Night photography

Since I don’t have time to update these sites, I’ve decided to temporarily suspend them. I plan to recreate both under common name and a single address, but it’s going to happen no sooner than in a few months. I’ve made backup of all posts and comments, and they will be imported to a new site. See you later.

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If you ever wanted to create quickly an index-print of your pictures, here’s the solution for the terminal-savvy:

montage -trim -tile 5x8 -geometry 100x80+0+0 *.jpg out_%d.jpg

This command (given that you have ImageMagick installed) will create an image named out_0.jpg with 40 (or less) thumbnails 100 pixels long from your pictures. They will be arranged in eight, 80 pixels high, rows , five thumbnails per row. If you have more than 40 pictures in your directory, further files will be created: out_1.jpg, out_2.jpg, etc. It’s that simple. However, you should create an index-print on the resized images - if you put in files straight from a camera (let say, 6 megapixels) more than hundred pictures will most likely eat all available RAM. Use web versions instead.

I’m perfectly aware that there are easier or more convenient ways of doing the same. But I believe that those of you who live in the terminal will appreciate this method, especially that it can be part of a larger, shell-based workflow (dump pictures, convert to jpgs all RAW files, rename according to Exif data, resize for web, make index-print, make an album, publish).

Below is an index-print created with ImageMagick.

Tags: linux, mac osx, software tools

The Light Crafts company released their main product, Lightzone, for free for linux systems. LightZone is a zone-based image editing software with unusual, but pretty useful workflow. It supports RAW files for all major DSLRs. The linux version works with all major linux distributions and window managers. More information at sonic.net/~rat/lightcrafts/.

Tags: linux, photography tools, software tools

You always wanted to be a night photographer but never found a good reason to become one? Here you have five:

1. Big wow-factor. Your non-photographing friends will praise your 10 minutes star trails exposure and consider a random moving car lights a great photographic idea. Very likely they will ask you for prints or at least to send them the photos.
2. Stories about your alone night walks with a camera will create an adventurous legend surrounding you.
3. You will become a part or world’s elite - night photographers are a very small part of the photo-snapping world.
4. Each properly exposed frame is worth keeping and sharing - most likely there’s no similar taken (see above).
5. Your passion gives you a good reason to (depends on a … seniority?) a.) ask a close friend for a late night walk b.) leave home in the evening.

But most important and most serious reason to photograph at night is that feeling of calm, internal peace and invisible connection with other night-lovers… It’s rare, it’s rewarding, it’s definitely worth these few hours of sleep.

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After many weeks of being mostly occupied with daylight stuff, here it is.

Fog was the reason this shooting session lasted only hour. I didn’t prepare anything to protect camera against humidity (thing to remember next time) and the spot I chose wasn’t the best one (few hundred meters further fog was almost absent) - but I least I made some interesting shots. The white horizontal line near the bottom comes from car passing by during the exposure.

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