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Working from home since March 2020. Over the months, I made quite a few tweaks to my home office. I’m so much more at ease at home than at the office with a desk, a chair, a lamp, and devices that I chose, instead of being imposed on me.
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One More Gripe Against Appleās Photos Memory Feature
Jim Novell & Stephen Hackett both have valid points against Appleās Photos Memory feature. I would another one: memories are created on a very aggressive schedule. There are way too many; I miss most of them. I donāt know if this is related to the fact that my library contains more than 42K images or if other factors come into play here. There should be a way to reduce the frequency.
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Those Curvesā¦
Iām a big fan of curves, but up until now, I didnāt really know how to take advantage of them. š Enter this short tutorial for Pixelmator Pro. š Youāll learn how to use the curves adjustment to tweak colours and luminance of any photos. I usually prefer to use sliders just because up until now I didnāt really get how to use the curves. Now, thanks to this tutorial, I have a much better idea. Many more tutorials are available on the Pixelmator Pro YouTube channel.
The production quality of these tutorials is impeccable. I really love Pixelmator in general, and I always thought this photo processing application could have been done by Apple, when they cared enough about making one, back in the days. This isnāt a paid advertisement. Iām just being enthusiastic about great native macOS applications. š
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He says "Hi!"
For no apparent reason, I started a photo series of this little guy in all sorts of visual contexts. I’m using an album to store them all. I’m currently at 23 photos of him. He’s so cute, isn’t he? I got my inspiration from someone here on Micro.blog who did the same in recent months. I can’t remember who, though. So who knows where this is headed. It’s the time of the year for frivolous projects. š
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Completed The Servant Season 2 - At Long Last!
Finally was able to finish season 2 of The Servant on Apple TV+ yesterday, just in time for the third season. What a weird story. The only occasion I can spend time watching TV series is during the holidays. Using AirPods Max for the listening experience is pure magic; nobody in the living gets distracted by the TV, and the sound quality is impressive. Now, I should finish For All Mankind Season 2.
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Glass ā Maybe We Need to Be Patient?
Matt Birchler blog post about his interest for Glassās fading out:
I was very high on Glass, a new photo sharing app this summer, but my enthusiasm for it has dropped in perfect sync with the temperature dropping here in the Midwest since then.
Lee Peterson blog post about his interest is so low that he canceled his Glass subscription:
I still feel it was a bad slope to start down by adding appreciation and Iāve cancelled my subscription.
Finally, Andy Nicolaides on Twitter thinking out loud about the introduction of āappreciationā (a term used instead of ālikesā):
Iām not one of the folks that wasnāt a big fit of Glass adding the likes / appreciation function, but Iāll tell you this much, in my small case study of one, itās completely killed off any comments I used to receive.
Letās be honest: Glass has been alive for less than four months. They kept updating the service since the beginning to improve the experience and discoverability. They didnāt fall in the āme tooā trap yet. Arenāt we expecting too much too soon from such a small organization? Should we expect them to come out with the right recipe on day one? Could this be much more difficult to be different and yet familiar in the crowded space of on-line photo sharing? I would argue that your feed is as good as the people you follow. Sure, Glass needs to attract great photographers. I suspect they are working on it as I write this. People are busy. Living in a pandemic put a lot of stress on everybody and cancelled so many opportunities for doing photography, but it created others too. It wasnāt the best moment to launch such a service, and yet, theyāve done a great job so far.
I do have a subscription to Glass (my profile page here) and Iām willing to be patient here. I have a goal of posting at least one picture a week, even though I have another place to do so, on Smugmug (my profile page here).
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An idea. The iPad. A Brainstorming Session. Another Article in the Works.
I love the iPad. Appleās Notes.app in dark mode is š. Youāre currently seeing a brainstorm of ideas for an upcoming blog post in early 2022. The subject? Can you tell just by looking at my notes? Hint: Itās a meta blog post. Another hint: https://numericcitizen.io.
Yes, I know, my handwriting sucks. š¤¦š»āāļøšš
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The Enigmatic Snapseed from Google
Surprising to see Snapseed being updated since it is owned by Google. I use this photo processing application to create the posts in the Perfect Imperfection Series on my Smugmug account. If Google was to kill this app, it would probably put an end to my photo series. I tried to find other apps to replace Snapseed but failed to find something that comes close. Now, why is Google even bother maintaining Snapseed? How does it fit their business model?
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Being Unsplashed ā Take 2
If youāve been reading my blogs for a while, you probably know by now that Iām a big fan of Unsplash (āMy Growing Love Affair with Unsplashā). Iāve been using Unsplash constantly to find and use pictures in many of my posts (when I cannot find one of mines that fit the post subject). My contributions slowed a bit in the last year because I spend more time building my online presence on Smugmug (my Smugmug page) and more recently on Glass (my profile on Glass).
This week, the picture above has been selected to be featured in the architecture category. Iām honoured. You can see my featured photo in the architecture category right now. The last time that Iāve been unsplashed was less than a year ago, I wrote about it on my main blog: OMG ā Iāve Been Unsplashed!.
To see all of my contributions to Unsplash, visit my profile page. The expression of ābeing Unsplashā is a creation of mine. š
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On #Glass Appreciation
Surprise! Today, Glass introduced something I thought would never come: Like! Oops, Appreciation (Announcement on Twitter)! In summary: they are private. They are note at the forefront of the experience. They donāt propels algorithms. They arenāt used to sell targeted ads. They are merely a check box in a database. They are gentle. They are a gift. The team behind Glass is showing sign of lucidity. I like whatās Iām seeing since the start of this special place.
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On My Photographic Style
The photo thumbnails are from a personal trip to Austria in 1998. When I look back at these photos, I have to come to a conclusion that my photographic style didnāt really change in 30 years. It feels a bit depressing. It is basically revolving about architecture, nature. Very rarely about people, these are too hard to capture; I donāt have a good sense of timing, and Iām shy. Iām rarely doing street photography. The only addition to my subjects in recent years is urban exploration. Do we come into this world with a pre-determined photographic style?
Here is my Glass page.
And my SmugMug page.
Oh and my Unsplash page!
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Testing Synology Photos as a digital assets management solution (#synology #beta #dsm7)
I’m currently testing Synology as a storage solution for all my non-personal, non-photographic digital assets that I often use to complement my blog posts. After testing Synology Moments, their previous solution for photo management on DSM 6.2, Synology Photos in DSM 7.x is a step in the right direction, a big improvement. I like what I’m seeing. It’s fast. The ability to use folders as well as albums to organize my collection is a big plus. I’ve yet to find a bug. There is an iPad version of their Synology Photos. It’s not perfect but it works. Lacking is support iPad multitasking, which is a shame but not a deal-breaker.
In order to test this solution, I’m using my DS720+ running DSM7 beta inside a virtual machine. DSM Virtual Machine Manager allows the execution of a Virtual DSM which is very cool for testing future releases of their software. I’m impressed by the relative speed of this setup running on 6 GB of RAM, 2 x 6 TB SATA drives and a Samsung M2 NVMe 512 GB cache drive.
Stay tuned for more.
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Photo editing while on the beach
On my iPad Pro, in split-screen view: on the left, Lightroom. On the right, Appleās Photos. Same photo in DNG format (ProRAW) edited with available features and possibilities of each application. Lightroom wins, obviously. Recent update to Lightroom adds editing masks which makes a big difference in achieving desired results. Picture taken with iPhone 13 Pro. On the beach. While in vacation. Cheers. šš¹
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Some of my heroes over the years. Do you have any?
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From ProRAW to JPEG ā When JPEG is Simply Enough
Here is a situation for which Iām searching for a solution. Letās say Iām going out with my iPhone 13 Pro to take a few pictures outside. After a while, I notice that all the pictures that I was shooting were in ProRAW format. What if the lighting conditions were great that day and my photos didnāt require post-processing of any kind besides the iPhoneās own processing? How can I convert from ProRAW to their optimized JPEG counterparts and keep them in my iCloud Photo Library? Such process would decrease image size by a factor of ten.
I cannot find an answer for this seemingly easy question. So far, it all comes down to exporting the photos from Appleās Photos application and then reimporting them. Such process needs to be followed by the deletion of all the original photos to prevent duplicates. There has to be a better way. Shortcuts, on iOS or macOS doesnāt provide any solutions as far as I can tell. Why is such thing not possible? If you happen to have a solution for this, please let me know.
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Here is my Sunday so farā¦ how is yours going?
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Comparing Notion and Craft running on an M1 MacBook Air. Notion takes 382 MB of RAM while Craft uses less than half of this. Both are native, but Notion is based on Electron. Well, Craft is based on Catalyst, it’s not pure AppKit. Yet…
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Time to relax, itās Friday after all. Whoās playing?
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Glass Profile Page ā Finally?
After a successful initial launch, categories support addition, now here is profile page support. Glass is maturing, one step at a time. The web experience wasnāt part of the initial launch and I think it is fine. This is my profile page. Works great on iPhone, and on iPad which is cool. To join, you need to download the application. Works great on iPhone, not available on iPad. Oops. Next? Like support? I donāt think so. Hoping to meet you there!
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Computational Photography Meet Traditional Cameras
But I wonder, where is photography headed from here? Surely, computational photography will play a big role in the short term. In my opinion, smartphones are not the future of photography, but they are hinting at where standalone, interchangeable lens cameras have to go in the next few years. I canāt wait to see whatās coming next. Source: Where is photography headed? ā aows
What if Canon or Nikon were developing computational photography features in their cameras, just like Apple does for its iPhone? Imagine a “real” lens, a much bigger CCD captor, algorithms coupled with machine learning running on a powerful CPU. I wonder if this is the only way for Canon and Nikon to survive.
