photography

There are 8 posts tagged photography (this is page 1 of 1).

LightZone

Over the weekend I began to learn more about LightZone, which is one of the best photo editing programs available to Linux users (it’s also cross-platform).  

Lightzone edit screen

I have previously tended to use DarkTable more often.  LightZone is easier to learn, but is still quite a powerful non-destructive editor.  It handles RAW formats of many cameras, has built in styles, and seems to have a more logical workflow.  As in DarkTable or GIMP, one can select parts of an image to work on separately.  

Years ago, LightZone was a commercial program, but its source was later released on GitHub. Since then it has been maintained by a couple of developers who have not always had enough time to give to the project.  However recently it has been showing some new development.  The version has been bumped up from 4.5.2 (available as a flatpak to 5.0 beta, which is available in a Debian depository.  Yesterday I filed bug reports on two issues, and already today a new beta was released, which resolves the more substantive issue. Thanks to Masahiro Kitagawa, the current main developer, for this quick action.  The ability to reach out to and communicate with developers is the best aspect of using open source software.  

Additional resources for LightZone:

YouTube channel

Forum

Diary

In the morning picked up one of my grandchildren from the railway station in Modi’in (one of two such drives today, because in the evening I had to pick up son). I had a meeting with the accounts department people at the office, then spent the morning doing some cleaning and laundry (but then, forgot to hang the machine till about midnight, discovering it only on my room and lights out check.)

When D came home, she arrived with the negatives scanner I had ordered from China a couple of months ago. I was sure it was lost in the mail, and couldn’t do much about it because I had accidentally indicated that I’d received it. So that was a big surprise. With these orders from China, you never know whether it will arrive in a matter of weeks, or of months, or who will deliver it, or to where. The scanner is mainly for the archival work on old film at the office, but it can be useful for scanning personal film as well. I already tried it, and am quite happy with the results: the challenge is to keep dust away from the negatives, because the slightest speck of dust creates a white spot on the negative.

In the afternoon we visited our neighbours, where we said bye to R who is going back to the UK, where she and her husband are spending a year. In our neighbours’ yard, I found a good specimen of Lantana, a flower I’ve been wanting to photograph (above).

I was telling our neighbour about the interesting novel, “A Life of Holes”, which was narrated to Paul Bowles by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi, a poor and illiterate Moroccan, if Bowles can be believed. I think B would like it.

Travel plans?

I talked with D today about the possibility of continuing the Chemin Le Puy in France, from the point that I had left off in 2021, in Moissac. If I want to do that, it’s either now or in September-October. But we might want to go somewhere else at that time, such as India. I discovered that there are cheap flights to Barcelona, from where it is possible to take a train or a bus.

So it’s a possibility. I’m not sure I actually want to get away just now, because I’m enjoying being at home, but it could be nice. D might join me for part of the way.

Search

My default #search engine is SearX. But what’s the story with DuckDuckGo and Firefox? It used to be there as one of the options. When it disappeared, I installed the DDG extension; however this didn’t actually do anything. It did not include DDG as a search option and (fortunately) did not succeed to make DDG the default engine. Next I tried to include DDG in what should be the standard way: using FF’s OpenSearch option, but it seems that DDG does not play nicely with OpenSearch either. Further, its API no longer works with SearX, so it is not possible to receive DDG’s results in SearX. I no longer trust DDG – I also just read about the deal they made (though last year rescinded) with Microsoft.

Diary

thistle flower

Happy with the photos I took yesterday around the village, and that more of them came out well than did not; a sign that I’m getting a hang of the X10. Just one or two of them were out of focus or poorly exposed.

Problems lingered this morning after uninstalling Protonvpn, which proved too buggy on my Linux box. After the uninstall I couldn’t enter some sites (including this one). This was resolved by restarting the modem. I may have to return to the earlier vpn (which worked fine).

Our resident climatologist Avner Gross has a good article about climate change in the Hebrew version of Haaretz that didn’t make it into English, so I read it today. Together with Greta’s book, through which I’m still plodding, I feel a bit under the weather.

It’s almost impossible to depart this country, at least to Europe, without airplanes, so I think I have hit on a unique plan: Go to the airport and book the first plane with an empty seat. Planes are rarely full, especially out of season. Once in Europe, it is possible to go by trains or buses, which are less harmful to the biosphere.

That won’t help with India. The days of overland travel through Iran, Afghanistan and Pakistan have passed. With an Israeli resident stamp, Iran could arrest me as a spy, while India is wary of travelers who have been to Pakistan. I’m not even sure that foreigners can travel through the Wagah border these days.

Back from America

Back from the US to the turmoil of this Jewish-Israeli intifada, which is only getting worse. With this people and government it’s like the cliché about when an irresistable force meets an immovable object. So far neither are giving way though the government is showing more signs of stress than the people on the streets are showing signs of despair.

I’m jetlagged – should be asleep now. Besides the change in time zones, there have been two daylight saving time switches: first in the US and now here.

I went for a walk with my new old camera on Thursday to learn more about it. I’ve posted a few photos. Spring is about at its peak here now and the greenery is lush, with more rain predicted for the weekend.

WordPress

I spent most of the day improving a WordPress website that I manage voluntarily. For that site and another, I use the flexible theme Weaver. The theme developer tries his best to keep up with WordPress’s changes, but maybe it’s a losing battle. It seems to me that at a certain stage Autommatic lost the plot. In the attempt to make everything simpler, they keep making it harder. I’ve tried a few times to adopt their block editor but each time gave up and went back to the classic editor, which itself is sufficiently cumbersome and unfriendly. I try to do some of the editing in html but WordPress usually messes it up.

Today I tried to include a simple html accordion (the details, summary css solution), but WordPress wouldn’t let me use it properly, due also to RTL-LTR issues. I looked online for a solution, but the only one offered is with plugins – either the old or the new kind that take advantage of the block editor. The writer recommended the latter, and, in particular the Kadence block plugin. So I installed that, and re-initialized the block editor. The result was a horrible mess. Besides WordPress’s native block editor, I now had a button for Kadence blocks, in addition to another unusable button fo Extendify blocks. The latter is a form of malware. It somehow insinuated its way into the system without my asking for it, and provides options that don’t work unless you purchase the plugin. In any case, I was unable to get the accordion working properly.

After more search engine research and failed attempts to get rid of Extendify and after disabling Kadence, I went back to the classic editor, where I soon discovered I already had a working system for accordions and had simply forgotten about it. That’s another thing that happens with WP – it encourages you to download loads of ridulous plugins that you later forget about, so they just sit there slowing down the site. This was also my experience after initializing the block editor: Slowness happened after I’d initialized the block editor: the editing slowed to a snail’s pace (in Vivaldi: it won’t work at all in SeaMonkey – you just get a blank page).

But those problems were only the beginning. The majority of my time was spent in WP’s customize module, where I tried, and eventually succeeded. to move and resize the site logo and adjust various spacing issues. Weaver has, besides the “customizer” module, an older classic theme editor, and I have often used these together. But this time I discovered that the classic theme editor will sometimes undermine the changes made with the customizer module, so it can no longer be trusted.

The attempt to put html editing into a GUI is understandable in modern web development because the underlying infrastructure grows ever more complex.

But for my limited needs, it is usually quicker and more satisfying to edit html and CSS directly. Moving the earlier mentioned site logo in the Customizer was a nightmare in WP’s customizer, and there’s a feeling of surrending control to the whims of a system that seems to “have its own mind,” or at least its own quirks.

The further you get away from the code, the greater the feeling of helplessness. Coding can be exasperating too, but the frustration is more honest – I don’t find myself screaming at the screen and cursing the developers – there’s only myself to blame when something doesn’t work out right.

Aaron Swartz

R came by the other day to do some laundry. He’s camping out in the woods during his stay. We somehow got talking about Aaron Swartz on a previous occasion and he had read up on him in the meantime. He said he was surprised that Swartz took his own life despite the fact that the conditions of his detention were not terribly serious. But then he said that maybe for someone like Swartz, who had invested so much idealism in the internet, seeing what was happening to this tool for emancipation may have driven him over the edge.

It was 2014 – the heroes of the Arab Spring were being rounded up and put in jail. Snowdon and Assange were also being hounded, and governments were using the internet as a tool for surveillance and tyranny. Perhaps Swartz could not stomache this dystopian outcome of his early idealism? I don’t know. But certainly it’s a plausible motive for suicide.

Meanwhile, it seems to me that the only people who approach me with regards to this blog are those who want to sell something. In their world, the only purpose of blogs and websites is to be part of the money market – a particularly grubby corner of it where people write commissioned articles for the purpose of advertising. So when I read an article like the one concerning WordPress accordions, I find myself wondering who was paying him.

Film camera boom

The Guardian had an article today about young people who are going back to film photography ‘You only have one shot’: how film cameras won over a younger generation. Apparently the market for old cameras is bouncing back. I would do it too, but only if I were to do the developing myself. I always hated surrentling control to some stupid photolab that can sabotage one’s best efforts. A few of those albums we have from earlier years contain photos that have lost most of their colour. What I could conceivably imagine doing is to just develop the negatives at home, then put the negatives through a negative scanner. The same could be useful also for many other old negatives that we have.

But in almost every other way, I’m a man of the digital age – I don’t even do my reading away from a screen, so I’m not sure I would go back to film cameras.

Journal – mainly about photo handling under Linux

I was somehow sick yesterday – woke up feeling very low energy.  In mid-morning I had loose bowel movements, throughout the day felt zift.  And it was also quite a busy day, with the annual test for the car, a visit from the guy that replaces our water filter, two trips to Modiin to take Yotam to work and back.  Then in the afternoon we bought him a new computer monitor.

Most of last weekend was spent moving files around and doing backups, in order to free a disk up for our new Nmix multimedia player. Then setting up the player itself.  I will talk about that some other time.  But the awkward thing is that somewhere during that process my laptop Windows partition, and even the HP restore partition got affected, such that I can’t use Windows, and have to use Ubuntu.  Previously I was flipping back between these every few weeks; probably eventually spending more time with Windows.

The data on the partition all seems to be there, and I was able to access and transfer it using Yotam’s Ultimate Boot Disk.  Just won’t let Windows start. 

So I’m stuck with Ubuntu, unless I get it fixed.  Truth is, I’m a bit worn out by the problems of both operating systems, and have found myself lusting for a Mac.  But, as my son Yonatan says, if I had a Mac I would probably find things to complain about that too.

Since I’m a bit of a fatalist, I took up using only Ubuntu as a challenge.  The most difficult thing for me under Linux is finding a way of working with photos.  Although photography is by no means the larger part of what I do, it is an area that has to be in order.  And the big obstacle to overcome is finding a Linuxcentric photo organizer and workflow.

I have done a major revisit to this subject in the last few days, trying the most commonly known applications and some less known options:  Picasa, Digikam, Gwenview, G-thumb, F-spot, Lightzone, Bibble Pro, as well as reading up on Geeqi and a couple of others.

What I need really, is actually what Picasa does rather well, except that Picasa under Linux chokes on my photo collection (it’s about 35,000 photos so far). I need something that imports photos from a camera, lets me organize them and handles light editing – preferably non-destructive.  I have a folder-based system, but also use tags (keywords).  I want to use both, and to be able to search for photos using both. I also want to have a quick way of uploading the photos to the web (I have been using Picasaweb.

All that turns out to be a tall order.  Picasaweb has the most elegant user interface I have seen for handling photos.  In a single screen, without any customization, it does everything I need to do.  It is super-fast, for browsing, searching, editing and sharing, and permits a brilliant workflow.   I think it’s a work of genius.  There are still a couple of things I don’t like about it, but all in all I’m happy.  But, as mentioned, the Linux version (which is based on the Windows emulator Wine) is less robust.

Under Linux, the best equivalent seems to be Digikam.  It has keywords, uses folders, can handle editing (not non-destructive as in Picasa), but, for some reason, on my machine it is almost unusable.  Slow and prone to freezing.  Again, the problem may be the large photo collection.

G-thumb does a reasonable job.  It’s fast and easy to use.  It uses a folder-based system.  It allows simple (not non-destructive) editing.  Instead of keywords, it relies on searchable comments.  Trouble is, the comments are recognized only in G-thumb, and it does not recognize IPTC keywords at all.  That means that any time spent in tagging (which is an exhaustive process) would be good only for G-thumb, or perhaps Gnome’s file manager. 

F-spot is just the opposite.  It relies only on tags, and does not allow a folder view.  It does tagging very well, and these are searchable.  The tags are generic IPTC standard, and are recognized outside of F-spot.  The problem is, that after you have invested so much time organizing a photo collection in folders, it just isn’t possible to go back and start tagging every single photo.

F-spot seems to be closest to I-photo under Mac.  I checked out I-photo in a display model in Office Depot today.  I don’t think that would work for me either. 

Lightzone and Bibble are two non-free photo managers and editors that work under Linux.  At up to $200 they are expensive.  But I would consider them if they did everything I want.  Lightzone does editing very well, and is supposed to handle Raw photos (which I don’t use).  Bibble seems to handle the photo-organization quite well and also allows editing.  Both programs are aware of and can handle tagging. Both do non-destructive editing, though they handle it in different ways.  Unfortunately neither have a search engine.  Lightzone has some problems navigating to my external hard drive.  Bibble has an interface based on dockable windows, which seems a bit messy to me.  A new version of Bibble has been promised for a long time.  I will wait and see what that offers.

Gwenview is nice mainly for viewing photos and is a bit limited.  Geeqi, based on an old “competitor” to GThumb, is in a very alpha-stage and is mentioned as being unstable and not recommended for serious use.  There are systems that use PHP and Appache, but these don’t seem a good option for work on a desktop computer.

So there I am – nothing really does everything that I need to do.  I will probably adopt a workflow that involves Picasa, GThumb and F-Spot.  Perhaps I will import photos in Picasa, use Picasa as an intermediate station, since it works quite well with a smaller number of photos.  In Picasa I can tag them, then archive them for later viewing in GThumb and F-Spot.  Sometimes, in order to work with photos in the archive, I can do the opposite – moving them to a folder that is watched by Picasa, doing quick editing, then sharing them from there by email or web.  There are a couple of things I’m still not sure about in this process, such as Picasa’s handling of keywords, and how best to use Picasa as a way-station.

Perhaps, in a few months time, some of my difficulties will be solved by updates to some of the programs I have mentioned.

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Rediscovering an old camera

For the sake of curiosity, I refitted my aging Minolta AL-F with a new battery and UV filter, and shot a roll of film. This is a camera I received at the age of 15 or 16, almost 35 years ago. I used it to take the majority of photos when I was younger and, later, most of my family albums. Up to a few years ago. Then I began to use newer cameras – either the cheap point-and-shoots that my brother sent me or the good digital cameras I have at the office. I became convinced that newer cameras must be better than the old Minolta.

But I always did enjoy taking photos with that camera, and had a kind of nostalgia for it. So I began to read up on the web about Minoltas of that era (late 60s, early 70s) and rangefinders in general. It turns out that the 1970s were a kind of golden age for cheap rangefinders. I didn’t find much on my particular camera – it wasn’t a popular model – but more can be found on Minolta hi-matics of the same era, and some of these seem to share the same lens. That’s a very average Rokkor 38 mm f2.7. Still, by the standards of today’s cheaper cameras, it’s quite a sharp lens. The camera too is sturdier than today’s breed, which explains why it lasted so long. It’s easy to take good photos with the AL-F since exposure is shutter speed priority based. You focus by the old parallax system; aligning a yellow diamond in the viewfinder centre. Parallax correction is provided in this camera. Any cheap electric flash can be placed in the shoe, for better results than most of today’s built-ins. An easy guide number system is used to calculate the flash exposure. It’s no longer possible to find today the mercury battery that the minolta uses. I bought the equivalent alcaline 625, which the man in the camera store said should work fine with negative film, and indeed it did.

The only other problem I had with the camera was a cracked viewfinder pane. I first gummed it with selatape, and then had the idea of using a thin piece of rigid plastic cut from packaging material, which fit snuggly in the frame without further need for tape.

Why would I go back to this old camera? Partly nostalgia, partly due to the reassurance received from reading on the web about cameras of this kind, but mainly because it really is a camera that’s comfortable to use, with more quality than other cameras in my price bracket. There are certain advantages to rangefinder cameras of this kind, too, like a very large bright viewfinder, which is wider than the frame itself, no blackout at the time of the exposure, and no on-off switch to wait for. The viewfinder is great for my aging eyes as I can leave my glasses on when focussing.

Although there are conveniences that come with digital cameras, these have been diminished by the fact that photolabs readily provide a photo disk at processing time. The digital copies on the disk are fine for printing and can be batch-processed down to screen size with free software like Irfanview in Windows or Imagemagic in Linux.

The disadvantages with my Minolta are what they always were – no way to override the semi-automatic settings, no chance to shoot at a wider aperture than f2.7, and no interchangeable lenses.

Such cameras are a bargain. I think the Minolta cost just over $100 originally – the equivalent of about $450 in today’s dollars. Its worth today is probably less than $10 at an auction. That’s an advantage too, considering that the spanking new Canon EOS 3 we purchased last year was stolen before I really got a chance to use it. Smaller digital cameras are also a hot item for pickpockets in the world’s vacation spots. But who would bother stealing a worthless 1970s camera?