Tag: photo

Directing, 2003-08-14 Toronto

A woman in business attire stands in the middle of a downtown street. It is late afternoon on 14th August 2003, the first day of the blackout. She is facing west along a street with streetcar lines: her shadow from a beam of sunlight from between two buildings is prominent behind her. Her dark jacket is folded over her left arm, and her right arm is extended in a Stop gesture. No traffic is visible, but there are many pedestrians visible behind her
Directing, 2003-08-14 Toronto

Not a great scan, but it’s a photo I thought I’d lost forever.

Taken in Toronto on the afternoon of the 2003 blackout, I was struck by the way she directed traffic in the middle of the intersection.

(as previously shared on mltshp and subsequently to twitter.)

creature so smol

This little one was napping in the sun on the bike path.

fun with darktable

LiquidI’m really impressed with darktable, a raw photo workflow for Linux.  Unlike Gimp, it uses floating point for all image processes, so it doesn’t get caught up in quantization error. It’s a non-destructive editor, too: it assumes your source images are like negatives, and any changes you make are only applied to the exported images. Darktable also has a very intuitive black and white filtering mode (where you apply a virtual colour filter to the front of the lens, and see the results in real time) and some very powerful geotagging features. I’m sold.

darktable-uiIt’s not immediately obvious how some of the features work, and it took me a few hours (and some reading of the manual — eek!) to get files to export as I wanted them. It’s not quite perfect yet — the map feature can become unresponsive if you click too much on image icons — but it’s definitely solid enough for my purposes.

More of my initial darktable attempts on flickr: A Day by the Lake.

So that’s how the Raspberry Pi camera fits in the CamdenBoss housing …

 

The CamdenBoss Raspberry Pi Camera Enclosure (data sheet, suppliers: RPI CAMERA BOARD – RASPBERRY-PI – ADD-ON BRD, CAMERA MODULE, RASPBERRY PI | Newark element14 Canada, MCM Electronics Carbon Raspberry Pi Camera Case 83-15493 – Micro Center) comes with no instructions. Maybe the lighter coloured ones are easier to work out, but on the faux-carbon one I bought, the little guide slots the board has to slide into are very hard to see.

Given all the warnings about static, I was a little too careful trying to install the camera into the housing. Slip open the camera case, then put the board in at an angle with one side in one slot, then (with a bit more force than I’d like) spring or flex the housing so the other side of the board can click into place. You have to make sure that both sides are fully engaged in the slots before the cover will slide back on.

So here it is, all set up:

raspberry_pi_and_camera_agh_my_retinas

Oh, sorry;  should’ve warned you about the bright pink case and the awesome/appalling Lisa Frank sticker. The sticker is in no way to cover up where I cut the wrong place for the camera connector, nope nope nope …

to scan film, or not

I’ve recently taken up film photography again. But processing is expensive.

To have 24 exposures processed and scanned at 6MP at Downtown Camera costs $12 + tax. That’s a pretty good price for black and white.

I can process at home (yay stinky toxic chemicals!) for a bit less. I’d need to buy a scanner, and the cheapest film scanners come in at around $300.

What to do, what to do?