My Digital Photography Workflow—Step 2: Working the Image

You now have a basket of images, each retrievable by the date and time at which it was taken, and now named in honour of that same blip in your own history.

Step 2 is to work the image to make it better.  By this I don’t mean as a candidate for the Photoshop of Horrors annual awards.  We are not going to attempt virtual surgery where we remove limbs, reduce waists to such an extent that would even make Barbie wince, and add ripped stomach muscles to one’s rippled mid-section.  Actually scratch the last part; I certainly wouldn’t mind personally benefiting from that photo transformation.  The world was so much simpler when we were content with playing the board game Operation.
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2013
01/22
CATEGORY
Photography
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My Digital Photography Workflow—Step 1: Camera to hard disk

Camera to hard disk

Recipe:

You have a camera brimming over with photographs.  Okay, so what’s next?  Actually, what’s the first step since we can’t have a next without a first, no?

Well, it would have to be getting the pictures on to your computer, but stored in a sensible fashion where you might actually be able to retrieve them.  For me, I want to be able to retrieve my photographs based on timestamp chronology: the date and time when the photograph was taken.  By now we should have all evolved from the era of the flashing “00:00″ on our VCR with its time not being set, to something resembling close to astronomical time on our digital cameras.  Otherwise, you are unlikely to be reading this article.  Of course, it begs the question:  if we travel do we just keep the time on our home timezone, or do we remember to adjust it to our new locale?
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2013
01/17
CATEGORY
Photography
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First a Hop. Then a Skip. And then a Jump—My Digital Photography Workflow

First off, I primarily use Unix.  Actually Linux mostly, but I stubbornly refuse to succumb to the trademarking of the word Unix, which has led, sadly, to its decline in common usage.  Whereas we Unix folk used to declare loudly and proudly that we did Unix—never mind whether it was System V or Berkeley—now we have furtive meetings in the back streets of Prague to buy counterfeit New Hampshire license plates with the logo of the revolution “Live Free or Die:  UNIX” , and exchange snarks about how we were on the right side of history.

That banal and unsurprising confession out of the way, I can now add the following caveat in proper context: that most of what follows applies to the various *nix OS flavours.  Some of it may travel across the OS landscape, but likely you will have to think through how to adapt it to your particular platform.
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2013
01/17
CATEGORY
Photography
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Fellowship: An Ancient Social Network

Neeraj Prem 2012 Christmas Concert

Neeraj Prem 2012 Christmas Concert

We are in an age where we think that social networks are a new phenomenon, enabled as they are by web based technologies.  Even the term itself abstracts away the personal, human aspects out if it, giving it a modern, clinical slant:  social+network.  But I was reminded this past weekend that there are forms of human interaction that are both ancient and profound.
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2012
12/14
CATEGORY
Music
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What a Modern Calculator Geek Dreams Of

Herbert's Calculator Shop

This is a photograph that needs no caption!

Today, as I was driving form Allentown, PA to the Lutron campus in Coopersburg, I nearly veered off the road, having caught this store sign out of the corner of my eye.  Sadly, the shop was closed that early in the morning, and I was not to return that way on this trip.  Next time, I will make it a point to stop in.

Most of the stock seemed to be printing calculators, that too by Victor, as the letter sign in the window alludes to.  I will have to ask if they might have any HP calculators in their inventory.

2012
12/04
CATEGORY
Calculators
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