Concert at Musikens Hus Göteborg

Three local bands were playing in Musikens Hus Göteborg this Thursday.

The evening kicked off with Desiree Hermann:

Then followed by a wild and crazy act of Kapten Hurricane:

And finished off by Bobastian:

Great evening all in all. Lots of fun, good music and great people! Rest of the pictures from the concert are here.

For the geeky part- I am still shooting with D70s. All pictures were taken with Nikon 18-70 kit lens. No flash at all this time. As it was dark in there, all had to be shot ISO 800...

Raw processing done with Bibble 5 (still under Linux ;-) ). Not much of it actually. I messed up white balance, so that had to be fixed. Added strong vignetting to most of the pictures to clean off the cluttered background. I have made the personal discovery of Noise Ninja while working on these pics (it is built into Bibble 5). It is a really useful plugin when a dark cafe forces to use high ISO... More on that some other time.

Cheers!
//M.

Speeding up Bibble 5

In case you are running on a system with slower hardware (like I am limping on Intel Celeron 1.86GHz with 2GB RAM) you might run into problems with Bibble while handling folders with large amounts of pictures in them (valid for both Linux and M$ Win). In some cases I even had the Preview generator hang right on the start and it never let go of the hanging preview generator even if I closed down Bibble and started from scratch again. It is useful for us slow folks to completely disable this feature.

In the main menu of Bibble 5 go to File->Preferences and choose Import and Cache from the side menu. Uncheck the box like so:

I have also changed the time cache is kept from 2 weeks to 2 days.

Now it takes a moment longer to open every image, but in general it is well worth it as Bibble never crashed after this change again.

By the way, last weeks post about moving to Linux from MS Win also is a good trick that speeds up Bibble performance. The startup time is almost nothing compared to what it was on M$! Yet another reason to migrate to open source ;-)

In all honesty, one glitch did pop up on Linux. When using crop tool in Bibble, it is hard to move around the selected area as it is not following the mouse smoothly. There are minor glitches when moving the Curves sliders too. Not sure yet if that is because of something in the default Fedora configuration or if it's something with Linux version of Bibble. More on this after I figure it out.

Cheers
M.

First photo workflow breath under Fedora 13 Linux

Finally it happened- after just one and a half hour of work I have my Fedora Linux up and running with GIMP and Bibble as my tools for digital photo workflow. Yes, it is possible and yes, it does feel good!

Why Fedora? Because there are two flavors for us not willing to fiddle with tech details too much - Fedora and Ubuntu. And I like colors of Fedora better. OK- as serious as it gets- Fedora has been there for a few years longer than Ubuntu. Bigger community, more support, hopefully more stable.

I have not worked on a Linux machine for at least 5 years now... And (this is great news) there was no need to remember anything! Installing the system took no time at all and was as easy as clicking the Next button under M$.

Nowadays (if your computer supports booting from USB) you don't even need to burn a CD to get this working. Download the Live USB creator here. It will create a bootable memory stick from your ordinary USB stick. Reboot and off you go! The system should start up and become fully usable without the need to install - that's what Live CD means. It allows you to use a completely functioning computer without any installation at all. When you've made sure that you like it, just click Install to hard drive icon on your desktop and follow on screen instructions. It is a really quick and painless process.

One note for you who have never seen Linux before- root user is like administrator under win. You'll need to supply a password for that one during installation. Remember this password as you will need it every time you are installing new stuff on your machine.

Everything else is very much self explanatory. All software updates are delivered automatically afterwards so you don't have to worry about things getting old or staying buggy.

To install the GIMP just go to System->Administraion->Add/Remove Software. In the search box type GIMP and select the packages you want to add. Click apply button, wait till it's done and you have GIMP installed on your computer! Didn't even need to download it yourself ;-)

Bibble is not ported into Fedoras package list therefore you will have to go through the 'hassle' of downloading. Get it from Bibble Labs download page. Just run the package after downloading and it should install all by itself.

That's about it! You are now a proud owner of a Linux system and should be fully capable of managing your photo workflow on it!

Here is the first picture I've developed under Linux (from one lovely evening at the Swedish coast):

This is it for now. It is time for me to do more playing around with Fedora so I can write more stuff for you folks! Keep checking the Linux tag and enjoy being M$ free! It is easy and effortless nowadays!

//M.

Changing My Skin

It is yet another post-vacation period - the time when all the stuff accumulated in my head through out vacation is being compiled and released out in the open. Relax, there is no need for you to take cover, but this time my actions are a bit more visible than what they normaly are.

Those of you that have been here before noticed already that it is all bright and shiny now. Jep- coming out of the shadows :)

Besides having a lighter skin here I've also removed all kinds of searches and links to various photo directories. They are meaningless (i.e. give none or close to none measurable effect and I don't care what you web marketing people say) as I've noticed so far so no need to clutter things up. Also no more adds from now on as there is no real financial gain from them too. Plus they are annoying :)

As for content there are a couple of new things coming up. I am planning to go crazy beyond webspace. Just tried out the trial version of Bibble 5 which made my day because it is a realy good tool that is workable. Got it's own ups and downs, but haven't they all? So, soon enough I will be moving everything over to some flavor of Linux and have my whole digital darkroom windows/mac free (reasons for this coming together with the flavor choice details). There will be tons of writing about the whole Linux/Bibble/Gimp stuff.

And it is not only on the blog that is changing - homepage got turned inside out completely too.

It is all concentrated on people photography now. Making portraits is something I was getting ready for. And now I am. You are allowed to call me barn/porträt fotograf i Göteborg as my utterly poor Swedish suggests :)

Anyhow, looking forward to see where this brings me. All new adventures will be covered here together with the tech stuff.

That's about it for now!
Keep on dreeming ;-)
//M.