Relax

relax

This self portrait is my second try, both in self portraits and in stitching multiple photo’s of myself in one photograph. The first attempt was to blurry and there was more overlap of myself which made it difficult to post process.

Making such a photo is not that difficult. Make several photo’s of yourself  in different positions and put them together in software like Gimp or Photoshop.

Here are some things you should consider when shooting the photo’s:

  • First you need a tripod or a stable surface for the camera so the camera will not move between making the photo’s.
  • Second you need to make sure the exposure of all photo’s is exactly the same. Even the white balance should be the same (or you can change it in post)
  • Third you shouldn’t move objects between different photographs, it will make it extremely difficult to align the photo’s correctly.

When editing the photo’s you add each photo to a different layer and apply a layer mask to show the part of the photo you want to show. The most difficult part is to make overlapping areas convincing. Although there are different ways of creating a layer mask, I just use the mouse and a paintbrush tool. Doing this using a mouse is quite difficult and I think a pen tablet like the Wacom Bamboo will be very helpful here.

Over the next few weeks I will try out my Wacom Bamboo to see if it is really easier to use than the mouse.

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Changes to the blog

When you start something new, you start very enthusiastic. When the enthusiasm fades away, it will be more difficult to keep going. To keep going you need to find inspiration, otherwise you will completely stop doing it.

This blog suffered from that problem. I created this blog because I wanted to share my experiences in the search for a good post processing software and I wrote several posts about that topic. After that it was difficult to find new topics and I kept talking about things I was working on, but after a while I stopped writing. I didn’t know what to write about and I didn’t want to think a lot about it.

A similar problem I have with my photography. I love making photographs and I made a lot of photographs last year. What I don’t like because it takes to much of my time is post processing. Most of my photo’s are imported into bible, so I can do something with them, but I never did anything with them, some of the photo’s I didn’t even look at. So it is hard to see what level I have in my photography, which makes it hard to improve my photography.

To stay inspired and to improve my photography I’ll will change this blog and post more photo’s on it. I will post some reviews of some gear and software I have, but I will focus on posting photo’s.

Secondly I will go out and make more photographs, post process them faster and post them on this blog.

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Recovering from a bad backup strategy part 2

After a lot of time and after a few tries, I finally recovered all my photographs from the bad backup strategy I had. (You can read about that here)

What I end up doing was copying all photo’s one by one to a correct folder (year/month) and sort them, when a specific photo was already in the correct folder, I just deleted it and moved on to the next photo. It only took a few hours to do it this way, and I am pretty sure I have all the photo’s I wanted to keep.

The next step now is of course setting up a good backup strategy and keep that going without getting duplicate photo’s or loosing photo’s. I still need to think about that, but for now I will once in a while copy my bible library to an external harddrive.

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Recovering from a bad backup strategy

File management has always been difficult for me. Most of the time my files and photos where on logical places, and I could always found them when I needed them. I didn’t really do any backup. I used to reinstall my computer a lot, always trying an other operating system, never happy with what I got. To make sure I didn’t loose my files, I made a ‘backup’ and put it on a floppies, zip-drives or harddrives. After installing the new system, I copied the most important files back to my computer. Sometimes I made a copy of the backup medium to be able to use it for something else. Whenever I reinstalled my computer, everything started all over again.

Since I started owned my own camera, I started to be more concerned over where my photos where kept. Since I use Bibble I want to organize all my photos inside Bibble, but where could I find all the photos? After going through my complete ‘backup’ I found that I had photos all over the place, in different folders on the harddrive and in archives. Sometimes I had copies of archives, and copies of files in different folders as well. After putting all the photos inside one folder, I found that I had around 40 GB of photo related files, including raw files, jpegs, Gimp files and some photo album files.

At the moment I am in the process of importing the photos in Bibble and make sure I don’t have any double or unwanted photo. All the newly imported photos get a tag “unsorted” and I will remove all the photos that are duplicate and the  ones I don’t want to keep (since they are not mine).

From this experience I have learned a lesson I always knew. Make sure your files are properly organized, so you can easily find them. When backing up files, do this by making an exact copy of the complete folder structure. so that it is easily to restore and you can easily find files. Don’t wait with organizing your files, because the files you have, it gets more difficult to get started.

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Linux and creating photo books.

Years ago, we used to create lots of photo albums. Since we have digital camera’s most of the photos ends on the harddrive.

For the last holiday my wife and I decided that we wanted to create a photo book. There are a lot of companies that allow you to create these books and they provide software that helps you to create them. There are, however, very few companies that provide Linux versions of the software. Some of the companies allow you to send in some PDF files (one for the content and one for the cover) which they will use to print the book.

Using the software, provided by the company, makes it very easy to create a photo book very fast. It is easy to select the right format of the book, they provide borders and backgrounds and you know that when you have send the book, it will be printed correctly. The biggest disadvantage is that you don’t have full control over the layout of the book. You can’t create master pages that are used for every page and you can’t use custom borders.

When you can create a PDF you have full control. You can use almost every word processor (like Microsoft Word or OpenOffice.org) or publishing processing software (like Microsoft Publisher, Adobe InDesign or Scribus). Most of them will allow you to create a PDF file natively, for others (especially older version) you need a PDF printer (which you can find on the internet).
Although full control is mostly an advantage, it can also be a disadvantage, because the possibilities can be overwhelming.

Because there are not so much printing companies that have support for Linux, I have decided to look for a company that support PDF printing. I will use Scribus to create the book and export it to PDF. Then I will send the PDF to Blurb.

Since this will be the first time I use Scribus and Blurb, I will post my experiences when I am finished.