My Toolbox
Camera & Accessories
Nikon D90
18-200 mm VR kit lens
10.5 mm, f/2.8 fish eye
50 mm, f/1.8 prime lens (aka nifty fifty)
35 mm, f/1.8 prime lens
Custom-made panoramic bracket, somewhat similar to
these brackets
but not as precise when locking in position.
Manual flashes LumoPro LP120 +
Cactus V4 remote triggers
TTL flash Nikon SB-400 + short TTL cord
A few light stands, swivels, umbrellas... mainly from trademe (New Zealand e-bay like site)
Software
I prefer to use and support free software.
Currently all my workflow consists of software licensed under
GPL or similar. I pay no licence fees but
I donate to help projects of my choice.
Ubuntu
User friendly distribution of GNU/Linux operating system.
Complete and easy to use replacement
of Windows or Mac OS X. Most of the software I use is available from Ubuntu software repository.
All you need to do is to find it in the list and click Install button. Your application of
choice will be downloaded and installed without any user intervention needed. Running GNU/Linux
also offers better performance even from low-end and older hardware.
RawTherapee
Flexible and blindingly fast raw converter, just recently released under GPL. I used to run Bibble but
RawTherapee gives me better controls and produces superior results.
digiKam
Photo management application, somewhat similar to Lightroom. I don't like the built-in raw converter and
process my raw files in RawTherapee before importing them into digiKam.
Gimp
A mature replacement of Photoshop. Current mainstream version allows 8-bit colour depth. Other than that
I haven't found any serious limitations. There is wealth of plugins available too. My favourites are
exposure blend to simulate HDR
and tone-mapping in one step and high pass filter.
Hugin
Powerful panorama photo stitcher. Whether you need to stitch a couple of hand-held shots or a full
spheric panorama, Hugin will offer you all the tools and knobs to get the job done. Recently supporting
also HDR. The sheer number of buttons and levers might seem little overwhelming for a novice user
but well worth the learning. There is also a simple wizard tool available to automate most of
the process.
Gallery 2
Full featured on-line photo gallery (for techies: PHP + MySQL application). Available are templates and
wide range of plugins and configuration options. I run Gallery 2 on FreeBSD using shared web-hosting.
To upload new photos there is a handy Java application
Gallery Remote available.
ptViewer
Java applet panorama viewer. I use it on my website in a simplistic way to present my
spheric panoramas.
Learning Sources
Strobist - Lighting 101 course
Strobist - Lighting 102 course
Digital Photography School website
Light, science and magic: an introduction to photographic lighting, an excellent book by Fil Hunter, Steven Biver, and Paul Fuqua
Linux Photography blog
D.I.Y. Photography Accessories
GoBo's and Snoots
Grid from black drinking straw
Beauty dish
Diffusion panels and stick in a can style light stands
Colour Management
My current colour management is limited to my LCD monitor only. To create the ICC colour profile I use
Spyder 2 colourimeter (monitor calibration gadget)
and Argyll colour management software. For more information on
colour management in Linux see Linux Photography
blog.
Other Resources
Documentation of lighting setup
A handy template for creating diagrams that show positions of your subject, camera, lights and modifiers,
together with notes and comments. Great for sharing the setups with other photographers. Download the file from
here. Open it in Gimp and save as .xcf
format for future use. Similar template is also available here,
including on-line version.
Script for downloading photos from Nikon D90 via PTP
I like scripting routine tasks. This is a script for downloading photos from camera to my computer running
Ubuntu 9.10. Unlike my previous Nikon D40, D90 can connect to computer only via PTP protocol and not as a
standard USB drive. This makes the task little more interesting. The script here will download all files
from the camera to your local hard drive; the default location is ~/Pictures/YYYY/YYYY-MM-DD. Once
downloaded, it will rename every file to include current date in the filename, i.e. DSC_NNNN.NEF will
become YYMMDD_NNNN.NEF. You can get the script here.
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