Category Archive

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

Recently I decided to install a gphoto2, open source software for controlling digital camera on my Mac computer. It wasn’t very straightforward, but with some help from friends I managed to make it working.

gphoto2 is just an interface - it depends on the library called (surprise, surprise) libgphoto2 and without this library you cannot use it at all. There are two ways of obtaining this library: the first one is to use DarwinPorts and the second - compile everything by yourself.
I really do not recommend compiling libgphoto2 (and libusb, and few other things needed) for many reasons. Probably the most important is, that the newest libgphoto2 (2.2.1) will not compile under Mac OSX. Few people tried, including myself and nobody succeeded at that. Interestingly, the previous version (2.1.6) will compile and install without any problems BUT it will not work anyway.
Now, when I convinced you to use DarwinPorts, here’s the procedure I used to make gphoto2 working under OSX:

1. Install DarwinPorts and then, install libgphoto2 (available from libgphoto2.darwinports.com) with command: sudo port install libgphoto2. It will download all needed libraries for you and install all of them under /opt/.

2. Download gphoto2, unpack, go to it’s directory and configure with: configure –prefix=/opt/local. The script is not smart enough to search for libraries at /opt/local directory unless you’ve added this to global libraries path. Type then, make, and sudo make install. You will most probably need to provide your password. Remember, that it will be installed under /opt/local/bin - you may want to adjust your $PATH variable.
3. Now is the trick I couldn’t find elsewhere. When your camera (set to PTP mode, remember?) is connected to the computer, kill the process named (all in one line):

/System/Library/Image Capture/Devices/PTPCamera.app/Contents/MacOS/PTPCamera

with a kill command. It’s necessary, otherwise gphoto2 will not be able to capture proper usb device.

That’s all.

After connecting my Nikon D70 I was able to trigger capturing - using gphoto2 –capture-image command.

All command line options of gphoto2 you may find on its man page. For features list go to the Gphoto Project home page.

Tags: No Tags

While photographing at night I started to think that some software with ability to predict what is going to happen on the night sky (for example, Moon sets or rises, presence and time of meteor showers) would be very useful. Online tool wasn’t an option - there are times I don’t have internet connection. I looked at standalone, preferably open source programs. There’s plenty of free software for watching night sky, like Celestia, Stellarium or Kstars. I knew about them but I chose to install Xephem on my Mac. It’s not the prettiest program available, it does not have fancy graphics like competitors mentioned before and being so powerful Xephem is probably an overkill for a night photographer. It’s features list is long and target audience are rather astronomers. Why I chose it?

- it does not eat computer’s resources almost at all

- its features may actually be quite useful in the near future, because I want to jump into astrophotography some day

- it has a nice window called Night-At-Glance - it’s an overview of what is happening on the sky on the particular night

Here’s the mandatory screenshot.

Note on installing: Xephem is available for all major linux/unix systems mainly. Installation under OSX should be performed through Fink - otherwise you may run into trouble while compiling it by yourself. I haven’t tried installation under MS Windows, but Xephem’s homepage states it’s possible.

Why all this you may ask. Here’s the answer - look at this photo by Brian Chapman. It’s one of the most stunning examples of night photography I’ve seen recently.

Tags: night photography, software tools, xephem

E-paper devices are just appearing on the market and first users as always carry the weight of making them usable. But I believe they will make it eventually. Imagine a A5 sized device which is light, has good readability, great contrast, long battery life and contains somewhere around 100 and 500 kilos of books - almost perfect, isn’t it? Well, if I were going to spend a few hundreds on this I would like to have couple features more. After stumbling around already released and expected to release e-paper devices I collected a wish-list of features my perfect e-paper device should have: Read the rest of this entry »

Tags: epaper