publicenergy

I walked along the Chesterfield Canal today from Worksop to Retford. I’ve never walked along that section before. I have walked west from Worksop before and in that direction it’s a very different experience. The section between Worksop and Retford feels more untouched and natural. There aren’t as many people using it, there aren’t as many locks and narrowboats and it’s quieter, apart from a section where you go under the A1. The opposite direction is lovely too - just different.

The other major difference is that there is field after field full of cows! A lot of these were going about their usual munching duties, but on two occasions I saw a calf chasing a goose around a field - and at pretty impressive speeds too! I only had the Ricoh GX100 with me, so didn’t have an extensive zoom range to capture this. It was such a hot lovely day today that I wanted to travel light, without bags full of paraphernalia!

There are more photos from the walk in this set.

I don’t really do ’street’ photography. When I’m out taking photographs, I just like to do my own thing and try not to get in the way of other people or upset anyone. My golden rule when photographing people or animals is to make sure they’re happy and I’m not upsetting them by being there with a camera and taking their photo. Animals have been friendly enough to peck me and lick me (I haven’t been that lucky with people while out in public!). Anyway, before this degenerates, the thing that sparked this off was reading this:

Harassment on the streets of Middlesbrough

Be sure to click through to read the links contained in that article as well - especially When is it better not to take the photograph.

Ok, here’s a couple of Llama photos.

There’s a few more on Flickr

I use Microsoft Windows every day. Mainly 64 bit versions of Windows Vista because I use the Home Premium variant at home and the Business version at work. I have used Windows on computers for as long as I can remember and it’s so familiar to me and easy to use.

As for photography, in Windows I can pop in a memory card and have Lightroom grab the images and file them all away in the right place, tagged up with metadata templates applied and then happily browse the photos and make RAW or other adjustments, right-click and export to Flickr or do a multitude of other things with them very easily.

Considering how easy this process is, I wondered if it was possible to achieve the same thing using Linux. This is out of curiosity more than need.

So far though, it all seems like going back in time to when graphical user interfaces had just been invented. Everything seems very rudimentary and there are lots of basic things that don’t quite work right that are getting in the way even before I get to looking at a decent photographic workflow.

The issues that I have so far:

• I haven’t found any good way to browse a lot of images quickly
• The image editor (GIMP) doesn’t show me previews when I try and open a file (it just says “Loading Preview…” and sits there (for JPG as well as RAW)
• My mouse doesn’t have enough buttons available! - this one sounds silly, but I have a mouse with five buttons, the usual 3 on top including the clickable mouse wheel but also two buttons where my thumb lives. I’m so used to using these for forwards and backwards when browsing files or web sites.
• Graphical acceleration doesn’t work properly with my graphics card. This I find particularly odd because I’m using probably one of the best known manufacturers of chip sets - Nvidia. You’d have thought if any of them would work properly it’d be them!
• Adobe haven’t released a version of Flash 9 for 64bit Linux so a lot of web sites don’t display correctly.

Despite these problems, which I’m going to look at sorting out, it is quite pleasant to use for browsing, email and general bits and bobs.

And after a bit of mucking about I managed to get a music player to find my music and was able to listen to music and have it register with last.fm again. It’s amazing how much more pleasant using it is when you have access to creature comforts like a nice desktop MP3 player - Banshee is quite nice but it does do odd things sometimes. For instance, I paused a track and later closed the application. I later noticed that it was still running and had a little musical note icon near the date on the task bar - so I moved the mouse over it, it displayed a pop-up window showing my paused track, started playing on it’s own for about a second, then closed the application!

The bit I’ve not mentioned so far is installing. I started off with downloading Ubuntu - mainly because it seems to be flavour of the month and while there is a lot of activity around something, it should in theory be easier to get information and help. However, that turned out to be a right pain. The installation didn’t get very far before I just got a screen full of flashing colours. Another installation attempt and turning on graphical compatibility mode I got further still but then it took exception to my installation CD and bombed out right at the end. Is it honestly too much to ask to check the files on the CD at the start and put them on the hard disk to install from. By this point I was sick of Ubuntu. I thought that if I’m starting off by having to use compatibility modes at the installation point, then it doesn’t bode well for actually using it later.

So, I did some more digging and research and downloaded another installation image. This time OpenSUSE. I just downloaded a 60Mb boot disk that could install over the internet and fetch whatever it needed. I popped that in, told it where to find the files and let it do it’s stuff. It seemed to correctly identify all of my hardware, suggested the right place to put the disk partitions (something Ubuntu didn’t get right). The placement of partitions was especially impressive becuase my set-up is probably a little unusual. I had prepared two partitions for this prior to starting but Ubuntu didn’t think they were a good first suggestion to use - OpenSUSE did.

At the moment then, there is no way I can use it to process my photos so I’ll be booting in to Windows and doing it (and probably staying there most of the time). But I’m going to keep looking at this periodically to see if I can sort these problems out and get something nice working.

I’ve only been to Aysgarth twice. On each occaision, the weather hasn’t been brilliant - this time was better than the first time though when I get well and truly drenched and then a few minutes later the sun was out and it got that warm I had to dispense with my coat and was walking around in a t-shirt. Then a hail storm hit! This time there was a bit of drizzle and that was about it.

The top shot was taken with the Ricoh GX100 and was an 8 second exposure with an infrared filter attached. I didn’t have my tripod with me so I balanced the camera on some rocks and used the timer. The second shot isn’t infrared. I found those roots fascinating though. I wandered around a few times before I saw an arrangement I liked the look of. It’s funny that moving a few centimetres in any direction seemed to alter the view so much. I could have spent hours taking differently composed photos of this one tree! - I didn’t though, so this is the only photo I’ve got! :)