Scribbles and Snaps

digiKam offers several features that can improve photos containing under- or overexposed areas. For example, the Exposure Blending tool lets you merge multiple shots with different exposures into one perfectly exposed photo. But what if you have just a single image? In this case, you might want to give the Local Contrast feature a try. It’s based on the LDR Tonemapping utility which is designed to improve the dynamic range of the photo by reducing its global contrast and increasing the local contrast. It does so by generating a desaturated and blurred version of the photo. It then combines the RGB channels of the original photo with the desaturated blurred image using either the Linear or Power function. Sounds complicated? Don’t worry, the Local Contrast tool is rather straightforward to use, so you don’t have to understand all its intricacies in order to achieve pleasing results.

Open the photo you want in the editor and choose Enhance | Local Contrast. The tool lets you apply up to four tonemapping operations called stages. Each stage offers two parameters for you to tweak: Power and Blur. The former allows you to specify the desaturation level, while the latter lets you adjust the affected areas on the photo. To preview the result, hit the Try button. Once you are satisfied with the result, press OK to apply the process to the photo.

While the Local Constrast tool may sound like an easy way to fix photos, you should use it with care: sometimes it can do more damage than good, producing unnaturally looking photos.

Giving your photos meaningful names makes it significantly easier to keep tabs on them. Of course, renaming each and every photo by hand is not particularly practical, especially if you take dozens or even hundreds of photos each day. This is when digiKam’s Rename feature can come in rather handy. You can use it to define rather advanced renaming rules and apply them to multiple photos in one fell swoop.

To put the Rename tool to practical use, select the photos you want to rename and press the Rename button in the main toolbar (you can also choose Image | Rename or press F2). The Rename dialog window offers a vast range of renaming options which allow you to create complex renaming rules. But you might want to start with a simple rule that renames photos using the date and time data. To do this, press the Date & Time button and select Image from the Source drop-down list. This will pull the date and time info from the photo’s metadata.

Next, you have to specify a date/time format by selecting the appropriate item from the Format drop-down list. If none of the available formatting options satisfy you, select the Custom item, which lets you construct the formatting string manually. For example, the yyyyMMdd-hhmmss formatting string produces file names like 20100531-173501 and 20100701-110111, while the MMM-dd-yyyy-dddd string generates names like May-31-2010-Monday and June-01-2010-Tuesday. The clever part is that you can immediately see the result of the renaming string right below the Format field. For a full list of available formatting options, check the official Qt documentation.

Besides date and time, the Rename dialog window offers a few other useful options. The Camera button, for example, allows you to add the camera model to the file name. This can be useful if you are using several cameras and you want to quickly identify photos taken with a specific camera. The Metadata button gives you access to EXIF and other photo metadata you can use in renaming rules.

Next to the field where you enter the renaming rule, there is a button that lets you specify so-called modifiers or actions that will be applied to the file names during the renaming operation. For example, using the Change Case modifiers, you can convert all file names to lower or uppercase, or capitalize the first letter. Here is a quick overview of other useful modifiers:

Trimmed – Removes leading, trailing, and extra spaces.
Unique – Adds unique numerical values to identical file names.
Replace – Performs search and replace. The modifier supports regular expressions.
Range – Lets you specify a specific fragment of the file name for the renaming rule. For example, the {5-} modifier in the [file]{5-} rule removes the first four characters of the file name, so IMAG0113.jpg, IMAG0351.jpg, and IMAG0573.jpg are renamed to 0113.jpg, 0351.jpg, and 0573.jpg

While digiKam offers a wide range of other features that can help you to keep tabs on your photos, it’s worth experimenting with the Rename tool. This way, you can quickly locate or identify specific photos even when digiKam is not running.

No matter how good your camera is, taking a well-exposed photo of a high-contrast scene like a black bird on snow can be really tricky. Even if you switch to the manual mode and tweak the exposure settings, there is still a risk that you will end up with a shot containing under- or overexposed areas. One way to solve this problem is to use exposure blending. This technique involves taking several shots of the same scene or subject with different exposures and then fusing these shots into one perfectly exposed photo.

While exposure blending sounds simple in theory, achieving usable results can be a rather laborious and time-consuming process. Fortunately, digiKam can do the donkey job for you thanks to an exposure blending tool bundled with the Kipi plugins. The exposure blending tool relies on the hugin application for processing and fusing photos, so you must install it on your machine beforehand. On Ubuntu, this can be done using the sudo apt-get install hugin command.

To keep things tidy, move the photos you want to blend into a separate album, select them using the Ctrl+A keyboard shortcut, and choose Tools | Blend bracketed images. This opens the Exposure Blending Import wizard that guides you through the entire process. In the Set Bracketed Images window, add other photos if needed, and remove and rearrange the photos that are already in the list. Hit then the Next button to move to the next step. digiKam can align the selected photos before blending them. This feature can come in handy if you took the photos without a tripod. If this is the case, tick the Align bracketed images check box, and press Next to start the pre-processing. Once digiKam is done, press Finish, and you will be automatically dropped into the Exposure Blending editor.

Hit the Preview button to see the blended photo in the preview pane. If you are not satisfied with the result, you can tweak the available options, including exposure, saturation, and contrast. You can also exclude individual photos from the stack to improve the blending result. The clever part is that every time you tweak the settings and press the Preview button, digiKam generates a preview image which you can compare with the previous versions. You can then save all the generated versions, or save only the one you like most.

Although digiKam’s exposure blending tool is not the most powerful or flexible solution out there, it is capable of producing rather impressive results, especially if you are not afraid of getting your hands dirty with manually tweaking the final results.

For ages, I’ve been using Google Picasa to manage and tweak photos I took with my point-and-shoot cameras. Its editing tools are pretty limited, and the Linux version is just a not-so-pretty port that runs in Wine. When I moved to a DSLR camera these and other limitations became even more apparent. So when Google released Picasa 3.5 for Windows, leaving Linux users behind with the older 3.0 release, I decided that it was time to move on. After testing different photo editing and management applications for Linux, I settled for digiKam.

For many serious photographers using Linux, this is probably an obvious choice, since digiKam offers pretty much all the features you’d expect from a competent photo management application. Of course, as a writer who covers Linux and open source software, I knew about digiKam and even wrote a few articles about it. But at that point, it was overkill for my needs. Now, however, digiKam is exactly what I need. It can handle raw files and it offers excellent organizing tools (tagging, geocorrelation, star rating, powerful filtering options, etc). digiKam also provides an impressive collection of photoediting and batch processing tools as well as a sharing feature which lets you upload your photos to popular photo sharing services like Flickr, Picasa Web, and SmugMug. All in all, digiKam is a real gem, and I’ll be donating a few euros to the project.

I’m writing this on the train heading home from Berlin — the coolest city in Europe, if you ask me. Visiting Berlin is always something I look forward to: my mom lives there, and there is always something interesting going on in the city.

This time, it was the Festival of Lights — an annual event when many landmarks and buildings are lit using all kinds of creative lighting. This was also the first time I decided to do some serious photographing — now that I’m the proud owner of a Nikon D60 DSLR. As you would expect from a first-timer, I made a few beginner’s mistakes. The most grave one was the decision to pack a Velbon CX Mini instead of a “full-size” tripod. Since D60 lacks the live preview feature, I literally had to crawl on all fours when composing a shot. On the positive side, I found the Nikkor 18-55mm VR kit lens extremely versatile, so much so that I decided to postpone purchasing additional lenses for the time being. To be honest, I don’t think that my night photo walks yielded any decent photos, but it was a valuable learning experience.

The next item on my todo list was a visit to Berlin’s botanic garden. I’ve been there before with the missus, but I had only my point-and-shoot with me, and one of the most interesting pavilions was closed for renovation. This time, I spent almost four hours shooting flowers, but I did have a few problems in the process. Firstly, as soon as I walked into a green house with tropical plants, the lens became covered with condensation, and I had to wait 15-20 minutes before I could use my camera. So here is my question: Is there any way to avoid or mitigate condensation? The botanic garden has an excellent collection of cacti. Unfortunately, the most interesting ones were behind the glass, and I’d like to hear your tips and tricks on shooting through the glass. Despite all these annoyances, I managed to take over two hundred photos. I used RawTherapee to transfer photos to my laptop and quickly review them.

Speaking of the laptop, I planned to take a netbook on my trip, but it turned out that RawTherapee (or any of my favorite photo applications) was pretty unusable on the small screen. So I had to pack my HP production laptop. When going through my photos from the botanic garden, I realized that I made another mistake: I didn’t write down the names of the flowers I photographed. Now all of them go by names like “pretty flower”, “yellow flower”, “flower that looks like a star”, and so on. So next time, I have to remember to write down the name of each plant I photograph, or — even better — take a picture of the sign with info about the plant.

All in all, the trip was a success. Despite a couple of rookie mistakes, I’m heading home with an SD card chock-full of photos and a few valuable lessons. I’ll be slowly posting photos from my trip to Berlin on my Flickr page, so stay tuned.

Wonder how the aperture affects the depth of field? Here is the answer:

Explanation: high f value = sharp background, low f value = fuzzy background

The Manfrotto Modopocket tripod is probably the most useful accessory in my photo bag (and it’s the only Manfrotto product I can afford).

Technically speaking, Modopocket is not a tripod, but a cleverly engineered foldable stand for stabilizing your camera. The clever part? You can attach Modopocket to your camera and just leave it there. The tripod weighs a mere 50 grams, and once folded, it doesn’t take up much space. Better yet, Modopocket sports its own mount thread, so you can use your camera with a regular tripod without removing Modopocket.

My very first camera was ЛОМО Смена 8М, and I got it when I was ten. So I guess I was doing lomography long before it became a bit of a photography cult. Unfortunately, my Смена 8М is long gone, but its spirit lives in many lomography photos.

Lomography Store, Sheung Wan, Hong Kong

M.A.S.H

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An old saltpan cart

For You…

935uuh

A sandcastle, circa 1972

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Strasbourg

Thirsty for more? Visit the LOMO group on Flickr.