Category: Photography

Categories
Photography Weather

Welcome Fall

Happy first day of Fall. Oh, how wonderful to think this miserable summer is drawing to a close.

August went down as the third warmest August since weather history has been kept in this region. A couple of cooler days towards the end kept it from being the hottest. We’re still quite warm and humid, with temperatures today in the 90s and only getting down to about 70 at night. Hopefully, we’re heading into normal temperatures later this week.

I thought I would check the Fall color report and the predictions look dismal for the state. Whatever region didn’t get blasted by our odd thaw-freeze-thaw cycle this spring, got hit with an ice storm in January, and/or the summer drought. This is the first time I remember that all parts of the state are being conservative about their predictions for fall color.

We’ve started feeding neighborhood animals and birds, once I saw the pathetic acorns and other nuts coming from our own neighborhood trees. I’m concerned because we don’t seem to have many birds this year; even the number of squirrels are down. The only critter that has done well in the weather this year are the mosquitoes.

leaves

During one of the nicer nights in the last few weeks, I was finally able to open the windows to get some fresh air, only to have the St. Louis pest control come through with the mosquito spraying. Ah, there’s nothing better than the smell of bug spray by moonlight.

Still, Fall is my favorite time of the year. I don’t know if it’s the deeper, richer colors of autumn, the cooler weather, the pleasant walks, but I always feel changes for the good are right around the corner.

color palette

Plus there’s Halloween candy.

Categories
Photography

Raw shoots

I’m looking at various RAW editors, including UFRaw and Adobe’s Camera RAW but also downloaded a copy of RawShooter 2006. The company that produced this tool, Pixmantec, is no more having been bought about by Adobe. However, the tool can still be downloaded, though the registration process fails each time you open it. A minor nuisance, no more.

It’s not the best of the RAW editors, but it is fast and one of the simpler to use. I like the batch conversion, but I also like the slideshow, similar to what you get with Lightroom or Aperture.

I was testing it out yesterday and started the slideshow for a set of photos I had taken of tulips at the Botanical Gardens this spring. No matter what tools you use in your photo workflow, nothing beats a slideshow to give you your first really good look at the photos as a set.

I keep most of my raw images after a shoot. Not the obviously bad ones that can’t be recovered: too blurry, too overexposed or underexposed, or missed subject; but the ones I didn’t especially care for at the time. You never know how much your perspective is going to change after a few months, and a picture you thought was uninteresting one day may suddenly seem to have potential another.

More importantly, when you’re stuck inside because it’s 108 degrees in the shade outside, and all the trees and lawns are baked brown, there’s nothing more refreshing than sitting down to a slideshow of rain kissed tulips. It just doesn’t matter if 99% of the photos will never see the inside of a web page or picture frame, or if the only person to see them is the same who took the pictures originally. It doesn’t even matter if they’re ‘good’ or art.

There is just something very satisfying about sitting down to monitor-sized slideshow of old photos.

Categories
Photography

Creepy digital animation

Pink Tentacle points to the Japanese Motion Portrait web site, featuring software that can take a digital photograph and convert it into an animated, interactive 3D representation.

Among the examples linked is one of a dog, which I agree with PT, is somewhat creepy. It’s the human examples, though, including the interactive on one the main page that leads me to wonder how far we can take this particular art.

Perhaps news organizations will hire a ‘face’, and then just program it to talk.

And just think: every Barcamp can have its very own SillyValley A-Lister. No one could tell the difference.

Categories
Photography

Traced Botanical tour

I grabbed my camera and my GPS handheld yesterday to get some test data for application development. The recorded track isn’t the best, primarily because the containing field was small, and the terrain was flat. I also realized from the track that I tend to meander when walking around, taking photos.

screenshot from Google Earth

I can assure you, though, that I didn’t actually go through the lily pond.

Garmin provides it’s own export format, MPS, but I used g7towin on the PC to export the data directly from the device into GPX, another popular format. I also loaded the same track from my device using Ascent on my Mac. All these formats are XML-based–GPX, GML, MPS, KML, and geoRSS. Not to mention the embedded photo info contained in the EXIF data section, which is formatted as RDF/XML. In the debate between JSON and XML, when it comes to the geoweb, JSON has no where to go.

I converted the GPX files into KML files using GPS Visualizer. I also generated a topographic map of the area. With the GPX and KML, I can use any number of GPS applications and utilities, including Google Earth, and the GPSPhotoLinker, which provides the capability to upload a GPS track and any number of photos and geotags the photos, either individually or as a batch. Works in the Mac, too, which is unusual, as most GPS applications are Windows-based.

I can do any number of things with the GPS data since all of it is standard XML and accessible by any number of XML-based APIs and applications. I can generate SVG to draw out the track, as well as create an application to determine from the variance in slope between waypoints or tackpoints, whether the hike is arduous or not. I can use ‘geotagging’ in the images to incorporate photographs into mapping. Or mapping into photography.

Lastly, I can display or otherwise use the EXIF data, though using ImageMagick to generate thumbnails can also strip this information. Eventually even update my old photo/RDF work into something not dependent on a content management tool.

water lilies

Dragonfly on purple

Statue of Woman

Categories
Photography Technology

Image Magic

I’ve been experimenting around with software tools and utilities, and for this batch I used ImageMagick’s command line tools to create the thumbnails and add a signature.

The shell script to add the signature is:

#!/bin/sh
for name in *jpg
do
echo $name
convert $name -font AvantGuarde-Demi -pointsize 24 \
-gravity SouthEast \
-fill maroon -draw "text 27,27 'Shelley'" \
-fill white -draw "text 25,25 'Shelley'" \
$name
done

Puts a signature on every JPEG in a subdirectory.

I also found a lovely little online photo editor that does everything most people need, and has one of the few truly intuitive interfaces I’ve seen among these tools. It’s called Picnik and it doesn’t cost anything to give it a try, as far as I can see.

I won’t use the WordPress upload software, nor the software I had been developing. These require the ability to have global write to a directory, and this has been hacked now and I don’t consider it safe. Instead, I FTP images to a working directory, run my ImageMagick scripts to do my global changes, and then push them over to the my photos subdirectory. All in all, it’s actually as fast or more than uploading one photo at a time, though it doesn’t ‘hide’ you from the environment as much.

I think that’s a mistake myself: protecting the users from the environment. All we’ve done is help them/you to open their/your environment to hacking. Not particularly responsible of us.

Daylily
Gardens
Rose