Lolrus.org

I need to learn to count

January 11, 2007 at 07:20 AM | categories: Photography | Comment

So, I was visiting my friend in NYC over break and I decided to bring my 4x5.  So I thought I had shot 8 sheets of color print film.  Then when I emptied out the holders I counted 7.  When I got my negs back from the lab they told me that I only had 6.

I had some interesting results too.  One sheet of film was exposed twice.  It looks pretty cool, but the white balance in the two scenes is completely different, but that might be a good thing?  Also, one of the sheets I had processed was some Velvia 100 that I guess I had in one of the holders.  It got cross-processed.  The exposure seems pretty good, but I have a feeling it will take a very long time trying to get the white balance correct.  It's somewhat of an abstract scene with no people, so it's not a huge deal whether or not I get it perfect.  If not, I will just scan it when I get time.  I'm curious.  I never cross-processed before. I also need to make sure I tighten my movements on my 4x5.  The rear tilt always seems to end up moving when I use my 90mm lens and I realize it after the fact.  It adds an interesting aesthetic by making the bottom of the exposure a little softer, but it's not like I am going for it.

Grinding Aspheric Lenses

December 15, 2006 at 12:36 PM | categories: Photography | Comment

For those of you that don't know, I've been employed part-time at an optics company (well, they do more than just make lenses.  They actually make machines for making lenses as well as sell software.  That's where I come in.  I've been working on software for the manufacturing of Aspheric lenses.

The Aspheric lenses I am referring to are not the kind you get in your Nikon kit lens, or even the large format Rodenstock or Schneider lenses, but the kind that go into aircraft, or the ones that are several inches in diameter that are used in some of the best "amateur" telescopes that cost tens of thousands of dollars.

Anyways, it's a really cool process how they're cut and polished.  Each lens taking lots of time to rough, polish, and finish the edges.

I have my camera so I will take pictures of the process and post them.

A Test for Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4

October 11, 2006 at 01:55 AM | categories: Photography, Computer | Comment

Well, I had hard drive issues a while ago and I had to recover all the data off of it, and I got a bunch of randomly named files (with the proper extension at least).  Forty gigs of those files are 6 megapixel NEF files (Nikon's RAW format).  Twenty out of the forty gigabytes of RAWs are from the classes I took this summer which I need to finish filtering out and editing by the end of this quarter.

For a while I have fiddled around a bit with Adobe Lightroom Beta 3 and liked the results and the flashy graphics.  It's simple to use and does a pretty good job for what I used it for.

The other day I put Adobe Photoshop Lightroom Beta 4 (I think they are going to push the Photoshop part to entice people).   I imported the 40gb of pictures into Lightroom and let it move them to where it wanted and sort them by date (I figured this way at least I would be able to get a general idea what I was looking at by date).  I assumed that it would take a while so I wasn't too concerned about performance so I let it run over night.

Today I finally decided I wanted to start editing some things, or at least sorting the stuff out so I could have stuff to show tomorrow.

I am completely disappointed.

Let me start off by saying this does not reflect how the final product will behave because I am using beta software.

Heres's a brief description of the box I am running it on: Athlon M 2500+ (running at 2200 mhz) 1GB of RAM Vista RC2*

I load up Lightroom, I click on a "shoot" that has about 300 RAWs in it, and my system locks up for a good five minutes.  When I finally get my task manager open I can see it is sucking up about 500 or 600mb of memory.  Finally, I can use the system again.  Everything seems to be going smoothly.  I check my Task Manager.  Lightroom is only using 170mb of RAM.  Lookin' good.  I scroll through some images.  Perhaps that was just a glitch or it just needed to cache some things...

Nope.  It locks up again.  This time I have task manager open and I see the memory jump back up to it's peak before.  Obviously, Lightroom is eating up all my memory and caching all my images into swap space.  Efficient?  Heck no.  It takes longer for it to read the data cached off of swap space: A. because it is not in it's compressed form. B. even though caching the manipulation that lightroom aplys to the RAW file may be fast when the cache is in memory, it's probably faster to recalculate it for the freshly loaded RAW file.

It went through a few cycles like that.  By this point I had only been running it for about 30 or so minutes and it racked up a good 6 million page faults.  Why can't Adobe manage it's memory responsibly.  Relying on the OS for this when dealing with data of this magnitude is silly.  Do you think SQL servers that have gigabytes of data store it all in memory and rely on the OS to manage it? I hope (and know) not.  It makes me cringe to think of how this software would run on a default MacBook configuration with a mere 512mb of memory.  I hope they're not just targeting professionals with large budgets that can afford fancy Mac Pros (or in my case, more RAM) and such.  Most students don't get much of a choice when it comes to computers, if a choice at all... and if they even do use Adobe Lightroom, are they going to really want to use that piece of software that they perceive to be slow when they get out into the photography industry?

Conclusion:

Lightroom is a great product, with great features, a great interface and everything like that.  If only it worked well for me on large scales like what I am doing I would fall for it.  Unfortunately, this is not the case.  I think I'll let it stay on my hard drive and use it for correcting pictures from parties and such.  One gigabyte of RAM should be sufficient enough and not cause this much of an issue.

*I'd like to address that due to the lack of my knowledge Lightroom works that there is very slim chance that it could be Vista's fault for all this, but Adobe should have taken this into consideration, and I highly doubt this to be the case.  Had I more time, I would put XP on another hard drive and do the same tests.

Scans of Zion Pictures

October 10, 2006 at 03:17 PM | categories: Photography | Comment

I finally got around to posting these pictures in my gallery, which can be found here.  They are still pretty rough, and unedited, except for some contrast stretching. Here are a couple of my more favorite ones.  Click for slightly larger image :).

I hope you enjoy them.

I really need to get around to processing them.  I have only a gig of RAM on my desktop and it doesn't like dealing with 400MB 16bit tiffs.

Rolleiwhat?

August 10, 2006 at 11:30 PM | categories: Ramblings, Photography | Comment

Yay!  I was fiddling around with my rolleiflex today and I finally got the exposure counter mostly working, which is just fantastic.  Still, I wasted a ton of film trying to get it to work.  Ugh.  At least most of it was expired.

I shot two rolls that came out and they are drying right now.  It was getting dark and I didn't have much to shoot, so I just took pictures of my cats, Apache and Lord Fuzzles, and some other randomness.  I'm also getting the hang of metal developing reels so I am happy.

Tomorrow is the company picnic which is bound to be fun.  I had to miss it the last year because it was after school started.  If the weather is anything like it was today it will be fantastic, just fantastic. :)

I was given a project at work to do which involves splitting MFC projects into two projects, one for the code and another for a resource only DLL.  There's like 60 projects for me to do and I think my boss was planning on it taking several days/weeks, but I wrote a ruby script which automates 90% of the process.  I still have to modify 1 file in each project by hand, add each project to the solution, and deal with Visual Source Safe (EWWW, VSS is so bad).  I also have to test each project.  Oh by the way, I love REXML, the  built in XML ruby support.  It's making my life so much easier because .vcproj files are XML and I can read it in and spit it out.  The only issue is that Visual Studio wants to "convert" the project once I open it up again probably because it isn't the exact same formatting as the ones it outputs.  That's the only actual difference I see.  Order of attributes and whitespace shouldn't matter with XML.

I'll post some pictures from my Rolleiflex when I get around to scanning them.

Waiting for my Rollei

July 27, 2006 at 04:31 PM | categories: Photography | Comment

I bought a Rolleiflex from India a week or two ago and it takes forever to ship from India, apparently. I really want it *wah*

I think I'll owe money on my credit card for it before it arrives.  And I have so many rolls of 120 just sitting in my fridge... just itching to be shot.