Photography

See also Digital Images for more on processing and organizing images.

My Camera

I have a Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3 and a Canon PowerShot SD450.

When I was considering the Lumix, I also considered:

• Four new PowerShot models
• Canon PowerShot SX10 IS Review

For my upcoming BurdensLanding:Korea trip, I'm considering a new camera:

Camera	Thoughts	Links	Examples
Canon G11			Canon G11 Part 3 (portraits). Beautiful portrait shots. G11 shots on Flickr Timelapse (using CHDK) and other awesome pics
Canon S90		Digital Photography Review	Shallow depth-of-field S90 shots on Flickr

One day, I'm going to get a Leica M8:

• Leica M8 Hands-on Field Review
• Flickr pictures taken with a Leica M8

Other possible equipment:

• Solica ST500 Tripod

Managing Photos

Most of my public pictures are on Flickr.

I wrote some of my own tools for cataloging my digital prints, which are now heavily outdated. They were inspired and based heavily on Gerald Oskoboiny's digital photo publishing software.

I'm experimenting with exiflow for managing my digital photography workflow (renaming files, metadata, etc.). F-Spot has an extension that supports an exiflow workflow.

I'm constantly disgruntled by F-Spot, but I keep returning to it, because it keeps getting better.

I'm not crazy about F-Spot for importing images off of my digital camera, so I'm thinking about switching the default to gThumb.

I pondered a move to Google Picasa, but decided against it due to lack of development of its Linux client. If I ever do make the move, I'll need to import my F-Spot albums.

Other tools of interest:

• DVD-Slideshow

Notes

Tags + types. Tags can have types. If I want to get really funky, types can have relationships -- an ontology! For example, the "Eugene Eric Kim" tag could be of type "People." This would allow me to do faceted classification.

Collections (or albums) cannot be tags, because you want to be able to do special things, like define cardinality and other metadata within a collection. However, you ought to be able to assign a photo to multiple collections.

I'd love to integrate Greg Elin's Fotonotes for granular annotations.

Favorites from Eugene Chan

• lobsters
• under the golden gate
• pig pastries
• piano
• leaf
• underwater calder
• Bay Bridge
• sailboat
• ray
• jellyfish
• rays of light
• bus

Techniques

Introduction to White Balance. Use an 18% gray card for better color balance.

Wide aperture (smaller f-stop) decreases depth of field and gives you blurry background.

Try increasing the ISO for darker shots or action shots.

shutter speed

My camera doesn't have aperture or shutter priority modes, but they're good features to be aware of.

8 Guidelines to Taking Panoramic Photos with any Camera.

Aperture

A nice explanation of apertures and focal lengths, and why you can't get good depth-of-field in point-and-shoot cameras (like mine).

In general, to [get shallow depth-of field], especially w/ point-and-shoot cameras:

• Lower F-stop numbers (larger apertures)
• Longer focal lengths (zoom in)
• Get closer to the subject

Online Depth of Field Calculator

High-Dynamic Range Images

• The Definitive Guide to Realistic High Dynamic Range Images
• HDR in Gimp

Panoramic

• GigaPan

Photo Mosaics

The best tool for doing these on Linux seems to be metapixel:

• Generating Awesome Photomosaics on Linux with Metapixel
• Create Photo Mosaics with Metapixel
• Three photo mosaic apps compared

References

• The Ideal Digital Photographer's Workflow, Part 1, Part 2
• Top Ten Digital Photography Tips