, the only G+ app available is for Android, with iOS “coming soon.” Using the app, you can choose to have photos uploaded automatically to Google Plus. These are stored privately until you decide to share them.

IOS users currently have a few choices. Thanks to Google Plus’ photos ties to Picasa, you can use any app that has Picasa export to get your photos up into your albums. Some, like the excellent Photosync, will push the pictures to a selected folder (I use Picasa’s Drop Box folder, which is private). Others, like Web Albums, let you browse, upload and manage all of your Picasa albums. You can even rename your photos, and browse and edit comments. These changes then sync both ways immediately, and you can also see any of the albums your friends are sharing on Google Plus by adding their e-mail address. It’s actually a pretty great app, and might even replace the photos app for me. It looks like this, and you can grab it for $3:

This screenshot of Web Albums was taken on the iPad, uploaded to Picasa and viewed in Google Plus. Confused?

This shows us that Google Plus photos are already tied deeply into Picasa, which brings us to…

Picasa

Picasa, which the rumors say will soon be renamed “Google Photos,” is both a photo-sharing site and desktop software. This brings us to a third way to get your pictures into Google Plus. First, download and install Picasa, if you haven’t already (it’s free).

It could do with a re-design, but Picasa for Mac gets the job done

Once it has done importing your photos, sign in to your Google account. Then just create a new album, click on the “Sharing” drop-down and choose “Enable Sync.” You’re done. Any photos in this folder will now be automatically uploaded to Google Plus, and vice versa. In theory at least. While some of my publicly shared folders sync back to the computer, my private Drop Box doesn’t.

Editing

If you want to do some heavy editing, you can head over to the Picasa site and take care of things there using the Picnik web app. Any changes made here, from cropping to Lomo-fying to anything else are immediately propagated back to your Google Plus albums.

If you want to make some quick tweaks or just get some extra info, you can do that from inside Google Plus. Just click on a photo to take you into the blacked-out lightbox view and click one of the buttons at the bottom. Add tag lets you tag a face, and this ties into your G+ contacts. Actions, though, is where the meat is.

You can view all your EXIF data from within Google Plus

Here you can rotate the image, delete comments, but more interestingly you can edit and get “Photo details.” The latter will bring up a histogram along with any EXIF metadata (shutter speed, camera model, date taken etc.) Tap the left and right arrows (or scroll with the mouse) to flip between the info pages of all photos in the current album. You can also view the EXIF data for other people’s photos.

Simple editing is done here. If you want to get fancy, head over to the Picasa Web site to edit the same photos

Editing lets you choose from six presets, like Instagram. Or rather, five presets and Google’s trademark “I’m feeling lucky”, which picks a random filter from the five. You can also come back later and undo any effects you have applied, reverting to the original. The effects are limited, but I have a feeling we’ll get the full Picnik suite before too long, and they’re just fine for quick fixes.

One thing to note is that there’s no slideshow yet, although you can use you arrow keys to quickly flip between images (way faster than Flickr). Neither is there any easy way to move photos between albums. As you can only publish whole albums and not individual photos, this is an annoying limitation, although I’m sure it will be fixed soon enough.

Viewing

As mentioned above, you can view the photos of anyone on Google Plus just by clicking on their photos tab. You can choose not to show the photos tab at all, and also choose whether GPS data is shown, and which circles can add tags to your pictures (tags let you say who appears in the photo, remember).

All of this is invisible when you view photos, though. You see what you are authorized to see, and can quickly browse and flip through albums of images and add comments. Oddly, you currently can’t +1 a photo you like, but you can see a number in the corner of thumbnails, indicating how many comments the photo has.

Browsing is fast if your browser window is small. Go full screen and the pictures are scaled to fit, slowing things down while the images load. Photos all have their own URL and can be saved or just dragged to your desktop. It has the slick feel of Flickr, but without all the heavy crap and forced button-clicks to download a photo. In fact, you might want to pull your images out of Flickr and put them into Picasa. It’s not easy, but our sister site Ars Technica explains how to do it here.

The future

Google Plus’ photo sharing is surprisingly robust for such a new product, likely thanks to Picasa running under the hood. Even now it is already my favorite way to share pictures, and it’s pretty likely that the feature-set will grow as soon as Picasa is fully integrated. One thing’s for sure, though. Google Plus makes Facebook look like a complex, bloated piece of junk.

Warning: Hit mute before you play this clip or you’ll have some explaining to do. You also might want to skip forward to around 19 seconds in.

What we see here is the sensor of a Canon 5D MkII being zapped by lasers. The hapless owner was videoing DJs spinning some truly horrible club music when one of the lasers in the light show shone right into the lens and frazzled the sensor within. Pretty bad luck, I’d say — with all the camera shake I’m surprised any light found its way onto the lens at all

The photographer, named Jatimco, now has to contend with a vertical line permanently etched onto the sensor of his $2,500 camera.

This reminds me of the days, back in the 1980s, when video cameras came with tubes instead of CCDs, similar to what you’d find in a TV. When you carried them, it was advised to always keep the lends-cap on. Not to protect the lens, but to protect the tube should you accidentally let it point at the sun. If this happened, the tube would be burned out, leaving permanent spots on the image or worse. The only solution? A new tube.

Laser 5D MkII Sensor Kill [YouTube via Photography Bay]

See Also:

• Lasers And Ray Guns
• DIY Lasers Are Irresistibly Dangerous
• New Use for Lasers: Blinding Pirates

Miniature robots shot by the LensBaby. Photo Charlie Sorrel

I’m a big fan of putting crappy, plastic lenses onto high-end digital cameras. The quirky, hard-to-control analog results are the real thing, sometimes startling you with serendipitous surprises. By contrast, grungifying software is both repeatable and predictable.

The latest is the Toy Lens from Japanese company SLR Magic. Here’s what it does, plus a look at a few other purposely junky lenses.

SLR Magic Toy Lens

This lens even looks like a toy, and comes with a bagful of brightly-colored plastic rings that can be slid onto the barrel for extra grip. Its specs are a lot more interesting, though: 26mm ƒ1.4. The lens fits only Micro Four Thirds bodies, so that gives it a 52mm (35mm equivalent) focal length.

Unlike many “toy” lenses, the elements are multi-coated glass, and the results show it. You certainly get some odd color-shifts, and the image quality falls off fast towards the edges, but the lens can bite some sharp detail from the center of the frame.

Here’s a slideshow of from the SLR Magic group on Flickr.

The hitch? The lens costs ¥9,800, or around $120, plus shipping from Japan. Fear not, though. This lens appears to be little more than a rebranded c-mount (CCTV-camera) lens with some fancy-colored plastic rings and a new lens-mount added. Made by Feihua (also branded Fujian), these lenses can be picked up from Ebay, complete with a Micro Four Thirds adapter, for around $40, or even cheaper if you already have an adapter.

LensBaby

The LensBaby Composer offers lots of control, but at a price

The LensBaby is, despite its infantile name, the spiritual daddy of the deliberate-blur scene. First conceived as a simplified, plastic-lensed alternative to the crazy-expensive tilt-shift lenses used by architectural photographers and co-opted by creative types, the LensBaby has spawned a whole family of optics.

Now there are fisheyes, adapters that let you use Nikon lenses on Micro Four Thirds bodies (complete with tilt), and interchangeable, drop-in optics. But the real heart of the range is the Composer.

It works like this. You focus the lens on the spot you want sharp. A flower in a field, say, or a model’s eye. You then twist the front of the lens, which moves the glass elements so they are skewed away from the film-plane. This moves the “sweet spot” to wherever you like in the frame.

Recompose to put the flower or eye back in this sweet spot and you have a unique effect: one, off-center spot is sharp, the rest disappears into a surreal and dreamy blur.

I bought myself a LensBaby a few years ago (best birthday gift I ever received) and I love it. However, it’s not cheap: the Composer with the Double Glass optic is $250. Consider this to be the entrance fee, however, as you’ll soon be shopping for the accessory drop-in optics.

LensBaby Composer [LensBaby]

Diana Fisheye

At the other end of the quality scale is the Diana Fisheye lens, which can be mounted via an adapter onto most bodies. The Diana itself is a medium format film camera, which means that its lenses suffer from a crop-factor, even when used on a full-frame SLR. This stops it from being a proper fisheye, but you’ll still get strongly-curved distortion at the picture’s edge.

The horrible view from my balcony is made even worse by the Diana Fisheye

The $45 lens is, in short, junk. Somehow the distortions and color shifts that look so good on film look terrible on a digital camera. Fastened to my full-frame Nikon D700 the results were disappointing. The lack of contrast, ugly chromatic aberration (when the lens focusses different colors of light in different places, resulting in fringing) and overall effect made me think “cheap digicam” rather than “cool Instagram.”

Even if you’re really on a budget, you should avoid this lens. Worse, the adapter gets stuck fast to the lens, so you can’t even reuse that.

The 20mm Diana F+ Fisheye Lens [Lomo]

Pinholes

Here’s the perfect antidote to the Diana. Low-tech and possibly free, depending on how fancy you get, the pinhole isn’t even a lens. It’s just a hole, meaning, if you discount the material holding the hole, you’re taking a photo with nothing. Did I just blow your mind?

This diagram shows the principal of the pinhole camera. Picture Wikimedia Commons

A pinhole camera focusses light by making the aperture so tiny that it effectively gives an infinite depth-of-field. Spectacle wearers can check this effect by taking of their glasses and peering through a tiny hole (make one by curling a finger if you like). You’ll see that you can make out distant objects much better than with the naked eye.

The lack of glass means you don’t get such a sharp picture as you would with more sophisticated light-bending, and the tiny apertures let such little light through that exposures are necessarily long, but pinholes seem perfect for digital cameras because of the instant feedback. You can make mistakes and correct them immediately, instead of waiting a week to get the film back and finding everything is black.

The easiest way to get into pinholes is to make one with black card perforated with a sewing needle. This is almost free. Or you can get fancy and try out something like the Pinwide, a wide-angle pinhole for Micro Four Thirds cameras.

Hands-On With the Pinwide Wideangle Pinhole for Micro Four Thirds [Gadget Lab]

Household Junk and Other Hacks

You’ll also find plenty of other neat “lenses” your house. Try shooting through the bottom of a bottle or glass, snapping photos using mirrors to distort things.

Another old favorite is the ghetto macro lens, a great trick if you’re not scared of dust. Take the lens off your camera, flip it around and hold it backwards in front of the lens-hole. Moving the whole rig backwards and forwards to focus on your subject, you should be able to shoot as close as a few centimeters. Believe it or not, there exist adapters to let you this. They’re called “reversal rings,” and they still work out cheaper than a proper macro lens.

Any other tricks? Leave them in the comments.

See Also:

• The $50 Hole: Photojojo's Body-Cap Pinhole Conversion
• Instagram for iPhone, Like a Lomo-Twitter for Your Photos
• Hands-On With Lensbaby Fisheye and Soft-Focus Optics
• DIY Fisheye Made From Broken Lens
• Panasonic Adds 8mm Fisheye to Micro Four Thirds Lineup