Photography

Putting the new Rolleiflex through its paces by subjecting it to some self-portraits of me

Took a walk with the new Rolleiflex this afternoon

I maintain a list of shell commands for updating Make/Model/Lens information in film scans. I’ve always run this via babel in a code block in an Org mode file. Something like this: #+begin_src sh cd ~/Pictures/_Scans exiftool '-m' '-Make=Leica' '-Model=Leica MP' -overwrite_original . exiftool '-m' '-LensModel=Summilux-M 1:1.4/50 ASPH' '-FocalLength=50mm' -overwrite_original . #+End_src Easy enough, I just copy and paste from a list of commands, depending on the lens and camera. However, it occurred to me that I’d prefer to simply have Emacs prompt me for the information, and then take care of the shell commands for me. Also, instead of hard-coding the path, I wanted to use marked files in a Dired buffer. ...

I’ve not been shooting much film recently. Yesterday, I was bored and in a mood, so I grabbed the Hasselblad and fired off a roll using Alice as my model. Only one frame was good enough to share. I really like it, so it was worth sacrificing the other 11. Alice

A few quick thoughts after just over a month with the new Nikon Z f

Some former Nik Software people are building a new tool for managing photo libraries. It’s called Aspect. I’m a sucker for any photo-related software, so I installed the beta and spent yesterday testing it. I took some notes after using it for a day. First impressions were good. I like the ideas behind Aspect. It relies on the underlying file system, so it’s reasonably transparent. It organizes things for me based on dates and events. I can control the structure. I can even change it later, and Aspect will move things around to match. ...

I bought a nice Nikon FE2, but I don’t love it enough to keep it.

The Canon AE-1 Program was my first real camera. Unfortunately, I no longer own that original from 1982, so I bought another one in 2013. It’s not a great camera, but it works. I like to put a roll through it now and then.

I spent the morning of the election with my daughter and grandson. It was a nice way to spend part of an otherwise anxiety-filled day.

A portrait session with my aunt and uncle’s family. Taken using the Hasselblad 500C/M and 80mm Planar. HP5.

The viewfinder is kind of a mess right now. I have been thrilled to be able to use my little GR1 again, after pulling it off the shelf and finding that it does actually work. Except this morning I was reminded why I’d retired it before. The viewfinder becomes blocked by something loose in there or perhaps some sort of separation. Either way, it’s not usable when this happens, so I may have to document the issue and re-retire the camera.

I brought the Hasselblad to my parents house while my daughter and grandson were visiting. I underexposed the roll a bit, but the hit rate was better than expected. I love this one of my sister and Lincoln. Jess and Lincoln My parents with Lincoln Crystal and Lincoln Mom with photobomb

Jess on Trampoline I posted the above photo to Flickr 20 years ago today. It was my first. Flickr remains the best place to upload photos. I just wish it was still the best option for sharing them.

Photo Mechanic is the fastest, most powerful tool for ingesting/browsing/exporting photos. It’s always been a little expensive, but I’ve had a license for many years. Before 2024, I could buy a license and use it until the next version came out. I paid $90 to upgrade Photo Mechanic Plus (the fancy version with catalogs) from version 5 to version 6 in 2020. That was four years ago. It’s not cost me a nickel since then. ...

Most of the information I’ve written down about my cameras is either on my wiki or in random blog posts. I’ve decided to try and consolidate things in a new, separate wiki (using TiddlyWiki). It was trivial to drag and drop my original camera notes from the main wiki into this new wiki. I then copied the wiki file to my server, and it now lives here: 👉 jackbaty.com/cameras It’s very much a work-in-progress. My intention is to flesh out the individual entries and catch up on the TODO list. If that goes well, I may include some of my photos or notes on process. After that, maybe I’ll add information about photographers who’ve inspired me. Or not, who knows? TiddlyWiki makes all this easy, but it is also kind of weird. I’ll try to keep it easy as I can to navigate.

Recent versions of the new Lightroom (Desktop, not “Classic”) have added features making it feasible for me to use.

I switched from using Lightroom Classic (LrC) to Capture One Pro (C1) “for good” back in 2021. It wasn’t because of Adobe’s subscription model, or because I had some vague aversion to Adobe, the company. It was because I felt like I was getting better images, faster, with C1. I kept a few notes on Lightroom Classic vs Capture One but haven’t updated it in a while, so here are a few notes about why I have moved back to Lightroom Classic. ...

As much as I would love a new X100VI, I don’t actually need one.

I don’t like the way Glass shows images in a desktop browser when the browser window is wider than around 1,000 pixels. I prefer the layout in narrower windows, but I never have mine that narrow. This means whenever I’m browsing Glass, I have to shrink the window. Left: What I want. Right: What I get The Arc browser has “Boosts” that let me easily adjust the CSS of any website, so I created one for Arc. This is it: ...

In which I think about using Lightroom again.