F-Spot - new version aggravation

Typically I've always used F-Spot to transfer the photos from my DSLR to my hard drive. I like the way it arranges my photos: /home/user/photos/yyyy/mm/dd.

However, I don't use F-Spot for managing my photos. There are various reasons for that and I'm pursuing the use of IPTC data for tagging the photos directly (and not using a separate database) — but that's for another post.

So up until this last upgrade (to Gutsy), F-Spot has always imported my photos and had a checkbox that let me import them WITHOUT adding them to it's managed photo library. However since upgrading I think the new version of F-Spot has done away with this checkbox, and so I am unable to stop it from moving any imported files directly into it's library. Thats NO GOOD. I checked the options menu but couldn't spot any way to turn off this feature.

Please someone tell me I'm wrong. How can I copy photos from my camera using F-Spot without importing them into an F-Spot library?

I'm open to suggestions for other apps. I have used gThumb, but I couldn't figure out how to get it to auto-create the subdirectories in the same way and format as F-Spot did.

Let's hear some suggestions!

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A SD card with wi-fi built into it? Now that's cool!

On a recent TechGuy podcast I heard about this Eye-Fi Wireless SD card that comes with built-in wi-fi capability. Yes wi-fi right inside the SD-card!

So the gist of it is that you can transfer pictures to your pc or mac without even taking the card out of the camera. And this would be camera independent.. so you don't need a camera with wi-fi built into the hardware. This is right up there in the good idea hall of fame with the Sandisk Ultra II SD Plus card that folds open to reveal a USB plug right on the card.

It also does auto uploads from the camera to online photo management services like Flickr. And I'm assuming this would work anywhere you can get wi-fi connectivity (not necessarily your own PC). Personally I don't like just mass uploading pics to Flickr. I like to cull my photos and toss out the horrible and mediocre ones whenever possible.

I'm not sure how well it would work with Linux and haven't read about all the other potential issues like security etc. But the one stumbling block I have is not Linux related at all. It is the fact that my Canon Rebel XT uses Compact Flash and not SD.

Oh well, it's still very very neat. :)

ps - With the extra room in the significantly larger CompactFlash card, they should be able to give me a 0.5"x0.5" OLED preview of the photos right on the card too! :)

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Postr - Gnome-based Upload tool for Linux

Lifehacker seems to have it's fair share of Linux related info lately which is nice. Something interesting spotted today was this article about Postr, which is a Gnome based application for uploading photos to Flickr. I've been using jUploadr for a while and it does work fairly well. But it would be nice to have a non-Java based alternative that would be a little better integrated into my Gnome/Openbox environment at home. I think I'll give it a shot this week and see how it works.

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Liquid Rescaling - Very Cool.

Saw this excellent and interesting demo of something dubbed 'Liquid Rescaling'. In essence it allows you to stretch or compress an image but keeps some semblance of proportion for the objects within the image. It's hard to describe but imagine you had a 4x6 image, but there was an ugly garbage can on the right hand side. With this tool, you could crop off the right 2 inches (leaving you with a 4x4 image) but then stretch it back to 4x6 *without* fattening up the people in the picture.

It uses algorithms to detect areas in the photo where it can stretch while minimizing distortion. It's really quite neat. Even neater is the fact that there is a plugin for the GIMP which uses the tool. If you watch the demo you will be amazed at what you can achieve.

I also believe that there is no equivalent tool in the beloved Photoshop that does this. ;)

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Photographic Inspiration

I haven't done a lot of photography related posts lately. Unsurprisingly, that's because I haven't done a lot of photography lately. ;)

Not that I have lost interest mind you, but anybody who reads this blog regularly will know my interests shift around all the time. Sometimes it takes a little creative inspiration and awe to get me moving again on certain fronts. This gallery by Nick Brandt is just one of those things.

While his photographic subjects might be dramatic to start with (how often do you get to photograph lions, elephants and zebras in the wild?), his use of tone and somewhat dramatic burning and dodging techniques add a huge amount of drama to each and every image.

I've always been a fan of post-processing when it's well done; and in Nick Brandt's case, it sure is. And given the tools you get in the GIMP and Photoshop, applying these techniques to improve your own images is not so hard. I've always found John Arnold's Photowalkthrough tutorials to be incredibly useful in teaching techniques that can really enhance your post processing work.

Expect to see more photography related posts here in the future.

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Photographic Observation

Over the past few months I have noticed something different in my neck of the woods. I do a lot of driving (commuting etc.) and a great deal of it is on back country roads north of Toronto (the area where I live). It is not uncommon to see the odd car pulled over on the shoulder with a dead battery, flat tire, child peeing in the bushes.. y'know, the usual. But lately, when I spot one of these cars, I look over further and see people with their digital SLR cameras across the ditch photographing some grazing horses, a majestic sunset or just a nice picturesque farmhouse scene. Sometimes they've even got tripods set up!

You can clearly see that almost all of them are not professionals (no big camera bags, or huge elaborate glass), but amateurs satisfying their passion and hobby on the way to and from work. Sometimes I'm almost tempted to pull over from the rat race and just chat them up about photography, but alas, my social skills are not that well developed I guess.

I'm not sure if it's just my own perception, but it seems like digital photography of the more serious kind is really on an upswing. Very nice to see.

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Photo Printing in Linux

A recent article in LXer points out that printing photos in Linux is a nightmare. And while I can't comment on most of the apps that she's tried, I can say that I've been quite satisfied printing in the Gimp.

I recently bought a new Epson R380 printer. So new in fact that Feisty didn't have support for it. It turns out that the Gutenprint project added support for this printer as of version 5.0.1. Installing these drivers was a bit of a quagmire, but I got it done. And luckily, the next release of Ubuntu (Gutsy) will support this printer out of the box.

So contrary to the LXer author's findings, I can print photos quite happily in the Gimp. Yes, even high quality borderless ones (I've printed borderless 8x10's and 4x6's so far). Colour profiling and correction for the printer is not easy, but I have to say that with a little tweaking to lower the greens and increase the magenta levels, I've managed to get very nice colour prints. And besides, my dad has an older model Epson R300 that he uses with XP (and the Epson drivers) and his prints always end up magenta-heavy, so colour profiling is not something that's really easy on any platform - it's a feature that requires simplification everywhere - and no, getting your printed output to match your screen in Photoshop is not that easy either - definitely not easy enough.

My Most Narcissistic Post Ever.. so far anyway

Like many avid photographers, I've got thousands of photos on my hard drive, of which, I'm in maybe 5 or 10.

I just wasted 30 minutes trying to find a decent photo of myself to use for my Twitter badge. I quickly remembered that I generally hate photos of myself. It is very rare that I like any of them and that's why the photo in my blog profile has never really changed.

I did manage to find a couple passable ones. The first one I chose I happen to like quite a bit, but it looks far more serious and contemplative than I actually am. I would feel like I was pretending if I used that one. It was actually taken with my 50mm F1.8 lens at arm's length while I was looking out a nearby window.


I finally found one a little more in character for me. Of course it was taken when I'm at my absolute happiest - when I'm cuddling my daughter.


So until I go get the glamour shots done at the mall, that's the one I have to settle on for my Twitter badge. ;)

Of course the backup plan is to do some very very minor touchups to my blog profile photo using Inkscape... can you tell which one's the original?

Cool 3D photo collage modelling

Now no one can accuse me of not being an equal opportunity blogger:

[Via a recent episode of Leo Laporte's KFI podcast]

Just in case you thought Microsoft wasn't full of smart people (ok, maybe acquired smart people), wanting to push the envelope, check out the demo videos of the Photosynth project.

Think Quicktime VR but formed from a mass of normal digital photographs. From what I understand, they've got software that analyzes a group of photos of a specific location, recognizes datum objects, figures out camera position and angle of view, transforms them to account for parallax errors and assembles them together in a sort of 3D collage model. Put that inside a nice viewer with cool pan and zoom navigation and you have something really really interesting.

You can't get this software yet (I don't think), but it does show some really interesting possibilities for all those millions of photos being posted to the net. A use for photos in aggregate.

Now if only I could find the open-source equivalent.. ;)

New 4GB CF Card - $129 Not Bad Eh?

On a lighter note, the day before Idiot broke into my car, I picked up a new 4GB compact flash card for, get this, $129.00 CDN.

I took a look at an old Shutterbug magazine from November 2003, its cover story touting the news that Lexar had released the worlds first 4GB flash card. At that time, it's street price was $1500.00 USD!!

I heard just a few days ago that flash memory pricing has taken a real dip as of late. So if you're interested in a new card, maybe now's the time.

Inkscape Screencast 6 - Polaroid Pin-up

I've created yet another screencast (with yet another cobbled together sucky intro). This time I've shown how to use Inkscape to create a 'polaroid pin-up' effect with a photo. Hopefully somebody will find it useful and enjoy it.

Now that I've got a little more of the Inkscapy-ness out of my system, I might actually get back to writing some actual blog posts. ;)

P.S. As sucky as the intro is, I still had fun making it. And that's what really counts isn't it? :)

Inkscape Screencast 5 - Photo Popping Fun

I finally managed to find some time and figured out some (very) rudimentary video and audio editing skills so I put together my 5th Inkscape screencast. A few weeks back I read a post at instructables.com which described how to create a 3D effect with your photos using the GIMP or Photoshop. Naturally I thought I'd give it a try in Inkscape and lo and behold it was pretty darn easy. The toughest part is finding a suitable photograph that works well for this effect.

You'll also have to indulge me for about the first minute or so of the screencast where I've created a *really really* hacked together intro using only 3 ingredients:

Inkscape + Beryl + Music

This past week, I found some really cool music by Arthur Yoria over at Magnatune. I purchased the album and used track 10 for the intro music **. Then I decided I'd simply use Inkscape to create a screencast video intro. I spiced it up a bit using the Beryl zoom feature as well ;). It's a little over a minute of hacked together badness.

Don't laugh too hard! And let me know how much you liked it or hated it. ;)

I also figured out how to use Avidemux to extract the audio tracks, Audacity to mix in the music and adjust levels and then Avidemux once again to create the final video. Hopefully you'll find it somewhat interesting and helpful.

** If you watch the screencast and like the music, Magnatune allows me to legally provide full quality copies to 3 people. If you're interested in getting the album (for free), send me an email (rfquerinATgmailDOTcom)and I will provide you with the link so you can download the album which is available in a wide variety of formats too. I've listened to it quite a bit this week and I really like it. Magnatune rocks!

Also, huge thanks to Alan Pope for his great post on creating screencasts which let me know exactly how to use Avidemux for my purposes - great stuff.

Here's the screencast...

Gimparoo!

From the "Why hasn't this been done before?" file...

If you're a fan of the GIMP image editing program, you might want to check out Gimparoo! which, besides having an ultra-cool name, is a new blog dedicated to "Adapting Photoshop tutorials for The GIMP". I found it via the Ubuntu Blog. He's currently basking in his new found popularity so give him a visit and continue to make his day :)

It looks to be a very useful feed for those looking to expand their GIMP repertoire.

Rawstudio 0.5 is out!

Another great release announced today is Rawstudio 0.5. There are several improvements, the most important to me being the incorporation of batch processing. I've been using a development version for a while now and I have to say as a Linux user who shoots almost all my stuff in RAW format, it's a great project. I find the workflow very efficient. It's nice to see so much work being done on this front.

Like all good open source projects, the developers are eager to improve the project and are willing to discuss all sorts of suggestions and ideas on the mailing list. If you're currently using ufraw or another application for your raw photo conversions you should really check this out, you might find it's just what you've been looking for.

Flickr changes - Much Ado About Nothing?

While I would prefer that Flickr not set limits on the number of contacts a user can have, or the maximum number of tags that can be placed on a photo, after reading the arguments for and against in the Flickr forums I find myself coming to a few conclusions:

1. Yeah, merging the Flickr and Yahoo logins sounds wishy-washy. But after doing it, logging out and logging back in, I fail to see what difference it makes. Sure I go to a Yahoo login page, but I enter my username and password and I'm in. As simple as before. No URL changes to my photo stream. Why is this such a pain for some people? When I switched to the new Blogger I had to change my login to my gmail login info. No complaint here. No fuss anywhere else it seems either.

2. The 3000 contact per user limit is so well and truly above what I'll ever need that it simply doesn't register as a problem to me. How anyone could effectively follow the work of 3000 other photographers sounds ridiculous to start with. But there just has to be a better, more efficient way to do this if that is your goal.

3. Applying 75 tags to a photo seems outlandish to me. Sometimes simplicity is a benefit. Maybe this will force people to be a little more efficient with their descriptions. I think if you can't adequately describe your photo in less than 76 tags, you have a few too many subjects in your photo.

4. It appears that these changes will affect a minute (but vocal) portion of the Flickr user base. It is being done in the name of site performance. You either believe Flickr or you think they're liars. If you think they're liars, you should move your photos somewhere else now.

5. Blogs seem to be reporting on this as if Flickr users everywhere are in the midst of revolt. Thomas Hawk (who it should be said, is also the CEO of a competing service and a Flickr user) is probably the most prominent blogger engaged in this issue. But if you go read the Flickr forums you will find that there are quite a few Flickr users who are NOT in revolt, but who are perfectly content with the coming changes. Don't be misled by antagonistic blog posts telling you otherwise.

6. This is how a market is supposed to work. If Flickr ends up screwing it's users and the users get pissed off enough, they'll move to a competitor. That's the way it should work. If Flickr makes the changes and users remain happy, then it succeeds.

7. Just because Flickr is a social networking site, doesn't mean it's owned by the users. I'm have a paid Pro Flickr account, but I make no insinuations that I should have final call on business decisions. As long as they are not violating the Terms of Service I agreed to, I have no argument.

Currently Flickr is providing a great service for me. If they piss me off enough, I leave. Simple.

Rawstudio, partitioning, screencasts and more!

In the midst of fending off pre-vacation work overload a few bits and bobs have been occupying my spare time. Think of this as my pre-vacation brain dump:

Another call to my ISP confirmed that they had already sent me a replacement DSL modem. It arrived this past Wednesday, was installed that evening and seems to have cured all that ails me in the connectivity department.

I've also been learning a little about partitioning in Linux. I've shrunk my ntfs partition and created a separate 60GB partition for my photos. It took a little doing, but with a little (ok..a lot of) help with the great people on ubuntuforums.org I managed to get it accomplished and learned something in the process.

I've also joined the Ubuntu screencasts team (at the behest of Will Simpson) to see if I can contribute something to the community there. We'll see if I ever get the time (and the USB mic), but hey, I'm always up for a challenge.

Another thing worthy of noting is that Rawstudio is *really* coming along nicely. This is a free and open source app that handles RAW image conversion for Linux. The latest patches have implemented batch processing - something Rawstudio users have been waiting for a long time. Kudos to AndersK and AndersB for creating such a great app! It's still a small group, so any issues I've brought up on the Rawstudio mailing list have been answered very quickly. Clearly digital photography workflow on Linux is already well developed and like everything else in the Linux space, things are progressing at a fast and furious pace. It's kind of nice to be somewhat involved the process too. ;)

Again, the world of Linux is broadening my knowledge. With Rawstudio, in order to get the latest patches I had to get accustomed to checking out the source from subversion, applying patch files and compiling. With a few quick questions to the friendly guys on the Rawstudio mailing list, I was up and running the latest patches no problem.

So that's where I sit at the moment. Living, learning and not blogging about it often enough ;) Some things never seem to change.

A New Lens for New Years

With a little help (actually a lot of help) from the camera store gift certificate my wife gave me, I picked up a Canon 85mm f/1.8 lens last weekend. I haven't had a lot of time to play with it other than shooting my favourite subject (my daughter).

As is becoming tradition, we headed across the border and stayed two nights in Lockport NY over New Years. It's a short drive and my wife tells me the shopping is mucho fantastico ;) Anyways, I managed to take some shots at the pool, most of which turned out pretty good. One unfortunate mistake was that I had originally set the camera for ISO 800 in order to freeze some splashing fun, but forgot to switch it back until many shots later. So the digital noise in some of them is a little annoying. I haven't managed to convert or upload any of them yet, but here's a quick sample of what was probably one of the best shots, and a 100% crop to give an idea of the sharpness:

Crop at 100%:

Things I Learned:

1. When you play with a high ISO, don't forget to switch it back.

2. I have a tendency to shoot wide open (f1.8) too often. A shallow depth of field is effective but overdoing it is not. I have several shots of my daughter with one eye nice and sharp and the other quite soft. Doesn't make for the greatest photo.

3. Kind of related to #2, using an extremely shallow depth of field can also throw off the focus. Even though the autofocus is good, I still sometimes ended up with soft faces and sharp backgrounds, especially on the moving subject shots. Using f2.8 might have minimized this problem.

4. Don't be afraid to take a lot of shots. I probably have 20 shots of my daughter getting into and out of the pool (nevermind all the close-ups). Probably 3 of those 20 are keepers. If I hadn't taken all those shots, I probably would have ended up with no keepers. Don't forget you can always delete them. Not every shot is going to be a good one. Increase the number of shots you take and increase your chances.

It's Over... or at least partially...

Hopefully everyone enjoyed (or is still enjoying) their holiday time. Myself, I feel kinda relieved it's over once again for another year. It's such a mad rush at the end of the year. As you can see from the photo above, our dog Jessie was as beat as we were by the end of it all.

It's not completely over since our little one has her birthday a couple of days from now and New Years is just next weekend. If holidays are supposed to be restful, then these don't qualify as holidays.

Among the nice shirts, belts and ties, I snagged a nice gift certificate to a local camera store. Right now it's a toss-up between a new lens and a new printer. I've been pining for the Epson R800 printer for over a year now, but the price never seems to drop ($449-499 CDN). I feel guilty for paying that much for an inkjet, although I have seen the output and it is quite nice.

So it may be that I'm leaning towards a Canon 85mm f1.8 lens. It's a little more than the printer, but it's fast and relatively cheap. On my 350D it will work like a 135mm lens and since I love available light photography (witness most of my nicer photographs) that nice wide aperture is very very appealing. So we'll see in a few days if I change my mind.

For now, my absolute favourite shooting is done with the 50mm f1.8 cheapy that I bought a while back. While you still have to fight with moving subjects under typical indoor lighting, sleeping dogs turn out rather well. :)

Early Gift From Flickr!

Looks like Flickr has given an early Christmas present to its users! Free account holders get their upload limits increased 5X to 100MB/month! And even better still Pro account holders (of which I am one) now get unlimited uploads!

Now I've really got to get my arse in gear. I've yet to run up against the old 2GB/month limit. Sounds like I'm not taking or uploading nearly enough photos. ;)

Ho Ho Holiday Flickr Fun with Photos

Lifehacker has a post up about a neat little Flickr easter egg which lets you put a Santa hat or beard on a photo.

But why do that when you can do the real thing! Here's a shot of my lovely niece Sarah from this past weekend: