Photography

Finger activity

Fingers are Maxim’s most active body parts without a question. He moves his fingers all the time. And I mean all the time. He moves his fingers when he sleeps, eats, baths, dumps the load, plays, goes outside… You get the idea.

With all these movement, some of the figures or gestures he displays are really funny. The problem with capturing them though is that they don’t stay. He changes the location and position of his fingers constantly. Rarely, when he focuses on something else, like sleeping or eating, his fingers stay a few seconds in the same place.

We are having lots of fun watching him move. The best time is when he is awake and his fingerwork happens simultaneously with his funny faces. At this time he can impersonate anyone – Eminem, The Presiden of The United States, Cyprus taxi driver, Marilyn Manson’s fan at the concert – anyone.

Sometimes I am fast enough with the camera setup to capture the complexity…

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-24_POTD/

Sunrise

It has been a while since I photographed the sunrise. I did a lot of them at some point, but then I just couldn’t see anything new in them anymore. This was mostly due to the fact that I photographed all my sunrises from my office window.

Today I suddenly saw a slightly different view. It was there for about two minutes only, but luckily I wasn’t grumpy enough to miss it. I grabbed my camera and made the shot. At times like this I am really proud of myself.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-23_POTD

Picture of the day

Today I was photographing Maxim (again). He was very calm and was looking towards the window, so I used it as my primary light source for most of the pictures. I have also tried flash, but Maxim didn’t responde well enough.

With these series I was trying to capture emotions and different faces that he was making. Unfortunately, most of the aethetically pleasing images went terribly wrong in the technical department.

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-22_POTD

Nature

Today, photo opportunities were practically jumping into my eyes.

Firstly, when I left for work I saw this big bright yellow blooming tree on the parking lot. It is the biggest tree around and it had so many flowers that it was impossible to miss. Yellow colors of the bloom worked great with green leaves and blue sky. So I grabbed my camera and made a shot.

I thought that these will be all for today. But I was wrong. There was this really jumpy spider cruising around my workplace all day long. I wanted to photograph it, but I was too lazy. He wasn’t in a hurry though. A couple of hours later I said that enough is enough and made a picture of him. He left three minutes later.

It looks like I am getting signs. The bad news are that I don’t believe in signs. :)

Album location: /photos/2005/2005-03-21_POTD

digiKam

Contrary to popular belief, Gimp is not the only image manipulation application for Linux. There are a few.

Today I came across yet another one. digiKam is a KDE-based application for editing and maintaining collections of digital photographs. Iti s possible to store images in albums with comments, tags and dates. SQLite database backend allows for more metadata. digiKam also has a number of image processing features. Basically, it supports KDE image processing architecture and thus can utilize a number of plugins from other applications. The usual suspects for image rotation, levels, curves, cropping, annotating, white balance and color corrections are all there. Check it out.