Olympus PEN with Kodak Retina 35-80 Optical Viewfinder

Posted on May 5, 2012 by MJ

Kodak Retinas were very popular, high quality rangefinder cameras first released by Kodak in 1934. You can read about them for example at photoethnography.com. This post is about an accessory for those cameras (read more about these here), the 35-80 optical viewfinder. Below you can see how it looked on the real thing, and how it does on an Olympus PEN.

Kodak Retina IIC and Olympus E-P1, both with the optical viewfinder mounted.

Everyone wants to own a camera with the red dot. Well – as far as I know this is the only way to have one on an Olympus! :) For a long time I wanted a viewfinder on my E-P1. Although the LCD has many practical uses, photography simply isn’t the same without framing shots with the camera next to your eye.
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Transparent background in every browser

Posted on April 29, 2012 by MJ

There are several ways to achieve the effect of background transparency. I will put them into a short list and later show ways to adapt them to work under Internet Explorer browsers. Of course one could ponder whether or not wrestling with IE is even worth, now that IE9 is released (or should I say “upon us” ;). Well… it is worth it. A strong percentage of users visiting my website are still using IE7 and it’s going to be several years until their number is low enough to justify ignoring them.

Ways to achieve transparency:

CSS

1. DIV#element { background: rgba(200, 54, 54, 0.5); }

Works in all major browsers except IE. Is part of the CSS3 specification and in the perfect world we won’t need anything else.

2. DIV#element { opacity:0.5; filter:alpha(opacity=50); }

The opacity property makes the whole element opaque / transparent. Both content and background. As such it affects the readability of the content. You can change it by stacking two layers of elements on top of each other and making the bottommost one opaque. Not worth the hassle. What it’s good at is hiding content and that’s how I’m hiding the background of my website.

3. DIV#element { background: url(‘transparent_image.png’); }

Using a transparent image as the background is cross-browser compatibile (ekhem, except IE6). You need to prepare it beforehand of course.

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cross-browser display:inline-block

Posted on April 28, 2012 by MJ

We all know how important it is for our code to be universally interpreted by all browsers. Currently the oldest relic from the “old times” is the (in)famous Internet Explorer 7. By default it’s unable to handle inline-block elements. One common way to avoid the problem is to float your “display:block” elements. It is not without drawbacks, however. Float just wasn’t meant to be used this way, and also – once floated there is no way to align our elements in any way. Here is a simple and elegant solution to the problem:

Horizontal inline-block menu:

HTML

</p> <div class="menu"> <div class="menuitem">Element 1</div> <div class="menuitem">Element 2</div> <div class="menuitem">Element 3</div> </div> <p>

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Three column layout in clean HTML and CSS

Posted on April 28, 2012 by MJ

Today I want to write about several ways to achieve standards compliant, table-less three (or even multi) column layouts via CSS.

The first way to achieve it is this:

HTML

</p> <div style="overflow:hidden;"> <div style="float:left; width:33.3%">Left</div> <div style="float:left; width:33.3%">Center</div> <div style="float:right; width:33.3%">Right</div> </div> <p>

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How to measure and judge sharpness and resolving power

Posted on April 28, 2012 by MJ

Today I want to write you about testing the resolution^* your camera systems. It’s not that I think every photographer should spend time evaluating, obsessing over sharpness or high ISO noise. In fact it’s just the opposite – I’m generally against it as these things distract you from actual photography and taking pictures. However I think it is important to be able to gauge the technical quality of your gear and output. To be able to do so you need to know what quality factors such as resolution, sharpness and contrast are and how to measure them. And that’s what this article is going to be about. I’m going to keep the amount of math to a minimum, but provide links to various other resources as we go.

* resolution and resolving power are not the same thing. However they are commonly treated as such. I will also do so as it is conveniant and harmless as long as you are aware of the distinction.
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