Month: January 2014

Why Not To Shoot at f/22 Anymore

Every “professional” photography book I’ve read makes it gospel that you have to shoot landscapes at f/22, in order to ensure that the foreground and background is in focus. Special thanks to these guys for teaching millions of photographers to create blurry photos. Lens Diffraction, and an explanation as to why shooting at f/22 (and Read More

How to Tolerate DxO by Hacking MakerNotes and EXIF Tags

DxO Optics Pro was a purchase I immediately regretted making, once I realized that it intentionally restricts you from selecting what lens optics you’d like to adjust your photo with. It would take all of five minutes of programming to let the user decide, but for whatever stupid reason, if you’re using a different lens than the one they support OR if you are looking to adjust a photo that you’ve already adjusted in a different program, DxO becomes relatively useless.

I’ve figured out a couple easy ways to hack the tags in a raw image file to “fake” a different kind of lens. This worked for me. I make no guarantees it will work for you. In my case, I have a Canon 8-15mm Fisheye, which isn’t supported by DxO. The fixed 15mm Fisheye is, however, and since I only ever shoot at 15mm, I’d like to use the fixed module to correct. As it turns out, the module does a decent job once you fake DxO into thinking you actually used that lens.

Read More

Forensics Tools: Stop Miscalculating iOS Usage Analytics!

There are some great forensics tools out there… and also some really crummy ones. I’ve found an incredible amount of wrong information in the often 500+ page reports some of these tools crank out, and often times the accuracy of the data is critical to one of the cases I’m assisting with at the time. Tools validation is critical to the healthy development cycle of a forensics tool, and unfortunately many companies don’t do enough of it. If investigators aren’t doing their homework to validate the information (and subsequently provide feedback to the software manufacturer), the consequences could mean an innocent person goes to jail, or a guilty one goes free. No joke. This could have happened a number of times had I not caught certain details.

Today’s reporting fail is with regards to the application “usage” information stored in iOS in the ADDataStore.sqlitedb file. At least a couple forensics tools are misreporting this data so as to be up to 26 hours or more off.

Read More