I’ve finally had the chance to tweak and upload some photos of my recent trip to the Great Barrier Reef. There was quite significant tweaking required for the underwater photos, to try and correct for the blue colour cast. Read the rest of this entry »
Archive for June, 2009
Photos from the Reef
Jun 26
Swimming at the Outer Reef
Jun 22
I’m on a wave-piercing catamaran, crossing the Coral Sea. We’re returning from the outer edge of the Great Barrier Reef, where I went snorkeling amongst the aquatic wildlife. Its so beautiful! Hopefully some of my photos worked, and I’ll share the good ones here soon. The tide got so low today that the top of the reefs poked above water; apparently this only happens a few days a year.
Safely in Cairns
Jun 21
I am further north than I’ve ever been in Australia, by a factor of about 2. My previous record of the Sunshine Coast is not even halfway from Canberra to Cairns. The morning started nervously when we boarded our plane in Canberra only to be told that there was a slight delay: they had loaded our luggage on the adjacent plane to Melbourne, and our cargo hold was full of bags wanting to go south! At least that’s better than noticing at Brisbane.
Can I post from my mobile?
Jun 17
Web on mobile phones is becoming quite normal there days, but by these standards my phone is antique. I have been able to install the Opera Mini browser, which gives me a level of web access that is useful but not exciting.
If this works, however, then it proves I can post here from my phone.
Even when shooting images in raw format, it is typically easier to do simple sorting and sharing with jpg files. With Nikon *.nef raw files, it is possible to extract a full-resolution jpg image using the nefextract script. However, exif metadata is not automatically copied to this extracted jpg.
The tool that I use to manipulate my images according to their exif metadata is exiv2, and I can quite simply copy metadata from raw files to their corresponding jpgs (matching filenames, and all in the one working directory) with:
exiv2 insert -l./ -S.nef *.jpg
After sorting through the jpgs and deleting all but those worth keeping, I wanted to automatically remove the raw files of those deleted images. Sure enough, this is easily done with some bash shell magic:
for file in *??.jpg; do mv raw/${file%%.jpg}.nef 2> /dev/null rawKeep/ ; done
This command says “for each jpg file you find here, move the matching nef file from the subdirectory raw/ to the subdirectory rawKeep/”. I can then delete any files left in the raw/ subdirectory, as they mustn’t have a matching jpg.
People often ask my why I persevere with the “command line” (more technically the “shell”). It seems that they assume tools with graphical interfaces are more powerful and faster. These two routine tasks demonstrate yet again that the shell really is the most efficient way to do many common jobs.
Back on air
Jun 14
The poor old Toshiba Portege 3110CT laptop that I was using as a webserver turned out not to be up to the task. It would regularly run out of available RAM, and shut down the database server that provides the guts of this website. Luckily for all of us, I was recently able to obtain a hand-me-down “upgrade” for this laptop.
So here we are, back on air again at lachlan.rogers.name . Hopefully more reliably connected than we have been for the last few months.
I have tweaked things a bit, as you may notice. With the change of hardware, I did an upgrade of my WordPress installation. I’ve also switched to a new theme, and at the moment it has a very minimalist appearance (which I like quite a lot, to be honest). I may have a go at “colouring it in” over the next little while. More importantly than appearance, however, is the fact that this new theme is easier and more efficient to use.
I like this post. and your painted eggs are awesome! maybe when Jasper is...
