I needed a new headshot for something recently, and I figured it might be fun to expand a little on something I started playing with while shooting my friend Mairi. I wanted to work on getting my backgrounds blown out to pure white.

I think this was mostly due to reading the great Zack Arias “White Seamless Tutorial”, and trolling around on The Strobist again. I also just got my camera back, so it was as good a time as any to put it through some paces… (Plus, I needed the practice).

So first, here is the final result after all of my fiddling:

So my first desire in shooting this was to play with getting the background blown to pure white. I happened to have a whiteboard in my office conference room that I figured would be a good background to start with.

After a recent post I came across on the FOSSPhotography sub on reddit that proposed to list the “Must Have GIMP Plugins for Photographers” I got a bit irked. I made a snarky comment about how crappy the linked post was, and the mod made a pretty level-headed response: “Make a list and submit it”. So here I am.

Just a little disclaimer before I get started. This is not a comprehensive list at all. Most of my work utilizes the built–in functionality of GIMP. So they are not all done with plug–ins/scripts, rather I’ll work those built–in functions manually to modify my images. I’m 100% positive I’ve left a few other great things out, but not intentionally for the most part. If I am missing something that you think I really should have included, let me know in the comments!

Also, this is what works for me . I make no claims that this is the way you should approach things (except for the learning concepts part - everyone should learn to approach things that way).

Almost a month ago I headed out on a really hot day down here in the deep south* with coworkers for a day on the delta in Mobile, AL. I had brought along my (relatively) new OM-D E-M5 to take some nature/fun shots with everyone. However, after finally boarding our boat and pulling my camera out to take some shots, I was greeted by a completely white EVF when trying to shoot some photos…

This is really just a small update. I had noticed a while back that I get many international visitors here (cool!), but that the actual Getting Around in GIMP main page was unusable if someone was using Google Translation (not cool!). Luckily this only affected that page and not the regular posts.

So I finally got off my butt to fix it. I used some questionable javascript to detect if the page is being loaded inside a frame, and injected different css to hopefully fix the problem. If anyone happens to visit the page using Google Translate and it is still unusable, please let me know!

Hot on the heels of Flickr’s new redesign, and giving its users up to 1TB of free storage, is a real fumble, in my opinion: a Google-esque navigation bar.

I was greeted today on logging into Flickr with an incredibly inane navigation bar above the rest of the Flickr navigation header.

I’m not sure what I’m more offended by, that the navigation bar is there, or that it is so incredibly ugly. It’s just poorly styled and implemented (if they had at least matched the color of the nav bar already there, it wouldn’t be so bad). Seriously, look at that screenshot.

I say HDR-ish because there is not a true HDRi being created, but rather a final output image is being blended together from multiple exposures (using a fancy algorithm and what I suspect is some magical kung-fu).

First, though, a quick recap. I talked about creating HDRi’s in my previous post about doing it entirely with F/OSS tools. The intention there was to create a single HDRi scene that contained more luminance data than could be captured with any camera in a single shot. The problem was, you had no means of visualizing this high range of data.

So, here is a view of the most expensive image ever (that doesn’t really exist - except for now because I made it):

This is an amalgam of 16 (out of 18) of the most expensive photographs ever sold, all at once (based on the list at Wikipedia).

I averaged all of the images in Imagemagick, and brought them into GIMP for some level adjustments and minor processing.

I’ve been pretty busy lately, and haven’t had a chance to post anything, but that doesn’t mean I haven’t been fooling around when I can! Here’s a finished blended amalgam from the other night:

This is every one of the U.S. Presidential portraits (except one) all blended in Imagemagick. Once using an average, and a second one using median blending. I brought these into GIMP and overlayed the median blend at 50% opacity.

I was absolutely not going to bother covering this topic. Then I started a conversation with +Dan Tauro in this thread on the GIMP Users Community in G+…

The reason is that I’ve had mostly a love/hate relationship with HDR images (well, tonemapping HDR more than the HDR themselves). I think the problem is that it’s really easy to create really bad HDR images that the photographer thinks look really good. I know because I’ve been there:

I hesitate to mention G’MIC in a title sometimes because I feel that whatever I write is not going to do it justice. For this post, I couldn’t resist.

I really should have posted this a while ago when I first saw it, but to be honest it slipped under my radar. So I’m trying to catch up and make amends.

David Tschumperlé was kind enough to post today a link to some incredible work done by Jérome Ferrari with more averaging images. (It is seriously incredible).