In a (New) World of My Own

I installed Linux – on a laptop no less – and Everything Worked. Everything fucking worked, good as gold, nice as can be.

Everything. Fucking. Worked.

Sound? Check!
Graphics? Check!
Sleep/suspend? Check!
Wifi? Check!

Observe, one hour after installation:

It worked. It all worked!

Gobsmacking aside, I’m really very impressed at how far (certain) Linux distributions have come in terms of polish and accessibility. When I last seriously played with Linux, under Gentoo, you had to pick one or the other unless you were a bored hacker with even more time than a stockroom worker in a retail store.

Fair play, Ubuntu!

Wait, laptop?

Yes!

Behold!

Thank you Mariah for the best birthday present. Ever.

I arrived at work on Monday and opened my laptop to find a pretty crack in the corner of the screen. As of right now, Solo Photo Book Month is on hiatus, at least until I purchase a new machine. :[

Heh

Imap+Growl=Spam

In a Neal Stephenson-ish twist of fate, I happily connect my Macbook Pro’s new charger and discover that the power socket on the laptop is damaged.

…thank you, Apple.

Oh, for sure I’m kicking myself for not purchasing Applecare. After eight years in Currys I have a very fine idea of the worth of an extended warranty for a laptop, especially in consideration of the typical cost of repair, but for some ineffable reason I decided to not purchase it (actually it comes to mind now that the sales assistant in the Apple store mentioned it didn’t cover internationally).

I wouldn’t say I’m screwed; to describe the fault, I’ll say that the power connection on the laptop looks slightly distended and needs to be jiggled before power will go into the machine. If it’s a case of that there’s just a wire loose, the repair will be less expensive. If Apple decide the mainboard needs replacing, I should just start hunting for a replacement right now…

Back to Apple. You’re not off the hook.

Your 85W Magsafe power charger is a piece of crap – nearly every review of it on the Apple Store, Amazon and elsewhere is negative, and our own experiences with it are scarcely better. It’s flimsy, the head is easily damaged, and your practice of (first) using a proprietary head and (second) refusing to license the patent involved leaves Macbook owners in a nasty situation. The only two ways we have are to purchase another flimsy charger for $80+tax through the Apple store and wait a few weeks for it, or purchase a new or used one from a reseller, and hope it works.

Bastards..? Yes, absolutely. I love OS X, and short of Adobe Photoshop being released natively on the Linux platform it’s going to remain my first choice of OS, but the bulk of your peripheral hardware is plastic junk. Sure, they have a definite look and style, but it’s one which unfortunately screams “cheap!” in twenty-point lettering. In a tacky and non-aliased font, to boot.

Kinda.

Disclaimer: Traipsing around any kind of ruined structure can be incredibly dangerous and should never be attempted.

Anyways.

Some young vagabond(s) had forced open the door of Doughiska Castle in Merlin Park forest, which for me turned it into a veritable wonderland. The keep is wonderfully intact, to the point that I was able to make it up onto the roof of the castle, explore most of the rooms and cells and even go down into the cellar. A manifest lack of torch and flashgun, combined with a very short time limit put me off getting more photos, although I really want to get back into the castle before I leave on Wednesday.

Mayhap I can bug out of work early on Sunday and make a beeline for this magnificent building.

All I really got from the castle were some excellent infrared photos:

Doughiska Castle

The Keep

Looking down

Untitled

Why god, why?

Dead Tauren on the road to Thunderbluff

Dead Orc on the road to Astranaar

Dead Gnome on the road to Ironforge

I accidently deleted several hundred photos tonight – Fremont Street and Mariah’s belly from just before I left last June, and I feel physically sick over it. They’re on my NAS, I realised the deletion immediately and unmounted it, so I know I can recover them. It doesn’t leave me feeling any less sick over temporarily wiping out some very precious pictures.

For the rest of the day, I tried to show up some weekend warriors who were nervously snapping away at sawns from the ramp at South Park by getting down and bravely crawling up to said feathered beastie. I got about a hundred absolutely magnificent photos of them, but the whole experience wound up with me sticking my forehead in fresh bird shit and getting snickered at. I was deservedly owned.

Swan

The whole experience got me thinking: For all that they are beautiful animals, swans are a swans are a hugely popular subject for fledging photographer. I know that I’ve taken my own fair share of pictures of them. So what makes an awesome or a different photo? I commented last night on a forum thread that short of offworld travel being opened up to the unwashed masses, most subjects have already been photographed in most ways imagineable. So what makes one in paticular different?

You do. You put your own mark of strangeness on a photo. I’ve looked at photos by acclaimed phofessionals, which the masses have lauded, and found a bland vista. I’ve looked at blurry photos taken by children and found a world of wonderment. It’s different for you. You can see the magnificent and subtely perfect sunset in the first and a crappy photo of some toys in the second. I won’t even pretend I have some form of enlightened stance on what makes something great as I firmly believe that the subconcious makes the decision in a split second. It’s then left up to the concious mind to justify this like or dislike. Oh for sure there’s certain aesthetics in a photo I’m inclined toward, but it’s all in the gut.

And all of the above really sounds like I’m arrogant and talking shit. Win! I’ll leave words to Jenny in future as she has a gift for the English language that I honestly lack.

Jenn, Mum and I went out to dinner tonight, where we got in a fight because I brought my dammed camera along. Jenn asserted that she hadn’t given me permission to take her photo actually stirred pride in me of all things; she’s learning. After an okay-ish curry I photographed the family behind our table as they got their birthday cake, on a complete whim:

This makes photography worthwhile

They were incredibly happy with the photos and I wound up showing the two boys how to use my camera, and gave us all some cake (glee!); and my own family were happy I did all of that for people who were complete strangers. The whole incident cememted my own outlook on charging for photos (I didn’t, before anyone yells at me): If I take a photo on my own time, it’s yours if you’re not a company trying to make money on it. If you pay me to take photos for you, that’s an entirely different matter.

I’ll start by saying that – I had might craic and I really enjoyed myself.

But…I didn’t feel inspired at all. I took some photos and then tortured something out of them this morning in Photoshop. I gave rein to the uninspired feeling to see where my subconscious took me, only to find that it has a fascination with bleak, black and white, contrasted pieces.

In every photo I put online from Dublin, I find some kind of juxtoposition…

Something old, something new

Between the statue and the cranes, I see detail versus shilouette, light verus shadow, old verus new, and freedom and creativity stacked against stifling organisation. I’m inclined to pay attention to my subconscious, so I’m going to take all of those photos as a sign that the waiting is getting to me. Near to seven months of waiting and working toward a visa and now in the few days before the interview I’m at a free end with nothing much to fill my time before Thursday.

You can find the rest of the Kilmainham photos in my Flickr as always.

I braved the inclement horribly shitty weather to take some photos of the Abbey church on Eglinton Street.

As I have a terminal lack of anything to do tonight, I’m going to fill in some of my workflow on the photo. The first step is to actually get the photos from my memory card, for which I use a shell script. It does nothing exciting and I don’t accept any responsibility if it accidently dumps ten thousand photos into one folder (which happened to me). There’s not much to say for the script, it takes all the .cr2 files from the memory card and places them under ~/Pictures/Imports in a subfolder, going by today’s date – 2006-12-31.

After that, I import the photos to Lightroom:

Workflow 1

Normally I’d use the raw editor to screw with whatever aspect of the photo needed screwing with, but in this case I wanted to compose a HDR shot in Photoshop, so I just exported the three photos I wanted to tiff format and used the HDR function in Photoshop to create the final photo. I used Photomatix before, but in 90% of shots people go utterly overboard with tone mapping, which leads to a horribly fake and cartoony image, which was never to my tastes when it came to HDR. Going through the HDR group on Flickr I find this and this.

Workflow 2

Creating a HDR photo in Photoshop is insanely easy if you have good shots taken, so I’ll skip on the detailed instructions. Suffice to say, to pick File-> Automate-> Merge to HDR, click a few buttons and go get a coffee if that’s your thing. At this point I’ve composed the HDR, converted it to 16-bit for ease of work and straightened it:

Workflow 3

I’ve started working in layers where I can, I did a lot of tweaking of colours and lighting, with a little clone work for a few annoying cables and wires that were in the church:

Workflow 4

Squinting at the above picture, I had layers for the shadow/highlight tool, levels, hue/saturation, curves, colours and the channel mixer. And behold, the final shot:

Workflow 5

The Abbey