Nils Pickert's blog ^pro

If you have a large photo collection (and I am sure you have, you wouldn't be on ipermity if you wouldn't...), you for sure have encountered the problem how to organise your photos and how to keep track of information related to a photo (like the place it was taken etc). I have started a thread in the Open Source Photography Group to share experiences with the programs you use and how you add meta-data to your pictures. Feel free to discuss...

And gone again, this time getting lost in the alps again. No technology for a week...

Enjoy the time without my boring pictures...

You know it's the 21st century when you iron your underpants[1] while watching a 70's avantgarde sci-fi movie with David Bowie. Punk and creases in your underpants no longer exclude each other...

[1] Of yourse I just ironed them to dry faster...

The rumors have it that there will be a Canon 50D soon. So I'll wait for the Photokina (and maybe till I have enough money on my account again to spend it on cameras...)

The specs do not look very impressive, but at least the price of the 40D might drop.

I'll be on vacation for the next two weeks, somewhere in Portugal and southern Spain. I'll continue with the classic cars when I come back, maybe I'll post some vacation pictures during the next two weeks... But I plan to stay offline as long and as often as possible :-)

Have fun and enjoy the sun!

Nils

Back from the Auto Union-Meeting in Zwickau, now you'll have to cope with a gazillion of pictures of old cars I will upload the next few days

The next couple of days I will upload pictures from this years Sambafest in Coburg. I was quite surprised when I came home and saw I had taken 500 photographies... And I was constantly complaining that my camera is to slow and always only takes 4 pictures in burst mode before it has to think for a long time... Thank god I do not have something faster which fires till the card is full.

The Chicago pictures will continue shortly. Meanwhile enjoy the soccer pictures. The management apologises for the interruption.

Beta geprüft

1 year on ipernity...

For those of you, who (like me) learned french when the internet was not yet invented, and sometimes are completely lost with the modern jargon in commentaries, maybe this is of help: http://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_de_termes_d'argot_Internet

a2m1!

Bruce Schneier, security expert extraordinaire and columnist for various newspapers, had a nice article in The Guardian (and his blog) about the current tendency to restict people taking photographies.

This is not only happening in the US or the UK, where private security companies hassle people who are taking pictures in sites where it is perfectly legal to do so. This also happens in Switzerland, which is not necessarily known to be a hardcore paranoid in the war on terrorism.

In Schneier's article and the comments are a couple of links on your rights as a photographer and on what is legal to photgraph and to publish:

• Germany
• UK
• US
• Australia
• Ireland

There is a nice comment in this article, which not only applies to the US unfortunately:

Scientific American has a nice article on how to detect if a digital photography is a fake or has been altered.

As Beteigeuze asked, here is my script I used for RAW processing (right now I convert the RAWs manually in f-spot with ufraw)

#!/bin/bash
# Converts all Raw-Files in a dir to jpeg with dcraw
# needs ExifTool available from www.sno.phy.queensu.ca/~phil/exiftool

set -e
ext=.CRW

for i in *$ext; do
# Get basename of file for easier treatment
bn=`basename $i $ext` ;
#
# Convert from RAW
#
# Check if a jpg already exists
if [ -f ${bn}.jpg ]; then
    echo "File $bn already converted"
else
    echo "Converting File $bn"

## Method 1: just use dcraw
    # converts directly to jpg without any treatment
    #   dcraw -a -c $i | ppmtojpeg > ${bn}.jpg;

## Method 2:
    # This should do some basic image treatment:
      # dcraw -a -4 $i ;
      # convert -normalize -gamma 1.8 ${bn}.ppm ${bn}_dcraw4_normalized.jpg ;
      # rm $bn.ppm;

## Method 3: 
    # Including an ICC profile, this gives the best results for my screen
      dcraw -4 -c -w -m $i | pnmnorm -bpercent 0.1 -wpercent 0.1 -brightmax \
        | pnmtotiff -truecolor >temp.tif;
     tifficc -w -i ~nils/eos10d-linear-8apr2004.icc temp.tif ${bn}.tif;
     convert -quality 90 ${bn}.tif ${bn}.jpg ;
      rm $bn.tif ;
      rm temp.tif;
#
# Copy and set EXIF stuff
#
    ~/Image-ExifTool-6.81/exiftool -TagsFromFile $i ${bn}.jpg;
    ~/Image-ExifTool-6.81/exiftool -Author="Nils Pickert" -OwnerName="Nils Pickert" -UserComment="(c) Nils Pickert" $bn.jpg;
    rm $bn.jpg_original;
#
# rotate according to EXIF
# this is only necessary for method 1 and 2, not for 3
    #  exiftran -i -a ${bn}_dcraw_only.jpg;
fi
done

This weekends Photowalk remembered me on something I found some time ago somewhere on the web...

With the gazillion of pictures taken by everybody, how do you find the one you want? Microsoft has done some nice way of presenting pictures in a 3d reconstruction based on the pictures themselves. A technology preview (which only works on windows with IE probably) can be found here...

Who will it be?

What if one of them seems odd?

Found on boingboing: Londonians are now supposed to report to the police people who seem a little bit odd and are taking photographs. Just think about how this will work: most of the people I know on Ipernity seem a little bit odd, mostly because they carry around an amazing lot of gear and do take pictures of odd things. If you take a picture of something which is not the standard picturesque view, or even then, you are already a terrorist suspect. This is getting 1984. Be scared!

Spiegel Online has an article about a website I posted here already August 2007. Quite slow in my opinion...