Photoshoot: Århus Å

Took the 70-300 with me when going for bread. The little park has a couple ducks and *many* gulls. When shooting birds and other rapidly moving objects, set manual exposure for the bird -- especially white things will easily overexpose, and getting that extra speed will help.

Went down to Eskelund to recycle cardboard. Since this was the first sunny day in quite a while, I was hoping to get some good time in, but I napped until about 3:50, and by then I could mostly just watch the last rays of the sun disappear. Official sundown is 16:36, but I was out at the path at 16:10 and the sun had by then dipped below the usual western clouds. The path out to the lake is actually rather long, and the flooding has made it difficult to get out to clear water.

Photos turned out to have little interest, except perhaps the three sculpture pics. Need to consider what to look for on snow-less, plant-less days. 70 mm is fairly long (112mm equivalent), and 300mm (480 equivalent) is positively paparazzian.

I tried the printable lenshoods for the 60mm. Disappointed to find out that they don't attempt to screw into the normal slots, but are supposed to be put on with tape or rubber bands or something.

Ditching Karrigell

Karrigell is too complex for my needs. I'm going with mod_python for the web service backend and PHP/JavaScript for the frontend.

Going with PHP for the backend would make it easier to move to an external server that might not have Python, but starting with Python allows a quick start and giving some KPA-MySQL access code back.

The Publisher mod_python handler is excellent, exposes functions with their parameters. Extremely easy for web services. Combined with JSON for transfer of data, the web service side of it is pretty much taken care of.

The trick now is the right division of labor between PHP and Javascript. Unfortunately, there's not a lot of obvious tutorial for Prototype.

Setting up Karrigell according to http://karrigell.sourceforge.net/en/apache.htm (second version)

Moved autostart script to /usr/lib/cgi-bin

Enabled rewrite module.

Added handler for .cgi.

Still no worky:(

Notes on Taggart

Taggart is the code name for my newest crazy idea for a tagging system.

Put up mysql server with the usual password. Created db kpa, user taggart, as per in script in /usr/local/src/KPhotoAlbum-src/kphotoalbum/script/KPhotoAlbum

Ran script transferring all data from index.xml into MySQL. Created test script for getting out data, it seems to work.

Karrigell seems to be the nicer way to embed python in HTML, installed.

Next step: get list of images from a given folder and present them in HTML together with their tags. This requires some access methods -- they will be written as needed. Also need to interface with dcraw to get thumbnails - -c option is perty fast, but it needs downscaling too, and convert is slow. Using a faster resizer like point speeds it up a bit. Obviously need to cache these.

Note: filename and dirId are separate in the media db.

Keywording assistant

Ideas for a "keywording assistant" type application: Use keywords of other images not just as completions, but as suggestions.

Screen should contain either several lines of keywords from various input strategies (see below) or one big cloud with combined keywords, emphasizing the ones that are repeated from several strategies.

The user can click to pick, after which that keyword disappears and new ones arrive. Issue: How to avoid that the user clicks just as keywords change? Maybe fade in/fade out, maybe have slow movement from the edge, maybe keywords close to the mouse don't change. It's important that there is no interruption, the user should be able to click on several keywords quickly.

To lessen mouse straing, maybe have the top N keywords have letters or numbers assigned.

There are many possible strategies for selecting relevant keywords. Essentially, they find other pictures and add their keywords. It may be useful to have a way to push keywords out that don't apply, to avoid cluttering.

Strategies:

- number of shared keywords
- MPEG-7 image similarity
- image name similarity (e.g. numbering ranges close to the image in question) Only relevant for user's own pictures
- image time similarity
- image geo-tag similarity
- thesaurus similarity (this doesn't pick pictures, but individual keywords)

Photo editing ideas

Since reading Alain Briots 'Just Say Yes' essay on his standard reply to "Is this image manipulated?", I've been wondering about doing GIMPing (aka photoshopping) myself. Having met one of the forerunners in image composition, Scott Mutter, I'm not adverse to some fiddling, and like the possibilities it presents. One avenune that just popped up when looking at Jerry Uelsmann's front page is to make photos that show what I would like to see. A house with roots is plausible, I would love to live in one, but I don't think one exists. Why not use photography to explore the realms of the possible - things that ought to be, but would require more work in the real world that I can put into them.

New photos on walls

I changed out the photos on the walls at home, to some from the new batch (finally from the new camera). The black mattes are definitely better, though it's possible that a colored one would work better in some cases. White mattes are uninteresting, partly for the whiteness, partly because it hides the thin white edge around the picture itself. The extra edge on the prints helped with the smaller mattes, but the narrow edge is probably a few millimeters more narrow than needed, while the long edge is still too long. Of course 18.5x26.5 isn't exactly 2:3.

Specific notes:

0137-8108-waterfallrocks: Should have taken it a bit to the left, so the rocks were fully bordered by the water and the the waterfall itself could have been more towards the left corner. It is possible that the rock behind to the right should be made to have contrast in between the front and waterfall rocks, to give an even better feel of the depth.

0043-9109-hazy-landscape: Kinda dark for having a black matte. Possibly the front parts should be lighter, they are rather overpowered by the sunny top. Already starting to buckle despite being upstairs all the time. The foam core backing is definitely needed, and probably should go on together with the matter.

0166-9711-stretchedsand: This one just works.

0032-4738-leaves: I could possibly cut a bit of the top, bottom and left side, but otherwise it works.

0102-9044-tool: Very tempted to move the tool a bit in Gimp, but otherwise it's nice.

Need to sign them.