More photographic goodness

Odd, the way I seem to work on this at roughly the same time each month. I'll chalk that up to a strange coincidence. Or perhaps it's indigestion.

Reality's nice when it steps on your ideas. I've backed off on the licensing for my photos, mainly because there are complications -- For example, the belly dancing. I may not have the rights to let anyone use the photos (But I'll know that in advance) -- and perhaps more importantly, I think that you should have the consent of the person photographed before you use it for any purpose whatsoever. There are many fine lines surrounding this point -- for example, most of my photos are taken in public, so I can do with them as I will.

In the end, I guess the point is that I'd prefer that people ask -- While I don't generally care what or how they're used, I would still like to know that they're being used, and on a per-photo basis. On that note, I plan to start watermarking the images I put up, which may make all of this moot. The images are relatively low-res, but they're good enough for many purposes.

Meanwhile. The hacking on Photo Organizer continues; a good many of my changes made it into the latest release (Long descriptions, Colorspace awareness, storing orientation, and a boatload of smaller enhancements and fixes) and I have more work pending, including sub-album support, the use of unsharp mask for sharpening tasks, and much improved RAW handling.

I've started taking pictures with the camera set to RAW mode. This spits out only slightly-processed data straight from the camera's sensor, without any sharpening, gamma, or (lossy) compression applied. Unfortunately this means the images need to be post-processed to be usable. I'm thinking that I'll need to further extend PO so that the sharpening and RAW settings can be specified on a per-image basis, as the camera isn't doing it any more. This gives you a much wider latitude in what you can get out of images if you know what you're doing. For example, the following image looked almost completely black in the auto-generated JPEG, but I was able to crank up the levels on the RAW image and I ended up with this rather neat image:

This is my favorite picture of late. Can you tell where it is, without looking at the few which precede it?

As a birthday present to myself, I bought an MC Rubinar 500/5.6 mirror lens -- which is essentially a small telescope with a Nikon camera mount. After about a month, I'm now getting the hang of its quirks. My tripod isn't solid enough to use it for decent moon shots yet. So I'm now window shopping for a decent tripod, a monopod, and a lens to cover the gap between the 210 and 500mm extremes of my current optical kit.

I've switched back to using stumpy as my walkaround lens, in part because it's light, fast, and fixed at 50mm. Due to the FOV multiplier, it works out to a 75mm equivalent -- so I'm also shopping for a 35mm "wide angle" lens to fill the void of a "what you see" lens. So my wish list is getting longer (another Nikon flash unit, a pair of studio strobes, tripod, monopod, and more lenses than you can shake a dead cat at) but my finances are worse than ever. Damn gas prices! In the mean time, all I can do is go out and take pictures. And save up money for The Complete Calvin & Hobbes. Drool.

Random statistics: PO is now holding on to 13,502 of my photos, comprising 30,460 megabytes of data. Now that sub-albums are in there, the last of my excuses for categorically organizing my collection is removed. Crystal's volunteered to lend her OCD to this task, which will help immensely! We will be sorting out the keepers, or at least get rid of more that are truly awful -- with luck, that will eliminate at least a couple thousand off the top.

Life's getting more interesting again. Yay. My bedroom is almost habitable, lacking only baseboards and door trim. Yay. It's lunchtime. Yay.