Here they are, finally – post-processed, the best of the best of what I took. Please comment and make suggestions, I am after all a beginner studying.
[nggallery id=3]
Aug 312009
Aug 312009
Okay, what a weekend. The only amazing thing is that I arrived at work this morning suffering only a minor case of sleep deprivation and not a massive hangover. It all began on Friday afternoon, around 2pm we left the office for our quarterly team lunch. We went over to the Wijnhuis where despite tasting awesome I found their wonderfully raw beer would later make my stomache a tad unhappy. I ordered the spatchcock baby chicken and upon seeing it, my first comment was: “I guess if I ordered it yesterday it would have been served sunny-side-up.”
Apparently when they say “baby” they are not kidding. Stil, credit where due: it tasted awesome. Right after lunch I headed out to the west coast, parklands (very near my home) to be exact. Left around ten past three, didn’t make it past the koeberg interchangen until 4pm (yet another truck overturned on the N1 below the interchange). Finally I did make it though – and picked up my new camera. A Canon D400 which is really sweet. I’ve been shooting everything I could get in focus. Right now I only have the standard 18-55 lens Canon’s come with but that’s at least a good general-use lens until I can buy more.
It also came with two 1GB memory cards, not exactly huge things. I spent most of Friday night getting the settings tweaked, including switching to Raw+JPG mode (which this camera supports). I then rapidly changed my mind about it – in RAW+JPG the 1Gb cards could only take about 40 pix each. I switched to RAW only, more than doubling my shots-per card, still, even with both cards that’s about 180pix between downloads.
I’ve already filled up and downloaded about 5 times over the weekend and there are some good stuff in there I think. With camera in hand, I had to head back into town, I avoided the M5 this time and headed down through woodstock missing most of the traffic disaster and getting to Arno and Christel’s around 5:30pm. We went down to Fat Cactus and finished… three jugs of margarita-like cocktails over the next few hours. In between I called my dad up for camera-tips, a conversation that lasted a good hour in which I once-more learned a lot.
Finally, semi-drunk and widely excited – we went off to see district 9. Now just about everybody has been tweeting and blogging this movie but I have to say – it is just bloody perfect. It couldn’t be more South African. The culture and nature of our society could not be better portrayed, an alien-encounter movie with a plot that’s actually original. Real drama, real humor and excellent action. There is just nothing I could fault about it. In fact, the portrayal of South African life was so good, with the sifi so carefully blended into it that I had, perhaps, the most complete suspense of disbelieve I have had in a movie, ever – and that makes it in my book, one of the best movies ever made. Not just one of the best sifi movies, not even just the best South African movie- just outright, one of the best movies ever made. Somebody asked, and I stand by it: it’s better than watchmen.
I’ve never before come out of a movie and felt a genuine expectation that our cab-driver may have tentacles before…
With that, we went home and passed out- ending Friday. Saturday morning I had to do a stint at the office before Arno, Christel and Anita and me somehow all ended up at my place playing WII, drinking a massive amount of salty-dogs and discussing life. A sort of accidental geekparty. I must say, it’s nice to still be able to be good friends with my ex and just have a hang-out like that to get smashed on a hot day.
Sunday morning I went down to the wimpy near my house for breakfast, in the same center is a small photography shop that’s been having a special on tripods. I of course, wanted to have a look – they had a nice one at about the same price that second-hands of the same variety go for so I bought it. It’s a nice light-weight one that’s easy to transport in a small carry case, yet full height. Not the sturdiest tripod in the world and you need to tighten the bolts well when it’s set up or you still have a tendency for shake but it is pretty much everything I need this early on at a great price and it’s light weight means you could even take it on a hike for that perfect middle-of-nowhere portrait. Afterward, I went out to Kirstenbosch with Ani to join Christel-Michelle and her family for a picnic. It was a baking hot day, in which a bottle of Merlot disappeared and lots of crap was talked, sunshine enjoyed and the general serenity of the gardens provided the perfect slow-down ending to a rather hectic weekend.
Upon coming home, I downloaded the new pix, and then continued processing the kruger-park pix, I’m about halfway through the ones that survived the first round of culling, still deleting many and making the others as awesome as I can.
I watched the Da Vinci code on E-TV on Sunday night, once more feeling that the movie really doesn’t come close to the book, and if that’s not bad enough – the book is rather shallow with riddles and codes that feel like they were copied out of a pre-schooler’s puzzle-book and a plot that’s more predictable than government stupidity, but I was bored and it was adequately mindless for my state of mind.
Went to bed. Slept.
Which brings us to this morning, where one of my first acts was to sign on to Kalahari.net and complete my order of Gimp2 for photographers which I expect tomorrow, it’s one of many books currently on special there so if you’re looking to score a bargain on it, I suggest grabbing it now.
Now, on with Monday, and on with the week. I declare this Monday I will not suffer the normal Monday-blues. This Monday is gonna be my bitch, and it better behave.
Aug 282009
We haven’t had much major news on the Kongoni front recently, largely because with a stable release out there and the upstream not ready for the next cycle, there wasn’t really much interesting happening for a while. Just steady growth and enhancement.
That changes today with big news from upstream meaning the next major kongoni wave has started. I sent the following mail about it to both the devel and announce-list and thought I would repost it here. As this major work begins, expect to see the weekly development newsletters resume – as always – every Friday until we finish stable.
Just to clarify – we continue to maintain and support the 1.12.2 release’s tree, the new current tree will become 2.13.0 – but will be a separate tree so that we can continue to provide bugfixes and crucial support where needed for 12.2 users for as long as practical.
——–
Hi all,
First off, can I ask one of the webmasters to do us a nice write-up
from this mail, the slackware.com announcement and whatever other
relevant sources you want for the website ? Some of the information in
this mail is crucial to our users as well.
The crux is, slackware 13.0 is finally released stable. This means
that we will now start the development cycle of Kongoni 2.13.0 – with
work beginning on a first alpha. This could take a bit of time because
there is a lot of major changes from 12.2. As of the next few days
kongoni-current will begin to track slackware-13 and this means that
clean upgrading will likely be broken for a while, particularly on
64-bit as we will be switching from bluewhite64 upstream to
slackware64 upstream.
As we find and fix incompatibilities the upgrade-path will become ever
cleaner and as it stabilizes we will begin to put together ISO’s.
One other change from earlier plans is that I will not switch to
upstream KDE packages after all. The reason for this is that I would
like kongoni to continue to track the KDE monthly point releases
which, at this stage, it seems slackware will not do (in fact, kongoni
is already ahead of slackware 13 which released KDE4.2.4 while we
already ahve 4.3.0)
So I would highly recommend that only developers follow
kongoni-current until further notice as it almost certainly will be
broken for a while.
The final decision to make here is to name the new alpha in
development, as always – everyone can make suggestions and we’ll have
a vote. I would like to propose one of my personal favorites, the
classic roman philosopher who gave us the quote “All generalizations
are false” – Cicero.
Aug 282009
As I left after my vacation, fully intent to pursue photography all out, my dad gave me some copies of programs he uses day to day (as one who works primarily on Windows). One of which is called “RescuePro” – a program Sandisk makes freely available (as in beer) with their SD cards (though many shops neglect to include the CD’s).
The purpose of this program was, he said, to be able to recover files deleted from your SD card either by accident or because of a software bug. I hadn’t had the opportunity to look into this issue and since my new camera is not yet acquired and I was just working with pix already on my hard-drive, I haven’t had a need yet. As it turns out, fortune smiled on me and in my RSS feeds this morning was a blogpost shared by Karl Fischer covering a GNU/Linux tool for the same purpose.
It seems this is a frequent need for photographers so it’s as well to be prepared and good to know that as a GNU/Linux using photographer you don’t have to miss out on anything. I know I promised a post on touch-ups but that will take some time still, in the meantime – this was a piece of evidently appropriate information that I felt deserved a post in this series.
So I would highly recommend ensuring that you have PhotoRec installed on your machine as part of setting up your digital darkroom. The post in question (which also runs through it’s use very nicely) and has all the required information is here.
Aug 272009
I received the following message from David Robert Lewis via the CLUG mailing list today, I felt it was worth reposting here – it seems a good approach to a major problem so I just wanted to show my support and hopefully get the word out a bit wider.
ZA-FREE started out as a simple request to end the R152 surchage on Internet access. In effect we are asking for the right to use any of the competing DSL and VOICE services available in the country and to stop Telkom’s practice of insisting that users pay rental on Voice as well as Data on the same line, in effect a policy of double-dipping.
I still believe this demand is a good one and the argument for doing so is valid. However, shortly after instituting the campaign, I realised there was another solution which would probably achieve a better outcome, since it dealt with the existence of the current regime and merely requires that Telkom institute the same kind of practices already at play in the wireless sector.
Everybody knows that when you buy a cellphone, some phones are network locked. This is called carrier preselect. Your phone in all likelihood is already locked to a particular carrier who bills you for services.
Likewise, when you order a landline (from Telkom) it comes with services that are already preselected. It is impossible, as far as I am aware, under the current system to dump voice services and to have a data-only line in the household market. If one is a business, such a possibility exists at a premium.
If Telkom carrier preselect was ended, and your household landline were no longer network locked for voice services. We would be able to prevent Telkom from double-dipping and extorting various surchages.
For example, the line rental would probably be a basic R152 discounted to R100 and that would be that. Cable would be just like any rented device, and you could then choose which services you needed based upon a fair market which was open to competition.
If you needed voice services from another company, you would purchase these services on top of the basic infrastructure supplied by the cable company. Yes, this is what has been left out of the equation all along, the damn cable. Its a word that became associated with network television companies in the USA, and with the digital migration that is occurring everywhere, it is a good word to describe Telkom, South Africa’s Cable company.
In the old days, a phone line would come with a free telephone. Then Telkom decided to charge rental for the phone before shopping this out and turning the devices into another market. Telkom thus no longer provides you with a telephone as such. In fact what is it that the company actually does? How many subsidiaries are profiting from the simple provision of cable services to households, without actually providing any value to the consumer?
If ZA-FREE demands were met and implemented Telkom would probably become three separate companies/divisions.
The first division would merely supply the cable and the basic switching infrastructure needed to access Voice and Data services.
The second would supply data services.
The third would supply voice services.
A competitive environment created by such a restructuring would result in greater bandwidth and better services for consumers. We would not have to choose between cable and wireless, because the system would be integrated and allow consumers to make educated decisions based upon economic need.
A consumer might decide that the only cable services required in a household are data, and use wireless for voice services. Likewise, another consumer might find voice on cable to be cheaper, and data on wireless to be a better option.
In fact there is an argument to be made that Telkom should only be a cable company and nothing more. It should be restricted from supplying voice and data services altogether because these services would be better off if they were supplied by an open market instead of a government monopoly or parastatel.
End of the day, it is the consumer which benefits, not simply shareholders and fatcat CEOs. The Internet surcharge which has characterised the South African telecoms landscape would therefore come to an end and be replaced by a legitimate charge for cable.
Telkom would be furthermore forced to acknowledge that charging line rental for voice services and line rental for data services via carrier preselect was an unfair and invalid practice that resulted in double-dipping and even tripling of costs for the consumer down the line.
I therefore urge you all to demand an end to Telkom Carrier PreSelect! Down with the surcharge on Net Access!
Feel free to circulate and forward this message. Please use the group as a forum for discussion and debate. VIVA ZA-FREE VIVA.
Aug 262009
So, yesterday we looked at tools for manipulating and reading the RAW format images that photographers so often use. I want to start with a small update to that, Johan has let me know of another gimp plugin called gimp-dcraw which opens the RAW files directly in gimp eliminating the intermediary step you find with UFRaw. Now I am not at all sure whether I think that’s a good or a bad thing, since Gimp won’t offer the RAW modification tools you want but it may be better for some people’s workflows so I thought I should at least mention it.
Now on to today’s lesson. Last night saw me having to start the process of organizing pictures, deciding what to delete, what are “keepers” already, what needs RAW work, what should be going for touch-ups etc.the workflow I propose here is what I came up with, it may not be something you like but the generic skills in it should be usable by all.
Digikam defaults to keeping your main local store in your home directory under a subdirectory called Pictures. Within which each directory becomes and album automatically, and subdirectories form subalbums. This is actually a nice way because it means you can quite easily construct a sensible album structure from an existing folder structure.
I began by creating three new top-level albums inside this folder called “RAW”, “WEB” and “TIFF”. Raw as you can guess is for keeping the RAW imported albums as they come in from cameras. TIFF is where post-raw compressed pictures will be kept for the future, and WEB is for dumping web-exports like png or jpg.
Over time they will have almost identical subalbum structures but with radically different content, and of course, as I finish processing an album under RAW, the RAW copy will be deleted.
Currently my photo-management tasks were centered around the pictures I took in the Kruger Park recently. I took well over 500 pictures, of which most are really bad (with nature photography being as hard as it is, you get a lot of wastage). So I needed to make sense of this whole lot of pictures, get rid of the really bad ones and find a sensible way to work through what’s left for post-processing.
Digikam handled this very well. I started with tagging, renaming files to represent their content really isn’t ideal for images – for starters it would take forever, a nicely thought out tagging structure makes it so much easier to find things later. So I started by opening the KNP album, and selecting all, then I applied a new “krugerpark” tag. Digikam allows tag hierarchies, so I then started going through the list, looking at the thumbnails and selecting a bunch at a time, tagging each set of pictures appropriately.This gave me for example a set of pictures tagged: krugerpark/birds/fisheagle for example. The ability to multi-select and tag and easily select prior parts of the hierarchy was really handy and I had everything done within about an hour’s time.
Thus with the content tagging done, the next phase came. Now I cycled them in large-preview mode, one by one. I would study each picture and make an initial assessment. The ones I were simply unhappy with I tagged with “delete”. Those I could see needed some touch-ups I tagged with “touchup” and the rare few ones I consider my best shots were tagged with “keeper”. Of course some were tagged with both touch-up and keeper (meaning I think it’s a good picture but it needs a little something such as cropping). This was a much slower process as I was working one-by-one through a huge set of pictures, but still I was done in about 2 hours and I have no doubt without digikam’s brilliant interface it would have taken a lot longer.
Thus done, I went to the main menu and chose: Tools|Advanced search. I then search for pictures where a tag contains “delete”, did a select-all on the results and chose “Move to trash” from the right-click menu. In all, well over 300 pictures didn’t make the cut, leaving me with just over 200 to go. Some of those will no-doubt be deleted over the next few days, many will get touched up. Often when there were several good shots I couldn’t yet decide which was best and will be deciding this only after touch-ups are done.
Ultimately then, I will end up with a slightly smaller subset of the above that is touched-up and ready. My approach now will be I think to start going through them one-by-one again. Open with gimp, then do my raw-editing and touchups, and save the result into the KNP album under TIFF. What doesn’t make the cut here won’t even go there.
Once everything is through that process, delete the entire KNP album under RAW and get that space recovered. Though I won’t be able to do further RAW work on the TIFF’s – future touch-ups will be possible, and of course they will be very high-resolution and quality. My plan there-after is to go through and select the ones I want to publish to the website album, and the “best-of-each” that will make up the big Kruger Park photo-blog. Again I plan to use tagging, some will be tagged “web”, some of those will be tagged “blog”.
Then a simple search will once more let me select out everything with “web” tags, and batch convert them to png which will be in a KNP sub-album under WEB. All seems quite sensible to me – and I think I like this. Even if your preferred layout is different I think the approach to tag and then work will save time and help you to manage the photos effectively and easily.
Finally – the content of the web subalbum will be uploaded to a gallery on the site, and the ones with the blog tag will be filtered into the nice big post (with, of course, a link to the complete album included).
While this post did not cover all the features of digikam (there are many, many of them) it did cover the core piece of it’s functionality, managing, finding and organizing your photos, the rest really are – in my view, add-ons.
I expect it will take a few days before part 3 is published as that will be about touch-ups – something I myself am still learning, in the meantime though, I would like to offer as a reading list the book I intend to use myself for this part. Check out the following:
Gimp 2 for Photographers – Image editing with Open Source Software
Also, check out the list of books on Gimp’s own site.
A nice overview of the basics is to be found in this blogpost (and there are many others covering various things if you don’t have the budget for a set of books).
At this stage I would like ask for a bit of additional feedback on another topic. Which other GNU/Linux friendly tools than gimp have you used for photo-editing and what did you find to be the best and worst about them (this list does not need to be limited to free software only, as I’m firstly trying to get an overview). I’m particularly interested in your experiences with krita, picassa and picnic but please mention others I may not know about.
Aug 252009
As part of my forays into digital photography on a professional level – I will be trying to replicate to the highest possible degree (and exceeding where possible) the tools and equipment used by our non-free software using friends in the windows and mac worlds, particularly photoshop and it’s associated tools.
Now to do this, I will be evaluating a number of tools and seeing how they fit in as replacements. I will blog the results and the methods I use and this will lead to hopefully a series of good howtos for the beginner photographer using GNU/Linux and free software. Since I’m a beginner myself and this is a learn-as-I-need-things series it will be on a lower level than most tutorials out there, and will also act as my own reference documentation in the future.
With this intro out of the way – let us start part one, working with RAW format images.
Now first of all the question should be answered: what is a raw image and why use it ? After all, almost every digital camera shoots in jpeg format by default right ? This is true, but real photographers override this with good reason. RAW means the image gets dumped as it’s read by the camera’s censor with the maximum amount of data stored. JPEG is in fact just about the worst format for storing images in anyway as it’s a lossy-compression. You will want to save your web-published pictures into jpeg, but you will not want to work with it yourself or store your own copies this way. RAW images are also refered to as a “digital negative” as they afford you a lot of the power that film photographers had working on negatives… and then some.
But there is a catch – there is no standard on how RAW images are stored, each camera brand uses it’s own format and sometimes it even changes between models. The good news is that for GNU/Linux users there is a very good library that can read and manipulate RAW images known as libdcraw (for DigitalCamera RAW), all the tools we use for RAW work are based on dcraw. DCRaw supports a massive selection of camera formats and virtually every common one including those used by Nikon and and Canon are fully supported. DCRaw is included in most distributions, and since it’s a dependency of the other tools here, should be installed automatically if you have it.
Now the first issue with RAW images is viewing them, and viewing them in bulk. Opening them one-by-one is not a good way to go through a set and decide which to keep, before starting to edit. The good news is that the current version of digikam includes full support for dcraw and can view them easily as can KDE4′s showphoto (which is a one-by-one tool integrated with digikam as well). Digikam makes a very solid replacement for photoshop’s “bridge” program and includes a massive amount of extra features of which I haven’t explored the half.
Where it falls a bit short is the manipulation of RAW data. Adjusting light levels and such – it includes a tool to do this, as well as a batch RAW-converter (so when you’re done editing you can rapidly export say web-jpegs of all the final results) but the manipulation tools was a bit… well clunky for me. Not knowing exactly the details of all the options you can do on RAW files, I need something that lets me play quite easily with it. It is also not integrated into an image editor which makes the next stage hard – now you need to edit the RAW file, then save it as something else (like TIFF) before you can use most image editors to work on the image itself.
Well, gimp is obviously the tool of choice for image editing. It’s powerful and feature-rich and while it doesn’t work like photoshop – it can do the vast majority of what photoshop can (I am quite certain it can do everything the beginner photographer will need for some time). I suggest reading a good gimp tutorial to learn it if you don’t know it (the good news is, I do know it quite well since I’ve been using it for things like logo designs for years). Even so I will be brushing up with some new tutorials to sharpen up my skills. I just learned today for example (thanks to a blogpost that showed up in my RSS reader) that gimp can read and use photoshop brushes.
But, here’s the catch: gimp doesn’t natively support libdcraw and thus cannot work with raw images. Free software to the rescue, I found a lovely gimp plugin called UFraw which handles this in much the same way photoshop does. Opening a raw image first loads it into the UFRaw interface which is just like it’s photoshop cousin (UFRaw also has a stand-alone version) – I will be adding a port for it to kongoni today but I don’t know how well it’s take-up in other distro’s are, it’s quite easy to build if you follow the instructions on the site though.
It actually supersedes most other raw tools because it uses the single-library nature of libdcraw to gain some real power. For example it can create and use nikon curves on images taken with non-nikon cameras (whatever that means…).
So once you install it, you open a raw file in gimp and bang – here’s your raw manipulator. You do whatever adjustments you want, and click Okay… and it then exports this as pure bitmap data and you get a normal gimp window where you can proceed with your touch-up work, and save the final result in whatever format you wish.
A note on that last point. The advice from books and other photographers agree: for your own copies, once you are done with the raw, save as TIFF format. If you want to save some disk-space, use the loss-less LZW compression (which is free software by the way). This means you can always come back later and work on the touch-up level, you have a high-quality image for exporting for print or other purposes etcetera and it takes a lot less space than the RAW files do.
While jpg continues to rule the web – I prefer to export my web images in png format, it’s more powerful far less lossy (for similar compression ratios) and not encumbered by patents.
Thus we have now set up the first part of our digital darkroom, we can browse and manipulate the raw images from our cameras, and get them to a touch-up ready point. As I learn some tricks of the trade about touch-ups, I will be sharing this in part two.
Aug 242009
Okay, so not having blogged much recently – I figure I owed the three people who care a decent update on my life. Firstly – as I promised before I am working on a very nice photo-blog post with the best of my KNP pictures – I had quite a crash course in real photography while there and so I think I took some pretty decent pictures.
The bug has definitely bitten me and I want to pursue photography as a serious hobby. Starting with the purchase of a decent camera of my own (I was using my sister’s Canon D350 while there), lots of digging in the classifieds have shown some interesting ones and a good view of what pretty decent second hand cameras are going for. Somebody who was either very desperate or slightly crazy had a Canon D20 for sale for only R2300 (just the body though) – but I missed out on that one. Right now there’s a lost of D400′s out there for around R4000 This is a pretty impressive one featuring a 10megapixel self-cleaning censor and all the core features you really need like manual settings control and lens swapping.
Of course, I also know that the camera is just the start of the expense, more lenses, tripods etc. will all be following.
In the meantime I am learning real photo processing, if you got a good link to guides on doing so with gimp and other GNU/Linux friendly free software tools please let me know where to find these. Photoshop is not my preferred software and is non-free but all the good books and howtos so far are based on it. I will probably use a “learn how it’s done there, then figure out how to repeat in gimp” kind of approach but any help is much appreciated in finding the ways.
So that means the nice photoblog I promised won’t be up for a few days – first – I’m processing the pictures and choosing the ones that will be posted.
Been quite busy with blogwork actually, cleaned up a few things on this one and installed next-gen gallery which will completely replace the old non-integrated gallery2 I used. I’m quite impressed, it’s a lovely plugin, using it also set up a site for my dads’ photography studio and we got all the structure and the basic templating done within a few hours- as we speak, he is adding more pix.
My dad is somewhat worried about how to approach copyright issues on the web, though he does say “if somebody takes a pic from my site, that’s really just flattery – web images are hardly high-res, high-quality and barely printable so it won’t interfere with my income anyway”.
Myself, I’m a tad more liberal about it even than that. Any picture on this site is under the same CC-BY-SA license as the rest of the content, if I ever want to sell pictures- this will be the high-res copies I keep (which aren’t suitable for the web anyway) but I’m doing this for a hobby, not for a job so I doubt I’ll ever make much out of it. If you like my pic – link it, use it, whatever – the only requirement is the copyleft clause: you have to release the results under the same license you got it under.
This could have an interesting effect – a CC licensed magazine for example could use my pictures, while a traditional commercial one cannot. They’d have to negotiate with me for a license (but on the other hand, will get the high-quality print-worthy version instead).
Of course, this is all pretty much theory on a just-in-case basis, it’s hardly like I expect to take sellable pix anytime soon, I’m still just starting to learn.
In the meantime, I’m harassing just about all my friends to model for me at some point – (hey II need the practice and friends pose for free).
Either way, I’m back from holiday, back at work and my lunch break is officially over so it’s time to end this post.