Saturday, 8th January, 2022
Trying to take better pictures of my 4x5 film with an angle-poise stand, light table and Fuji X-T2 with the 60mm macro. It’s a lot harder than I expected! The angle-poise arm is annoying and wobbles way too much. Tempted to replace it with a tripod. I looked for a copy stand but they’re either super expensive, or cheap and nasty, or if I did get one it’s not a convenient thing to store anywhere. I feel like a tripod that can go horizontal or allow me to point the camera down would be more stable and having another tripod is probably useful in the long run.
Been trying out some free negative convertors. One of which is built into RawTherapee. Now it doesn’t help I’ve never used RT but the one tick negative convertor seemed decent enough. Auto levels makes the film too constrasty, so I need to play with things to figure what’s best.
Here’s my best result so far:
DarkTable has the negadoctor module. The manual makes it sound very complicated but perhaps just good advice to get the best image. I might install it and give it a go.
After quite a slow but productive effort with Tinderbox yesterday, I’m not feeling it any more. I’m still yet to tackle the export configuration and maybe I’m procrastinating on that. I found myself reading Hugo docs and looking at Hugo themes.
I do really like Tinderbox as a piece of software. I love applications that give you lots of tools, that are simple enough individually, but then allows you to build complex systems (if you need complex). I suppose like Excel. However, there’s something that is making me hesitant to use it. Maybe I just don’t want to be constrained to just macOS and one piece of software. The underlying file is supposedly just xml (I’ve not looked), and my license for this version lasts forever so as long as I keep an installer and the key I should be fine… hm still not sure what I don’t like. The whole thing feels hacky but that’s just how it works. Am I just so normalised to keeping all my files on Github and having various services do everything for me?
I do occasionally want to write from my iPad. Sitting in the kitchen or somewhere, or when we’re away from home. I can still write stuff in other apps and then move it into Tinderbox later (there’s lots of syncing stuff it does too). But I don’t want a delay or further effort. Although, the delay is meaningless as it’s just this site.
Hugo is quite complex and I think it can do what I want, the hardest part might be figuring out how to structure the data and then how to most easily type it out. I worry this’ll rely on me remembering a bunch of front matter or writing various scripts or text expansions to manage it. Maybe that’s not that bad.
I should finish the tinderbox blog and see what it’s like before I change course. Maybe I just needed a break from it. Plus it’s not like I wouldn’t need to dig into Hugo docs and web searches to figure it out and spend a lot of time on that.
Think I’m going to try using Apple Photos as my main photo organisation. Found using keywords with nice shortcuts pretty much fixes the ratings shortcomings. I can just press 4 on a photo and now it’s got a keyword 4⭐️. I can use smart albums to filter out all those images. Plus it has facial recognition, good enough editing tools for me, Shared Albums and great integration with everything. Seems silly not to try and use it. I just need to decide upon iCloud storage. If I’m going with the 2TB option, then I need to import all my photos into it. This then means the Photos Library needs to sit somewhere with enough space, and currently the SSDs in the mini aren’t big enough on their own. iCloud would mean everything is sync’d across devices, and with family plans would mean my wife has a lot of space for her photos. Really I need to buy a new SSD for the mini, then I can make a new library on it, then add everything from the NAS. The alternative to iCloud is to also get the new SSD to house a copy of the photos local to the machine, and then just reference them there in Photos. The conclusion is…need a new SSD regardless!
This guide is just what I need to sort out the 2TB drive and iCloud etc.
