spotted in riga, latvia, at the university, during software freedom day 2008.

Truly fitting image about the ISA, in the wake of recent happenings. Feel free to use the image, its CC-BY-NC-SA.

(for those international readers, Kamunting is where the ISA detainees are held [sat view]. This photo however, was taken in the middle of Kuala Lumpur)

I had a media pass - all thanks to Talents Magazine - not that it really mattered, as there were lots of amateur photographers there, crowding the area, looking to capture the moment. Want to know what successfully separated the wheat from the chaff?

The rain. It came, and it poured. Some scurried under tents (and tried to get people to move out of the way). Some managed to scurry under an umbrella. Most ran away, to protect their precious gear. I, I stayed. And shot through the rain. Much to everyone’s surprise.

The highlights, from me?

Suki, a singer, who ate at Mr. Teppanyaki before performing, because I ate there too

The Balloon Competition Winners

The Balloon Competition Winners pt. II

How quickly can you take off a bra?

The models, with body paint

The models, with body paint

I’m too lazy to wade through the entire set of photos again… You go ahead and enjoy the set. Sloggi: Art for Humanity is where its at.

There, that wasn’t so bad. August 23rd 2008 was when the event was at… Its only September 9th 2008 now :)

Anne and Serhan. Cute, aren’t they? Anne’s a really smart cookie, doing a biotech degree, and considering furthering her studies. She seems to always be stressed about weekly tests, but we’ve assured her they don’t last forever.

Don’t hesitate, to see the rest of the gang, attempting to inhale shisha (apparently, also known as hookah). Originated in India, but popular in the Arab world. Impressive. Oh, the rest of the gang - clicky clicky.

I’ve been getting closer and closer to her, and I can now say, that she really does light up my life!

I notice I drive really slowly when she’s in the car. I even turn the headlights on, in broad daylight. Playing with her, I truly get the meaning of a bundle of joy.

Today, she was on my lap, while I was reading a magazine, and attempting to proof-read it. It was serene.

P/S: More and more pictures to be uploaded in due time… My backlog from November 2007, is still around… iFail

I missed the actual birthday, as I was in Sydney for work (conference joy), but a party two days before, definitely made up for it. Don’t hesitate to check the set out.

I’m excited about One Buck Short. Its a band I tend to track, and photograph when the opportunity arises. I have sets, from 2005 when there were at Celcom/8TV Homegrown, and in 2007 when they were at JamAsia’s re-opening. I have photos from their launch that still require processing, so expect them to arrive online soon enough.

luna:toblog ccharles$ ls |wc -l
29

For a comeback…

I have been checking in my photographic equipment. I already carry a backpack with 2 laptops and various other tech gear (it probably weighs in at around 10KG, which airlines can frown at). Of late, I’ve also started carrying a briefcase. Where does my camera gear fit? In checked-in luggage of course!

This can be anywhere in the reigns of 3 Canon bodies, a 30/1.4, 50/1.4, 24-70/2.8, 70-200/2.8, 17-40/4, and a couple of flash units. Not exactly the cheapest of equipment, as I’m into good glass (read: L).

However, the one place I don’t tend to check equipment in, is when I fly to and from the US. The TSA have a silly rule that says your bags must be unlocked, or else they will break the lock for you. This has naturally led the paranoid me, not want to carry any professional camera gear into the US.

And today, my paranoia proves right. I found out that Matt (Wordpress fame) lost his camera gear, as did another blogger.

Yes, this is on a certain particular American airline, but I wonder if its just baggage handlers that are dishonest with them, or baggage handlers that are dishonest in general? Also note that insurance tends not to pay (afaik, anyway) if your camera equipment or laptop gear is checked-in.

What are options for the technophiles in us, that fly a lot?

Use cases? Those new digital photo frames. Buy two, and have many images scroll by, eh?

What’s been done?
Making use of ImageMagick’s identify is what needs to be done. You’ll be using the -format option, which normally takes a type or string. A full list of what options are available for -format are available.

The choice is to use -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘. The output of identify -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘ is either:

• 1 - portrait
• 6 - landscape
• 8 - portrait (the way I normally shoot, with the battery grip)

I’ve not seen much documentation about the above, so it seems like these values come from trial and error… They apply for Canon cameras that have EXIF orientation details. I’d be interested to hear from others what values they’re getting (or getting pointed to some documentation).

The shell script?

#!/bin/sh

mkdir portrait
mkdir landscape

for i in *.jpg;
	do
	type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format '%[exif:orientation]' $i)
case $type in
	1)
	mv $i portrait;;
	6)
	mv $i landscape;;
	8)
	mv $i portrait;;
esac
done

Other bits of BASH?
If you do: type=$(/opt/local/bin/identify -format ‘%[exif:orientation]‘ $i) , you can grab the value from the command (1, 6, 8) and manipulate it. Check by doing echo $type.

If you’re after getting the return value from a command (i.e. 0 for success, 127 for error, and so on), you can do echo rv: $?.

All in all, remember to read the BashFAQ. Tests and Conditionals was also essential to my reading.

ImageMagick rocks nonetheless. I’ve used it before to resize, append and much more… I’m thinking that maybe its time to read The Definitive Guide to ImageMagick, written by Mikal.

My favourite photo browser, is GQview. Its not standard software any longer, but its pretty old, and it works fairly well. It however, doesn’t support RAW. Today I discovered f-spot (ok, I discovered it ages ago, but I didn’t like its iPhoto-ness, where it wants to import stuff for you). Never fear, that’s what

    f-spot –view <path>

is for. Shortcut wise, its a little different, so I just use the up/down arrow keys to browse.

Now to convert the RAW files to JPGs, with preservation of EXIF data. I played around with the commands manually after reading the man page for dcraw, and figured there must be a better way. So I hopped on over to Yahoo!, did a little search, and came up with Jamie Zawinski’s mvpix. After changing the script a tad bit to suit my environment, I have images! RAW, JPEG, and copies of the JPEGs in an EDIT folder. mvpix also works on OS X.

The options being passed to dcraw seem to be simple: -w for using camera supplied white balance, -t 0 for no tilting, and -c for writing decoded images to stdout. Its passed to cjpeg, and run at 95% quality. However, the images seem to be a tad different, and I have no idea why.

On left, is when the camera was shooting in RAW+JPEG, and on right is the JPEG generated from the RAW file (click for larger image). These are 100% zooms.

The colour differences befuddles me. Why does the camera come out with “brighter” RAW, and dcraw come up with paler tones?

On left, is what the in-camera JPEG gives, when you’re shooting in RAW+JPEG, in the middle is what UFRaw sees from the RAW file, and on the right is what the converted JPEG looks like, after being parsed through dcraw+cjpeg (click for larger image).

What gives? Are there better options in dcraw to give me an as-close-to-in-camera JPEG experience? Are the converted images better/more true coloured? I’m not sure which to pick, and I’m not sure what’s the correct setting, to be honest.

Now about the photos. Apologies to the girl pictured here, all I know is that she’s probably a student at the Caulfield Campus of Monash University (so no, I don’t know her name). She was randomly picked for some quick studio photos, which was really just a bunch of us playing with a few studio strobes, and having the power of wireless triggers. These photos all rolled off an EOS 350D digital back, with a 50mm/1.4 lens attached to it, shot at f/1.6, at 1/25s. Sure, this should have really been made at f8, but there was no time to coax the girl.

Technorati Tags: linux, raw, cr2, gqview, f-spot, jpg, dcraw, mvpix, cjpeg, colour correction