Rich's Tongfamily (Richtong.net add-on)

Well it certainly is a great time to try new high end cameras. In looking at lensrentals.com, it’s a great way to test them without spending thousands. Here’s my drool list: Blackmagic Design 4K Production Camera. This is 4K with a Canon EF mount system, so a great complement to all that Canon glass if…

Well I’ve been using Vuescan and suddenly it started doing dark blue scans and ignoring things in the user interface. it would continuously scan four times. The fix seems to be the age old delete all the preferences and start over. Here is how on a Mac Go to Finder and hold the Option key…

So given all the photos that are happening, where’s the best to store things. Much has changed and it has gotten incredibly cheap to store photos and see them everywhere. So I’ll sort the list with two criteria, size of storage, privacy and convenience: Photos in the cloud Amazon Cloud. They just announced that Amazon…

Adobe continues the drum beat of including everything. Perhaps this is the right subsittute given Apple Photos issues. The latest Lightroom has a bunch of the separate utilities I’ve been using: HDR Merge. This works with Raw and is like the Photomatic I’ve used or HDR Luminance (open source) Panorama. Like Hugin which I’ve loved…

They don’t even make this anymore (heck Minolta became Minolta-Konica and then I think Sony bought them). But it is still a good 35mm film scanner. As I get nostalgic, I’ve reinvigorated the desire to index all those old photos my Dad and I have taken. Here are some operating notes:  Firewire vs USB 2.0…

Wow incredibly useful things that I didn’t know (hat tip to Cult of the Mac) on using Finder in OS X. I’m almost a power user: Get a full-screen slideshow, complete with available index sheet, by hitting Option-space bar with several files selected. You’ll be able to scroll through them all with the arrow keys,…

I don’t know what is going on but it looks like others are hitting this “bug”. With “don’t copy” checked, my 400GB photo database is generating a 250GB (see Apple support comment on discussions.apple.com, macrumors and on reddit) which is consuming essentially all of my hard disk. There’s some debate as to whether these are…

https://launchpad.net/~mamarley/+archive/ubuntu/nvidiaThere are so many different notes about how to do this. Basically, the default appears to be Nouveau open source drivers, but you can also used the proprietary nVidia ones. The main problem is that with Ubuntu 14.04, these proprietary drivers don’t show up in the driver user interface. So how to kick it when…

Now that I’ve got the basics of Swift, time to start learning how to use AVFoundation to take photos and videos. With James’ tutorial gives you the very basics and here are the gotchas: If you plug your phone in for the first time while running XCode it may not work properly. I had to…

All this trying to see the lunar eclipse made me want to: a) get a telescope which I’ve always wanted and b) take some astronomy photographs. Well with modern cameras, it’s so much easier to do both: Mark explains how to take “wide field” photography. The main trick is that you use ISO 1600 and…