My plans for tomorrow are simple: a worldwide wide photowalk! Not taking photos across the whole world (I wish…) but a challenge from Scott Kelly to have a photowalk around the world. I’ll do my part here in the Lisbon and we’ll be around Alfama for a couple of hours.


Photo by luispedron

Worldwide Photo Walk - Lisboa, Portugal

Update - I already have my photo walk photos available

Film photography isn’t dead yet. The guys at Epic Edits think the same way and created a list of ten reasons why film photography still is cool in their latest posted. Actually it’s an update to an earlier post written in a sarcastic tone which caused some confusion, I guess they should have chosen a title like 10 things I “hate” about film for that post to avoid misunderstandings.

The latest incarnation of deviantART, one of the largest online artist communities, is out but this release, like all the others throughout the years I’ve been there, is more focused on “sleekness” and having a cool interface than adding real features.
deviantART still is missing the point in a few important issues: crappy RSS support or no API or similar among other things.
There’s no way to embed deviantART elsewhere, I can’t put my messages or my contacts photos on my Netvibes, I can’t put deviantART News on my Google Reader, I can’t use data via a public interface to create things like a desktop uploader or a cool mashup. In other words: deviantART is closed, outdated and monolithic and is clearly missing how the Internet is evolving, and a fine example of that is their FAQ item #335:

Are RSS feeds available?
to be updated……….

read more | digg story

Heather, besides designing the cool theme used on my tumblog, does a pretty nice job in sewing photos together (a.k.a. panography). And fortunately she does it quite often.

Thomas Hawk, photographer and one of the minds behind Zooomr, posted an interesting post in his blog where he explains his process of handling the hundreds of photos taken each day. While not being exactly “rocket science” it’s interesting to check the workflow of a professional, whose archive nowadays is bigger than 5 TB, and compare it to our own because, as an amateur photographer, my organizational and handling problems are about the same, but in a much smaller scale.

My workflow nowadays is built around the fact that my everyday operating system of choice for some time has been Linux, which can be cut down to this:

1. Using F-Spot (recently I preferred it over Picasa because it’s a Gnome native application) I import all the photos in my memory cards to a Incoming folder in my storage device, I rarely delete photos. F-Spot already organizes those photos into folders with “year\month\day” structure, something I use to do by hand, so this keeps the bulk data roughly organized per date. I’ll do some basic tagging here also.
2. Quickly browse the imported photos and develop the ones “somehow interesting” with UFRaw, (I’ve been shooting exclusively in RAW for some time). I don’t have the huge amount of photos Thomas has so I don’t use the intermediate Maybe, I just rely on the different versions created by F-Spot.
3. Basic processing in Gimp, 95% of the time is things like Levels, Curves, Noise Reduction, Saturation and Unsharp Mask.
4. The output of previous step goes to a Processed folder, which contains lossless JPEG files (sometimes in a slightly smaller resolution). This is the starting point for the final touch, if any (most of the times is extra processing like a fake lomo look).
5. Pick some of the photos Processed folder and publish them to my Flickr and Zooomr accounts, usually the tagging and geotagging is done here.
6. And that’s it!

A photography workflow evolves throughout time, adjusting to someone’s needs and preferences, mine changed a lot in the last couple of years when I decided to shoot RAW and use Linux on my desktop, and this is the current iteration of mine, which will probably evolve in the future (having a decent Lightroom in Linux would be a fine reason to change it a little).

And that’s all!

My Photography Workflow [Thomas Hawk’s Digital Connection]

PS - I guess this post also could be called “Photography workflow in Linux only using with Open Source tools”

Lately I’ve done most of my photo processing with Gimp, which meant no decent noise removal tool for some time (despite being a great app this is one of Gimp’s handicaps). Fortunately I stumbled upon GREYCstoration a free plugin, as in “free beer” and “free speech”, that brings top quality noise reduction to Gimp, probably the best around right after “camera profile oriented” tools like Neat Image.

Denoising with GREYCstoration [Linux Photography]

Thomas Hawk was interviewed for a Mahalo Daily episode on basic photo tips. All of them are very important and should be followed almost religiously, but one caught my eye:

    #4: It’s all about the glass

This so true! Too often I find myself trying giving the same equipment advice to friends blinded by the quantity of lenses available in some DSLR kits: one good lens is better than two or three cheap lenses.

PS - Tip #9 probably is the most important: take lots and lots and lots of photos. Persistence leads to perfection and, quoting Henri Cartier-Bresson, your first 10,000 photographs are your worst.

[update] This post was on my reading list today, check out item six.

A new year is now beginning and that usually means New Years Resolutions, so here are mine, just the geek oriented and in no particular order:

• Finish TemujinPhoto, finally I’m working on it and in a few weeks I hope to have a working beta.
• Probably this is the year I’ll take a certification, most likely a Microsoft Certified Professional. Probably…
• Take photos.
• Must dive into .Net 3.5 and LINQ.
• Been thinking about creating a desktop client for Remember The Milk in WPF, I’m needing one and the guys at RTM have a neat API (WPF is for learning something new).
• Must buy a tripod, need to do night shots.
• Get a taste of EJB 3.0 and the Spring 2.5, just a small taste to check what I’ve been missing on the Java world.
• Put my reading up to date, I still haven’t read this one (no need to buy me a copy, I already own one and it has been gathering dust for some time).
• Take more photos: night photos, motion photos, street photos, concept photos and all kinds of photos I haven’t been doing lately.
• There has been some ideas to make a few short movies, I sure hope we can turn them real. Another reason to buy a tripod…
• Probably dump Windows on my laptop completely, I’m getting happier with Ubuntu everyday.

There’s an interesting discussion going on Nikon Digital Learning Center group at Flickr about digital post processing, not photo manipulation, and how it could lead to the end of professionalism, due to the fact that tools like Photoshop, Gimp or Lightroom make post processing much too easy.

While some people are trying to sell their photoshopped photos as taken straight from the memory card, which indeed is wrong, others really are becoming just minimal photoshop purists or even no digital manipulation at all and only lab processing is good fundamentalists. But what really is a pure and untouched photo?

Post processing is as old as photography, the difference is, until know, it was done just by a few people, because not all photographers could really master the lab, and plenty of adjustments can be done in there (and even techniques like cross processing). But nowadays everybody can use their favorite software (even online) to do the same thing, and the funny thing is the same people who did lab processing in the film days, or had someone to do it for them, are those who now are pointing the finger towards digital processing.

The photo medium itself has a fair share of limitations: there isn’t just one kind of film and you have to choose between the obvious B&W or Color to other features like the color temperature or film grain. All of this means the captured photo already is a distorted image, because in nature there are no such things like film grain. The applies to the sensors in digital cameras, which doesn’t react to light the same way the human eye does: extreme post processing like HDR sometimes is not that extreme because current technology has a smaller range than the human eye.

Even a lens can manipulate a photo, in the SLR world a 50mm (or 35mm for digital cameras) is regarded as the lens with human eye’s perspective, which means that every other focal length is in fact distorting reality. Another fine example of lenses distorting reality is lomography, where one of the coolest things is the extremely saturated colors due to the poor quality of the optic elements that were used.

It’s easy to find an example of how a photo is a distorted view of reality, which makes much harder to mark the frontier of “too much post processed” photos. Overall I have no problem with tools like Photoshop or Gimp, because that’s what they are: tools, just like a lens or a tripod. Almost every photo I upload to Flickr had some kind of digital post processing, even if only minor adjustments in levels, curves or contrast . And the fact is: Photoshop can only turn a bad photo into a slightly less bad photo, but rarely a really good one.

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