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26.1.09

Digital photography, a new passion..


Ready!
Originally uploaded by thinkfat
Since we got our new digital camera I have been using it quite regularly and I got very much interested again in digital photography and everything around it. I used to shoot lots of photos when I inherited my grandfathers Cosina SLR, despite the tedious act of having the film developed and paying for prints just to throw lots of them away.

I don't quite remember why I never picked up a digital SLR camera when they became fashionable, but they were quite expensive back then and anyway I spent most of my money (and most of my time) on amateur radio equipment. Today the situation has changed. DSLR cameras today are mass market products, not just for photography enthusiasts.

So, I familiarized with the Lumix G1 quickly and today I carry it with me almost constantly. The photo in this blog post links back to my flickr account, you're welcome to have a look at some results of my early ventures into digital photography.

Interestingly, this camera got me back to KDE programming again. Of course I started using various 'K' programs like KPhotoAlbum or DigiKam to keep track of my growing collection. And sure enough, once you start using a 'K' program, you find lots of small annoyances that demand fixing. So I hacked kflickr to upload resized pictures with an adjustable quality instead of some default value, digikam to recognize the lens description of the Lumix G1, the flickr export plugin to allow uploading to the photostream only instead of requiring a set and I'm now trying to automatize lens defect correction using information embedded in the RW2 files this camera generates when shooting 'RAW'.

25.1.09

First motobike trip of the year


p1020151.jpeg
Originally uploaded by thinkfat
If the motorbike virus has you, somehow it's not a question of convenience any more to go for a quick ride or not. So right after lunch today we took out our bikes for the first time this year. It was sure a bit chilly still at 5°C but with the right clothing it was bearable. We drove up to Neunkirchen, had a coffee and apple pie and went back home again.

I also took the opportunity to see if the camera setup I envisioned for our summer vacations would work out, and I'm happy to report that the Lumix G1 fits nicely into the tank pack as planned and is easy enough to operate while on the bike.

I also experimented with the geotagging feature of digikam, which worked quite nicely. I downloaded the trip log from my GPS after the ride and told digikam to correlate the images I had taken. It added a set of tags to the EXIF information that show the location where the photo was taken - well, to be precise, the location where the GPS receiver was when the photo was taken, but since it's mounted on the bike, that's not going to be too far off.

Now if I only could get flickr to consistenly import the location data. It's working only sometimes and I don't know why.