Recently in Photo-Blog Category

Line & Shape

Wow. Yesterday I posted some photos to some groups around Flickr, including The World Through My Eyes. Today I found out that one of TWTME's admins has made one of my images (the one at right, in fact) the group icon! (For the day, it's not as huge as it first sounds, but I'm still very happily honored).

That's really quite cool.

I'm also glad I didn't sit down and write the diatribe rolling around my head from Saturday about how it's easy to get anywhere from 25 to 2,000 views on Flickr if you insist on posting everything you take to 8 bazillion group pools, forcing other people to click through your tripe looking for something decent.

Because that would make me look stupid right about now.

(If, on the other hand, someone could figure out my previously mentioned Cuddle-Pile Conundrum, I'd be forever in their debt.)

Today I took a metric fuckton (well, ok, 260+) of photos of our new house, most of them intended to be stiched togoether into panoramas. As I was copying them, I noticed that I'd rolled my camera's numbering. (!!) Well, to be fair, I started this numbering on my d30, but still:

I've taken over 10,000 photos since September August, 2001!

That number is high enough to be suspicious, and I do suspect it. But I don't remember jiggering the numbering (except to restore it after Chiara or Matt borrowed my camera/card) so there's no rational reason to expect it to be wrong.

Kinda humbling, actually.

[It's official. I suck at this whole "blog" thing. The genesis for this entry is exactly one year old. It's been rolling around in my head since I was in Maui. It's a big topic, and one that's very important to me, so I wanted to be sure that I captured it. Invariably, that meant I'd put it off. -ed.]

For some time, I've been yearning to produce/get "something more" out of the pictures I take. A year ago, I started down the path toward figuring out what that really meant.

This is getting ridiculous. It's been over 3 weeks since I've come back from Maui, and I still haven't posted any of the three or four blog entries I mentally outlined. Work has been CRAZY, so I don't know if I'll get to them all, but things are beginning to fall out of my head. So here goes the first one.

For those of you who don't know, Chiara and I did a Sierra Club Service Trip in the Honokowai Valley on Maui. It was a 10 day trip that we rounded out to a full 2 weeks. The whole trip was amazing! We saw and experienced so much of the island, and spent time on many things most tourists pass by without even being aware it's there.

It was such a rewarding experience. We were able to take a wonderful vacation, while also giving a little something back to the community we were visiting. Everybody wins. Two weeks was the perfect amount of time. It was long enough that we didn't feel rushed (though some of the breakneck scheduling done by the Club helped us get to things we wouldn't have otherwise) and let us relax completely, yet it was just about over as we started to get antsy about going home.

Over the course of these two weeks I took 1900 (!!) photos. Some of those were at 5 per second on the whale watching trips. But that wasn't the majority.

I've pruned that to the 400 "essential" photos I uploaded to Flickr, but I thought I'd pull out a few (too many in the end, but I can't prune any farther) highlights, and describe my trip.

Essentially, this is the modern equivalent to an invitation to "come over and watch my slides from the trip." On the plus side, you can go at your own pace (or skip them entirely). On the down side, there will be no popcorn or cocktails, unless you provide them.

The images on this page will take some time to load, to be kind to you folks (and Flickr), I'll put them below the fold.

Well, well. I feel like a horse's ass. A few years ago I bought a Canon D30. My G3 had committed seppuku a few months previous, and that left me with a Linux box as a workstation for image manipulation. Much to my chagrin (but not surprise), there were no utilities available for Linux for manipulating RAW (lossless) camera images. I was forced to use the camera's JPEG compression, and I've never really been satisfied with the image quality.

Fast-forward 3 years. I'm still shooting JPEG, and I'm still futzing with the images a lot trying to improve the image quality, never being satisfied with them. Matt (who I learned has the same camera I have) and I were recently talking and he told me that there ARE free RAW file manipulators available for Linux, and specifically pointed me at dcraw, which has existed in one form or another since I started looking (though it didn't handle my camera until after my last search.)

So now I'm itching to try it out. Unfortunately, my camera's still in Chicago (so Yoj could take pictures of paintings).

To make matters worse (or more embarrassing) Matt also talked about EXIF information, which only rang a small bell. I wasn't aware that my camera supported it. D'OH! Fortunately for me, although GIMP (somewhat understandably) obliterates this information when it saves an image, ImageMagick's mogrify keeps it. I'm lucky that I'm a programmer, and would rather automate a solution to a problem (In this case, rotating a bunch of images back to portrait mode as they were shot)

Recently, Arshad showed me Gallery. I'm intrigued, since it uses some of the EXIF data. In general, it seems a LOT more interesting than my current solution (not the least of which because the author never responded to my patch, which makes me wonder if he's still working on it)

It's all very humbling. And yet, exciting!