Posting Photos from the Field

If you just take photos on a mobile phone ...no problem!

 

But what if you have a proper camera?

Here are a few tech notes from our 2nd holiday to Costa Rica

AllSky: taking pictures of the night sky

I'd heard that a meteor shower was on its way

so I rushed around and built a camera system.

Geeqie Data Overlay Customisation

Geeqie is a great application for viewing photos.

 

Its easy to display photo data (e.g. EXIF) and even chose how & what you want to display.

So this post explains how to do it!

Gimp: Trim photos for required Aspect Ratio

I generally trim my photos for what I consider to be the best composition.

 

So I end up with a photo collection of odd shaped rectangles.

But sometimes it is necessary to trim them to a pre-defined aspect ratio, maybe for publication.

Olympus ED 75-300mm zoom lens

Buying cheap zoom lenses generally leads to disappointment.

 

And you often eventually end up trading the damn thing in for something more expensive, costing even more money in the long run.

But we went ahead and bought this low cost lens anyway.

Olympus OM-D Firmware Updates: not using Windows or Mac

We love our 3 Olympus OM-D cameras.

 

But I was less happy recently when I wanted to update the firmware.

However, I've now found away around my problem.

Olympus OM-D E-M5 mark 2

I've never been able to resist a good body.

 

Especially when the controls feel nice and are easy to access.

Yes, I'm talking cameras once again!

Photography: I like manual lenses

Manual lenses can be a lower cost alternative to those that support automatic operation.

The disadvantages are pretty obvious.

But I still prefer to manually set the camera before releasing the shutter.

Hacking my Pentax K to M4/3 lens adapter

Lens adapters that allow you to connect different format lenses to camera bodies can be very handy.

But they ideally need to be the correct length to maintain focus range.

I decided to try to hack an adapter that is just 1mm or so too short.

Using Pentax SLR lenses on a micro four thirds camera

Although we got rid of the majority of our Pentax gear over a year ago, I still have a few lenses.

Since these are just gathering dust, I thought I'd try to put them to use...

...so I bought a lens adapter!

The Olympus 9mm Body Cap Lens

A lens the size of a camera body cap!

Is it any good?

I guess there is only one way to find out.

Experimenting with Focus Stacking

Focus Stacking is supposed to be a good way to increase the depth of field, especially for macro photography.

In an idle moment I noticed that my camera had a built in mode to help with this.

So here are my notes on focus bracketing and stacking.

Re-discover the Night Sky #2: stacking images in Gimp

Stacking time-lapse photos of the night sky allows you to create 'star-trail' images.

It is possible to get good results using Gimp by selecting the appropriate layer mode.

This post also describes how I hacked one of the existing Gimp scripts.

Re-discover the Night Sky: star trails

With an improvement in the weather, I thought I'd try a bit of night-sky photography.

One thing I've never attempted is taking time-lapse photos and then stacking them to produce star trails.

I used a RaspiCam for the photos and Gimp to stack and process them.

Camera + monopod + Hugin = Panoramic Photos

I recently started to take an interest in stitching together photos to form panoramas.

The process is not that difficult, but some photos can be more problematic than others.

So here are a few tips.

my photographic workflow: RAW > Geeqie > RawTherapee > Gimp > Jpeg

I seem to change the way that I process photos every 18 months or so.

These changes may affect the choice of photo viewer, editor or even the format used to take photos.

So this post just details my current preferences.

Add Copyright text to Photo with Gimp

Adding a copyright watermark to photos before uploading them to the internet seems like a sensible thing to do.

 

It may deter someone from reusing/stealing your valuable artwork.

Here is my suggested method when running The Gimp on Linux.

Switching from dSLR to micro four thirds

What is it like to use a mirror-less M43 camera after years of using digital SLR cameras?

Is the quality acceptable from the smaller format used in this new breed of camera?

Now that we have made the switch, for us the answer is yes.

Fixing my Pentax K-30 exposure problem: #4 more details on solenoid

I spent a jolly day thinking about the exposure solenoid and doing a few checks.

Everyone has a theory about why the green solenoid is problematic.

I've tried to work out how it operates...

Fixing my Pentax K-30 exposure problem: #3 one problem leads to another!

Having reassembled my K-30 with the replacement solenoid, it was time to test it.

Unfortunately it failed the test, with all photos underexposed.

I think my problem was due to a truly stupid mistake.