Paudies Photoblog

Nice editing.

Stab, Quik Pro, Highlights from Stab on Vimeo.

So it looks like my great Ubuntu experiment is over. I’ve just ordered my new Canon 7D and was planning on shooting a lot of HD footage with it. Turns out no Linux program handles HD very well at all, there are ways to get it working apparently.

But it seems awful bloody difficult. It’ll be hard enough getting my head around editing video never mind having to worry about re-encoding the video and all that craic.

Sorry open source.

You have failed me.

Oh in case any one was wondering I ended up using RawTherapee for my raw editing, it’s little buggy but it mostly works very similar to the raw converter in photoshop, all sliders, which I was very happy about.

It actually gives you more options for tweaking in some areas and has a sharpening tool built into the converter.

One of the main problems with it is that when you straighten a picture the image just goes black. However the small preview image in the corner is still visible.

I might try and run it in Windows when I switch back, see if I have better luck.

Hyah!

Mountains Gandalf!

Views from my eyes on a trip around the world.

Ireland is my world

Who needs somewhere else.

It’s hard to not feel like I was being rewarded after my super depressing post a while back.

But it’s all chance.

It happened to be sunny.

Lets give it four hours, it’ll probably be icey.

Shannon to Sligo, doable, need to reach Shannon first.

I do and stay up too late chatting about LUE.

0500 ding ding, up you get sunshine.

Weetabix: check Sultanas: check Soya milk: check.

Ice was forecast, but there is only a light dusting, no need for water, just get in and go.

The county councils seem to have learned from their mistakes as there is a new an abundance of grit dirtying my recently washed car. But at least I can drive at the limit now.

I fly along the motorway trusting that other cars will have their fog lights on. I always regret my driving afterwards, but in the moment getting to the surf supersedes anything else. It is a stupid choice to drive this fast.

My back and neck begin to ache and I’m getting a headache. I realise I’m sitting hunched right up over the steering wheel. The combination of concentrating on the small distance my lights give and the oppressive fog pushing down on top of me is wearing me out. I feel claustrophobic, as if the fog is physically pushing me down into crouch.

There is no let up. I get to Tuam and decide I can take a break. Half an hour power nap will relax me a bit and give the fog time to clear a bit.

I hit the road again with a bit more brightness. I don’t know if this is better or worse. No there’s a few idiots who think because it’s past 7am they don’t need the lights. One car happily flashes me back when I try to get his attention. But as I continue the fog starts to lift a bit.

I begin to get horrible flashbacks to my last adventure in fog.

I arrive in Enniscrone too early despite my mid-trip nap. It’s still foggy.

Freezing Foggy.

I meet up with Cain, we chill for a while talking about what to do. The wave I came up to shoot won’t be working for another few hours so we cruise the coast looking for something to keep us occupied.

We find a little bay with a few waves coming through. There’s a bit of slab around the corner but tide is already too high for it, although it’s hard to resist the barrels I can just glimpse over a ridge of grass.

No point jumping in the water, much more likely to get shots from land despite the distance.

I start wandering looking for interesting angles. Land shooting is bloody boring but you make up by being able to move around to get different angles and actually compose shots properly.

And you have more options of things to shoot during the lulls.

My battery is almost dead now. I regret not arranging some signal with Cain before hand. He stays in picking off the best ones, always trying something interesting.

Eventually he comes in and we head back to the house to refuel ourselves and our electronics.

By the time we get all our stuff together it’s time to head over to the main event.

We arrive to a seething cauldron of white water.

Yeah Cain I think I’ll just shoot land here as well.

Ferg, Shane and Dyl are there as well and don’t waste time suiting and booting and entering the fray.

Dodging bombs is the order of the day, Shane nabs one followed by Dylan.

Ferg sits patiently out the back, waiting for something none of us can see.

It comes and he strokes in on the absolute wrong side of the peak. His knowledge becomes apparent as he sits tight letting the lip fold right over him, embracing and enclosing him. Fergal doesn’t seem to mind he had his line set before the wave even appeared on the horizon.

Cain is surfing a board much too big for the conditions and pays for it a number of times before he finally cranks hard off the bottom and tickles the face with his right hand. Braking just enough to get hosed by the spit then exit moments later to the hoots of all.

Do what you’re supposed to.

Seamus “Airdrop” McGoldrick

Damo Conway. Having Fun.

Still not completely happy with the workflow.

I definitely prefer the sliders in PS to messing with a curve, maybe I just need more experience.

Ok So I’ve Ubuntu running for nearly a week now, and I’m getting used to my new tools.

I only managed to get Picasa working this morning as there is a bug in the 2.7 version which nobody seems to be trying to fix since the 3.0 Beta version works fine apparently, so at the moment I’m letting build it’s library of shots.

I also installed digiKam and UFraw while trying to get Picasa 2.7 to work. digiKam seems to be a more advanced version of picasa, with more editing options available. Although right now I’m not too gone on the digiKam interface I’m sure I could get used to it soon. One thing I dislike is that it takes a little bit longer to get to the editing than it does with Picasa where the editing tools pop up as soon as you view the big version of the photo, but it’s only one extra click so not the end of the world. Also in digiKam you have to hit update after making any changes to a RAW file to see the how the change affected the photo, this increases editing time and is a lot more annoying than watching the changes as you play with the sliders.

UFraw works a lot more like Photoshop, you pick one photo to edit at a time and you have a lot more control. Bonus points for actually showing the changes as they occur, even if there is a slight lag. There seems to be a good amount of room to play in UFraw and it’ll probably give me all the stuff I need to edit RAW shots in a way I’m happy with. One thing that got me was the lack of a straighten tool (which was very easy to use in PS), if it is there it wasn’t completely obvious (although I didn’t look that hard). Which meant I had to open the new jpeg in digiKam to straighten, as well as resize and add the watermark. Which I used to do in picasa anyway, so not a huge problem.

Below are

1. An unedited RAW to jpeg conversion.

2. A RAW edited using digiKam.

3. A RAW edited using UFraw and then digiKam.

Thoughts, comments and ideas welcome.

Ollie “The Fla” O’Flaherty stalling hard for the pit man.

Get your Buzz on.

A few from a recent trip to the coast for sun down.

Pre dusk pano in the middle of a rocky place.

Definitely need to go back with better light and park somewhere else.

Crazy colours that evening.

Ghosty water +dust spots

Slightly less ghosty water with added spray.

Clear Skies, Cold Heads, Can’t Loose

There was a mental full moon, man I really want a bigger zoom. This is heavily cropped.

My tripod mount is bust so this was balanced on my hat on a sloping wall.

Wow, this is hard.

My PC has been acting up for the past few weeks, hence the delay in posting new stuff.

So I decided to completely wipe the hard disk and install Ubuntu, for those who aren’t aware, Ubuntu is an operating system just like Windows or OSX, except better. I had a good look around before doing this to make sure that there are sufficient programs to meet my requirements.

Namely something that can handle RAW photos to the same degree as Photoshop, a decent photo management program and usable video editing program.
There seems to be plenty of options, so I went ahead with the wipe and install on Sunday.

Things are … interesting lets say. The good news is that you can get an Ubuntu version of Google’s Picasa which is the photo management software I’ve been using for a good while now, basically it lets me flick through all my photos very easily and does some fairly minor editing. However at the moment I can’t get Picasa to run. I had downloaded the latest Beta release and followed their instructions on how to install it, but it didn’t work so I’m currently trying to install the last stable release, which is proving slightly difficult.

The easy of installing it is by doing something with repositories, which I half understand. But that doesn’t seem to work for my version of Ubuntu so I’m trying to do it via the Terminal which is also proving difficult. So I’m taking a break to write this.

All I ever used Photoshop for was to develop my RAW files. This is just pushing about a few sliders relating to brightness, contrast, white balance as well as cropping and straightening. The only reason I ever opened a jpeg in Photoshop was to clone out some dust spots from a dirty sensor. So I knew I wasn’t going to be missing much by jumping ship to Ubuntu.

At the moment I’m trying to figure out how to download the UFraw program that apparently does what I need done. I’ll report back on that later.

My plan for the video editing is to use Cinelerra.

I’ll keep you updated.