Month: December 2011

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Photo favourites: 2011

2011 marked a return to the SLR world with the acquisition of a used Canon Digital Rebel XT. I spent most of this year experimenting, playing and learning. Lots of photos were taken. Lots of panoramas, experimenting with different photo settings, dabbling with long exposures and a lot of learning how to manipulate RAW images.

These are some of my favourites from this year.

This one was from a CSCLUG meeting we had at Coastal Coffee Roasters in Summerville. It’s the falling beans that I liked about this photo.

A handful of unroasted coffee beans against a background of large containers

This was from a sunset photowalk at White Point Gardens. I really like the orange-y cast of the sunlight and the shadows of the trees.

Orange light from the sunset filtered through trees in the foreground.

This is from a night time photowalk I went on with some friends. A simple photo of some spanish moss lit by the flash, but it has kind of an alien look to it against the black background.

Spanish moss

I started experimenting with star trails and long exposures recently. This is one of my favourites from my recent experiments.

Long exposure of the sky showing star trails curving around the North Star

The rest of my favourites are silhouettes, a technique I enjoy using. The first one was taken at the Red Bull Illume exhibit that was set up in Marion Square earlier this year.

Silhouette of a photographer against the background of an illuminated display. The display is of a tree against a white background.

These three silhouette images use my favourite light source: the sun. I just think objects backlit by the sun look really cool.

A church spire silhouetted against the sun
Silhouette of a street lamp against the sun. The street lamp is attached to a boardwalk over the marsh.
The post of a pier silhouetted against the setting sun.
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New starts and fresh beginnings

2011 was an interesting year, in that Chinese proverb/curse sense of the word. Hopefully 2012 will be less “interesting”.

I see new things in store for 2012 and it looks to be a busy one.

Probably the biggest event in store for 2012 will be getting past my qualifier. Once I make it past that, it should be a reasonably clear road to finishing my PhD. My original intention to do work, classes and research at the same time turned out to be somewhat overly optimistic, especially this past year where I didn’t get much in the way of research done at all. Hopefully I’ll be able to make faster progress starting in the new year, because quite honestly I’m starting to get tired of the whole school and research thing and will be very glad to get it over with.

Also looking forward to finally getting rid of this dud of a cell phone and upgrading to something with that will be a little more fun to use.

More simplicity is the goal for 2012.

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Charleston Eats: Kudu Coffee

Double shot espresso

A small cup of espresso
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Charleston Eats: Patat Spot

Beef Shawarma and Charleston friets (pepper gravy and cheese sauce)

A basket of beef shawarma and fries with pepper gravy and cheese sauce..
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Thoughts on Digikam

Digikam is a KDE based photo manager. It’s a little more complicated than Shotwell, but can do quite a bit more with your indexed images. Just browsing through the menus it’s easy to see that Digikam has far more features and ways to view your photo collection than Shotwell.

Like Shotwell, Digikam uses a database to store metadata for each photo. Digikam can be configured to use SQLite (the default) or MySQL so I spent some time exploring both. MySQL 5.5+ defaults to using InnoDB tables, and scanning my photo directory (41k+ images) ended up taking several hours to finish and had the hard drive churning away the entire time. Switching to MyISAM tables makes the process much faster (a little over an hour) and was a lot quieter. The SQLite option is decidedly quicker, finishing the scan in just under an hour. In either case, the database can get pretty large if you have a big image collection.

Digikam lets you create a hierarchy of tags that you can apply to your images (didn’t notice if Shotwell lets you do thatShotwell 0.11 has this feature). One thing to note when applying tags is that the parent tag is automatically selected when a child tag is applied to an image. Selecting a parent tag automatically selects all the child tags under the parent. Not sure I like that behaviour so it’s something to think about when creating your tags.

Digikam synchronizes with nepomuk (KDE’s desktop indexer) so things like ratings and comments can go back and forth.

Despite the abundance of features like face and geotagging (haven’t tried those out yet) and more image editing options, Digikam isn’t difficult to learn. You’ll spend a little more time poking around checking out different things but if you’re looking for a little more out of your photo management software, Digikam would be worth a look.