Photography
You accidentally selected “Delete All” on your digital cameras and now your photos are gone? You even fear they might have been overwritten by photos taken after the accident? Fear not, the same thing happened to me, and I was able to restore all the photos from the event plus photos going back as far as three months from my CF card in my 400d using the PhotoRec software.

Cameras today often have an orientation sensor, so pictures taken in portrait mode will automatically be rotated. But this usually happens in the viewer, while the orientation is simply an EXIF tag. Of course this takes up precious computing time and not every viewer supports it. jhead can not only display EXIF information in a consistent manner but can also rotate pictures lossless and clear the orientation-tag afterwards. The call is jhead -autorot *.JPG
If you want to rename your images using EXIF-information, exiftool is the way to go. The command exiftool '-FileName<Party_ ${CreateDate}_${filename}' -d %Y%m%d *.jpg would prefix all the photos with “Party” and the create-date, while keeping the original filename as the suffix. exiftool can shift dates too, if you ever forget to adjust for daylight saving.

When uploading the images you’ll often want to resize them. The ImageMagick collection can do just that, and many other things (like sharpening etc.). If you mogrify -resize 1600x1600 your photos will be resized to 1600px maximum edge length, while keeping the ratio. But be careful, mogrify overwrites the pictures in place!

Music
Thanks to services like video2mp3.net/ you can download a lot of music from YouTube. But sometimes there is silence at the end or the beginning of a song, and a whole collection of songs might have differing levels of volume. To cut an mp3 you can use mp3splt like this to cut everything after 03:30 minutes:mp3splt file.mp3 00.00 03.30The sound levels can be normalized, losslessly, using mp3gain:mp3gain -rk *

Misc
When pretty-printing flat text files I use a2ps to format them nicely and get a PostScript-document. a2ps however does not support UTF-8, while the only characters I care about (German Umlauts) can be represented using Latin1 just fine. So, one can use iconv to convert them on the fly like this:iconv --from-code=UTF-8 --to-code=LATIN1 textfile.txt|a2ps --font 9 -E -B -r --column=1 > out.ps

To export images from a PDF-file I discovered pdfImages, which is part of the xpdf-suite. Use it like this:pdfimages -j foo.pdf bar

Believe it or not, this photo was taken about 2km from my parents home, from the dam of the Eschbachtalsperre, a dam for providing the region with drinking water. Usually I just jog around the lake in the morning, but last weekend Katrin and I discovered one of multiple hiking routes around it and the surrounding area. The trails all start at the parking lot and are clearly marked along the way.

I uploaded this shot along with other shots to flickr, but then decided to go back and give it a little more depth in Gimp (using Contrast/Saturation, Sharpen, a Tone-Mapping plugin and a gradient for the sky).

The shot on the left was done after Katrin asked me for some photos to illustrate a blogpost related to medicine over on her blog. Some other site apparently had the same idea, and now this photo can be found here, here, here and here. This was not only rewarding for me but also interesting since I discovered (from this and other shots) that websites not only seem to search flickr but rather other related articles on related websites and simply use the same photos. When the photo is used in the right context and the website itself looks professional, one might even forget the small “CC by heipei” link at the bottom and the fact that I’m an amateur spending little time or effort (much less creativity ;) on these shots. This can only lead to the conclusion that photography is as least as much simple engineering as creativity, or that I have some hidden sense for compositing an image resulting from years of experimentation, browsing flickr and doing CG where you spend a lot of time making your rendered images look like photographs.

In general I’m still happy with my EF-S 18-200mm 3.5-5.6 and my EF 50mm 1.4, and the decision to buy a Speedlite was absolutely right (in fact, reviewing old shots, I’ve been kicking myself about not having bought one earlier). Apart from some crazy experiments and time-consuming handicrafted tools, my usual approach is to use the flash pointed toward the ceiling, increase it 1/3 to 1 with TTL and just fire away. If possible, a natural balance with available light will make laymen forget a flash was even used. You can go fully manual or simply use the ‘P’-mode with an appropriate aperture. A nice result can be seen on the right, though Katrin is slightly underexposed in this one. What I did was take the photo indoors (where you have your trusty white ceiling) in front of an open window at dusk. The backlight was provided by the setting sun, which adds a lot the shot and usually is done with a dedicated flash. I will be trying more of these in the future.

A little photostream-recap below, so no one can complain that I’m not blogging for the average reader anymore. Enjoy!

A few weeks ago I decided to finally buy a flash. I didn’t hesitate long and bought the Canon 430EX II. Before that (and while waiting for DHL) I read a lot of strobist.com, so that I hit the ground running when the flash did arrive. The nice thing about buying flashes is that you don’t have to worry so much about capabilities/size, because you can buy a bigger one which can act as master at some point in the future should you feel the need to. Along with the flash I ordered some small utilities, like the Phottix Tetra radio-triggers for off-camera flash, the Roscoe Strobist Gel collection (gel from “gelatine”. It’s called “Effektfolien” in german) and a small diffuser (just for fun). The Phottix Tetra have been great as well, especially considering the price-tag of about 30€, which is next to nil compared to other wireless triggers which quickly add up to ten times that much. However the Phottix triggers don’t support TTL, which is a measuring-system so the camera knows how to adjust for the flash. Well, what better time to really get acquainted with the M mode ;)

Aachen Open 2010, which just ended today, was the only real event I looked forward to, photography-wise, and it turned out really nice. Not only was the event itself a smashing success (no other way to put it, the organisation was flawless, the attendance was record-breaking and the venue perfect for our needs), but also meant many diverse personalities to photograph. You can see my complete photos of the event here: photos.heipei.net/Aachen_Open_2010/ and photos by other people will be collected here: http://cube.hackvalue.de/ao10/media-de.

Tonight I salvaged an old (and broken) Umbrella and simply covered the inside with white xerox paper. I sawed of the round part of the handle and now it fits into the grip of my tripod. The Phottix has a mount option for standard tripods. The results are amazing, and as usual I now feel much better when I buy an umbrella (I’m not quite sure whether I want reflective or shoot-through or both ;)

Results
When are the effects of a softbox most obvious? Probably when there is absolutely no other light-source around (see my Black/White collage). It becomes even more obvious if you photograph something in front a background where it casts shadows. One thing I had to do was to increase my flash exposure compensation (i.e. make it brighter), and in a few cases I had to manually set the white balance, though that’s something I do very often anyway. And using the P-mode seems like the only usable way to incorporate the flash easily. I guess I’ll have to read up on the difference between “Green Square” and “P” again. If you can I’d try to build a bigger box and of course the flash should be close to the center (which can’t be done with the internal flash).

Bottom line
After quite a few shots (photographing people is probably the most rewarding) with my selfbuilt softbox and I know now that the money for a professional one will be well spent ;) If anyone knows of good brands for a) flashes (for Canon) b) softboxes c) remote flash triggers (wireless), let me know!

By the way, you should try the Eifelsteig.

Another good example, a) direct flash b) indirect flash. People which look greasy on photos (which is everyone) will be happy to see that it doesn’t have to be like that. I also like how the second image has more depth than the first, which looks “flat” from the lack of natural shadows (where the light-source usually is above the object).

Please take note that both of these shots were more than insufficiently lit without a flash, so the natural-looking light distribution can almost completely be attributed to the flash.

When I was younger I hated the summer (or let’s say I preferred winter). That was because in winter you had a reasonable explanation why you would sit in front of your PC all day long instead of going outside to play with the other kids or generally to “get some fresh air”. Now that I don’t have to explain myself to anyone anymore and that I’m bound to a desk by my studies and my work (and my hobbies as well) I can’t wait to prescribe myself a lot of fresh air. Having said that I’ll post a few pictures (the sky may already be blue, but don’t let that fool you) for those of you who couldn’t make anything of the last few posts here ;)