Hacking Photography - one Picture at a time
3D printed cameras are a lot of fun, and something I was planning to make a bunch of this year before we were told we weren’t allowed to go out and play. But despite most of us not being able to get out to shoot our cameras right now, it hasn’t stopped people developing new ones.
You might remember Dora Goodman, creator of the Goodman One 3D printed medium format camera. Well, now she’s back with the Scura, a new open-source 3D printed curved panoramic pinhole camera.
Darktable is an open-source alternative to Lightroom, and it seems to be growing in popularity, especially since it became available for Windows. The new version is now available for Windows, iOS, and Linux, and just like the previous ones, it’s completely free.
Now that digital imaging sensors are starting to become more freely available to the masses, all kinds of open source projects have been popping up that use them. Most of them are typically fairly limited to things like the Raspberry Pi or development boards like the Arduino and ESP32.
But now, there is a new and pretty serious looking open source camera out there. It’s called the Octopus, it has interchangeable sensors that go up to 5K full frame, it’s fully programmable and runs on the open source operating system, Linux.
When it was announced that Triggertrap would be winding down its business, many users expressed concern. What would happen to the apps? Will they be updated? Or will the hardware they’ve bought and paid for suddenly become useless? The common suggestion was to make it open source.
A couple of weeks ago we reported that the Triggertrap Mobile dongle had indeed been made open source hardware. Now, they’ve followed along with the software. The Triggertrap apps for both iOS and Android have now been released. They’re completely open source and available on Github (iOS / Android).
Over the course of its life, Triggertrap has had a pretty eventful journey. Triggertrap started life as an Open Source universal camera trigger backed through Kickstarter in 2011. It tripled its goal, and was very successful. Fast forward to 2013, and along came the Triggertrap Ada, also backed through Kickstarter. It smashed its goal, of £50K, raising almost £300K (around $500K at the time).
But then various problems ensued which eventually led to the demise of the company at the beginning of this year. Triggertrap has been winding down ever since. Despite this, they’re still receiving plenty of requests from people who want to buy a Triggertrap Mobile Dongle. With no stock left, and no ability to sell even if they had, they’ve now made the Mobile dongle hardware Open Source.
Facebook has announced that it is releasing three of its main image identification algorithms to the public. It’s not the first time Facebook has opened its research to the public, and it likely won’t be the last. In this particular instance, Facebook say that they hope the work will “rapidly advance the field of machine vision”.
Such technology has already come a long way in just the last few years. It’s a bit like what you see on Google when you search by uploading a image. It makes an attempt to identify the person, place, or object in the image, and offer similar or related results. It’s also similar to the technology coming in the iOS 10 update to automatically categorise your photos.
Whether hardware or software, Open Source is a wonderful thing. Open Source doesn’t always mean free, though, especially when it comes to hardware.
While not necessarily cheap, the DIY solution presented in this video from Bent-Tronics does fall in line with other such overhead camera projects. The simple fact of the matter is that it’s not easy to do something like this ultra cheap unless you happen to have the perfect components just laying around doing nothing already.
With Adobe’s long standing global domination and the current buzz around Affinity’s recent announcement of impending Windows versions of their software, it’s easy to forget that there is another application out there that can satisfy the needs of a good number of photographers, especially those who run Linux.
That application is GIMP. One of the struggles with GIMP, however, is the shortcut keys, especially if you’re already used to working with Photoshop or another application that has a similar default shortcut key setup.
I am a huge proponent of the open source platform. Sure, there are two sides to the open source vs. proprietary argument, but it’s still too early in the week to be arguing something that heavy.
There are numerous reasons to use open source software for photo editing. Perhaps you prefer the Linux operating system, maybe you’re on a tight (or nonexistent) budget, or maybe you just wanna “stick it to The Man.” Whatever your reason, there are an increasing number of solutions available to you.
This is where Pixls.us comes in. Founder Pat David started the website as a resource for those looking to use open source editing software. There are treasure troves of information and quality tutorials for applications like Photoshop and Lightroom yet very little (in comparison) for programs like Gimp and Darktable. David aimed to change that.
In my previous post I walked through the concept and shoot of my portrait of Mairi. At this point all I’ve got are a bunch of RAW (and jpg) files of the shoot. I know that I forgot to mention it in the last post, but for goodness sake if you can shoot RAW – do it. (It saved my butt with this image, as you’ll see below).
Also, you’ll be able to download my RAW file, and JPG output from RawTherapee below.
This is a long post.Seriously, this is the longest post I’ve ever written.I’m walking through many of the things I had previously written tutorials for, and apply them to a process this time so you can see them as part of a workflow.So, here’s a Table of Contents so you can jump to the section you need:[Read More…]
You can find out more about John on his website and follow his adventures on YouTube.
His videos have over a hundred million views, have been extensively published by news outlets, and has even received recognition from a few film festivals, such as International Ocean Festival
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