Photography

See also Digital Images for more on processing and organizing images. See my /Learning Journal for goals and progress. Also see:

• /Techniques
• Burdenslanding:San Francisco/Photography.

My Equipment

My primary camera is an Olympus OM-D E-M5. I also have a Canon PowerShot S95.

I have a Manfrotto 293A3-A0RC2 tripod with a ball head and QR plate. More on tripods here. I also have a Joby GorillaPod.

I have a Yongnuo 560 III and RF-602 wireless trigger. I may want to get some gels.

Digital cameras have limitations on video length.

Film cameras:

• My Mom's old Olympus Pen D3
• My parents' old Canon EXEE
• My parents' old Nikon N2020

Old cameras:

• Panasonic Lumix DMC-ZS3
• Canon PowerShot SD450.

Manual Lenses

I have a Canon FD 80-200mm f4L. I'm using a Fotodiox Pro Lens Mount Adapter to get it working on my Olympus.

• Using Classic Lenses. Tips and tricks on getting FD lenses working on my camera.
• Using Manual Focus Lenses on Mirrorless Cameras. Look out for Chromatic Aberration.
• Pros and cons of the various Canon 200mm FD primes. I think if I were to get one of these, I'd get the nFD 200mm f4 macro.
• Canon FD Extenders. Looks like the 2x-B teleconverter is what I would need for my lens, which would also effectively make it an f8.

Managing Photos

Most of my public pictures are on Flickr. View analytics via flickrstats. One day, I'll upload some of these to Wikimedia Commons. I'm intrigued by ThisLife and Everpix.

I use Adobe Lightroom for editing and photo management. There have been some suggestions that Olympus Viewer will render the RAW files more effectively than Lightroom, and that you should process RAW in Olympus Viewer, generate 16-bit TIFFs, then import those into Lightroom for processing and management. I've compared the two, and I haven't seen any differences in the rendering. Others have questioned this as well and have pointed out other tradeoffs.

Old

I wrote some of my own tools for cataloging my digital prints, which are now heavily outdated. They were inspired and based heavily on Gerald Oskoboiny's digital photo publishing software.

I'm experimenting with exiflow for managing my digital photography workflow (renaming files, metadata, etc.). F-Spot has an extension that supports an exiflow workflow.

I'm constantly disgruntled by F-Spot, but I keep returning to it, because it keeps getting better. I'm not crazy about F-Spot for importing images off of my digital camera, so I'm thinking about switching the default to gThumb.

I pondered a move to Google Picasa, but decided against it due to lack of development of its Linux client. If I ever do make the move, I'll need to import my F-Spot albums.

And now I've moved to Shotwell, because that's now the default in Ubuntu. I'm thinking about Lyn on my Mac.

Other tools of interest:

• DVD-Slideshow
• PhotoRec. Recovering photos from faulty flash memory

Services for scanning old photos:

• ScanDigital.com
• Lazy Scanning — Photoshop’s Crop and Straighten Command

Notes

Tags + types. Tags can have types. If I want to get really funky, types can have relationships -- an ontology! For example, the "Eugene Eric Kim" tag could be of type "People." This would allow me to do faceted classification.

Collections (or albums) cannot be tags, because you want to be able to do special things, like define cardinality and other metadata within a collection. However, you ought to be able to assign a photo to multiple collections.

I'd love to integrate Greg Elin's Fotonotes for granular annotations.

Developing and Printing

I use Dickerman Prints in SOMA. They're really great, but probably better for specialty printing.

I'm trying Nations Photo Lab (a Wirecutter recommendation) for standard printing. You have to pay for ground shipping unless the order is over $50, so only makes sense for but bulk orders.

I've been using Photoworks San Francisco to develop and scan film.

For ancient film, I've been using Photo Plus 1-hour film processing on Nob Hill.

Film

• How to shoot film
• 12 films worth shooting with before they're gone

I've experimented with Kodak TMax 400 (black and white), Kodak TriX (black and white), Fujifilm Pro 400H (color), and Kodak Portra 400 (color).

For color film, both Koda Portra and Fujifilm Pro 400H are slightly desaturated. Portra is slightly warmer than Pro 400H, but not exceedingly so. I probably prefer the warmth. However, Pro 400H seems to have better dynamic range and an interesting graininess. I'll test more, but right now, I prefer the Pro 400H.

Black and white:

• Black and white film types for film photography
• What black and white film should you start out with? Five popular stocks compared
• Kodak Tri-X: The best black-and-white film ever made?
• The basics of shooting with black and white film

Notes on using expired film. Quick summary:

• The freshness of the film depends on how it was stored (e.g. cool, dry temperatures are optimal)
• Some people advocate for stopping down the film one-stop per ten years, especially higher ISO (400+). Others suggest simply using the box ISO. Experiment to see!

Favorites from Eugene Chan

• lobsters
• under the golden gate
• pig pastries
• piano
• leaf
• underwater calder
• Bay Bridge
• sailboat
• ray
• jellyfish
• rays of light
• bus

Photo Mosaics

The best tool for doing these on Linux seems to be metapixel:

• Generating Awesome Photomosaics on Linux with Metapixel
• Create Photo Mosaics with Metapixel
• Three photo mosaic apps compared

Photographers

• Tom Robinson Photography. Love this guy's photos.
• Neil Ta
• Elaine Mayes

Mentions from my photography class (April-May 2013):

• Todd Hido. Look at his use of color.
• Uta Barth
• Doug Rickard

See Also

• Solar eclipse
• The Bastards Book of Photography: An open-source guide to working with light
• The Ideal Digital Photographer's Workflow, Part 1, Part 2
• Top Ten Digital Photography Tips
• Legal Misconceptions
• DIY Photo Booth (on Mac)
• How to make a time-lapse video from stills (using iPhoto and QuickTime)