Misadventures at 720nm

Many people have friends. Some people like me are lucky to have glamorous friends. Thank you, Kerry, for giving me some needed Photoshop practice. :]

Look at the groomed beard! Look at the neatly-cut hair! Look at the steady gaze and strong jaw!

Among my little social circle, a circle that mostly consists of myself and those poor others who are so paralysed with the fear of my insane wrath that they dare not flee, my hated of The Gimp is legendary. No other program, to me, exemplifies just how frustratingly right and how wrong the open source community can get things.

The Right: Features, features, features

I’m currently experimenting with Gimp 2.7.1. with Ubuntu 10.4, and feature-wise I believe it can compete fairly with Adobe Photoshop in core tools: Sharpen, blur, clone, crop, resize, heal, selection (by colour, magic wand), layers and it’s own experimental content-aware fill equivalent in Resynthesizer. There are even a limited subset of editing actions (creating borders and fine-tuning selections) that I find to be easier in The Gimp. And blessed of blessed, the 2.7 beta builds and the coming 2.8 version will have a native single-window mode. Huzzah. No more relying upon a(n outdated and unsupported) third-party solution for me to get my single-window fix.

The Wrong: Adobe Photoshop

Oh snap.

I am a Photoshop user. If you’d believe it, I even have a certificate that says, in part, yes Mark, you officially know how to use Photoshop. My personal point of hatred with The Gimp has always been its GUI, it’s interface. The keyboard shortcuts were (to me, completely backwards). Imagine your first time moving from to Firefox to Google Chrome or Apple Safari. You sit down and discover that instead of Ctrl+t to open a new tab, it might be Ctrl+i. Select all might be Ctrl+y, not Ctrl+a. Etcetera. Your very first experience is to discover that the keyboard shortcuts are all completely different to what you know and understand. Some things aren’t even bound to the keyboard at all! Where are my palettes? My brushes? Our first experience with The Gimp has typically overwhelmingly negative.

In the pioneering spirit of a man who has little else to engage him, I have set out to really give The Gimp another try by turning on single-window mode and changing all of the keyboard bindings so as to bring it closer to Photoshop’s. I’m ungimping The Gimp. The results have been pretty good so far.

It’s usable. The team has come a huge way since I last really used The Gimp (2.2-ish?) in GUI, in utility and in tools.

Watch this space for a keymap.

Not that ho. The other ho. My hand to god.

My stunningly expensive 15 euro webcam turns out to be super-sensitive to infrared light. I popped an R72 infrared filter on the front and got some surprisingly clear and usable images/video.

I apologize for the quality of an image; I was trying to screencap the scene while holding an R72 lens filter over the front of the webcam, which in turn was wobbly. My next step is to look at the fun and creative things I can do with a webcam, beyond the webstream and time-lapse projects I blogged about on the other site.

Star trails and astronomy immediately come to mind.

Suggestions, please. :]

Jackie, thank you for the photographs! I stole them without permission.

Kinda. I mean. It is a webcam still. Maybe more of videography?

Having two blogs and trying to keep their content separate and unique sometimes leaves me at a very strong risk of neglecting one or another blog (caveat: I maintain the capability to immediately and seamlessly merge one blog into another, should I see fit). While I’ve been active on other-and frequently related-geek fronts, I haven’t really felt and strong desire to pick up a camera since mid-May or so. I know that I’ve gone through such dry spells before. I also know that eventually I will come back to photography in a strong way.

Give it time.

Having starting working with 091 Labs (/plug), and having been shown how not-difficult it is to process basic film, I’ve come up with some embryonic ideas that I eventually would love to try:

• I have a big stock of photographic paper. I could use some of it for six-month exposures.
• A room-sized camera-obscura in order to dramatically demonstrate photographic principles.
• Papercraft pinhole cameras.

Over on the other site I have really gone into a good bit of detail on the technical side of the whole webcam/timelapse thing, but here on Misadventures I want to hold forth for a few minutes on the creative side of the matter: I am really excited to have a method for painlessly capturing timelapse video, so long as I can find somewhere to put my laptop. Maybe more of this?