photography – Brabeum

Tethered shooting with Entangle

I recently wrote about using gphoto2 to both set Owner and Copyright information on a DSLR, and using it for tethered shooting. For those of you who are adverse to command lines, the very promising Entangle is now in Debian unstable.

Tethered shooting with gphoto2

Tethered shooting with a DSLR (shooting directly to a connected computer via a USB cable) on Linux is very, very easy, assuming you have gphoto installed.

gphoto2 --capture-tethered

And start shooting away! However, I wanted to be a bit cleverer and improve my workflow slighty to overcome a few shortcomings. I wanted to:

Shoot raw
Display the last shot full-screen.
Not clobber existing files if I re-ran the tether.

it turns out that this is all easy to do with a small bash script and gphoto’s “hook” capabilities. I knocked up the following based upon the sample distributed with gphoto and called it hook.sh.

GIMP xcf file size reduction

If you are a GIMP user you can end up with plenty of .xcf files. I do all my editing with xcfs after importing from RAW with the excellent ufraw-gimp plugin. But they can get pretty big…

Step forward bzip2. If you are running linux, you will already have bzip installed, and the bonus is that GIMP can read and write natively its xcf files compressed with bzip. There is a small performance hit on opening and saving files, but you can save 10-40% of file-size; that can easily be 40 MiB for a simple file with a couple of layers.

Updating camera settings with gphoto2

gphoto2 is a cool little command line utility to remotely control many digital cameras and their settings. Grab it out of your repository, connect your camera by USB, turn on and enjoy.

Superquick thumbnails in Gnome 3 for raw camera files

I do most of my shooting in Canon Raw (*.CR2) and convert to jpeg for display, but my Debian Testing system won’t show thumbnails for them: until now. And as a bonus, it’s dead simple to do and they are produced really quickly.