Monday, December 31, 2012

All work and no play...

So far, this blog has been related to what I do work wise.  Well, it's time to shift, especially for the new year.  Time to start posting on my hobbies and other activities, and how I use Linux tools to do various hobbies.

My (current) hobbies:
  • Scuba diving
  • Photography
  • Wood Working
Sadly, I have pretty much neglected all of these due to time constraints (work, house remodel/repair, life, etc).  But this year, I have at least been able to do some decent photography with two new cameras (Canon Rebel T1i, GoPro Hero 2), and even combine this with scuba diving to produce some stunning raw video.



With the Canon, I shoot only raw images.  This way, I have more control over editing.  If I need to convert them for posting, I can do it faster and more accurately on the computer anyways.  For the GoPro, I am still getting the hang of it, but I think I may stick with 1080p for most video.

So, how does this relate to Linux????

I am currently focusing on a large collection of digital photos taken from our recent Caribbean cruise.  Every afternoon, I would gather SD cards from everyone in our group (5 people, 7 cameras) and download them to my netbook.  Some from cell phones, some from point & shoot cameras, and then my two cameras above.  In total, I have ~1400 photos and ~12 hours of videos to go through.

I use Digikam to manage all of my photos into albums.  For this trip, I made a central album, followed by sub-albums for each individual's photos.  When I upload them, I can mass-edit the meta info with locations, dates, who did the shooting, etc.  This comes in really handy later on when I want to assemble them into albums by date or location (for example, all photos from everyone taken in St Croix).


Before editing
Unfortunately, not everyone in our group is an avid photographer (including me).  Face it, we all make mistakes when trying to go for excellent photos.  For example, my mother, who used to be in a photography club (not sure if she still goes or not), recently switched to digital, using a Canon Powershot (I know this because Digikam recorded the camera information in the meta data - already a plus).  Unfortunately, she left the date stamp turned on (in camera club, they call that a noob fail).  So I have to edit.

Date stamp removed
For editing, I am using a powerful program called the GIMP.  I haven't used it before, but I am learning fast.  Through the power of Google, I have found tips on how to remove this annoying "feature". Important tip for digital photograpy; turn off the date stamp.  You can always add it later in a less intrusive location and better format (Digikam can do this in batch mode).

Another issue we all had was taking photos over water.  One rule of good photography is that you want to keep the horizon level (otherwise the ocean flows out the side of your picture, right).  After removing the timestamp from this photo, I was able to fine tune the rotation by -10 degrees, then trim the edges by ~20 pixels.  This was very quick and easy (and as an added bonus, it also re-blended the area where the timestamp was making it completely disappear).



What about the case of a cell phone camera that somehow had its color balance out of adjustment?  Here is a nice photo taken by another member of our group on her Android cell phone.  Note the over-saturation of blue.

While there is probably a better way to fix this, I went with a vintage black & white photo conversion.  Here's the result:

Ok, back to editing.  I still have a LOT of photos to sift/sort/edit/mutilate.  I should also point out that for the Windows users, these tools are also available for you to download and install.  Just follow the links above.  Photos can be viewed here.

My goal is to finish editing this pool of photos down to the best ~600-800 and then I will work on a video slideshow DVD for the family members that were there.  I'll blog about the tools I use for that when I get to that stage.  I'm already looking at combining the best tools available to produce one stream.  Digikam has an excellent  slideshow, as well as LibreOffice, and other open source tools.


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