photography

I finally found the photo manager for me to use in Linux. I'd tried all the major apps, but none of them worked properly with the Olympus .orf raw format. Even the leader, FSpot, wouldn't display the images. It relies on an embedded JPG thumbnail inside the raw image, but my Oly camera doesn't put that image there.

I had originally started working on writing my own in Python, but I haven't really had the time to dedicate to it. I had heard about an application called GQview, but it turned out that it wouldn't display my raw images either.

Then I heard about Geeqie Viewer which is a branch off of the GQview program. GQview hasn't been actively developed in some time, so in the true open source tradition someone took the original source and revamped it while adding new features.

If you're like me and want to access a library of photos on multiple computers possibly from thumbdrives, DVD or external hard drives, going with a program that keeps it's own internal database just won't work. Geeqie allows you to just use folders for organizing your photos, while giving you the ability to still add keywords and comments.

As you can see, the interface has progressed considerably since last time. I've added a thumbnail view of whatever directory you're browsing at the bottom of the window that also slides with a kinetic drag control. If you click on a photo in the directory, it's added to the current working group. Sorry for the resolution of the screencast, but this video is hosted on Flickr.

Well, the thumbnail browser for my photography workflow application is complete. The next step is to finish designing the UI around it, and then link it with a database, etc. to keep track of photos.

Here's a video of it in action. Keep in mind this is early Alpha. It loads in thumbnails and rotates and reflects them on the fly. The farther and faster you drag your mouse over the images, the faster they go, and they continue to spin and slow down after you let go.

Here's another "Senior Portrait" for Whitley. I'm loving the new 50mm Prime lens. I was afraid it would be cropped too close for portrait work, and it almost is, but it's working out rather nicely.

It was blowing cold and about 15 degrees for this shot, so we didn't tarry and only got the one really usable shot out of the 30 or so taken. Lit with sunlight filtered through the trees behind me and over my left shoulder. No reflector was needed, because the snow did nicely to provide a nice all around soft fill.

First I used LightZone for Linux to do the RAW conversion and relight the image, reducing the shadows on her face and add a high-key effect. Then I used Gimp to do a bit of reconstruction of her hair due to some wild strands blowing in the wind, and softened up her skintone and brightened her eyes. I also prefer to use Gimp for the final image sharpening.

I've been playing around with my new 50mm prime lens. For portrait it seems that about F5 is perfect to give a well blurred background while still sharp on the subject. Here's a test shot of Annika at the park.

Unfortunately it was extremely cold that day, after just having a nice week in the 60's it was about 33 degrees so we only stayed at the park a few minutes. This was the best of the shots.

The Olympus Zuiko Digital F/2.0 is a sweet little prime lens. Being "prime" means that it doesn't zoom. Ever. It's locked in at 50mm - which on the Olympus 4/3 system is equivalent to a 100mm lens on any other camera. This photo was taken at around 6 feet from the subject. This lens will also do macro photography, i.e. flowers, bugs, dust mites, etc. lol.

This shot was taken at F/5.0 which seems to be the sweet spot for portrait photography with this lens. It will go all the way out to F/2.0 but the depth of field drops off significantly.

I shoot all my pictures in Olympus RAW format, and do most of my conversion and most of my editing with LightZone for Linux. Occasionally though, I may have several dozen photos that I want to treat like snapshots and just make quick JPEG images from them.

The Olympus RAW format hasn't been too compatible with most of the open-source Linux tools. The standard dcraw utility gave less than stellar results, leaving exposure and color slightly off and hard to fix. I did install ufraw and gnome-raw-thumbnailer so I could get nice thumbnail images in Gnome of my raw images.

For those images I want to do a quick and dirty bulk conversion to JPEG, ufraw-batch is the right tool for the job. From a command line, while in the directory with your images simply do:

ufraw-batch *.ORF --out-type=jpeg

All of your raw images in the directory will be converted to a high quality jpeg image. There's additional options that can be added, but I found it sufficient for snapshots. And, you still have the RAW image if you ever want to clean up that one shot and print a poster!

I spent a few hours tonight reworking the Drupal theme I run on my photography website. It's definitely a bit out of the ordinary for what a Drupal blog typically looks like. It uses the Javascript Galleria photo gallery to display the photos.

Today's "Flickr Group Roulette" project was "I Might Be A Cylon". Here's the top 10 reasons I might be...

10: That drumming in my head
9: I have perfect eyesight, I just wear glasses as a fashion statement
8: I'm a sexy beast
7: I clink when I walk
6: I use words like "resurrection" and "One True God" as often as possible
5: Red is my favorite color
4: I have cooler tech toys than my friends
3: I sometimes hear voices in my head
2: The constant video conferences with Baltar.
1: Oh yeah... that other guy looks a lot like me.

Is this your worst Halloween nightmare too? Yeah, that's why I run Linux.

Wow, hard to believe I have a senior now! Rather than pay $500+ to have senior portraits taken, I applied my new skillz: