Late Night PC

I have a dilemma kind of like what Jason blogged about a while back. He was looking for some software that would do tagging of photos that met a few specific needs. I have similar needs and I decided to go with digiKam partly as a result of the research he did. So I've been tagging some of my photos in digiKam and I can do some helpful searches thanks to this effort. Now I'm running in to a limit of tags though.

I just ran in to another case of no thumbnails for my photos in Konqueror. I know exactly what causes it but I guess it might not be obvious. I was just looking at tweaks for the KDE file browser yesterday and noticed that there's a file size limit that's considered when it creates icons which are thumbnails. You get a folder window that look like this:

My sister Linda and her SO were in town back near the beginning of summer. They were passing through Windsor en route from London to San Francisco. We went out for dinner and talked about traveling. They were going to see the motorcycle Grand Prix in Monterey, California. A week later Candace and I would be flying out for Candace to attend Blogher and me to soak up some of those silicon valley vibes.

As we sat and talked one of the things that came up was the awesome lens Chris was bringing with them. He had the same Digital Rebel XT that I do but he wanted to shoot some high speed bikes, so he was carrying some pretty hefty glass. I think it was the EF 400mm f/5.6L USM but I'm not positive.

The drive yesterday was simply amazing. Jeff and I have seen LA before and we've both been to San Jose, but the drive between the two has some of most beautiful natural views I've ever seen. We flew in to Los Angeles on Saturday and spent the afternoon there. After picking up dessert at Real Food Daily we drove up to Ventura where there was a room at La Quinta waiting for us. After checking in we took the half-hour trip to Santa Barbara for dinner at Spiritland Bistro and drinks in a local bar. The part Jeff and I have been planning out over the past couple months however, was yesterday's journey. I've done parts of Highway 1 before - Candace and I travelled between Malibu and Laguna Beach last year on our E3 trip (you can see some of the photos from that trip at OnBeaches.com). This year Jeff and I packed the whole 350-odd miles into one day. In the morning we got on the road pretty early, maybe a little after 8:00. Jeff drove first and I took a few pictures out the window. I know logically that there's no real reason to pick up a camera in a car driving at 70 miles per hour, but there's something that gets me every time I'm on a trip. There's this instinct to capture and hold on to great memories of great places. There's no real shareable value in photos shot out the window of a moving vehicle. Generally they're only of interest to the people who were there since the quality is only good enough to act as a queue to the sense of adventure that the scenery stirred up in the first place. When we got into Santa Barbara in the morning we went up State Street (the main drag). There's a wharf that juts a long way out into the water. We took a walk out to the end and soaked in the ocean smells and clear views out to the horizon. The wharf also affords a look back over the city laid out in front of the mountains. I'm still learning to use my new camera - a Digital Rebel XT, but I think I shot a few nice ones. We'd hoped originally to spend some time on Leadbetter beach, but when we got there it was way too windy. I took a couple pics of the highway winding up and away from the city and a couple of the sand and surf, and that was enough. I guess next time I'll pack a little warmer when the weather reports say 50 degrees and overcast.

I have what's called a polarizing filter for my camera. The camera part is is new to me, so I'm going to describe it in really basic terms. The science of it I kind of get. Polarization for light means that the light is filtered out so that only beams going perpendicular to the filter are allowed to pass and all beams that hit the filter from another direction are reflected. This makes it sound like it's an on/off thing, when it's not exactly like that with the camera filter. Physically, the circular polarizing filter is a round piece of glass that screws on the end of the lens. I'm talking about the 18-55mm zoom lens on my Digital Rebel XT, ymmv. So this dark plate of glass has a metal ring around it and it screws on the end of the lens. The filter can actually turn to adjust the amount of polarization it does. So you see that it never perfectly polarizes the light. The stronger the polarization, the more extra rays of light are being deflected and hence the less light there is in the picture. This can be okay outdoors, but the effect is very strong indoors. I decided to take a couple quick pictures for comparison. One has the filter turned to allow in as much stray light as possible, the other has basically the same shot with the filter set to let in as little as possible.

As a follow-up to yesterday's post on taking pictures with the Canon Digital Rebel, today I've got a couple notes on getting the CRW (Canon Raw format) files processed in Linux. I think that the tools I ended up with will work for other raw formats as well. I chose to install the Gimp and ImageMagick with Fedora Core 4 when I set up FC4, but neither of those applications supports raw files in the state they're installed in.

Candace graciously loaned me her Digital Rebel for the day so I could get an idea what it's like to shoot with a digital SLR. She suggested I should at least try it before I plunk down all that lettuce for the Rebel XT. I'm glad I did - her Rebel was really a pleasure to use. It really makes my point & shoot look like a toy. I know I don't have any real ability with it after just one day, but there were a few things that really impressed me (as a novice) with this piece of equipment. I played around with it at home for a little while early this morning. I figured that I should leave it on the automatic setting for a while. I've learned to appreciate automatic settings on a camera. See, I had a bad experience a few years back at E3 when I got my first digital camera. I didn't realize how much different the picture on the LCD could look from the same image blown up on a 19 inch monitor. And I knew that indoors with low light, like most of the convention centre, I'd need a higher ISO setting. So I fiddled with the manual settings a bit... What a whole lot of awful pictures. Some were salvageable. Many were so blurry I actually used the word 'blurry' in the filename. I'm going to try not to think about that anymore right now.