Shack, Aldrich Rd, 2010-02-03
I like taking pictures of … neglect. I don’t like the word neglect, so much, but rather the character a structure expresses after being abandoned to the elements. There’s another shack out on Aldrich Rd that I’ve been meaning to photograph, too.
Shack, Aldrich Rd, 2010-02-03
Expose to the Right
I was very impressed by Ray Maxwell’s explanation of what a histogram on a digital camera shows in Maxwell’s House episode 60 [http://twit.tv/mh60]. The histogram is showing the amount of pixels that have a particular exposure and that exposure is power. So the further right on the histogram you go, the brighter the luminance.
However, the halfway point on the histogram isn’t necessarily the halfway point of the color resolution. What does this mean? Well, if the furthest right you can go on a histogram is brightest white, say, 256, one stop down (1/2 the exposure, thus, 1/2 the power) is 128. Two stops down is 64. Goodness…how many stops are there on a gray scale? 10? That means 32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1….Does that mean that we run out of bits as we enter the dark end of the photo? Yup.
The previous episodes explain how this is managed using color spaces. This episode’s advice indicates a few bits of advice: 1) camera’s don’t themselves have ICC color profiles,
2) shoot in raw because that’s the full color resolution (common knowlege these days)
3) overexposing a bit will give you smoother tones, and a good way to get this effect is to set the “contrast” setting on the camera to “low contrast”.
4) the histogram you see on the camera is actually only possible after converting the raw image thru a color space (like sRGB).
5) what actually determines the information of the raw photo is a) ISO, b) shutter speed, and c) aperature. Other settings, like saturation, contrast, and white balance, are manipulations of the raw photo into JPG format (and that of course is done through color-space).
Neat stuff, good episode. I’m inspired to move towards using DNG format on my Pentax K10 now. The only bummer is that the Gimp doesn’t natively support DNG raw format (last I checked.)
Rebar, 2010-02-19
Bob the Build-*cough!* Ahem, ahem! Bob the…get the tune out of my head! Kevin, start whistling, please!
Rebar, 2010-02-19
I’m going to be building and building…software…but not my sink. This is not a matter of confidence, this is a matter of reliability.
Well, the Microsoft has Landed on the Jed
I spent all day getting my workstation to build a set of pretty intense C# projects. I’m impressed that we got it working in a day (not counting the four days it took to straighten out my Visual Studio install on my Vista workstation). Having developed projects in Perl, PHP, Java and C, and having been a Linux administrator for 15 years, the process was a bit different, of course.
The biggest difference is how many commercial components I had to manage. Contrast this to a Linux environment where most packages are either pre-installed, or managed by the distribution maintainers. In a Linux distribution, having to hand-roll and maintain out-of-band libraries is not really kosher. One of the things I installed today blew my Windows Explorer away…literally, in one case, a hybrid Java-based installer crashed the Aero interface and dumbed my desktop down to “Windows Basic.” Wow, 64 bit Vista at that.
The other thing that I reflected on was the amount of “oral tradition” that guided the application setup. Since there’s never been a product installer (this being a web based application), setting up the IIS application was never scripted. Wow! This was like nothing I’ve done before using Apache. I can see how an apache .htaccess file would be like black magic compared to an IIS Basic Settings dialog…but its usually just a file kept in source control and often just another bit of automatically deployed collateral…and just another bit of code to a programmer. In this case IIS really involved hand-holding.
The combination of 64-bit and 32-bit libraries was tricky. IIS 7 was not happy for a while until we forced it to run applications as 32-bit. I’ve seen plenty of 32/64 bit dissonance on Linux before. It’s actually quite sad that 64-bit architectures have been around for what…20 years (the Alpha) and it’s still a problem. (It’s still a problem on my home Ubuntu box: Firefox won’t touch my Adobe Flash.) I wish someone, a decade ago, came up with fundamentally better ideas on how to deal with combining 32- and 64-bit software together. The notion of “just keep them separate” is quite unrealistic…unfortunately, it just increases the pain…and quite unacceptable when it comes to customers that have invested in proprietary 32-bit development libraries–people won’t pay for 64 bit versions if the 32-bit ones can be made to work. Makes me appreciate how much work has gone into making so many Linux distros 64-bit friendly, really. The crazy IIS install also made me love bash scripting all the more…it made me think this would be a great time to learn Power Shell and create a PoSH installer for all the components. (It won’t get asked for, tho.)
Time to keep an open mind. Time to shelve my pride. I am now at a place where PHP has being stomped out like a smoking cigarette butt. The last time I coded full time in a Windows GUI was in San Francisco, using JBuilder, approaching a decade ago. The JBuilder eventually got discarded for Notepad++ and well crafted Ant scripts. I wouldn’t think that anyone now would have the chance to discard Visual Studio 2008.
My last thot is…gosh, this is what, like, a million other programmers use every day. I’ve been using F/LOSS components for so long, I forget how much of the world F/LOSS is almost entirely missing. In “typical” desktop and server environment, Windows is still the majority in much of the world. Some day I will develop more with Linux. Mostly, I am grateful to still be employed…that’s is definitely the most important point of all. I won’t let Microsoft be a barrier to that.
Sunset, Aldrich Rd, 2010-02-19 (Panorama)
Another wide format (dual monitor) desktop background. This included a clever combination of a hard-light filter and a graded mask…otherwise there was only one other trick and you better guess what it was. (No, it was not in post processing.)
Sunset, Aldrich Rd., 2010-02-19
Computer Shopping!
My mom just asked for advice on a computer. C’mon! I can’t pass that up? I showed her some prices on parts to setup a dual 24″, dual SSD, Intel i5 workstation for not too much. I should post links but not tonight. I’m soooo surprised this combination doesn’t pop out in searches easier. (Me: smug? Uh-huh!)
Mt Baker from Aldrich Rd (Panorama) 2010-02-19
Here’s an attempt at making a very wide desktop background: 2560×1024. There are obviously better photos I could have chosen, but this one was recent. I think I need to figure out how to turn my bicycle into a tripod. I could certainly lose the shake, even on a 28mm lens.
Mt. Baker from Aldrich Rd, 2010-02-19
Feel free to tease me about this photo. You can even do that on twitter now: @jed_reynolds or @bitratchet.
Monitor gamma, cont.
A very fundamental idea wandered my way on the topic of adjusting my digital photography work-flow for … anonymous (for lack of a better term) monitors. These monitors have not been adjusted by anyone, likely. Their settings typically would reflect little more than entropy. Do I care for all my work to look good on any monitor? I shouldn’t…it’s not worth my time. This explains why many photography web sites have a gray-scale on their doormat. If someone really wants to enjoy my photos, they need to adjust their monitor in order to appreciate any photo. Otherwise, I should only ever compose images in the Netscape color cube–256 colors.
Some basic monitor adjustment. And more basic monitor adjustment.
To enjoy your world more…please adjust your monitor.
Twitterfeed test
Let’s see…this should show up on @bitratchet #bitratchet #twfeed
More Discussion on Monitor Gamma
This discussion of monitor gamma has some more math about the subject, and different diagnostic images.
Wildly Varying Monitor Gamma
With all my recent photo work, I’ve started developing an eye for how my photos are looking on different monitors. I have an LG monitor at home for which I have a ICM profile for. I can get Ubuntu to load this profile using xcalib. At work, I have two Viewsonics that don’t live on viewsonic.com anymore, and there are no model specific ICM profiles available for them to download. So on my recent Ravenna Tree Sign picture, the Viewsonic monitors displayed that picture distinctly darker than my home monitor. I upped the gamma setting on my viewsonics to 1.50 (?) using the on-screen-menu. However, this is all very vague–using on-screen menus isn’t necessarily the bees knees. This leads me to wonder: What is a typical screen gamma?
According to this ancient discussion on monitor gamma photo.net, Macs and PCs have an entirely different default range, 1.5 for Macs, 2.2 for PCs (Windows). Apparently this lead to a development of storing gamma-hints in picture formats(?) First I’ve heard of this. However, here is an interesting monitor gamma dipstick posted in that thread:
Monitor Gamma Dipstick
On an LCD monitor, moving your head around makes the gamma value change. So if I tilt my monitor up to be more perpendicular to my line of sight, I change the apparent gamma from 1.65 to 1.35. Wow, looking at the picture in this html editor, it’s now 1.05. I think if someone were to pay me to do this stuff, I think I’d probably stop using an LCD to do color managed work. (Are there good LCD monitors for color managed work?)
If you have trouble viewing my pictures, or if you think they are too light or too dark, let me know. I’m not going to get a colorimiter (a Color Spyder) for my home monitor anytime soon, but if my home monitor gamma and brightness off the tracks, I want to know.
Tree Sign, Ravenna Park, 2010-02-15
I’ve walked by this sign in Ravenna park for years. I’m guessing it used to be a yield sign. Now it’s a macabre symbol that reminds me much of the art I produced in middle school.
Tree Sign, Ravenna Park, 2010-02-15
Purple Blossoms, Bellingham, 2010-01-18
I was surfing around looking at campsites tonight. Suggestions appreciated. If this February is a sign of what May will be like, I’m all for it. Consider how vivid these blossoms were in January. Any places you like to camp? Please share.
Purple Blossoms, Bellingham, 2010-01-18
This was a brief experiment tonight doing a “dissolve filter” and a mask. The unfocused background was kinda distracting because it was a lot of lens-circles. I blurred out the whole layer and masked the foreground out of it, dissolved it in and threw a “soft light” to rebuild the color on the blossoms. If you’d like a print of this, please ask.
Simple LDL Measurements Are Meaningless
Recent research shows that different types of LDL pose different risks. I hadn’t know previously that LDL was classified by “small” and “large” particles. However, lots of articles that have been published through the Weston A. Price Foundation journal Wise Traditions have long claimed there is no correlation between high LDL and heart attack risk. There is agreement that low HDL and high triglycerides are a clear risk.
Now consider that the high-carbohydrate diets we (as a nation) are putting into our kids raises their LDL…and doctors want to prescribe statins to children! Are we just blindly handing Big Pharma our money and our health?
Great gobs of FAIL from Amazon
Here’s a great write-up of the Amazon-Macmillan fight. I hadn’t realized how lame Amazon came out in this event.
LinuxFest Northwest 2010 Call For Presenters
At LinuxFest Northwest 2010 I’m going to be presenting on Apache rewrites and MySQL Performance again this year. I see mostly professional level talks posted. I wonder if there will be user-level sessions posted, too? I was considering doing a session on using Gimp. (Think I’m qualified?)
LinuxFest Northwest 2010 April 24-25
I will bring my hackey-sack and ride my bicycle. See you there!
Presenters and Exhibitors:
Online registration is now open for our 11th Annual
LinuxFest Northwest 2010
April 24th and 25th
in Bellingham, Wash.Presenters, register and click “Submit Session Proposal“
Exhibitors, register and click “Request Booth or Exhibit“
Bricks, Bellingham, 2010-01-18
I like the texture of the bricks and I knew I could bring out their color.
Bricks, Bellingham, 2010-01-18
Water Lid, 2010-01-26
This banal piece of rugged hardware has a very strong design. This is an experiment to bring out that bold design.
Water Lid, 2010-01-26
If you’d like a bigger file to print out, please ask.
It was a good day for cycling!
I hauled furniture in the kid trailer today.
Hauling Furnature in the Kid Trailer, 2010-02-08
I saw a wonderful sunset illuminating Mt Baker from Aldrich Rd. on the way home. Yes, I did Aldrich Rd with a bike trailer. I did not walk up any hills.
Mt. Baker seen from Aldrich Rd, Ferndale 2010-02-08
Stones, Squalicum Beach, 2009-01-26
It was cold and rainy. However, I needed to talk a walk. I recall that this walk I had the back of my camera dripping wet from the fog condensing onto my beard. My gloves were soaked, and my jacket sleeves were starting to soak thru into my shirt. But I had my new camera! That made it great!
Stones, Squalicum Beach, 2009-01-26
Celebrating the New Building
I got a lot of really fuzzy pictures. Two were not fuzzy. Rock on!
Narthex, Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship, 2010-02-07
"Don't Stop Believing", Bellingham Unitarian Fellowship, 2010-02-07
Steam Locomotive, Perris, California, 2008
This was a fun trip, but it was hot and all my photos from there were immensely bright and contrasty. I felt like I spent a small eternity comparing the quality of this photo to other photos of locomotive wheels where the grays were smooth and rich … and it dawned on me that I took a photo of a dirty old locomotive. It hadn’t been painted in decades. There was no lipstick I could put on this iron pig…so I rolled in the grit and went for the aged effect!
Steam Locomotive, Perris, California, 2008
Sweat Pea, Seattle, 2009-07-25
I love the Gimp. Tonight’s experiment was producing good looking newsprint, and using layer masks. I think I’m getting this layer mask technique.
Sweat Pea, Seattle, 2009-07-25
If you’d like to get a print of this, please let me know, I’d love to hear from you.
Hexnut Handrail, 2010
Wow, what a pile of layers did I amass to get this look. This was a fun experiment. I love adding grain. I also used a grain extract layer to lighten the middle.
Hexnut Handrail, 2010
Print version? Email me, I’ll put one up. I’d be glad to hear from you.
