Slow Light (Light Painting)
A while back I was too cheap (lazy?) to get around to purchasing some speedlights and in typical DIY fashion for me, I figured I could replicate most results using nothing more than a flashlight. So one evening with my friend Sean and his wife, we decided to try out some long exposure light painting ideas.
To be clear, the term "light painting" is often used to describe painting light onto an image where the bulb is visible, and used to create something visual in the final result. This is NOT what I am referring to here. I've seen plenty that are nice, but I don't personally have much interest in doing this:
As far as I'm concerned, the definitive "light painting" of this type was done years ago by Picasso:
I absolutely love the quality of the light fall-off when using nothing more than a flashlight to illuminate a scene during a long exposure. The ability to move around and to selectively place light wherever you want it at whatever intensity you desire is surprisingly fun once you get started. So let's get started...
ImageMagick Batch Convert Files
I recently shot a wedding for a friend and found myself with a few hundred images in RAW format, of which I processed the handful that I liked. Due to Flickr increasing the maximum file sizes you can upload to 50MB, I went ahead and saved my final results as lossless PNG images.
However, I also wanted to upload the images to a photo printing service that apparently does not accept PNGs as a valid photo file. (stupid AdoramaPix...).
So the question became, how can I batch convert all of the PNG images into JPG images on the windows command line?
I already had ImageMagick installed (and highly recommend it if you ever need to do batch image processing on your machine). So the question now becomes, how can I use IMs convert command to do this?
The answer is right here:
What a royal PITA it was tracking this down. In a nutshell:
For each variable (f in my case) in all the files that end in .png in my current directory...
convert the file with a quality of 100...
and name the output the original file name plus .jpg as an extension. That last bit was a real pain to get right, and required me looking into the Microsoft documentation of FOR.
So, if you happen to be on windows, and have Imagemagick installed - here is the solution to batch converting images in a directory.
Oh, and you can expand the types of images and lump them all together at once. For instance, instead of *.png, you could have told it to do .png and .tif images:
Hopefully this snippet will be useful to some fellow traveler... (relevant xkcd)
However, I also wanted to upload the images to a photo printing service that apparently does not accept PNGs as a valid photo file. (stupid AdoramaPix...).
So the question became, how can I batch convert all of the PNG images into JPG images on the windows command line?
I already had ImageMagick installed (and highly recommend it if you ever need to do batch image processing on your machine). So the question now becomes, how can I use IMs convert command to do this?
The answer is right here:
for %f in (*.png) do (convert %f -quality 100 %~nf.jpg)What a royal PITA it was tracking this down. In a nutshell:
for %f in (*.png)For each variable (f in my case) in all the files that end in .png in my current directory...
do (convert %f -quality 100convert the file with a quality of 100...
%~nf.jpg)and name the output the original file name plus .jpg as an extension. That last bit was a real pain to get right, and required me looking into the Microsoft documentation of FOR.
So, if you happen to be on windows, and have Imagemagick installed - here is the solution to batch converting images in a directory.
Oh, and you can expand the types of images and lump them all together at once. For instance, instead of *.png, you could have told it to do .png and .tif images:
for %f in (*.png *.tif) ...Hopefully this snippet will be useful to some fellow traveler... (relevant xkcd)
On Little Planets
I've been a fan of shooting panoramic images for as long as I've had a digital camera. Usually out of a desire to expand the capabilities of early fixed focal length point and shoot cameras to get a wider view of the world. Taken to its logical extreme, we get images like these!
If this is your first time seeing one of these "Wee Planets", it may seem a bit strange to wrap your head around (pun intended). This is basically a full 360° by 360° panorama.
If this is your first time seeing one of these "Wee Planets", it may seem a bit strange to wrap your head around (pun intended). This is basically a full 360° by 360° panorama.
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