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Picasa for Linux

I only came across this by chance on a news group, but there is a version of Picasa available for Linux. That fact isn't obvious from the main Picasa home page. People tell me that Picasa isn't bad, but I wasn't interested in it while I thought it was Windows only. What Google has done is to get it working under Wine, rather than recode it for Linux. I've downloaded it, and it certainly has no problem reading the RAW files from my Fujifilm S3 Pro digital SLR. I'll definitely be playing with it to see what it can do. I'm not sure how the performance under Wine will be, that's an open question.

One things I've noticed, though, it that it appears to want to import all of my photos into its own folder, rather than allowing them to be left in place. My RAW files are 24-26MB each, so I don't want multiple copies of them on my drive if I can avoid it. It will depend on whether I think Picasa is good enough to make the sacrifice and do it Google's way.

How Not To Do Slow Flash Sync

One of my favourite SLR features is  slow flash sync, where the camera uses a slower shutter speed (longer opening time) than would otherwise be required when using a flash. The flash illuminates and freezes the things nearer to the camera, while the longer shutter opening time allows the camera's sensor to get enough light from things further from the camera that they don't end up too dark in the final photo.

This is not a tutorial, however, it's a  tale of woe. I took my current digital SLR (Fujifilm S3 Pro) and my flash (Nikon SB-800) to a family wedding recently, with the hope of taking some nice shots for posterity. The rooms in which the weddings (it was in Germany, where there can be two ceremonies, one civil and one religious) and reception took place were sufficiently large that I wanted to use slow flash sync so that the photos didn't have dark backgrounds. I used to do this a lot with my film SLR (Nikon F-601), and it worked out pretty well most of the time.

Now, the reason you use a flash is because there isn't enough light for a normal photo. If you tried to use the available light, the exposure would take so long that the photo would be blurred (either from the camera shaking slightly in your own hands, or from your subjects moving around). With a slow flash sync, you are relying on the flash freezing the things near the camera so that they aren't blurred. It doesn't matter if the things in the background are a little blurred.

What I  didn't notice until later in the evening at the reception was that there was more ambient light that I expected, so the flash wasn't strong enough (in comparison to the ambient light) to freeze the people near the camera. I should have paid more attention to the shutter speed, to make sure that it wasn't too far beyond the  maximum for hand-held shots. The rule of thumb is 1/focal-length for 35mm SLRs, e.g. 1/35 of a second for a 35mm lens. For a typical digital camera (with a sensor smaller than 35mm), I expect you should divide that time by a further 1.5 to 2, i.e. 1/50 to 1/70 second in this case. So for a shot with the zoom set at 35mm, I should have checked that the shutter speed wasn't too much greater than 1/50 second (e.g. maybe 1/30).

With the  small screen on the back of the camera, I didn't notice the blurring (I should have zoomed in to check it properly, but I didn't, I was too busy taking the next photo). Only later in the evening did I notice, at which point I stopped using slow flash sync, and just used normal flash sync. It's a great pity, because a lot of otherwise nicely composed photos ended up  blurred and useless. I took over 300 photos, so I had a lot of examples of my mistake to remind me of what I need to do next time.  Don't let it happen to you.

(I haven't posted any examples here, because it wouldn't be fair to post failed photos from somebody's wedding.)

Oxford and the CSW XML Summer School 2007

These are some photos I took while in Oxford for the CSW XML Summer School 2007.

The Summer School is held at Wadham College:

Here are some photos from near the Bodleian Library, just a block away:

Finally, some of the presenters finishing the day with a quiet drink in the college bar:

The full set of my photos is on Fotki. There are also photos from other participants on flickr.

Ants on Plants

I was looking at a plant in our backyard, which has just started going into its full summer bloom:

I can't tell you what type of plant this is (I'm not a botanist, nor even much of a gardener), but what I did notice is that the open flowers (and not the unopen flowers) had ants crawling over them, which is something I hadn't ever noticed on a plant before.

Having trouble spotting the ant?  Here's a zoomed-in version to help:

For the photographically curious, I took these photos using a Fuji S1 Pro digital SLR that I bought recently (second-hand) on eBay.  The body and a Sigma 17-35mm  f2.8-4 lens were £200 together, which was not a bad deal.  The S1 Pro is basically a Nikon F60 body with a Fuji sensor and electronics.  This allows me to use the lenses from my Nikon F601 film SLR (which I bought in 1993).  I took the photos here with the 35-70mm zoom that came with my F601.

The S1 Pro has a 3 Mpixel diagonal array sensor that produces 6 Mpixel images in TIFF or JPEG format (no RAW).  The photos here are unprocessed; I simply converted the TIFFs to JPEGs using Corel Paintshop Pro, and added a drop shadow.

A Selection of Photos, London and Dublin

For your weekend viewing pleasure, here are some photos that I took with my (film) SLR and recently had scanned. Click on any photo to go to a page with a link to the full-size image.

Christmas Tree Lights

It's wonderful what you can do when your camera lets you trigger the flash at the end of the exposure, rather than the beginning.

Sunset on Greenland Dock, London

Swans swimming at sunset.

Waterfall at the Guinness Storehouse, Dublin

This is part of a display on the necessity for pure water in the making of beer.

JPEG Versus RAW for Digital Photos

My friend Chris Eastwood has written a piece comparing JPEGs produced directly by digital cameras to JPEGs produced by software from RAW (direct sensor data) images. I have great respect for Chris as a photographer, and he's not afraid to do things his own way.

For example, he recently sold his digital SLR because he prefers to work with just a large format film camera and a compact digital camera that produces RAW images. That's not something a lot of people would think to do (although it was aggravated by his SLR's tendency to produce corrupted photos, as I remember).

Chris finds that the differences between the photos produced by digital SLRs and digital compact cameras are exaggerated if you only look at the JPEGs produced by the cameras. If you instead work from the RAW files produced by the cameras (and only the better compacts produce these), and convert them to JPEGs with a good image conversion package, the differences are much less, so much less that many people wouldn't easily be able to pick the difference at the sizes that many photos are viewed.

For my part, I have a film SLR and a digital compact that only produces JPEGs, but for any future camera purchases, I'm definitely going to have RAW image output on my checklist.

Blue Dragonflies in Bulgaria, part 2

Following my post with my photos of blue dragonflies in Bulgaria, I was looking for other dragonfly photos on Google Images, and found one that looked very much like the photos I took. Turns out it was on a page for a dragonfly tour to Bulgaria in 2007. I hadn't realised they ran such tours, but there you go. Keep it in mind if you are at a loose end for something to fill your time in July 2007 ...

Blue Dragonflies in Bulgaria

I've recently returned from 2 weeks holiday with my family on the Black Sea coast of Bulgaria. While I was there, we went camping by a creek near a village not far from the coast. I didn't get the best sleep in the tent (not being used to the sound of jackals strolling past in the night; we found their paw prints on the banks of the creek where we pitched our tent), but I did get some photos.

The indigenous dragonflies are a beautiful iridescent blue/green, so I chased them around waiting for them to land. There was no shortage of them, as the creek is very near a place that is breeding them now to counteract a decline in their natural numbers. Here are my photos:

For good measure, a few more photos taken in the same area: