Cycle Quark

I have been taking more pictures than usual lately. I have taken a lot of the girls’ bunnies, but I am most pleased with some shots I took of the area last Sunday. It was a beautiful fall day. I took a shot right outside my house, because the sky looked so blue with clouds nicely contrasting.

From Fall day

I was quite pleased with it, so I drove to the scenic overlook off of I-270. I got this one looking west at a farm.

From Fall day

I have been trying to organize my collection of digital photos. It goes back to 1999 when I had some film photos put on CDs when they were developed. I now have over 1400 photos that take up 1.6 GB. I need to back up all of these photos and set things up so that I can continue to easily back them up. I decided that it would be good to upload them all to the new Yahoo Photos website. Yahoo Photos stores the full resolution pictures and lets me download the full resolution pictures later. It supports tags like Flickr. It is free and I have not found a limit to the amount of space I can use.

I ran into two problems when I started. One is that the upload dialog on linux did not recognize .JPG files as photos. It was looking for .jpg. My current camera, Nikon D50, produces files with the .JPG extension. The other is that my camera does not produce unique names for each file. If I deleted all pictures from the camera, it starts counting again from DSC_001.JPG. I was not going to use the same directory structure on Yahoo Photos. I was just going to upload them all in one big pile and tag them.

I needed to fix the names of the files. I decided to rename each file based on its directory name and fix the case of the extension. I could not think of anyway of doing this except by hand or writing a program.  I ended up writing a python program to do it. It is only about 20 lines long. It took me awhile since I had to consult my manual several times. Still it was faster to write, debug, and then run this program than do rename all of the files by hand.

What made this possible is the fact that I do have a large amount of programming experience even if most of it is not recent. I was slow but I knew what I was doing.

I use Picasa for my photo management and editing. I find it has just the right level of features for my use. I use the cropping, redeye fixes, the auto contrast, and the fill light features most often. Well it is now available for linux. I will download it tonight and try it out. If it works as well as the Windows version, I will have once less reason to but into Windows. Now if Apple would just release a linux version of iTunes.

Technorati Tags: linux, picasa, photos

Frederick Cherry Blossom Festival

There isn't actually a Frederick Cherry Blossom Festival, but we have a weeping cherry tree on our front lawn. When I got back from a 4 day trip to Chicago, it had had bloomed.

Friday bunny blogging was delayed this week, but I will be making amends for that faux pas. Due to demand from my many readers (You know who you are.), I will be dropping all science blogging, book reviews, technology tidbits, and insightful observations on the world and switching to all bunny blogging all the time. Pictures of bunnies will be featured everyday and not just Friday.

To start of the the new theme of the blog, here is Bquark. He is one fat bunny, although I did see him hop yesterday and successfully get all four paws off the floor at once. Bquark is a mixed breed, half Holland lop and half hippopotamus.

Ginger Standing

Originally uploaded by cyclequark.

Just a test of flickr blogging. I got a Nikon D50 for Christmas. It has allowed me to catch the girl's pet rabbits in the act, which I never could with my old point and shoot.

Flickr has a blog this button which will create a blog entry with a link to the flickr photo and allow you to add text. If I ever take an interesting picture of something other than a rabbit, I will know how to blog it.

I wanted to figure out how to post photos in wordpress. WordPress seems to default to a thumbnail, but I finally found the option to use the original size. Since I do not have a cat, I could not go for Friday cat blogging. Ginger is my daughter's pet bunny, so she gets the honor of the first photo post.

The Washington Post reports today that Nikon is getting out of the film photography business. The lineup of film cameras will be reduced from 9 to 2.

"To use a car industry analogy, it would be the same as Ford saying it is no longer producing an internal-combustion engine. It's really that revolutionary," said Mark Greenberg, a professional photographer who has shot for National Geographic, Life and this week's People magazine. "Film is done. Digital rules the world now."

Many years ago when I was a poor graduate student, I yearned for a Trek bike, a Sony TV, and a Nikon camera. Well, for Christmas I received a Nikon D50 camera which is a digital SLR. My first Nikon camera is digital. I guess this is why Nikon is giving up on film.

Technorati Tag: Photography