Posts about Photography

I was seeing the new GIMP 2.10.0 doing bad things with multiple gradients on a transparent layer, so I logged Bug 795866. They quickly fixed the bug within 48 hours, but now I’m sitting here reloading the GIMP news page to see if they’ve cut the newest release.

Update: GIMP 2.10.2 just hit Debian Unstable!

Since the beginning when I rebuilt my blog with JBake, I intended to split and restyle the photography work from the tech work.

The photo work just disappeared from here, so now it can be found at John Flinchbaugh Photography.

Both sites are rebuilt whenever new content is pushed to their respective git repositories.

I’ve heard lots of talk recently about information overload. I even tried to do that whole Infomagical Challenge, and I couldn’t really convince myself it was necessary. I just don’t seem to have that addiction trait.

Our social feeds are in reverse chronological order — dip in, see the latest, scroll a little to see something older, and then move on. Sure I’ll hit reload a couple times when I’m bored to see something new, (but I could totally stop whenever I want). I don’t feel like I need to necessarily click the bait or read everything.

When I want to keep up with a little news outside of the social networks, Feedly is showing me headlines from newest to oldest. I’m sure I miss some news, since I only scroll through maybe 100 stories at a time, but anything worth knowing will be mentioned a couple times over the days and weeks. I just never see some blips in news, and that’s OK — it probably wasn’t worth the time anyway.

I have BeyondPod configured to do the same thing for my audio listening. Sometimes I have 50 podcasts queued up, and sometimes I run it down to 0. I have 3 priorities into which I categorize each feed, so I can always hear my favorites first, but within each of those priorities, the episodes are still presented in LIFO order, so I don’t fall behind. When I listen my way down to something that’s just out-of-date and low in priority, I can just delete it.

The reverse-chronological (or LIFO, last-in-first-out) order works great for my photo workflow too. When I was working chronologically, every photo ended up late — up to a month or 2 at times. Working from the newest stuff back fixed that. The latest party or event could often get posted, while some lower-priority sets of photos could wait a little. When I got super-busy, some photos could end up a month or 2 delayed, but not all of them.

LIFO even saves me time when I’m culling photos, which is the first thing I do after importing photos. We often work a scene and shoot until we’re convinced that we have the shot we want, so I start looking for the keepers from the end of the set and browse my way back to the beginning of the set. When I know I have the keeper, I can more confidently skip all the previous images that led me to the keeper. There was no point in studying those earlier half-baked images when I’ll keep finding better versions as I work forward.

Once I’ve picked that 10% I’m keeping, I delete everything else, because I still have the end in mind — reasonably backing up all my images. Some probably find that idea backward too.