Thursday, February 13, 2014

On Photography ... part 2

Or the world hasn't suffered enough.

After my nifty copied-from-somewhere script did its job converting NEFs to JPEGs, the job is pretty much done done.  But I want to inflict more sufferings to the world by uploading the pictures to more social media in addition to this blog.  I figure maybe I should downsize the pictures more so I can upload them faster to Instagram--the destination for what I have for lunch.  Hence the below nifty script I copied and modified from somewhere ...
mogrify -resize 40% -unsharp 0x6+0.5+0 *.jpg
This resizes the files to 40% of the original and sharpen the pictures.  Sounds good enough for me.

Here comes the more difficult part.

The above were done on my cheapo Ubuntu 12.04 LTS.  It's an adequate machine until you need to talk to iPhone for example.

Anyway to make a short story long.  Here is what I have been doing.  I make the folders where my downnsized JPEGs sharable.  I copy those downsized files to my Windows machine which is installed with Instagram within Bluestacks which is forever in beta and rightly so as it's quite unstable but not to the extent that's totally unusable.  But it has its fair amount of glitches.  My recent New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 #nyfw, #nyc pictures are almost all done in this fashion.   http://instagram.com/laichungleung--post from the Instagram within Bludstacks on the Windows 7 machine.

That's all folks.



On Photography ... part 1

Once I am done shooting.  I remove one or two of my cheapo SD cards from my D7000 and plug it into my, what else, cheapo card reader.  I run Ubuntu 12.04 with four cores and a meager 4GB of RAM.  Shotwell Photo Manager is the piece of software to organize the pictures.  "Organize" is such a word that I most often ignore or fail to live up to.  Basically the software copies all the pictures and arrange them in year, month, and day order,  which is good enough for me.  To convert those NEF files, I run ufraw-batch to convert those files en masse.  Usually I blindly convert them without being selective.  Defending on the number of NEF files I process it can take some time.

I created an executable batch file like below
ufraw-batch --conf=DSC_1019.ufraw --create-id=no --wb=camera --rotate=camera --out-type=jpg --compression=95 --clip=film --out-path=JPEG/ *.NEF


... to be continued (or not)

Wednesday, February 12, 2014

New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 Part 2






New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 Part 1






New York Fashion Week Fall 2014 Part 0






The Mysterious World of Syncing i Devices

I don't bother syncing anything.  I don't understand it and I don't do it until I think I absolutely need to do it.  Anything I know about syncing is I thought I know but actually don't.
I thought I could create an empty folder on my PC and sync to my iPhone pictures so as to delete them in one shot.  No can do.  According to somebody, sync has nothing to do with Camera Roll.  So that's news to me.  So to erase all my pictures on my iPhone Camera Roll, I just do it via Windows erase after import.

I can never understand syncing.

On Photography ... part 0

Just kidding.

I don't know what people's digital workflows are but I know mine is painstaking, painful and rewarding.  The rewarding part is bull, I feel like to write it in.

I have illusions of grandeur and I'd like to think my files would enjoy some later use, like for Magnum, AP, Reuters, National Geographic so on and so forth.  So for stuff I think that are important which is like everything, I tend to shoot in NEF which is the equivalent of I don't know what I am doing so I will shoot with the biggest, baddest and most salvageable format in case I need to squeeze the last bit of data from the file.  The "in case" part have never materialized and if history is any indication, it most likely will never happen.

... to be continued (or not)

Civil War (2024)

This is basically a Dorothy yellow brick road kind of story.  Also, something to do with the new replaces the old, the circle of life thing....