Picasa 3.5 - Week 3 - 21% Completed

Picasa has been churning away at my computer for just over two weeks now. It's made a lot of progress, but still is only 21% finished according to its internal calculations. I have no idea how it knows how many total facees I have in my photo collection, but apparently it's saying that whatever it's found so far, I have that amount multiplied by four. So, if it's gone through 21% in two weeks, that would average to 10%/week, which means it should finish cataloging my system in roughly 10 weeks or 2 1/2 months. Whoa.

So overall, the process is pretty cool. It finds faces in your photos, grabs a thumbnail of each and asks you to identify who the person is in the thumbnail. Once you've identified a few, it tries to guess others in your photos by matching other thumbnails to the ones you've already identified. With some people, it nails it every time. With others, well...not so much.

Quibble #1

I have several quibbles with the way Picasa works, though - things I think the engineers at Google will eventually figure out, but here's one of the things you have to deal with if you have a lot of photos with a lot of people in them.

When it finds several similar images of a person, it stacks them up (behind the scenes) and asks you to identify that person by clicking on the "Add a name" feature under each thumbnail. If you want to see the entire photo, just double-click the thumbnail and you'll see what the original photo looks like. In this case, it's a shot of Vanessa Carlton at a concert in downtown Rockville.

Here's another

example of a shot that Picasa found (left) and what the original photo looks like when I double-clicked the thumbnail.

So, that works great. The faces Picasa found are clear in the thumbnail version of the image, I know who the people are and in both shots above, each person is easy to identify in the original shot and each person is the main subject or a large part of each photo.

Here are three other thumbnails as seen in Picasa. If you look at them, they're all very similar to the thumbnails above - the faces are large and fill the image space.

The faces are pretty much in focus and when I saw the thumbnails in Picasa, I wasn't sure if I knew who these people were, but since they were clearly the subjects of my photos (similar in size and quality to those above), there must have been a reason for me to take their photographs.

Below are the three photos of the three thumbnails above. Can you

match the thumbnail with the photo? It's just crazy how Picasa can key in on any face in any photo, but it would be great if Picasa could somehow distinguish the percentage of the photospace each face is taking or somehow be able to warn you when there are a lot faces in a photo. I've heard others complain about the same thing when taking photos at sporting events and the people in the stands are in focus. One photo could contain literally hundreds of faces that Picasa might pick up.

But for now, I'm happy with all the correct faces Picasa is picking up. For the three people above (none of whom I know), if I click the little "X" in the upper right corner, it puts these people in a gigantic "Ignored People" folder. So, I'll apologize in advance if you happen to end up in my "Ignored People" folder. If I ever do get to meet you, I'll be sure to add your name to my Picasa.

Picasa 3.5 - Now with Face Recognition Technology

Wow! What a difference the most recent upgrade to Picasa has made. Google has once again upgraded their FREE photo management and editing program with two huge new features - geotagging from within Picasa (which I haven't tried yet) and Face Recognition (aka Name Tags).

I started working with the name tagging feature last Sunday morning. Basically all you do once you upgrade to 3.5, is launch Picasa

and let it do its magic and it will find all the faces of all people (dogs, too) in all your photos.

For most people with photo collections of a few thousand photos, the process to find all the faces can go relatively quickly - maybe a few hours. As I've mentioned in other blog posts, I have in excess of 100,000 photos dating back to 1996 and a lot of those photos have people in them. For my system (duo core processor, 4GB RAM running Windows Vista), my system has been on and running since Sunday morning and the scan is currently (Weds at 6:50 p.m.) at 13% completed. At this rate, I'm estimating it'll be well past Thanksgiving by the time it's done.

So, why am I doing it? For me, it represents a huge leap forward in managing photos. If I want to find all the pictures of my son or daughter now, it's literally impossible to do. If I want to find my son at a soccer game, I might be able to find them, but over time, it becomes more and more difficult do so. Now along comes "name tagging" and now the task is much, much simpler and much, much quicker.

Face recognition isn't new, but from what I've read, Google has made the process the simplest out there. In the past, you could have gone to each photo and added keywords with names, but the process was very laborious and difficult. Google has made the process very, very easy and (as usual) intuitive.

I don't know how it does it, but it goes to each image, finds faces and crops the photo (virtually, of course), so all you see is the person's head. It then tries to cluster similar looking people together and if you identify one of the ones in the cluster with a name, it'll identify the others in the cluster the same way. It's really pretty slick how it works.

If Picasa identifies somebody in a photo you don't know or don't want to tag, you can click the X on their picture and it will ignore that person in the future.

Here's the problem though: when it scans your images, it looks for every person in every photo. So, if your subject is a large group of people, it grabs ALL the faces and asks you if you want to identify every one of them - even if they're in the background and their image is blurry, it still tries to get you to identify them. The photo on the left is an example of a shot that Picasa will try to grab every face from.

So, with my 100,000 photos, multiply that by some number (e.g. average # of faces per photo) and literally, there could be millions of faces to identify. Daunting task, to say the least.

One thing I haven't been able to find, are real instructions on how to best use this technology. There are some basic instructions, but no "best practices" to help people get better results in less time. So in a future blog post, I will jot down some ideas of what I think are Picasa name tagging "best practices." If you follow some of these concepts, it should save you some time and you should end up with better results.

So, in my next blog post, I'll list some of those best practices and some ideas on how Google could make their already awesome program even more of a killer app. If you're reading this and you haven't tried Picasa yet, go out there, download and install Picasa 3.5 and let the magic begin.

My Digital Past - My First Upgrade

Before I get into the upgrade, I wanted to post a couple of other shots from my Kodak DC40. Seeing these photos today and reliving the memories and once again, enjoying the expression on my daughter's face is exactly the reason why I take as many pictures as I do.

These two shots were both from a trip to Oregon in 1999. My daughter was a year and a half old at the time and until I saw the photos, I hadn't thought about that trip to Oregon.

Great memories.

In July of 1999 - almost 2 1/2 years after I got the Kodak DC40, I upgraded to the very futuristic looking Polaroid PDC 3000 (above). I bought this one on eBay. And with specs that blew away the Kodak (it emulated 2 megapixels and it used a huge 32 MB compactflash card), at $500, I thought this was a steal. It was a cool camera and took some decent shots, although as a photographer, I still had very little control over how I shot my photos.

Everything was pretty much on "auto" mode. Point. Shoot. Hope for the best. Taking control of my camera settings wouldn't come until my next upgrade.

With both the DC40 and PDC3000, you didn't see what the

camera saw. You looked through a separate viewfinder which approximated what would be on your image. As you got closer and closer to a subject, you had to adjust the camera - either move left or right, to get what you really wanted in the photograph.

What made matters worse (by today's standards), is that you couldn't see what you had just taken. No instant LCD viewing gratification. There was no LCD screen on either camera, so similar to film cameras at the time, you shot your photo and then, had to wait (for film - until the film had been developed and for these cameras - until the photos had been downloaded) before you could see if you got any keepers or not.

For me, getting a new digital camera is exciting. It's easy to feel like you've got something really great because it's brand new and so much better than what you had before. I mean, the pictures you take look good, you've figured out how to compensate for all those little quirks like shutter lag and the fact that what you see in the viewfinder is slightly to the left of what the actual image will be. And so you do what you have to do to get good shots with your camera.

And then someone comes along with a newer, cooler, more powerful, more flexible camera (I don't want to mention names, but his initials are Dan O'Neill - pictured at left with his slick Canon G2 hanging around his neck) and you're

blown away by what it can do and what yours can't. And all of a sudden, your hot little camera doesn't seem so hot anymore.

Thanks, Dan. That's what happened when he showed up with his Canon G2 at my 40th birthday party retreat in northern Michigan along with a laptop full of really cool photos. I was blown away. And I didn't even know he liked photography. Sure, my PDC 3000 could take decent shots. But Dan with his Canon G2 was making good shots -and there's a big difference between just "taking" pictures and "making" photos.

Next post: Taking pictures vs. Making Photos

My Digital Past - My First Digital Camera

I've been shooting digital for a long time - since early 1996 and I've accumulated a lot of digital photos since then. The picture at the left was one of the first images shot using my digital camera in March of 1996. The only reason I know when it was taken is because that was all the information that was recorded on digital photo files back then - the date the file was created. The camera I used was a Kodak DC40 (photo at top of page) - a "state of the art" consumer digital camera with these impressive features: photos at less than 1 megapixel. No LCD screen. No compactflash card. And it could hold a whopping 40 photos at a time - max. Downloads took roughly 1/2 hour via a cable connected from the camera to my computer and if at any point during the download process something went wrong, you had to start all over again. It wasn't pretty, but it was the beginning of what we're all experiencing today in digital photography. The cost of the camera was roughly $800. I bought in New York and I remember thinking it was a good deal at the time. Things really have come a long way.

(In case you're wondering who's in the shot above, from left to right - Mike Peer, Dan O'Neill, John Phillips and me, Eric Jensen. Photo above right is of an Iris in our backyard in Rockville, MD in the spring of 1996. Both shots were taken with the Kodak DC40.)

Next Post: My Digital Past - My First Upgrade

Shooting at Night

Shooting at night is tough. As the light dims, your camera wants to use a slower and slower shutter speed, making handheld shooting really tough. You can fool it for a little while by raising the ISO, but eventually, you have to give in and try something different. Flash is great - don't get me wrong, but standard flash-on-camera shots can look a little ordinary. Getting creative and trying new and different approaches can be a lot of fun and can yield some terrific results.

Recently, I've shot several events that begin before dusk, but the action and activity doesn't really get going until after dark. The events I've been shooting have been on the rooftop of a building in downtown Rockville. The parties have a nightclub atmosphere, but everything is outdoors and when the sun goes down, it gets very, very dark very, very fast. Candles and the moon are the main source of light for these parties. This makes getting good, clear and in-focus shots a real challenge.

My job has been to capture the mood and the feel of these Rooftop parties. When the sun is still up in the sky or just beginning to reach sunset, it's relatively easy to get some good shots. But the action really starts to happen after dark, so getting a good shot can be a combination of luck, skill and remembering what worked last time.

So, what happens when you try to catch a full moon and the area you're shooting is close to completely dark? In the shot below, I popped on my flash and set my camera to get the right exposure for the moon.

I took the shot and (as always) crossed my fingers and hoped for the best.

I like the shot because clearly, you know who the subjects are, but there's enough going on around the the two women that you can see that they're not in an ordinary nightclub and that they're outdoors. I tried a few other similar shots with mixed results. Sometimes luck was on my side and sometimes it wasn't.

Focus is a big deal when trying to shoot at night. During the day, the automatic focus on my camera works great. Rarely any need for adjusting and it just nails the focus. At night, the camera searches and hunts for something to focus on. But without any light, it usually doesn't find anything. Manually focusing is always an option, but imagine trying to focus on something you really can't see. 9 times out of 10, I couldn't see much at all. I knew there might be a decent shot there, but I was never certain. So, instead of using auto focus or manually focusing by looking through the viewfinder, I tried estimating distances and using the distance ring on my lenses to get the right focus. Now, if only someone created a lens with a light so you can see the numbers on the distance ring, I'd be all set. I had a small flashlight that I stuck in my mouth to read the focus distances. It wasn't pretty, but it worked (sometimes).

Other situations call for trying to convey energy and movement in a night shot. Shooting at night with a flash, leaving the shutter open for several seconds and having your flash set to rear-curtain flash can lead to some really cool effects. The shot to the right is one that I think captures the mood of the evening - high intensity, great view, lots of motion and again, on a rooftop and not inside a bar. For this shot, I stood on the DJ's table (with his permission, of course), set my camera for a long exposure, set my flash for rear curtain (flash happens at the end of the exposure), held my camera up even higher than where I was standing, pointed my camera down at the crowd, shot the picture and hoped for the best.

All 3 parties have been a lot of fun to shoot and great learning experiences. I've learned a lot about night photography and while you might get a higher percentage of rejects when shooting an event like these, the "keepers" can be pretty unique.

You can see and order any of these event photos at these links:

• Sky at Five Rooftop Party - Rockville's Town Square - July 9, 2009
• SuperNova - Rooftop party sponsored by Baci - August 8, 2009
• Sky at Five Rooftop Party - Rockville's Town Square - September 3, 2009

The Rockville Rooftop website (photos on the main pages are not mine)

The Beginning

I've been shooting pictures for as long as I can remember. 

Maybe I got it from my dad. He always had his manual rangefinder camera and always shot slide film. He'd spend days and weeks getting his slides together from a trip, sorting them on a light table and then, carefully placing them in a slide tray (upside down and backwards, I think). Then, on a special night, after it got dark, he'd set up his slide projector, pop open our 6' screen, turn off all the lights and we'd look at all the photos he'd taken from one of our family vacations, each slide punctuated by the "kerchunk" sound of the slide carousel moving from one slide to the next. 

I guess you could say things have changed a little since then.

eJensen Photography & Design Blog