China in glorious full colour

So the trip to China has been postponed until next year (best case). Until then I can at least take consolation in looking at some pictures to build up the anticipation (as if I needed more of it). Oh well…

Another weekend, gone…

… and, as usual, it was a good one. They (almost) always are, weekends.

I managed to finish tagging, rotating and generally cleaning up my photo collection. In the end, and after deleting duplicates and so on, I ended up with a bit less than 10.000 photos, none of them in Canon RAW format. This allows me to use iPhoto to manage the entire collection without any problems which is a good thing ^TM.
I decided to stop importing Canon RAW images directly to iPhoto because 1- They where just too big and iPhoto would choke on them (even with 1GB of RAM); 2- iPhoto processed the information on the pictures wrong and always assumed they were taken one month earlier than they had actually been taken on; 3- I had no real benefit in using Canon RAW on iPhoto.
So now I have the original files (I call them my “digital negatives”) on the server’s disk and on the CD and DVD backups and if I ever need them it’s quite easy to locate them, but for picture browsing, selecting and desktop- or web-viewing the JPEG versions I have on iPhoto are more than adequate, so that’s that.
I found out about a neat feature of iPhoto which allows the switching or libraries at startup if you press and hold the option key when you launch the application. This is extremely good because if (or rather, when) my collection outgrows iPhoto’s ability to deal with it I can just move some pictures to another library and leave the latest months or years in the “current” one. Very cool feature!

I’m also making good headway into the two design books I’m currently going through.
“designing with web standards” is indeed a great resource. Even if I already knew (or had guessed by now, through trial and error) most of what it teaches, it does consolidate what I knew in a very precise way and, of course, I’m learning a lot from it.
“the Zen of CSS design” on the other hand is not so much a “text book” as it is a “learn by example” one and it is just so inspiring! I absolutely love to read it. I’ve always liked the CSS Zen Garden a lot, but actually seeing an explanation of all the nitty gritty that’s behind it is beyond cool, not to mention educational.

Saturday, being father’s day, there was lunch with my father at his home (always a good excuse to get the family together around the latest newcomer) ;-) and dinner with Tuxa’s father and her brothers here at home (always a good excuse for her to experiment and explore alternative cooking. This has become a much harder task since she became a vegetarian as none of her brothers are particularly adept at anything of the “vegetal” persuasion. Still, she manages to do well every-time and this instance was yet another success!)

There was also some advance on the home-renovation department. We have chosen the colors we needed to choose and we have gotten the paint. This was a difficult process and from here on there are really no more tough choices to be made, so it was a good development.

Vasco and Sofia came back from their first-ever snow trip, so this evening there was the usual display of pictures and small movies. Man, I miss the snow already! I know I say this every single year, but I do wish I could ski more often. I really love it and I really miss it. One week a year is not nearly enough, but any means.
But then I’m not crazy enough to drive to Sierra Nevada on the weekends. Not only do I absolutely hate skying on the weekend with all the crowd, but I also have severe problems with making all those long car trips (8 hours each way). Much as I love road trips, I don’t like having to make this kind of a trip in order to ski for a day and a half and come back again. My back would kill me.
And after seeing what Serra da Estrela has to offer I also pass up on that. You don’t mitigate your craving for riding a motorcycle with a weekly ride on a kiddy tricycle.
Sigh…

Oh, almost forgot, today, finally, I got to watch “High Fidelity”. I know it is far from a new release. I know everyone and his mother has seen it. I know most people I know think it is a great movie and can’t believe I’ve never seen it, the fact is that I hadn’t seen it.
And they where right. What a great movie! I loved it, absolutely loved it.
I already loved it’s soundtrack, which I’ve had for a rather long time and I thought I would probably enjoy the movie. I was right about that.
But now it’s late (of sorts) and I won’t go into much detail about the movie or why I like it so much because I’m going to try and go to the gym tomorrow before going to work and so I have to get up early… ish…

Moon shots

Tonight there was a big (although not full) moon right in front of my living room’s balcony.
This prompted me to try something I’ve been wanting to do for a long time: take some pictures of the moon as seen through Tuxa’s telescope.

This is a small and weak telescope but I does allow a great view of the moons surface even with the smallest lens (the one I used for the shots.

Of course I don’t have a camera adapter for the telescope (yet…) so I ended up trying my luck with a really flimsy setup: I put the telescope on its tripod pointing at the moon and used the angular eye piece so that the piece was pointing back and upwards but very low (due to the moon being really high in the sky). I then setup my EOS 10D camera on it’s own (very old and broken but still serviceable in controlled conditions) tripod and got the lens as close to the telescope’s eye piece as I possibly could.

Then I just fired away a few shots and after checking out the results I wasn’t too disappointed (considering the precarious conditions I to take them in).

[There where a couple of examples here, but unfortunately the photos got lost in the way.]

I just wish I had remembered to clean out the telescope’s lens… :-)

Night photography with high ISO values

One of the advantages of digital photography is that you can use a different ISO setting for each shot without having to change rolls.

Until now I had never even touched the ISO setting but last week I decided to try my EOS 10D with a high ISO value just to see how it handled, so I took a few shots at night at Paço de Arcos beach (a regular evening strolling spot) and the results aren’t half bad.
Some of them can be seen here in the photolog.

[Or could be seen there in the photolog, as it no longer exists and I’ve lost the photographs in the mean time.]

Of course there is quite a bit of color noise, but that is to be expected and, in some cases, it ads to the picture.
Overall the quality is very interesting and I find the 10D handles itself very well in low light conditions. Better than in extremely bright ones. Funny that.

Now I must start thinking about a tripod for night photos. I’ve had my sights on a number of pictures I’d like to try one of these days, but all of them would need low ISO settings and high exposure times so a tripod is a must. The problem is that I just know I’m too lazy to drag a tripod with me on other, more casual occasions and buying a tripod just for a couple of pictures now and then is a bummer…

Thoughts on organizing a digital photograph collection

(I definitely must get me some (any!) sort of Wiki set-up for me, this doesn’t strictly belong in a weblog but on a Wiki page where I can expand on it.)

Be warned, these are just my unsorted and unstructured thoughts about this matter, so it’s long and it may not make perfect sense all the way…

What I’ve got covered

I’ve been thinking about a way to store my digital photographs. I’ve been thinking about it for quite a while now but each week that passes the problem gets worse and worse.

Right now I’ve got the part about the digital workflow covered (until I think of something better, that is, but for now it works), including storing the “digital negatives”, backing them up and creating the contact-sheets to find pictures at a later time.
The process is mostly finished in my head and it will be smoothed out as I go through it until it settles on something that I am absolutely conformable with and at that stage I’ll probably write it down and be happy with it.

Didn’t I take a picture of a nice boat, oh, 3 years ago?

What bothers me now is the “finding photographs latter” part.
The contact-sheets are a good idea for silver- (actually celluloid-) based photography, sure, but is it really adequate for digital photography?
I mean, the photos are all on a digital medium, shouldn’t it be easier and isn’t it more logical to use some digital tool to review and find them?

Apart from the quite extensive photograph collection I already have and the cost-issue that comes with printing contact-sheets for every “session” of photographs I make, is it really the best way to find the photographs in the future?

Of course I won’t even dream of cataloguing every single photograph and assign keywords to each and everyone of them —sure, that would be the ideal thing to do but I just know I’ll never have the time to do it, life’s just too short— so what other options are there?

The good-ol’ wish list

Well, I don’t have any answers, but I do have some ideas as to what I’d like to have and what I’ve already figured out about how to do some of it.

And it goes like this:

• I have photographs in jpeg and raw format. Actually I might conceivably have photographs in other formats (tiff for scans from my celluloid photographs, for instance) but the point is that on the web (ah yes, I envision a web-based system) I guess I’ll want to have it all on a jpeg format;

• Also, I know I won’t be using these pictures for any kind of fancy or high-resolution output, they will be used mostly for finding out a certain photograph (or group of photographs that match a certain criteria), browsing through the picture collection or viewing each one on the web (on some album-like site or maybe a photoblog), so I have decided that maintaining on-line versions of 1024x768 pixels (at most, maybe even smaller ones) is more than adequate;

• The points above indicate that a conversion has to occur from the original photograph (hi-resolution jpeg, tiff, raw, whatever) into a lower-resolution jpeg. This is OK, because if I want to process a photograph latter on I have the original to work with;

• I will want to use these pictures on a gallery or photoblog-like site and this implies that even smaller versions will have to exsit (thumbnail sized and medium sized ones). Should I store these on disk or should I create them on-the-fly? Disk, of course, but the storage issue may be a problem… Maybe create these scaled-down versions only for those pictures which will be used on the web? But the master catalogue must have all of them for me to find them so at least the thumbnail ones must be created for all of them. Oh boy…

• Search, don’t catalogue. Meaning, I will have to have some (very easy to use) way of adding some properties to the photographs in order to find them later. I know I said I don’t think I’ll have the time or patience to assign keywords to every photograph, but something as simple as selecting 300 photographs from a trip and adding the keywords “tourism” and “Venice” to them is a lot of help! (No, I’ve never been to Venice, but I’ve been to Venice Beach if that counts…) :). The ideal interface to search for the photographs would then be a search by keyword as opposed to a search by “folder” or by “theme”. Search by time-frame is also a must, of course and even by some EXIF properties, but this is the easy part;

• It must be extremely easy to add lots of photographs to the system and it would be even better if I could add the keywords to all of them at the same time that I import them. All other sizes required for the pictures should be created automatically at the same time.

Finding Nemo

Soooo… Now I just have to find such a system. I won’t even consider writing one until I absolutely run out of options in the open-source world and it will be a shock to me if I really have to do it. Altering something that already exists to suit my needs is quite acceptable, though. Won’t this be fun?

Actually I already have some candidates in mind, but I’ll have to investigate further to see which ones (if any) are the easiest to tweak to do what I want exactly how I want it.

I think I’ll start with photos, a great piece of software I already use by Alex King. I’ve stopped using it for a while now but it was already very good when I looked at it and there where a few more versions released in the meantime. Yes, I think I’ll start there.

But first all these ideas must settle a little more.
I think writing about it helps. Let’s see how it goes. :)

Improvements to the digital workflow

I’ve just finished printing the first batch of contact sheets for my digital negatives and I must say I am pleased with the results.

Printing at home is something I will never try to do —it just isn’t worth the hassle and I will never get good results with consumer-grade equipment— but I do have a colour ink-jet printer and it does come in handy sometimes.

In this case I use it to print the contact sheets for the digital negatives I store on CDs and on my big (well it doesn’t feel that big now but it did seem huge when I first bought it) hard-drive. I use photoshop’s ContactSheet II “script” to create full A4 contact sheets of all the photographs I put on a folder and then cram as many folders as I can into a master folder and burn a CD with it.

This way I can continue to use my favourite method of organising pictures and finding them later on (I still print contact sheets for my silver-based photography and I guess I always will).

Life is good. Now if I can only buy the definitive hard-drive and never have to upgrade again I’ll be really happy!

Cell phone photography

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again: using a cell-phone or smart-phone or PDA or whatever as a photo camera just doesn’t cut it.

In here two examples of pictures taken with a Sony-Ericsson t68i and the plugable mini-camera.

The resolution is not all bad (640x480) but apart from that you have strong chromatic deviation, spherical aberrations on the picture and lots of other faults.

It just turn’s me off from using it again when I look at pictures like the one below and remember that the walls where plain white and that this was a rather sunny day. And it wasn’t even taken at the end of the day, it was around 14h00 or 15h00. Just look at the colour on those walls!

[Well, now you can’t, because the photo is lost in the big bit-bucket in the sky.]

Oh well, it does give you an easy way to document your life, the picture above was taken on my way back from the usual lunch spot, while the one bellow was taken on a piece of waste-land just opposite said place.

[This photo, too, has gone the way of the Dodo.]

But I’m still not convinced. Might just as well buy a decent point-and-shoot.

Digital workflow and other digital photography goodies

I’ve found this really interesting article: “Rob Galbraith DPI: Sports Illustrated’s digital workflow” via ongoing.

The sheer volume of shots these guys have to process is amazing and the tools they use to tackle it are incredibly simple (from a computer geek’s point-of-view). It is very instructive to see how they cope with it and there are some very good ideas in there.

Also of great interest is a link in the article to the Sports Illustrated Photo site where they have lots of useful information. In my case the most relevant part is the Suggested settings for the Canon EOS 10D. Very interesting indeed for the digital photography lover.

As ondas da Consolação

[Em tempos existiu aqui uma foto. Agora já não.]

A praia da consolação no Sábado.
Apesar do aspecto delicioso do mar ainda está um frio proibitivo.
Pena…

Crédito onde ele é devido: esta foto não é minha, é da Tuxa.

Graffiti na praia

[A foto que aqui estava foi indevidamente reciclada algures no percurso deste site.]

As cores da praia da Parede: graffiti na parede, chapéus, mesas e cadeiras verdes.
No verão isto costuma estar um bocado mais cheio de gente… :)

Maré baixa na Parede

[A foto que estava associada a este artigo foi perdida no passado.]

A praia da Parede com a maré baixa.
Estes fundos duros com a maré alta proporcionam umas belas ondas.

Apanhando polvos

[A foto que estava neste artigo foi perdida nos tempos.]

Na praia da Parede é frequente ver apanhadores de polvos, pescadores e apanhadores de marisco na água logo pela manhã quando a maré está baixa.
Esta foto já foi tirada mais a meio da manhã e ainda lá havia uns 2 ou 3 resistentes.

Aventuras fotográficas de um fim-de-semana de primavera

Este sábado estive, pela primeira vez desde há muito tempo, o dia inteiro de t-shirt. Finalmente está mesmo um tempo totalmente primaveril. E como recebi o fabuloso “the photoshop cs book for digital photographers” recentemente tratei de lhe dar uso.

Aproveitei o passeio que dei no sábado, pela muralha do Estoril, para fazer umas fotos e depois, no resto do fim-de-semana, experimentei algumas técnicas do livro.

Para já ainda estou muito dividido em relação à maioria do conteúdo do livro…
Uma coisa é limpar umas manchas causadas por uma lente suja ou corrigir um pixelizado exagerado causado por uma medição incorrecta da máquina devido à falta de luz, por exemplo, mas fazer as alterações que o livro ensina a todas as fotografias é realmente outra coisa muito diferente.
Não é que essas alterações não fiquem bem ou não produzam imagens muito agradáveis, mas a questão é que isso já não é fotografia como eu a entendo. Nestes casos já estamos mais no domínio da imagem digital como imagem (ou objecto de arte) em sí e não como fotografia.
De qualquer modo conseguem-se fazer coisas sem dúvida muito interessantes se decidirmos seguir por esse caminho e o photoshop é realmente imbatível.
Passei tanto tempo a dizer que o gimp era um mundo (e é, não haja dúvida) e agora vejo pelos meus próprios olhos que o photoshop está a anos-luz de distância…

Uma coisa interessante que percebi durante este primeiro contacto mais a sério com a edição digital de imagem é que o pessoal que anda nestas coisas (artistas gráficos et al) têm toda a razão para andarem sempre a queixar-se das diferenças entre plataformas e da dificuldade que há em afinar as imagens para ficarem bem em todo o lado.
É impossível! Se editar a foto no monitor externo até ficar mesmo bem, passo-a para o monitor do portátil e está totalmente diferente. E quando a reduzo para mostrar na web então? E quando a vejo num browser diferente? Argh! É impossível ter uma imagem que seja vista de modo igual em todo o lado, por isso desisti totalmente desse intento. Quem quiser ver as imagens como deve ser arranje um monitor devidamente calibrado e utilize um software que respeite o perfil de côr embebido nas imagens e pronto!

Enfim, aqui estão algumas brincadeiras deste fim-de-semana, só pelo gozo da coisa:

[As fotos referidas a seguir foram, infelizmente, perdidas em alguma migração deste site.]

Um canto do sótão no sábado de manhã.

Visão parcial de uma casa vista da muralha do Estoril, junto à pria do Tamariz.

Pedras no mar vistas da muralha.

Rocha avermelhada a sair do mar.

Restaurante na praia do Tamariz.

Palacete no topo da praia da Poça.

Rocha na praia

[A fotografia que aqui se encontrava perdeu-se no tempo.]

Rocha no mar em frente à praia da Rocha - Algarve.
A textura do mar estava mesmo estranha, não é um problema de cor na foto.

Fotografia digital

Pensava eu que o laboratório “analógico” de preto e branco tinha muito que saber e aprender…

O laboratório digital, pelo que já me apercebi, tem tanto que saber que nem sei bem por onde hei-de começar!
O photoshop só por si já é um mundo, mas se começar ainda pelo mais básico como o tratamento e extracção das fotos em RAW, ajuste de white balance, acerto da gama do monitor, etc, etc, etc, já vou ter pano para mangas.

E isto já pressupõe que saiba utilizar a máquina na totalidade o que está longe de ser verdade.

Quem diria que a fotografia se poderia revelar tão geekoide?

Experimentei hoje processar uma foto segundo o workflow descrito nas dicas de fotografia digital do The Digital Picture e fiquei bastante contente com o resultado, mas só o número de workflows que já encontrei é enorme e isto sem saber praticamente nada de photoshop.

Enfim, chega por hoje, já é tarde. Acho que dava jeito umas férias só para me dedicar a isto… Vou ter de ver os safaris/cruzeiros/viagens dedicadas a fotografia digital com mais atenção… Olha que bela desculpa! ;)