Week Numbers Photography Project: Week 16
I’m now a proud owner of a Tamron SP 300mm f/5.6 Adaptall 2 lens which I bought cheaply on a local auction website. The lens included a collar and an Adaptall 2 adapter for Nikon F mount. According to various sources, this lens is a pretty good performer and it’s suitable for macro work. I look forward to giving it a try in our botanical garden. 
Week 16
Taken with Nikon D90, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D, Metz Mecablitz 44 AF-1, and Raynox DCR-250. Processed in digiKam. Shutter speed: 1/60 sec. Aperture: f/7.1 ISO: 200
Week Numbers Photography Project: Week 14 and 15
Last week has been rather uneventful, which is probably a good thing.
Week 14
Taken with Samsung Galaxy S III and processed in digiKam. Shutter speed: 1/146 sec. Aperture: f/2.6 ISO: 80
Week 15
This week, I acquired a Nikon F-301 film SLR in excellent condition, so it seems appropriate to use one of the photos I took with it for week 15.
Botanical Garden Sneak Peek
The green houses in our botanical garden are still closed to the general public, but a few lucky ones (including yours truly) had a chance to take a sneak peek inside the buildings. The missus and I thoroughly enjoyed the time we had in the green houses, and we got back home with loads of photos. I’ll be processing and sharing them in the time to come.
Old green house
Here is a quick snapshot I took with my Canon PowerShot S90 and hastily processed in digiKam.
Photo of the Day: Scilla siberica
Scilla siberica from the Aarhus University botanical garden. Taken with Nikon D90, Nikkor 50mm f/1.8 D, and Raynox DCR-250. Processed in digiKam. Shutter speed: 1/160 sec. Aperture: f/9 ISO: 800
Scilla siberica
The photo is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Dealing with Bugs in digiKam
Bugs are inevitable in complex software, and digiKam is no exception. So what should you do when you’ve discovered a bug in your favorite photo management application? As a non-programmer, the best thing you can do is to file the bug with the KDE bug tracking system (digiKam is managed as part of the KDE project). Submitting bugs can be considered a tedious task, but this greatly helps the developers to improve digiKam, and the KDE bug tracking system makes it relatively easy to file bugs and issues.
First of all, you have to create an account with the bug tracking system. To do this, point your browser to https://bugs.kde.org/, press the New Account button, and create a new account. Once you’ve done that, log in to the system using the specified credentials. Before you submit the bug, it’s important to make sure that it hasn’t already been filed in the system. Click the Search link, select digikam from the Product drop-down list, enter the keywords that best describe the bug in the Words field, and press Search. Check the list of the matching results for entries similar to your bug.
Submitting a bug
If the bug doesn’t appear in the search results, you can submit it to the system. Click the New link at the top and select digiKam from the list of KDE projects. Since you’ve already checked for similar bugs, you can skip Step 1 and go directly to Step 2. The fields in the bug filing form contain brief descriptions and examples, which make it easier to provide the relevant data. It’s important to give as much information as possible, as this helps developers to reproduce, identify, and ultimately fix the bug. Double-check the entered information, and hit the Submit Bug Report button. You can view all your filed bugs using the My Bugs link in the Saved Searches section.
Week Numbers Photography Project: Week 13
Here is an interesting factoid about Aarhus: most streets in the the city skip number 13. Defying the laws of arithmetic, 11 in many places is followed by 15.
Week 13
Taken with Canon PowerShot S90 and processed with Snapseed for Android. Shutter speed: 1/250 sec. Aperture: f/5.0 ISO: 500
Create a Bleach Bypass Effect in digiKam
Using tools available in digiKam, you can simulate a number of effects, including bleach bypass. This effect produces a desaturated high-contrast image. Creating the bleach bypass effect in digiKam is done in two simple steps. Open a photo for editing and choose Color → Hue/Saturation/Lightness. Specify the desired saturation value somewhere between -35 and -59, then press OK to desaturate the photo.
Creating a bleach bypass effect
Choose then Color → Curves Adjust, select Luminosity from the Channel drop-down list, and adjust the curve so it’s shaped as S. Feel free to experiment with the steepness of the curve to achieve the best result. As a starting point, you can download a ready-made S curve and import it into digiKam using the Load button.
